Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P.

It is commonplace to speak of the "weight of the past" for each one of us: the sum of felicitous or infelicitous responsibilities, consequence of our voluntary initiatives and determined by our freedom. That freedom alone explains the number at which stops the needle of the gauge indicating that our present is beneath its destiny, or just barely within the safety level, or that it has gone beyond the essential, climbing toward a brilliant maximum.
But the worrisome needle, day after day, will oscillate over that dashboard of existence, seeking its mysterious measurement, up until the day when death will freeze it definitively on the good or the bad number.

For if there exists a "weight of the past" between our cradle and this evening, we also have to speak of a "weight of the future" between this evening and our death; a weight of anxieties and a weight of hopes, conditioned by the fortune of the present–with the understanding of what that fortune represents, accompanied by the will to make it produce. One cannot be too well informed about what one has, about what one lacks, about what one can do, about what we must decide and will, when our temporal or eternal definitive is at stake. Everything is definitive, in the final analysis; each one of our consents immobilizes us in an orientation, either beatifying or dangerous. We have to dare to gaze ahead to the prospect of our tomorrows and look beyond the material chances or mischances that solely occupy our mind–they hold the promise of so much more.

There is a sacred aspect to the future, in view of whose definitive and formidable consummation the present can never be too demanding.

All professional activity includes a period of training, a realization of all that has to be learned: an apprenticeship dictated by the masters of the trade, assimilated by our mastering faculties and daily lived out by the exercise of our efforts and our application.

The salesman or the parachutist, the violin player or the professor of theology, know they need to learn so they can know how to do, in order that they might know enough to produce their optimum "yield" by means of that acquired understanding.

The weight of the future is conditioned by docility to the present. No one more strongly than the adolescent feels the mysterious weight of it upon his daily present. He knows he is destined, but to what? He knows he is gifted, but for what activity? He knows his tastes, but he knows his aversions; he is aware of his capacities–he is also aware of his pretensions. Every day, he adds to the fortune of the day before a supplement of knowledge, awareness, and weakness acquired during the course of the day. How is it all going to end for his future? With a decision or with a sudden impulse? With reflection or with a run of luck? With a healthy approach or with a runaway passion?

Leave them alone, people tell us today; you are not supposed to decide for your children–they are born to choose, so leave them the right to choose, and most of all forget about imperative-driven education: an education is not a direction. Léon Bloy would answer you in a voice of thunder: "Clearly, rivers are not the only things that overflow; we are watching an extraordinary flood of stupidity."
 
Parents are responsible for the good and the true which they have to draw their child to live and to love. This good and this true arise from a rational understanding of life, which the child is on the road to acquiring, but which he is unable to embrace spontaneously. By its nature, understanding is what comes when our reason has worked at comparing, discerning, in order to fix upon a decision.

Yet the child's reason is not fully formed or he would no longer be a child–he would have his majority, disposing of a freedom capable of willing in spite of the instincts, the caprice, the passions, the inclinations of his nature in turmoil and of his age in all its growing pains.

The defining characteristics of childhood are precisely a lack of sufficient reason combined with the anarchic excess of unreasonable impulses. The choices of a child do not descend from the heights of his intellectual faculties, which are still shrouded in the fog of ignorance or sensation. We therefore cannot abandon to him the responsibility of choosing in the absolute sense of the word, in the full and true sense, if that responsibility is not perfected by the parents, as a guide in the mountains perfects the choice made by the tourists, by directing their hike.

In certain families, the expression "just let them choose" is equivalent to exploring the mountains without a guide: "Just let them go off the path, lose their way, and tumble into a chasm." You will answer: "But I bought him hiking boots, a rope, an ice-axe, even a whistle to call for help." For pity's sake, understand that no climbing gear of counsels, warnings, lovely speeches are enough to prevent his getting lost, which is only avoided with an understanding of life which the child does not have and cannot have in one fell swoop. He needs the imperative of red lights and green lights managed by the wisdom of his parents. He needs the intelligent imperative of the guide–an imperative arising from a knowledge of the terrain which tourists by definition do not have and which, by way of an attentive authority, will determine the use of the means which each one is impatient to try out for himself.

The child, too, is impatient to try out all of his being; a knowledge of the terrain does not interest him for its own sake, but for the opportunity of self-affirmation it offers to him. For the child, everything is an opportunity. He trusts his psychological and moral agility, afraid of nothing: he does not know what constitutes a chasm; he does not know that he is confusing reasonable with curiosity; he does not know that for him decision is synonymous with passion; that courage is a mask for violence; that independence signifies intemperance; that liberty flatters laziness. He throws himself headlong wherever he is attracted; he is impatient to play at being a man, to affirm himself a man, to realize himself as a man. Like the tourist impatient to take the place of the guide, the child is impatient to take the place of his parents. His true capacity for choosing is much more a disordered need for personal affirmation than a concern with knowing where he is heading, with learning its difficult terrain, with accepting the conditions of access and the conditions of enterprise. Tourists only set out on a trip for sense impressions, with an understanding that leads their senses toward a result superior to the satisfactions of the hike: its goal. The child has a passion for setting out on trips; the parents need to have a passion for teaching him the goal toward which he is setting out without knowing it.

