July 2001 Print

Conclusion

Frank J. Sheed

 

The first half of this article by Mr. Sheed (The Angelus, June 2001) discussed how and why Catholic school children can graduate from Catholic schools lacking devotion to Christ, an awareness of Him, knowledge of His Life and Personality, and a desire to increase that knowledge. He prepared us to understand that an answer lies in providing a mental framework for reality, that is, the four-point framework: what God is, what man is, what Christ is, and what union is. This is what he discusses now. In addition, Mr. Sheed offers commentary on the importance of understanding "spirit" in his introduction and "mystery" for his conclusion.

 

ON TEACHING THE KEY DOCTRINES

I am adding this Note, which was not in the original talk, partly to answer questions asked by teachers, but also for parents who may want to co-operate in the religious education of their young. To teach the doctrines one must know them. Teachers, of course, will have the necessary doctrinal formation, but parents may not. I have treated all the points I am about to list in two books, A Map of Life [available from Angelus Press. Price: $8.95], and (in much more detail) Theology and Sanity. For the parents of younger children, I mention Marigold Hunt's St. Patrick's Summer.

Let us look more closely at our four-point master plan: what God is, what man is, what Christ is, what union is. And may I say once more that it is not for me, but for the teacher, to say at what age this or that truth can be taught. My plea is that the Catholic out in the world, and under pressure from the world and the flesh and the devil, should know all these truths and see them as central, relating to them all else that he knows. He needs them in the world: he should not leave school without them.

 

A Preliminary Note on Spirit

Involved in all four doctrines is the concept of spirit: it is the key to their understanding, as to the understanding of all religion. The mind which has not mastered its use cannot make much of what the Church has to tell. I must confess that, though I have been teaching Catholic doctrine these 30 years, it is only in the last few years that I have come to see this quite obvious fact as a first principle. If we are serious about teaching religion, we must concentrate upon spirit, always thinking of ways to make the idea clearer to the pupils, never satisfied that we have found the unimprovable method. Spirit is not just one more topic in the long list of topics to be taught in religion class, it is basic to every topic; it is not simply something to be known, but something without which nothing else can be known—at once an object of study in its own right, and a tool without which the mind cannot make progress; they must see it, and see by it. Thus it is not simply a matter of their learning and memorizing a definition, or even solely of mastering the meaning, but of acquiring a skill. Spirit should be as familiar a concept to them as their breakfast, and any amount of labor must be put into making it so. They will not understand God, or man, or Christ, or union, if they do not know what spirit is. If we are to grasp our own faith, and help others to do the same, we must be clear about spirit; no one should emerge from a Catholic school at any age, even if he emerges at fourteen, who has not been helped, to the limit of his and his teacher's capacity, to know what spirit is, so that he can handle it as an idea of which he sees the meaning and knows the importance.

It is, of course, difficult for the pupil; but the difficulty must not be exaggerated. The teacher has to work hard at preparing the lesson, and patiently at giving it, indeed it is a special test of the teacher's skill. The first step, anyhow, is no great problem. A child is very early aware that his body does not know or love, finds no difficulty in thinking of these as operations of his soul, and accepting the notion that knowing and loving go with being a spirit. Very early too he can realize that spirit has power, it can master matter and make matter serve it.

The next step is to introduce him to the idea of spirit as permanent. He can see that material things are changing, always liable to become something else, of any material thing other things can be made. He need not find it hard to grasp the idea that spirit is the very reverse of all this—it cannot become something else, nothing else can be made of it, it can only be itself; and, in my own experience, quite young children can be interested in the underlying reason for this difference between matter and spirit: material things can suffer change because they are composed of parts, and what has parts can be taken apart. Spirit has no parts, and therefore cannot be changed into anything else. Even a few minutes meditation on this by a class can work a profound change in their understanding.

A spirit has no parts, there is no element in it that is not the whole of it. They will not possess this idea at first meeting, but it will grow. As it does, they are ready for one further step: they can be helped to see how the possession of parts goes with occupying space, how therefore a spirit, having no parts, is superior to the need for space. (Neither upon this matter, nor the others I mention as I go along, am I bothering you with detail of teaching method; your own experience will tell you how, and at what age, to convey these truths.)

Just as their first awareness of spirit as permanent can be developed through the years, so can their first awareness of spirit as knowing and loving. These ideas must be further analyzed, to distinguish them as human and spiritual from animal imitations. Certainly by 16 or 17 they can have been taught the whole concept of spirit as the being which has a permanent hold upon its own nature, simple, outside space, the abiding reality under the endless changingness of matter, and again as a being of power, knowledge and love.

