Dear friends,
Congratulations to our students and their teachers and families on beautifully completing the first year of Chesterton Academy of Our Lady of Hope! And thank you to all of you who have helped make Chesterton in Rhode Island a reality.
The end of the first year was marked by many virtues - wonder, friendship, gratitude, perseverance, courage - but I was especially struck by the students' joy. While the beginning of the year had all the delight of starting something new and beautiful, the joy I witnessed at the end of the year had a different character. It reminded me of a line from C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle. After laughing together at an amusing moment, the characters all become silent again. Lewis writes: "As you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious." As Lewis suggests, this kind of joy is related to wonder, and it quiets the soul, because it comes from a relationship with what is truly beautiful. It is perhaps surprising to consider that joy - which a friend once called "the last true counterculture" - is an important part of our mission. But there is a profound reason why classical, Catholic schools are marked by joy.
As Aquinas writes, joy comes from love. It comes when we are with people or things we love, or when good things happen to those we love. This means that the more deeply and truly we love, the deeper and truer our joy can be. Classical, Catholic education is joyful because it helps students encounter and fall in love with the fullness of truth, beauty, and goodness. For example, we challenge students to grow in wisdom and virtue, and they discover that their lives are a quest of great significance - suddenly, they are being tested by reality itself, and not simply by the things the teacher decides to put on the test. Or when students learn Geometry and philosophy, their minds are stirred by the purity and beauty of truth present there. Again, when they study the Old Testament, they encounter the character of God and the meaning of the Incarnation in a way that makes their faith more whole. And by doing all these things in a community of earnest inquiry and mutual encouragement, they discover the life-changing power of real friendship, which, as Aristotle and Aquinas teach, is friendship founded on the love of virtue.
Finally, this joy is steady and deep because every day, through prayer and worship, we ground our quest in the relationship with Beauty itself, recalling that "the Lord is near" and is already victorious (cf. Philippians 4:4-9). Chesterton education is joyful because it is an education in love - love for what is real, beautiful, and enduring. For me, it has been a great source of joy to see all this come to fruition in a special way in the final days of the school year.
Please read on to see what we have been doing, and to learn about opportunities to join us this summer and fall!
Gratefully yours in Christ,
Robert Duffy, Ph.D.