By definition, the child does not judge based on a knowledge that he does not yet have, but based on whims, tendencies, and attractions that need exterior imperatives to guard the child from contradiction with what he should little by little know and understand in order to be a person. Intelligent refusal on the part of the parents is a way of giving the child knowledge that he did not yet possess: knowledge of a danger, of an unsuitability, of an opposition to the value he should acquire. Likewise, intelligent permission is a way of approving the child's beginnings of a rational understanding of life.
 
The firmness of authority is an imperative responsible for teaching the child the importance of what is asked of him in view of his personality and his future. For personality only exists through an understanding of the spiritual and moral value which we are called to become and to remain. Education is not a hazing, by a succession of imperatives, any more than it is a psychological criminality by a succession of abdications: "No, dear; you know what you have to do–you're a big boy." No, he is not; that is precisely the point.

In both cases, we have an absurdity: that of the educator who in all things takes the place of the educated; that of the educated who in all things takes the place of the educator. To educate is to dare: to choose for the child, in order to deliver him from his ignorance, his helplessness, his personal impulses; to choose in place of the child for the benefit of the child, even if it means effectively upsetting the child momentarily; to choose in function of what one knows as a Christian and as a man of honor to the benefit of the child, all unproven in the faith and in his honor.

To educate is to will at all costs the essential good of the child in view of his essential future: eternity.

We have reduced the future to a secularized problem of a purely temporal life centered around success, money, and well-being, instead of seeing that temporal future as supposed to allow the child to use things temporal to affirm himself a moral Christian, a personality, and a value: to draw things eternal out of it.
The discredit brought to bear upon the value of imperatives in education holds a particularly shameful place among educators. This proves that their authority does not even have the merit of understanding that to command is to love–and to make oneself fiercely loved–with precision, moderation, and gentle firmness; that they misunderstand the psychological frailty of the adolescent by treating him as a fully responsible person, for very quickly his intuition will seize upon the incapacity of the educators, with even a secret disdain for their liberalism; that their educational methods are marked from the outset by the fundamental flaw of that powerlessness inherent in contradictory terms: non-directive education! One might as well speak of the recitation of a non-learned lesson.

Léon Bloy was not wrong: there is an extraordinary flood of stupidity which can only finish by drowning the educators and the educated.

So where does this hatred of command come from? From human pride, abandoning man to his irrational mechanism of wants satisfied at the expense of the knowledge of the good to be preferred to the wants, and to be willed in spite of the wants. Liberated from the imperatives that preserve in order to develop, man is left to the development of his whims, imprisoning him in the tyranny of his passions.

There exist only three categories of men: men of duty, men without duty, and men against duty.
I can already hear the piously demagogic protestation of supernaturalized sentimentality presenting, with appropriate unction, Jesus' famous expression: "I give to you a new commandment, that you love one another." Love each other, and that's enough. And yet Jesus' words are a commandment: a formal imperative leaving no room for any concession, any interpretation, any abdication, an imperative legitimizing every effort, every sacrifice–giving your life included. Never has there been a leader so strong as the Lord in the matter of imperatives. No one has ever dared to demand such renouncement or confident, liberating obedience. Not one educator has ever dared to impose in such detail the rigors of an eternal formation and, after having constructed for us the program of love with the consented demolitions of Calvary, He declares that it will all end on the clouds of heaven, with a great power and a great majesty, doubly acclaimed by the Hosannah of the well-bred and by the cry of the ill-bred, "Erravimus": "we were mistaken." In which camp will our pious educators be found? Here, truly, the future will tell, but a future where no one will be doing any more choosing...it will be too late, and the surprises are likely to be devastating.

We have lost too profoundly the understanding of our finality to be able to soundly judge the education meant to prepare it. I take this reasoning very far: What is heaven?–It is the country of the well-bred by the imperatives of love. What is grace?–It is the return to the good eternal education of oneself by the imperatives of consent to that grace. What is natural education?–It is an interior preparation to lure grace into taking its initiatives in us, for education draws out the natural virtues.