All this may seem obvious. But the adult Catholics one meets do not, by and large, know it or get any light from it. How can the next generation of adults, your generation of children, be helped to? It seems to me only by the teacher keeping the concept of spirit continuously before her mind as one into which her pupils must be continuously growing. It must be returned to constantly. In every year the ideas involved in it, as statable, will be growing clearer and richer. Not only that: spirit itself will have been lived with, leading to an intimacy with the idea deeper than words or concepts can express. Spirit can become an essential element in the world they are mentally living in, so that world and thinking alike would seem miserably thin and impoverished without it, materialism however persuasively presented would at once be seen as repulsive and find all their mental habits ranged solidly against it: just as, if a man has learnt to walk, the most persuasive arguments could not get him to resort to crawling—he would find the idea repulsive, all his bodily habits would be ranged against it. The analogy is close—the mind that is aware of spirit is walking upright, the matter-bound mind crawls.

God

To the idea of spirit and its independence of space they can, even quite young, be shown how to join the ideas of eternity and infinity, and see God as the Infinite Eternal Spirit.

Infinite first, seen as greatness without limit. Every spirit has power, knowledge and love. The pupil can be reminded of his own limitations in all three—and it is no bad spiritual exercise that he be forced to concentrate on them, list the more obvious of them, see where he can extend the limits by developing his ability and his knowledge and his love, and where he will come to limits beyond which he cannot in any event pass. He is now able to attach some sort of meaning to the limitless power (so great, for example, that He can make things, using no material at all), the limitless knowledge and the limitless love of God.

Just as one approaches infinity by way of a concentration upon the limitations of the finite, so one approaches eternity by way of a concentration upon the "successiveness" of time. Provided we choose our vocabulary and our illustrations carefully, they can see that no one of us creatures here below is all he is, all at once: that if we consider ourselves, there is not only what we are now, but also what we used to be, and what we are not yet but one day will be; no one of us is at any moment all there. They can be familiarized with the fleetingness of our present, the word "now" applying to a different moment every time we use it, indeed not remaining present even while we are saying it (for while we are saying the n-, the -ow is still in the future, while we are saying the -ow, the n- has already vanished in the past). One way or another, by having considered the various ways in which no one of us is all he is, all at once, they can grow into easy familiarity with the phrase. Once they are thus familiar with it, they can be told that it is true of God, God is all He is, all at once (that indeed being Boethius' classic definition of eternity). God then knows infinitely and loves infinitely, none of His knowing or loving vanishes away into a past, there is no future from which any more knowing and loving can come to Him, because He already does both limitlessly.

As the years go by, this refining process in the ideas of spirit, infinite, eternal can continue. It will be for the teacher to decide at what age the various steps can be taken; but as a general principle it may be agreed that the earlier the pupil is helped to take the first steps, the sooner he will be ready for the later developments. Certainly it is an enlargement and a liberation for the minds of the young to see time, as they have already seen space, as not of the essence of all conceivable being, however much it be bound up with the kind of being we are. So early it can be only a seed, the glimpse of a possibility, but nurtured it will grow.

To have brought them to a better than verbal acquaintance with God as Infinite Eternal Spirit is a great thing, great in itself and the necessary preparation for a better than verbal acquaintance with the Blessed Trinity. They have seen God, infinite and eternal, knowing infinitely. They can now be told how in that infinite knowing He produces the infinitely perfect thought of Himself, a thought which is not only something (as our thoughts are) but Someone, equal to Himself in all perfections, the Son, the Second Person; and how Father and Son, loving infinitely, produce a total lovingness within the Godhead, a lovingness which is not only something (as ours is) but Someone, possessing all the perfections of Father and Son, for they have poured their all into it. In my own experience, it is better thus to begin with the processions of Son and Holy Ghost and when these truths are really living in the mind, go on to show what we mean by person and what by nature, and why what they have just learned is summarized as Three Persons in One God.

