At Our Lady of Hope, part of our mission is “to help parents raise up a generation of joyful saints.” What does this look like? The Catholic novelist Graham Greene compares saints to characters in a book who are easy to write because they “come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word.” How do we try to fulfill our mission to “help parents raise up a generation of joyful saints”? How do we help students “come alive”?
In Plato’s dialogues, the sophists believe they can “pour” Truth into their students’ souls, as if truth were a commodity to be bought and sold. But both Truth and the student’s soul are transcendent mysteries, and the art of the teacher is to facilitate a dramatic encounter between them.
To make this possible, we build a school culture that nourishes habits of presence and attention. We structure our days to communicate that reality is overflowing with meaning. We wade together into great works that raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human. Students read Homer, Plato, and Paul, study the stars, and wrestle with Euclid. Guided by their teachers, who are seasoned guides traveling the same path, students seek the truth through shared discussion and thereby learn to listen to one another and strive together. All these things foster hearts that are full of wonder and capable of deep and generous feeling.
As St. Augustine teaches so powerfully, God is present in anything that is good. Whenever we love anything, we love Christ in it. In all we do at Our Lady of Hope, we aim to cultivate attentive hearts and minds ready to see and to love what is true, so that everyone in our community can experience life-changing encounters with Truth and allow Him to mold us into saints, people who “come alive,” “capable of the surprising act or word.”
In Christ,
Dr. Robert Duffy
