Trinitas Blog

Perhaps we should ponder the meaning of the word “education” before we try to discern what a good education is. The word is derived from the Latin infinitive educāre or educere or a combination of the two. Either way, the word carries the meaning “to lead” or even “to lead out.” Understood this way, it is easy to see that any good education must lead the learner to something. Anything that claims to be education but is passive in its application, perhaps allowing the learner to find his own way, isn’t exactly education. To be educated then is to necessarily be led out of ignorance and into a particular knowledge, a particular way of understanding that produces wisdom. Such is a proper classical Christian education.

“I wasted time and now doth time waste me.” This is the lament of Shakespeare’s King Richard II. He was an idle and indecisive king whose crown was stolen from him because he wasted his past, and as he speaks these words he anticipates living out the rest of his days in prison or exile.  Another of Shakespeare’s great figures, Hamlet, is also famous for wasting time. After the ghost of his father appears and burdens him with the urgent task of vengeance, Hamlet spends the next four acts of the play finding excuses not to go through with it, because he fears what the future might hold.

We spend a lot of time thinking about our future.  People ask you what you want to be when you grow up? Where are you going to college? What are you going to do with your life? What job do you want? There is much we don’t know for certain about our future. But today I want to tell you something about your future.

In the last post we anticipated what habits would help husbands and fathers to be oriented toward the life of the home in ways that produce good fruit. What follows is not comprehensive. In fact it may seem simple, but simple things are often most important because they are most basic to life: plants need watering to live, pets need feeding to flourish, and man, well, man needs spiritual habits to cultivate holiness.

In the last post I ended with a thesis:

“A man’s improvement in the home comes through reorientation of his heart and habits.”

Let’s start with the heart.

Any notion that coming home to escape the hardships of the world also involves escaping the hardships of the home is a not-so-subtle retreat from a man’s godly responsibility. Worse, it is a lack of faith in God’s promise that great joy, the fullness of life, comes from precisely this labor from which Dad often wants to escape.

In the last post on Life's Chief Labor, I ended with the following claim:

“Every wife and every child can tell the difference between the father-and-husband’s genuine sacrificial work on behalf of the family that takes him out of their presence, and the sort of activity that the father-and-husband chooses for himself that takes him away with no perceivable benefit.”

When Dad has a job that requires him to work eight-t0-twelve-hour days to earn income, his family can see that the income he draws provides tremendous stability in the present and, if Dad is wise, into the future. The tangible goods Dad provides by his outside labor—clothes, food, shelter, recreation, etc.—Mom and the kids enjoy. However, Dad also brings significant good, or harm, through his labors in the home. When Dad gets home, are his choices bringing him into the lives of his wife and children, or escaping from them?

Every quarter, our students are invited to participate in the Classic Film Society. We gather, eat popcorn, watch movies, and then spend time discussing the ways these films wrestle with the Gospel, even if they do it inadvertently. This is more than just an excuse to watch good movies, because movies are one of the primary way our culture searches for the Gospel. Directors aren’t necessarily looking to imbed the content of Christianity in their film, but they cannot escape the shape of Christianity.[1] Films made in the past demonstrate this, as do those that continue to come to a theater near you.

And this is one of the beauties of our Classic Film Society: what we do connects with current movies as well. 

Our present culture offers little help to the Church Militant. Comforts and distractions abound; the continuous drone of ubiquitous advertisements chant a mantra of “you deserve it,” “take a break,” and “pamper yourself.” Lest we become the proverbial frog, slowly boiled to death in the accumulating abominations of our age, the Church must recover the glory and joy of indefatigable labor.