But how early can the effort to lead them into the mystery of the Trinity be made? Earlier, perhaps, than is always realized. The small child finds the doctrine in some ways easier than the adult: his power to accept reality has not been hardened and stiffened by routine and the customary as ours has: it does not bother him to be told of a thought that is not only Something but Someone. Yet that is not the only, or the main, consideration. Return, for a moment, to the view of teaching as a dialogue between the Holy Ghost in the teacher and the Holy Ghost in the child. You are not teaching merely natural intellects. These children have been baptized. The Blessed Trinity indwells them. If ever the Holy Ghost can be relied on to help, it must surely be upon this truth. The child can hinder Him by any of the countless ways of cussedness open to the young. The teacher can hinder Him by not giving the whole power of her mind to the seeing and the saying of the truth. A slackly prepared lesson on God is one way of taking God's name in vain. This matter of teaching the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity is the classic example of the maxim "Work as if everything depended on you, pray as if everything depended on God." After all, you are the people who KNOW HOW TO TEACH; and I am convinced that if you bring all your wealth of teaching experience to bear upon ways of introducing the child to the Trinity, advances will be made by which the whole Church will be the gainer. Meanwhile a pioneering work of extraordinary value has been done by Marigold Hunt in St. Patrick's Summer. This book is an exposition of Catholic dogma directed at ten-year-olds. In the story, St. Patrick instructs them upon the Blessed Trinity—expounding it stage by stage, at each stage getting them to tell it back to him, correcting them, drawing them on to the next stage. It is really brilliant pedagogy.

Man

Once again, it is for the practiced teacher to decide what can be taught when; but, by the time the pupil leaves school, he should have the following truths about man so mastered that, in all his thinking of himself and others, they operate automatically, so to speak.

1) He will of course have been taught that Man is made by God of nothing. It is essential that he be shown slowly and patiently and unforgettably (a large word, I know, when the young are in question) how it follows from this that he could not continue in existence, unless God continued to hold him, that he is held in existence from moment to moment only because God wills to hold him there. This is one of those realities, like spirit, which cannot simply be taught and left. It is as basic to the understanding of man, as spirit to the understanding of everything. If it becomes part of the pupil's very consciousness, he will see everything differently—more as it truly is than merely as it looks. For one example, it will take a lot of the bounce out of him to know that he is made of nothing, that God is holding him there and that if God dropped him, so to speak, he would be back in his native nothingness in no time at all: it is good for him to know that he himself, like everything else in creation, is expressed in that formula. For another example, he will see sin as folly—for sin means trying to gain something against the will of God: but only the will of God holds us in existence at all: what could be more idiotic? The realization may not stop anyone from sinning, but, if we must sin, it is better that we feel fools while doing it.

2) But if it is vital that the pupil should know his nothingness compared with God, he should also know his, and every man's, splendor simply as man. He should be aware of the greater splendor of the soul, as spiritual and immortal, made by God in His own image, and of the lesser splendor of the body as God's handiwork. He should be shown what it means for the splendor of both that God became man and took to Himself a human soul and a human body; and what it adds to the value of all men that Christ our Lord died to redeem them. This picture of man—as a union of matter and spirit, by his spirit immortal and in God's image, redeemed by Christ—should become so much part of his thinking that he can never see himself or any other man without seeing him so, can never make a decision about himself or another without taking it into account.

3) He must also have some notion of what is meant by the union of matter and spirit—of its strangeness first of all, given that matter is in space and spirit not, and then of the mode of it. By the time he is old enough, he can be given the notion of spirit pouring out its forming and animating energies upon the body, so that no part of the body lacks them (that being the sense in which the soul is in every part of the body). Younger, he may be helped by some such comparison as water boiling over a flame—the flame not in the same space as the water, yet by its heating energies in every part of the water all the same: the water so obvious, hissing and steaming and spilling over, the flame so still, that a chance spectator might think the water was everything and overlook the flame altogether (as there are people who think the body is everything and deny that there is a soul).

4) He should have been helped to meditate on the concept of man as a rational animal: especially on the truth—of which he, like all of us, has continuing experience—that rational does not mean reasonable but only endowed with reason, a reason he may use or misuse, that man is not only the one animal that can act reasonably but the one animal that can act unreasonably. There are all sorts of ways in which the teacher can profitably set the class musing on themselves as rational animals.

Christ Our Lord

What Christ is means the dogma of Incarnation, but in addition to that, it means a personal intimacy with Christ our Lord. I am not sure that that would not be the starting point of learning everything; everything has to be built up from that. Now I need not tell you that a personal intimacy is something one has to acquire for oneself. You cannot hand on your personal intimacy with someone to someone else. He has to get it for himself. Intimacy is not the same for any two people. You and I might each know a third person most intimately. The third person himself might be unable to say which of us is the closer friend. Yet each of us would have a really different picture of the person—not different in every way, of course, but different in a great many things. No one is able to respond to all the qualities of any other person; some respond to some, and some to others. I might respond to his love for Shakespeare. You might respond to his love for Bach, which would not mean a thing to me. But if there is no human being to every quality of whom one human person can respond, immeasurably more so is that true of Christ our Lord, and of course of our Lady in a lesser degree. We all respond to different elements in Christ, but we have to find them for ourselves. The student, like the teacher, should be soaked in the Gospels. He cannot meet our Lord anywhere else, not as He lived and moved and talked: that is where He is. St. Jerome said, in the fifth century, and Pope Benedict XV in the twentieth made the phrase his own, that "ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ." And as a kind of corollary of that, the ignoring of the Scriptures really looks like a lack of interest in Christ our Lord. It seems unthinkable that we should love Him and not want to know more about Him, know all that we possibly could about him.

