Weekends with Chesterton: Education

Over the years, I have read a number of books by G.K. Chesterton. However, since I am not currently reading anything by this great Catholic writer, I thought that I wouldn't be joining Sarah for her Weekends with Chesterton. Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen's Children and Parents caused me to change my mind. In his book, Venerable Archbishop Sheen quotes G.K. Chesterton.

Sheen explains, "By this he meant that education begins early." I will add that I think that Chesterton is also saying that education begins at home. Parents truly are the primary educators of their children.

A Plea for Intolerance

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded. The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broadminded. A bigoted man is one who refuses to accept a reason for anything; a broadminded man is one who will accept anything for a reason—providing it is not a good reason. It is true that there is a demand for precision, exactness, and definiteness, but it is only for precision in scientific measurement, not in logic. The breakdown that has produced this unnatural broadmindedness is mental, not moral. The evidence for this statement is threefold: the tendency to settle issues not by arguments but by words, the unqualified willingness to accept the authority of anyone on the subject of religion, and, lastly, the love of novelty.

~ Venerable Fulton Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

The above quote comes from the chapter titled A Plea for Intolerance in Ven. Fulton Sheen's book Old Errors and New Labels. Since the election, Fr. Saguto, our pastor, has been sharing passages from A Plea for Intolerance in the parish bulletin. Now, he has kindly shared A Plea for Intolerance on our parish's website. The chapter is applicable to today and well worth reading in its entirety.

Planting Seeds

Several weeks ago, as I sat in the dentist office reading a book, I heard a lady say, "I thought he was old school." I looked up and she looked at me and repeated, "I thought he was old school." I responded, "Actually what he has written is just as pertinent today as it was when he wrote it." She stood up and walked over to me saying, "Really? I used to watch him on TV in the '50s. I didn't even know he wrote books."

"Yes, really." was my reply and I went on to share with her a little bit about the book. I also mentioned another book that he had written and the fact that our library system carries several of his works. Eventually, the woman wandered back to her chair, saying that she would have to see if the library carried any of his works as audio books.

As she finished talking, her husband began. He began by criticizing his wife for always wanting to use technology instead of actually reading. I responded to his criticisms with the last words that I had read before his wife engaged me in conversation, "There goes Philip Neri, except for the grace of God." Thus, our conversation began. 

Eventually, my children meandered into the waiting room and I was called to the counter to pay. As I was leaving, I said goodbye to the Christian couple. The man responded, "God bless you! I hope to find some of his books at the library." As I climbed into the car, I could not help but think, "You never know when God might plant and water a seed."

Thank you, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen!
May God bless this couple!

Stoop

"The son of God made man was invited to enter His own world through a back door. Exiled from the earth, He was born under the earth, in a sense, the first Cave man in recorded history. There He shook the earth to its very foundations. Because He was born in cave, all who wish to see Him must stoop. To stoop is the mark of humility. The proud refuse to stoop and, therefore, they miss Divinity. Those, however, who bend their egos and enter, find that they are not in a cave at all, but in a new universe where sits a Babe on His mother’s lap, with the world poised on His fingers."

Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ, pp. 28-29

Divinity is always...

"If the artist is at home in his studio because the paintings are the creation of his own mind; if the sculptor is at home among his statues because they are the work of his own hands; if the husband-man is at home among his vines because he planted them; and if the father is at home among his vines because he planted them; and if the father is a home among his children because they are his own, then surely, argues the world, He Who made the world should be at home in it. He should come into it as an artist into his studio, and as a father in his home; but, for the Creator to come among His creatures and be ignored by them; for God to come among His own and not be received by His own; for God to be homeless at home—that could only mean one thing to the worldly mind; the Babe could not have been God at all. And that is just why it missed Him. Divinity is always where one least expects to find it."

Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ, p. 28

Divinity is always...

"No worldly mind would ever have suspected that He Who could make the sun warm the earth would one day have need of an ox and an ass to warm Him with their breath; that He Who, in the language of Scriptures, could stop the turning about of Arcturus would have His birthplace dictated by an imperial census; that He, Who clothed the fields with grass, would Himself be naked; that He, from Whose hands came planets and worlds, would one day have tiny arms that were not long enough to touch the huge heads of the cattle; that the feet which trod the everlasting hills would one day be too weak to walk; that the Eternal Word would be dumb; that Omnipotence would be wrapped in swaddling clothes; that Salvation would lie in a manger; that the bird which built the nest would be hatched therein--no one would have ever suspected that God coming to this earth would ever be so helpless. And that is precisely why so many miss Him. Divinity is always where one least expects to find it."

Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ, p. 28

Divinity is always...

"There was no room in the inn, but there was room in the stable. The inn is the gathering place of public opinion, the focal point of the world's moods, the rendezvous of the worldly, the rallying place of the popular and the successful. But the stable is a place for the outcasts, the ignored, the forgotten. The world might have expected the Son of God to be born--if He was to be born at all--in an inn. A stable would be the last place in the world where one would have looked for Him. Divinity is always where one least expects to find it."

Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ, p. 28

Suffering and Love

On Sunday, our pastor gave an excellent sermon on suffering.  He drove his sermon home with a final nail in the bulletin by including a quote from Archbishop Fulton Sheen on suffering and love.

     The lesson of the Crucifix is that pain is never to be isolated or separated from love. The Crucifix does not mean pain; it means sacrifice. In other words, it tells us, first, pain is sacrifice without love; and secondly, that sacrifice is pain with love.  Firstly, pain is sacrifice without love. The Crucifixion is not a glorification of pain as pain. The Christian attitude of mortification has sometimes been misrepresented as idealizing pain, as if God were more pleased with us when we suffered than when we rejoiced. No! Pain in itself has no sanctifying influence! The natural effect of pain is to individualize us, center our thoughts on ourselves and make our infirmity the excuse for every comfort and attention. All the afflictions of the body, such as penance, mortification, have no tendency in themselves to make men better. They often tend to make a man worse. When pain is divorced from love, it leads a man to wish others were as he is; it makes him cruel, hateful, and bitter. When pain is unsanctified by affection, it scars, burns up all our finer sensibilities of the soul, and leaves the soul fierce and brutal. Pain as pain, then is not an ideal: it is a curse when separated from love, for rather than making one’s soul better, it makes it worse by scorching it.

     Now let us turn to the other side of the picture. Pain is not to be denied; it is not to be escaped. It is to be met with love and made a sacrifice. Analyze your own experience, and do not your heart and mind say that love is capable of overruling, in some way, your natural feelings about pain; that some things which otherwise might be painful are a joy to you when you find they benefit others. Love, in other words, can transmute pain and make it sacrifice, which is always a joy. If you lose a sum of money, is not your loss softened by the discovery that it was found by some very poor person whom you loved? If your head is racked with pain, your body wasted and worn from long vigils at the bedside of your child, is not the pain softened by the thought that through your love and devotion, the child was nursed back to health again? You could never have felt the joy, nor had the faintest idea of what your love was, if that sacrifice had been denied you. But if your love were absent, then the sacrifice would have been a pain, vexation, and annoyance.

     The truth gradually emerges that our highest happiness consists in the feeling that another’s good is purchased by our sacrifice; that the reason why pain is bitter is because we have no one to love and for whom we might suffer. Love is the only force in the world which can make pain bearable, and it makes it more than bearable by transforming it into sacrifice. If the dross of pain can be transmuted into the gold of sacrifice by the alchemy of love, then it follows the deeper our love, the less the sense of pain and the keener our joy of sacrifice. But there is no love greater than the love of Him Who laid down His life for His friends. Hence, the more intensely we love His holy purposes, the more zealous we are for His kingdom, the more devoted we are to the greater glory of our Lord and Savior, the more we will rejoice in any sacrifice that will bring even a single soul to His Sacred Heart.

The Eternal Galilean

Thanks to this quote, I finally figured out what I am readingfor Lent.

Obedience

"Obedience does not mean the execution of orders that are given by a drill sergeant. It springs, rather, from the love of an order, and love of Him who gave it. The merit of obedience is less in the act than in the love; the submission, the devotion, and the service that obedience implies are not born of servitude but are rather effects that spring from and are unified by love. Obedience is servility only to those who have not understood the spontaneity of love...

Our Lord spent three hours in redeemming, three years in teaching, and thirty years in obeying, in order that a rebellious, proud, and diabolically independent world might learn the value of obedience. Home life is that God-appointed training ground of human character, for from the home of a child springs the maturity of manhood, either for good or for evil. The only recorded acts of Our Blessed Lord's childhood are acts of obedience -- to God, His Heavenly Father, and also to Mary and Joseph. He thus shows the special duty of childhood and of youth: to obey parents as the vice-regents of God. He, the great God Whom the heavens and earth could not contain, submitted Himself to His parents...All men may ponder well the hint of a Child subject to His parents, that no Heavenly call is ever to be trusted that bids one neglect the obvious duties that lie near to hand."

~ Fulton J. Sheen, The World's First Love: Mary Mother of God, pp. 99-101