BY MR. BLAISE A. HOCKEL
I have been asked to write a little something about the goings-on in our school, the Chesterton Academy of St. John Paul II, to show all of you– dearest families and friends– so that as we close the End-of-Year Campaign you can be given something of an idea about what we have spent our time doing here since the school’s opening in August. I can say that, through all the blanket insanity of the year, we have been pleasantly insulated from much of the exterior absurdity. Instead, we’ve been much wrestling with the sleepy-hearted student, lulled into a state of expectancy that theirs is the view most keenly insightful in the modern world. How pleasant it has been, then, to push them to rest more deeply in the Spirit than on the laurels of the world!
You see, a few days ago while working through a conversation over Herodotus’ views of the role of the individual within civilization, the students began to promulgate a view that man derives his meaning and purpose from the state– that stepping out of that prescribed role is to forfeit your own worth. Surprisingly, many of the students ascribed to such views; I do not say surprisingly because this is an uncommon notion these days, but that I was surprised that so many in the class thought it in contrast with what they believed true after reading Homer’s Iliad.
We discussed for some time why they believed that the worth of man should come from a state, and then we began to ponder this in contrast with Hector and Achilles– individuals who seemed not to receive their merit from those who governed them, but rather, as individuals gave worth to that governance. The students have begun to mull this over in their hearts: whether a claim that has been handed to them can possibly be true. Eventually, we will ask them from where all worth comes. I suspect, from prior experience, that they will be restless until they have an answer.
And we teachers, not making claims but rather asking questions, are pleased to see that the formation of their minds through our labors these last four months has led them to be able to answer such questions themselves through right reasoning rather than aspiring to particularly catchy phrases or things promoted through popularity. They are not yet in a place where they are certain, but so, too, they are young; they have time to consider these things as Mary and ponder them in their hearts. This is what it is, I think, that we are ordering ourselves towards: an imitation of our Mother who pondered things in her heart so often.
One such student, however, (who was much more of the mind of some sort of ubermenschian anarchy– man gives himself meaning and it comes from no other) made comment to me afterward that he and the small subset of people that thought like him were “woke” for their beliefs. In my years of teaching I have become familiar with the ‘woke’ crowd– people who are not dormant to some of the more perverse machinations of the world, but are both aware of and alert against such claims. This amuses me still, I admit. I hope that my students, by their learning in the classes, have neither become sleepy-eyed from droll lectures, nor have they become ‘woke’ through the subscription to beliefs of popular YouTubers. Rather, I would hope that their education does what it did as they ruminated over Herodotus’ beliefs as they contrasted him with modernity: I hope it makes them dreamers.
In clarification, what I mean is that I do not want them to be somnambulates nor insomniacs, but persons whose right consideration leads them to dream larger than they ever have before; they have begun to ponder more deeply, to pray more earnestly, and think more actively. I only hope that their dreams, then, (and hopefully they are dreams of Heaven), are large enough for ideas and desires forming within them.
And so is my prayer: Heavenly Father, let me be restless until I find rest in You.