The One Thing Necessary

The greatest moment of our lives, and usually the one we are least prepared for, is the one in which, upon leaving this world and entering the next, we will find ourselves face-to-face before God. In a real sense, we will judge ourselves in the presence of His pure goodness, love, beauty, light and truth. And we will immediately know where we belong.

Our judgment will occur in the context of two realities Jesus points to in the Gospel: how we have loved (I was hungry...) and how we have used the gifts God has given us. (Have we buried or hidden them under a bushel basket or used them to help build the Kingdom?) In the end, at this one definitive moment, that's what will matter.

So how can we prepare in order that this moment be for us one of utter joy and anticipation? Enter the deepest purpose of Catholic education which begins first and foremost in the home with the parents as the primary educators of their own children. The ultimate goal of all Catholic education, whether in the home, school, Church, or out in the world, is to prepare us to one day, see God face-to-face, having helped us to recognize and fulfill our own personal destiny in God’s great plan for mankind!

Even the most mundane subjects are meant, ultimately, to serve this goal, for everything that exists and that we interact with here has its own connection to God and either reveals something about Him directly or something about what He has created and why. In my early teaching years, the children, because they were in an environment which encouraged it, continually and spontaneously made these connections in music class, math class, science studies, geography, etc. It didn’t matter. They quite easily saw: “Middle C is just like Jesus. He’s the center to everything!” Or, “no matter what you are doing, God the Father looks into your heart to see if His Son is there!”

The development of Catholic education, which in a real sense began in the monasteries,
gives us a fundamental key to understanding the direction Catholic education should have today. For the monks, the essentials were always the same: "the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus"...(Phil 3:8), in light of which all else is rubbish.

The establishment of monastic communities was therefore ordered to a life that was conducive to the finding of God and to living out a covenantal relationship with Him. The biblical principles by which the monks lived and their deep study and contemplation of the mysteries of God in creation, started to leaven the chaos around them, so that time, learning, art, science, music, animal husbandry, farming, care of the poor, all began to be marked by the laws and light which God Himself had put into creation. An order and a fruitfulness developed that actually had heavenly origins. The bells announcing the call to prayer, which punctuated each day, and the liturgical seasons with their abundance of solemnities, feasts, and even the rich Gospel lessons of ordinary time, made the meaning of life, one's responsibilities, one's destiny, readily understood. It is important to note that Monasticism did not begin as an attempt to create a new culture or civilization. The holy men and women of early times were interested in the one thing necessary. The impact upon the surrounding environs was quite in accord with the words of Christ: "Seek first the kingdom (of God) and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides." (Mt 6:33)

The Christ-life within is still the essential thing in the midst of the contemporary bombardment of the inessential and our own growing barbarism. With authentic education, children begin to become (not in a forced way, but in a supernaturally natural development), little Christs touching the world in the activities of their childhood and adolescence. In adulthood, as they grow into the full measure of the mature Christ, they are meant to move into all the realms of human activity: intellectual, physical, scientific, academic, artistic, apostolic, spiritual, etc. and to be, even greater leaven as they take their places in the world.

Pope St. John Paul II often pointed out that the Church and the world are at a crossroads. Catholic education must respond to this challenge with new vigor. When it stays true to itself, it is the key to the formation of the new man, a new humanity and a new Pentecost, for, we know, "a Christian has only to be, in order to change the world." -C. Dawson, Christianity and the New Age.

Sr. Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT Jan 14, 2019