Enabled By The Spirit: A Review of Accepting the Gift’s New Confirmation Curriculum, by Andi Sligh
My son, Nathan, has been attending Mass since he was two weeks old. I still remember with perfect clarity that first time I took him to Mass – still struggling with the post-Caesarean section recovery, coupled with a case of Bell’s palsy that caused the entire left side of my face to droop, and still grappling with the stunning revelation that he had been born with Down syndrome. I remember holding him in my arms, gazing at his sleeping face, and hoping that God knew what He was doing.
My husband and I had a great debate about Nathan when it came time for First Reconciliation and First Communion. He didn’t think Nathan was ready because he couldn’t fully understand what was happening; I felt that he shouldn’t be kept from the sacraments but I wasn’t sure we could get him over the Reconciliation hurdle. Ultimately, we were both convinced…and we learned a thing or two about faith in the process.
Nathan is fourteen now and he’s the heart of our family. His speech isn’t always clear, and his language is still delayed, but he is funny and charming and loving and eager to learn. I pulled him out of public school and began homeschooling him four years ago after his older sister left for college, and it’s been both the most challenging and most rewarding thing I’ve done. Academically, he is very much behind typical peers, but he’s learning on a level and at a pace and in a way that works for him.
But now we’re rapidly approaching another sacrament…Confirmation. In our diocese, Confirmation happens during the eleventh grade, but a Confirmation retreat is held each year in November for ninth and tenth graders. I breathed a little sigh of relief this fall when I saw that we had a conflict for this year’s retreat, because it gave me an excuse to put off thinking about Confirmation for a little while longer. But seeing how close it is now, those old worries floated to the surface again. How much does he understand? Should we hold him back for a bit longer? Is it wrong to keep him from the sacraments?
As I was tossing these questions around in my head, I learned about the new Confirmation curriculum from Accepting the Gift, and have found it to be an answer to a prayer I hadn’t yet formed.
Enabled By the Spirit is designed to be taught over a period of nine months, with one lesson per month, leading up to Confirmation. Each lesson can either be taught in a single session or broken down into three smaller sessions across a few days. The curriculum also offers suggestions to help you tailor the lessons up or down in difficulty, based on your child’s specific needs. The lessons are grouped into three units: (1) Who is the Holy Spirit, (2) The Sacrament of Confirmation, and (3) Life As an Anointed Disciple of Jesus.
The idea of teaching my own child what he needs to know for Confirmation felt daunting to me. I’m not a “wing it” kind of homeschooling mom – I need a plan! Enabled By the Spirit offers a step-by-step program, including exactly what to say, when to pause, when to encourage discussion, and what materials are needed for the activities, while still remaining flexible for your child’s situation. It doesn’t just present the basic truths, but also encourages children to see themselves as part of the Gospel story and to consider how to apply what they’ve learned in their own lives – on whatever level their capabilities fall.
I’ve already decided how I’ll use Enabled By the Spirit. Although it’s a complete curriculum on its own, I’ll take a best-of-both-worlds approach. In our parish, Confirmation classes run for six weeks beginning in September each year, and the pre-Confirmation retreat that I mentioned earlier is held in November. We’ll follow the once-monthly lesson plan beginning right after Nathan’s Confirmation retreat in November 2025, which will bring us to the end of the curriculum in August – right before the classes with his peers will begin. My plan is to spread the lesson out over a few days and to briefly review key points in the intervening weeks between lessons – repetition is our friend!
Opting to do at-home confirmation prep will mean that he’ll already have been exposed to the material, so anything additional that he learns in the parish Confirmation classes will be a bonus, and he’ll get a “crash course” review in what he already knows while also having the chance to participate alongside his same-age peers.
It’s been a long and circuitous road since that first Sunday that I held him in my arms at Mass with tears in my eyes. Since then, our family’s faith journey has been positively propelled forward because of that tiny baby, and he has lived his own faith journey, as well. Once a disgraced VBS dropout, Nathan proudly received his First Communion alongside his peers and is an altar server nearly every Sunday. As our priest once said, we don’t know exactly what Nathan understands intellectually, but it’s likely that he understands God on a level that we will never grasp.
For the first time since I saw the Confirmation Retreat announcement in our parish bulletin, I’m actually now looking forward to Nathan’s Confirmation preparation. Enabled By the Spirit has given me the tools to help him complete the process that was started fourteen years ago at his baptism. Thanks be to God!
Andi Sligh is a wife and mother of two children with disabilities and three dogs. She is a lifelong Alabamian, Dr. Pepper addict, Catholic convert, and former engineer who rediscovered a love of writing when she became a mom. You can find more of her writing at https://andisligh.com/
