You open your eyes for the first time and see the world in all of it's glory, beauty and complexity. You notice internal sensations, appetites, thoughts and external sights, sounds, feelings. The awe you experience is extraordinary. It's a feast. This is what a good education should do: make you fully alive. Restore you to childlike wonder. That's what our faith teaches: that unless you become like a little child you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. G.K. Chesterton captured this idea so powerfully in his book Orthodoxy:
"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
There is a reason that such a thoughtful and extraordinary man as G. K. Chesterton inspired this network of schools. This attitude toward life produces eudaimonia, a word that doesn't easily translate, but which essentially means a state of well-being, of flourishing, which is what the Chesterton Academies are designed to give their students.
I want the seed of such an education planted in my native soil of Orange County.
There was a time when neither religion nor Orange County were at all appealing to me.
When I was young, and before I found Christ, (though He himself was seeking me, quite intently), I longed to escape the world behind the Orange Curtain. I dreamed of going to the Big Apple. The white bread, tract house, suburban culture of Orange County rubbed me wrong and I found no place for myself in what I perceived as its uniform aspirations to conformity. My single mom, sister, and I moved a dozen times around Orange County before I was 11 years old. And the worst spots for me were the affluent ones, where the children were few, materially wealthy and profoundly neglected. In the blue collar neighborhoods (there were some of these in OC in the '60s and 70s), the kids were rough and tumble, but they were more welcoming and accepting of others, and honorable. (As a middle schooler in Huntington Beach, I was encouraged to shoplift by a fellow student who lived in a large mansion-of-a-house and who had no need to shoplift.) I did escape to New York City at age 17, as a transfer student to Barnard College, Columbia University. The last place I imagined I would encounter Christ was in New York City, but I met Him that first year in three distinct places: in the poor, in the Gospels, and in the Western canon.
The poor were everywhere in NYC and remember, I grew up in the sanitized world behind the Orange Curtain. I never saw a homeless person as a child, or very many people who were not white like me. I wanted to think I was a good person, so I volunteered at the local hospital when I was a teenager. The sight of "bag ladies" on the subway or in the crowded foyers of the bank or on the sidewalk, created tremendous cognitive dissonance for me. I didn't have an answer for this. Why them and not me? What was the answer to the suffering that was right there before me in the person of a disheveled young man, crying for help on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building? It stirred my conscience, and thank God for Mother Teresa, who I admired greatly years before my conversion. Without her example of love and hope, I believe I would have despaired. I wanted to volunteer at her home in the Bronx, which had been opened just a short while before I landed in Manhattan. My neighborhood in Manhattan and her neighborhood in the Bronx may have been a short distance by subway or bus, but they were worlds apart in terms of socioeconomic conditions. When I called the house and asked if there was anyone who could accompany me through the rough parts of town, the kind woman on the other end of the line said gently, if I needed help to get there, maybe I wasn't cut out for the type of work they did. I wasn't a Christian at this point, and needed a faith that would give me the courage to traverse the divide between my world and the world of the poor, but the Hound of Heaven was definitely on my heels, using my desires (to be in the Big City) and my fears of somehow being caught flat footed at the judgment, to open me up to hear the truth.
Which brings me to the second thing which was key to my conversion: The gospels. A friend gave me a paperback copy of the New Testament and suggested I read the gospels. Just the gospels. I was alone one weekend early in the fall of my first year in the city and I read all four gospels straight through. This friend also had a group of friends praying for me, which I found out later is what you people do, even for complete strangers, and as much as I resented being the object, ever, of someone's pity, I know now that those prayers were instrumental in softening my rocky heart. I was not in any way prone to crying as a young adult, but when I read the passion, I wept.
The third thing that was critical in my conversion was the Western canon. I was not raised in any religion. Quite the contrary. I was raised to believe that religion was the opiate of the masses, a fairy tale for ignorant people. Nothing in my public school education contradicted this. The dis-integration of education that is part of our current conventional pedagogy meant a feeling of alienation and isolation, not communion with God and the world. Spiritual and intellectual impoverishment is the legacy of the education reforms of the 20th century. The secular world was the dominant force in the time of my upbringing. It appeared to me that the church was permitted to ply its trade at the will of the government, and coloring pictures of Jesus in vacation bible school didn't do much to contradict this. When I found out at this prestigious university that the greatest works of art, music, literature, philosophy, even mathematics and science were produced by Christians, I was understandably shocked and surprised. I felt betrayed by my parents, honestly, and by the government-run schools I had attended. But the Western canon, which was still being taught at Columbia University in the early 1980s, was extremely important in my conversion. I was particularly impacted by a book that Chesterton students read in their senior year, arguably the greatest novel ever written: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This Russian novelist plumbs the depths of fallen human nature and moral depravity and presents the strongest argument against belief in God: human suffering, especially of the innocent, and concludes that the person of Christ and his solidarity with the sufferer, is the answer.
In my case I received what a Chesterton Academy offers piecemeal. That's not ideal. I suffered spiritual malnourishment in my growing up years. Everything that brought me to a deep commitment and conversion and set me on a path as a disciple is provided at a Chesterton Academy, including what I implied in my story, the love of a community, starting with the group that prayed for me. I believe what Chesterton offers is every child's birthright and that as a committed follower of Christ, it is a Christian's duty and privilege to teach the children the love of the Father. May we all become like little children and experience fully the joy of God's kingdom.
Come meet us at the next open house, tell us how we can pray for you, tell others about us. Be a part of the Chesterton Difference which, for the souls of our children, could make ALL the difference.
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