This knowing about Him means, as we have just seen, meeting Him as He lived and acted among men and knowing the detail of His earthly life. But it also means knowing who and what He was, the dogma of the Incarnation in short. Where the Trinity has been carefully studied it is all much easier. The pupils will already be familiar with the concepts of person and nature, by attaching a meaning to three persons in one nature, will have seen that one person to one nature is not the only possible proportion, so to speak, and will be prepared therefore for the dogma of one person with two natures. It is vital here to make them realize that while the nature decides what actions are possible, it is the person who does them; thus that, because Christ had a human nature, He could perform genuinely human actions, yet the He who performed them was God the Son. This is not simply a theological technicality; as we have already noted, our redemption depends upon it. It was God the Son who was born of the Virgin Mary, it was God the Son who died on the cross, in each case, of course, in His human nature, not in His divine nature.

Union

We have glanced at the three—God, men, Christ—whose union defines the Church. It remains to see what their union means.

l) Just as the key to the understanding of religion as a whole is spirit, and to the understanding of all creatures, man included, is God's conserving action, so the key to the understanding of the union of men with God in Christ is Sanctifying Grace. And in the same way as spirit and God's continuing maintenance of man in being, grace must be taught continuously, the teacher must concentrate intensely on ways of making the doctrine known, realized, part of the very structure of the mind. I speak with some feeling: until well into my 20's, all I knew of Grace was that it was something to die in a state of. The Church simply cannot be understood without it, everything she does is done that we may have Grace and increase it. Experience seems to show that the young grasp it best as Supernatural Life—in the gradation life, natural, supernatural. Thus they can be helped to see it as a new set of powers, in the soul, enabling man to do things that by his natural powers alone he could not do, things that he must be able to do if he is (a) to attain heaven (b) to live there. They can see Grace operating here as faith, hope and charity, and finding its full flowering in the Beatific Vision: this, too, with careful, patient teaching can—must—be made a reality to the pupils, otherwise they will not know what that heaven is towards which their whole life must be directed: one always moves more languidly to a cloudy goal. Grace is union with God here below, heaven is union achieved, total, final: just as sin is refusal of union, and hell is refusal definitive, chosen eternally.

2) The breach made by sin between the human race and God was closed by Christ's redemptive passion and death; it is in union with Him that we are to be united to God. The truth that the Church is Christ's mystical Body has three consequences for union:

(a) Life, supernatural life, flows from Christ to us, making us one body with Him, incorporating us with Him (roughly on the analogy of the cells in any living body) so that He lives in us and we in Him; we are more closely related to Him in the order of grace than even His Mother was in the order of nature—though she, of course, is immeasurably closer to Him in grace than we shall ever be;

(b) united with Him, we are necessarily united with His heavenly Father—"I in my father and you in me";

(c) in the shared life of one body men are related not only to Christ the Head (though this is primary) but also to one another, and more closely than by any natural relationship: we are closer than brothers, we are members one of another. Even an attempt to live up to this truth would revolutionize social life.

Christ's life flows to us in the Body by way of the Sacraments: the Blessed Sacrament, above all. In the Body Christ continues to offer Himself once slain upon Calvary to His heavenly Father for the application to men individually of the rich treasure He merited for the whole race of man on Calvary. In the Body, we receive His truth infallibly—"we have the mind of Christ."

