+A.M.D.G.+
Learning after the gentle lethargy of summer
10 September 2006 at 12.22
Lively minds never stop learning. Medical experts are persuaded [that] constant reading and curiosity about events are a good protection against senility. I might add that it is also a cure for juvenility. To follow Christ requires learning Christ. That prime educator, St. Augustine, wished he had started sooner: “Late have I loved thee, beauty ever ancient ever new.”
September seasons our energy after the gentle lethargy of summer, and not least of all because schools open. That includes the education programs in our parish. I cannot say enough how much all of us are obliged to those volunteers who teach our CCD and RCIA groups and have brought them to an unsurpassed level of excellence. That certainly explains in part why we have the largest enrollments in the parish’s history. These programs are supplemented by the instruction given in preparation for baptism and marriage. [...]
In 1861, when our nation was in turmoil, Orestes Brownson paid attention to the importance of catechesis, for he knew that wars come and go but the spiritual warfare is lifelong:
No amount of pious training or pious culture will protect the faithful, or preserve them from the contamination of the age, if they are left inferior to non-Catholics in secular learning and intellectual development. The faithful must be guarded and protected by being trained and disciplined to grapple with the errors and false systems of the age.
Last week I gave the inaugural address at a catechetical institute founded by the new bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph. It is a much needed development in a time when there is good will but much poor information about the Faith. Happily, the same communications revolution which disseminates errors can provide unprecedented access to Christian truths, including the commentaries of our Pope, whose clarity and practicality are drawing immense crowds to his audiences.
An indolent society would reduce education to entertainment, the way it has deformed worship in many quarters. Cardinal Newman writes in his classic Idea of a University:
Recreations are not education; accomplishments are not education. Do not say, the people must be educated, when after all you only mean amused, refreshed, soothed, put into good spirits and good humor, or kept from vicious excesses. I do not say that such amusement, such occupations of the mind, are not a great gain; but they are not education.
One modern form of idolatry is exploitation of sports as a substitute for the life of the mind. Recreation and games are one of life’s joys, but if they pre-empt the worship of God, they reduce us to those victims of the pagan “bread and circuses” culture in which the first martyrs died.
Laborare est orare: Reflections on Labor Day
3 September 2006 at 12.22It would seem to be a contradiction: On Labor Day people stop working. It is, though, a way of acknowledging that there is a fine human economy between work and recreation. This summer Pope Benedict XVI addressed the importance of “taking some time off” as an opportunity for self-reflection and getting a right perspective on the purpose of life. One of the modern encyclicals, Laborem Exercens, explains how work is more than a utilitarian function. To work, in whatever kind of job, is to display our dignity as having been made in the image of God. Our rational and imaginative intellect and free will can respond to the Divine Love that made the universe, and be God’s agents in building civilization.
When the first man and woman had authority to “name the creatures,” they were manifesting their stewardship over creation, not simply by being “at the top of the food chain” but by protecting and properly using all creatures, animate and inanimate. This perspective saves ecology from turning into idolatry of nature. St. John Chrysostom said that labor is a powerful medicine: It exercises all the strengths, physical and moral, with which we are endowed. It can be a poison if it turns in on itself and is exploited for unworthy purposes, as the sordid history of slavery and greed has shown. Then it becomes the “curse” of which the Book of Genesis speaks, but it was not originally meant as such by God. A translation of Homer’s Iliad reads: “To labor is the lot of man below/ And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.” But the true God and Father of us all sent his Son into the world as a carpenter, trained in the shop of Joseph the Carpenter, as a sign that the only labor that is a woe is labor not consecrated to God. In a 1920 letter to the American Federation of Labor, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore said: “I cannot conceive any thought better calculated to ease the yoke and to lighten the burden of the Christian toiler than the reflection that the highest type of Manhood has voluntarily devoted Himself to manual labor.”
The Benedictine Rule requires that monks spend time in manual labor: Laborare est orare â?? to work is to pray. Even hobbies, crafts, and volunteer work are outpourings of the creative dignity of homo faber â?? man the builder.
Conversely, but not in contradiction, to pray is to work. “Liturgy” means work. The origin and conclusion of all human work is the “Opus Dei” or “Work of God,” which is the united prayer of the Church. Sunday is not a “day off.” It is the “day on” which gives focus to the rest of the week. True worship as servants of God saves us from the indignity of being slave to anyone.
Tue, 6 Jan 2009
- Epiphany of Our Lord
The Compleat Gentleman
Transformation in Christ