Echoing everyone else’s perspectives on your eloquent and wisdom-filled posts… Why not start with some articles on various topics and have them posted? I’m sure http://www.OrthodoxyToday.org and http://www.OrthodoxNet.com would be more than happy to share them with our large audiences. Already, just from the exchanges here, I see enough material for a good piece. Just a thought….

PS – I share your preference for speaking. Writing is a developed discipline that requires many hours of really hard work.

Thank you both for your kind words. As for a book, well, I will have to see what the future holds. Personally, and contrary to how it may appear, I prefer public speaking to writing. 🙂

In Christ,

+FrG

you have put into a few paragraphs what has been inchoate in me for a long time, but was not able to express as eloquently as you have. I’ve always felt that education is the province of the Church as are all “welfare” aspects of the gov’t. The Founding Fathers beleived that the federal gov’t should have only few ennumerated powers. The rest were to be left to the people and their “small platoons” (in Burke’s phrase).

I would go one step further and call such elitist attitudes, the “tyranny of the experts.” This goes to the heart of republican governance: only a person who is upright, pious, and strives to be moral can serve as a “citizen.” Republicanism creates a form of government that enables such citizens to serve the polis as a militia, jurors, electors, and magistrates if called upon to do so.

It is incumbent upon Christian parents to recall civic virtue and homeschooling or being the primary educator of one’s child is the necessary first step.

The phone call did not change our resolve to do what we felt was best for our child. The phone call did have a chilling effect on our ability to integrate what we were doing into the parish. It was my first inkling that dealing with Engelwood was not pleasant unless you agreed with the already established agenda and the ‘Friends of Philip’ ruled–believe me there was an implied threat in the tone of the conversation as well as the specifics.

The director was less offended by our homeschooling than by the suggestion that the Church ought to produce materials specifically for parents to use in their homes to help educate their children in the faith, rather than focusing on the centralized Sunday school programs.

One of the fundamental ideas that attracted me to the Church in the first place was the clear understanding of the human person in community each affirming and supporting the quest for holiness in the other. Being told by a ‘person in authority’ that only centralized, expert authority was any good, shocked me. In the fifteen years since that phone call, you are the first person to whom I have talked that really gets it. Thank you.

Thinking about the comment you quote above (# 30), when I visit children in the hospital I encourage their parents to be zealous advocates for their children. I remind them, “Your child’s doctor is expert in ALL children, you are an expert in YOUR child.” The idea that parents are not competent to educate their children flies in the face both of natural law and the theology of the Church.

God entrusts children to parents and it is parents who are called and established by God as the primary educators of their children. In fulfilling their vocation as educators of their own children parents choice to form educational cooperatives that allow them to work together with other parents. They may as well seek out the assistance of other adults who, whether parents themselves or not, are able to make up for any deficiencies that parents or group of parents may have in offering instruction to their children. BUT regardless of the circumstances, parents are the primary educators of children and this responsibility cannot and must not be surrendered to another adult except in the most extreme of circumstances.

Forgive me going on like this, but having served as an interim priest for four parishes where there had been “problems” of one sort or another, I have come to see that too often clergy do not see ourselves as serving the laity in fulfilling their own vocations. This vocation has too facets.

One, there is the general call–rooted in baptism–to sanctify the world. By virtue of our baptism we are called to conform not only our lives but the world of business, culture, education, etc., to the Gospel of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ.

Second, and as I mentioned above, we are called to discern the specific obligations we have within the concrete circumstance of our daily lives. By no stretch of the imagination can this obligation exclude the education of the children God has entrusted in His mercy to parents.

In any case, my call as a priest is based on my first call given in baptism. It is only to the degree that I am faithful to my obligation to sanctify the world that I am able to fulfill the call confirmed in ordination. What is that call? To help the laity–corporately and individually–to discern and fulfill their own vocation in both its general and specific details.

Having done this in each parish I’ve been asked to get back on its feet I can attest from my own experience (to say nothing of the testimony of Holy Scripture and the Fathers of the Church), if I focus on what is essential–helping the laity entrusted to my care to discover & fulfill their own vocations–then the parish will be healthy not only theologically and spiritually, but also psychological and socially. And a healthy community will grow and foster new vocations to marriage, ordination, monastic life as well as attract new Orthodox Christians and “reverts” to the faith as well.

BUT, none of this can happen when, as the comment you quote implies, we fail to acknowledge and serve each other as we discern and pursue our personal vocation. I’ve said it before, for all that our liturgical and ascetical life is theologically sound, as long as our Church life continues to be bureaucratic and not vocational, we will fail. The second though we place fidelity to our personal vocations at the center of parish and diocesan life, in that moment we will experience the transformation of our parishes, our dioceses, our jurisdictions and (most importantly) our families and our personal lives.

Great thread folks–y’all are an inspiration to me.

In Christ,

+FrG

He made a special call to me at my home in Wichita, Ks from his home in NY on a Saturday morning just to let me know how unacceptable my education of my own son was.

I know what you mean about professional educators as well. My wife is a tenured professor of education who encounters this attitude all too often. There is broad recognition that government schools are failing, but the inability to recognize the importance of tradition on the formation of the child leaves them with little to look at other than techniques. (That despite the overwhelming evidence that family culture plays a game-changing role in the process.) As converts, we wanted to make sure that the school was/is permeated, guided and defined by the faith. As you note, if this is the Truth, as we claim to believe, there is no other choice. We were particularly concerned to make sure that the process supported the content. Too often folks (especially converts like me) tend to treat faith like a concept. Yet the beauty and riches of the Orthodox ascetical tradition, evident in its ability to consistently produce saints, turns this on its head. The process must reflect and be conformed to the claims of the content. A concrete example: if we recognize the eternal verity of the faith, then our only posture can be humility. Love, discipline, humility, participation – all are vital in the formation process. If we “have” the Truth but are conformed to it in the work-a-day world, it only condemns us.

I particularly agree with your comments about the lukewarm. All “systems” are really designed to serve the peak of the bell curve. Those on the high performing second or third standard deviation will often succeed no matter what the system is. (They may not succeed as much, but they will succeed.) Those on the low performing second or third standard deviation will probably struggle no matter how amenable the system is. Those in the middle – the great vast majority of us – are very much affected by the system. We OWE it to “them” as act act of obedient stewardship to do what we can for their edification and blessing. We simply don’t have the right to bury our “talents.”

My late wife and I had one son. We homeschooled him K-12 despite the lack of other Orthodox homeschoolers and the overt hostility of the head of the Antiochian education committee (a +Philip crony) at the time to such a project. Being a committed government schooler himself, he thought parents were incompetent to teach their children even in matters of the faith. He actually said that to me.

We have to have a better, more cohesive understanding of Chrisitan anthropology that includes a renewed focus on salvation. I don’t think we’d do half the things we do individually and corporately if we really believed our salvation was at stake. We need to remember the fate of the lukewarm.

Given the clearly eschatological nature of the monastic witness, I am continually surprised how few Orthodox seem to understand that the faith is essential to a full and proper education, that the public schools are unequipped to resist moral relativism (and often promote it), that “the world” is not and will never be a friend of the faith, that social privileges are worthless compared to the knowledge of Christ (Phil. 3), and that – in the end – what matters most is who your child becomes because that will last for eternity.