3) The Church then is Christ our Lord continuing to do through a body of men the same truth-giving, life-giving work that He did in His own natural Body while He was on earth. But the Church has a human side too, and the young should be shown the implications of this long before they leave school; otherwise their faith is going to be tried very bitterly. What Christ has guaranteed in the Church—truth without any alloy of error, life by way of the sacraments—is perfect. What the human members of the Church, from Popes to laymen, do on their own judgment varies from the highest sanctity to the lowest depths of sin. It is a wicked thing to leave children to find this out from the Church's enemies when they have left school. Indeed it is a black mark against a school if the pupils meet, in the world outside, objections for which they were not prepared in school: obviously they cannot be told of every objection and its answer, but there are certain main categories into which objections fall and they can be introduced to these. They should, one feels, be prepared as for a mixed marriage—which would certainly reduce the number of mixed marriages. It is plain common-sense that they should hear of the objections in school, where they can be given the answers as well, rather than left to hear the objections, without the answers, in the outer world. On this matter of what is called Scandals—varying from great crimes down to ordinary human failings—it is especially urgent that they should learn in school. Otherwise, when they hear them outside, they may begin by denying them and suffer the humiliation of defeat in a needless battle; and their faith may be shaken by a feeling that their teachers never mentioned these things because the Church is afraid of them. They will on this matter, at least, be unshakable if (a) they have been taught that the Church depends on Christ's holiness, not on men's; and (b) they realize that they are in the Church for the sake of the gifts of Truth and Life which Christ gives in it, not for the sake of the men through whom Christ gives them: the essential thing they get from the Church is union with our Lord to the level of their willingness to be united.

A General Note on Mystery

Before embarking on this rapid tour of the four elements in the definition of the Church, I talked of spirit as the foundation concept. Now at the end of it, something must be said of Mystery as the atmosphere in which all must be seen. Seeing reality is an exhilarating experience; but part of seeing it consists in seeing why we cannot see more of it. There is a first stage of sheer ignorance in which nothing is seen: the darkness is simply darkness. Then the light of revelation is given and a new universe comes into view. But our minds are limited, there are realities beyond man's vision, even his grace-aided vision; and once more there is darkness. But it need not be simply darkness: if we know why we can see no further, the darkness is a sort of light, and we shall not be irked at not being omniscient. The young should be constantly aware that Mystery is inescapable—mystery in the form of truths we cannot see how to reconcile with each other, mystery in the even more testing form of happenings we cannot see how to reconcile with God's goodness. None of these things need be dangerous, they may indeed be enriching, to the mind which is livingly aware of its own limitations and God's limitless knowledge and love—knowledge which means that God sees where men cannot, love which means that men can trust God unquestioningly.

As I think back over this outline, I know that every element in it is already being taught. I cannot imagine any syllabus anywhere that would omit any of it (except, perhaps, the scandals). It is all being taught. But it is not being learnt—learnt, that is, in the sense of still being vivid and operative in the mind of Catholics ten years out of school. Let me remind you once more that I am basing all I have to say in this paper, not on what happens in school but on what remains in the mind afterwards, not on the process of religious education but on the product. I think it may be a matter of proportion, of light and shade. Teaching the faith does not mean simply teaching one thing after another till the list of things teachable is exhausted. The young must be given the shape of reality, with the elements emphasized that matter most—either in themselves, as Trinity, Incarnation and Beatific Vision, or as keys to the understanding of these great matters. Reality, seen thus in its true shape, should be ever growing in clarity and so in grip on the mind. Other truths must, of course, be taught, for I am not here drawing up a Syllabus of Religious Instruction; but they will be best learnt in their place in the master-plan, enriching it but never allowed to obscure its main lines. The difficulty of all learning is the difficulty of seeing the wood for the trees: in this subject it is almost a tragedy.

Where, in all this, comes piety? It may seem that I am suggesting a purely intellectual instruction, with will and emotions left on one side. Partly this arises from my own position as a layman: I am not equipped to give you guidance upon the development of your students' spiritual lives: nor, upon that, do you lack guides. Yet, as I have said, that is only part of the story. The truth is that the will and the emotions will re-act best to truths seen truly. A teacher can set about exciting devotion to our Lord, the Mass and the Blessed Eucharist, our Lady: but unless the young know to the limit of their power of grasping what the Church has to teach them—what those realities are in themselves, how can their reaction to them be genuine? All too easily the reaction of the impressionable young is not to the doctrines at all, but to the teacher's reaction to the doctrines: their emotional response is rooted in hers, not in the realities; and all too often today the reaction goes the other way, they dislike an enthusiasm which seems to them meaningless, and doctrine and teacher are involved in one single rejection. They must, then, as we all must, study the doctrines not for the sake of the emotional vibrations they may stir but to find out what they mean. The vibrations will come of themselves. Between stimulated reactions and simulated the gap is not wide.

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Frank Sheed was a world-renowned street corner evangelist, lecturer and writer. He and his wife Maisie Ward (herself an acclaimed Catholic author) founded Sheed & Ward publishing house, which printed some of the great­est integrally Catholic literature in America from the 1930's through the 1960's.