By an intelligently directed education, parents dispose the child to harmony with supernatural imperatives, so much will he have benefited from the natural imperatives of the education received. There is surely a high percentage of education in a person's appreciation of grace and of sanctity. Certainly, we cannot turn it into a formal condition for salvation–the Good Thief was probably not very well-bred–but be careful: God alone is judge of the causes which dispense from being well-bred for meriting His mercy. These causes are numerous: they go from irresponsibility due to heredity all the way to irresponsibility due to the fact of being an orphan, one more reason to measure your own responsibility to be well-bred when the opportunity is offered to you, by a directive education anxious to keep you from missteps and make you pick up the pace, in order to foster your encounter with grace.

Education does not mean bowing and scraping and flattering words–no imperatives are needed for those products of mere instinctive vanity. Education means spiritual and moral value acquired by affectionate imperatives and developed by the personal free will of each. We must not forget that the Living God has a very directive pedagogy from the first day of Genesis up to the Ascension, and from Pentecost up to our day. The prophets only spoke in imperatives.

Now, the duty of parents is to be but the echo of God to enlighten, support, warn, and achieve or obtain. Their children have received physical life: they direct them toward health by imperatives of prudence and care which they would be judged criminal not to express, which helps you appreciate the imprudent deeds and words chosen by the inexperience of children in the vital domain of the conscience and the understanding, because of parents who either do not dare or do not will.

No longer daring to ask, no longer willing to inform, no longer deciding to permit or to forbid, is, on the part of parents, attributing to their children the non-existent honor of a judgment they do not possess, and burdening their conscience as parents with a dishonor they ought not to know: that of abdicating their function as educators.

The joy of witnessing the emergence of self-control in an adolescent, the joy of observing in a young person a dawning independence from the tyranny of the senses, the joy of hearing appreciations wax more beautiful and more noble in a child gripped by an ideal and by beauty, the joy of seeing young people striving like saplings in a forest toward the highest altitude and the most beautiful light because they have been trimmed, helped, supported, pruned by the imperatives of the heart and the thought of the parents vigilantly watching over their chances for the future with the present of their wise and firm assiduity, which, for parents and children, all comes back to the new commandment: "love one another," even when it hurts.

All of those joys are music to the ears of parents, in recompense for having dared to love to the point of a command animated by an understanding put at the service of the little one.

For parents, to choose is to know; for the child, to choose is often to yield to his wants or to decide without knowing the significance of his choice, uneducated thanks to the abdication of the parents. Perhaps you will conclude that, at this price, never will the child dispose of his personal liberty, with the imperatives of his parents acting as permanent crutch. You fail to appreciate the efficacy of the educative command when you consider it thus. Maybe you will understand if I put it this way: when you use your authority to put an airplane on its runway, you deliver it from authority by communicating to it the freedom to fly away. The runway-imperative, accepted and loved, gives it the independence of flight through the freedom of takeoff.

Every order holds out to the subordinate the opportunity to develop his own intelligence. To obey is to draw out of an order the means to be freely capable of commanding later in your turn, by developing the thoughtful functioning of your will.

There is no blind commanding, or it is tyranny. There is no blind obedience, or it is slavery. There is the imperative of love: the order translating affection. There is execution by love: obedience reinforcing freedom.

To command well, you have to begin by obeying well; and to obey well, you have to appreciate the independence of spirit and the development of the personality which obedience proposes.

What we need is a people nourished once again on the great and liberating intellectual principles that go beyond the pedestrian, vulgar vision of imperative considered as abuse and of obedience considered as debasement. It has become nearly impossible to create any appreciation for these intellectual principles in a people whose education is limited to fostering well-being and material security alone.

For parents to be able to fulfill their role, they have to recognize that this role is inseparable from the risk of the imperative-out-of-love. For children to become men, they have to recognize that this destiny is inseparable from the risk of obedience. Whoever is unwilling to risk ("Gave his life," said Jesus) will never give more than lip service.

The unending declarations glorifying submission of the mind are often a mask for psychological passivities terrified of having to commit to the risk of courageous affirmations, or that of daring to discern error to the point of refusing to follow.

And yet, for Jesus, love is a commandment which is not interpreted according to persons but according to His Truth.

Moreover, life tends to exact a kind of revenge whose victims do not even appreciate its terrible irony; for there has indeed arisen a terrible irony of imperatives. By nature, their function was to watch out for the good of the human person in preserving it and in developing it. Today, authority despises and distrusts persons. It uses its power to issue orders from behind an anonymous collectivism of administrative councils and commissions. From the outset, the trembling personality of the leader takes shelter behind the non-responsible number, and the precaution of that non-responsibility is reinforced by a cascade of committees–local, regional, state, national, international–hence the catastrophic disaffection of the elite in regard to their leaders, who have vanished from their role even though they fill the space. Impossible to know them in order to make an assessment or speak to them: "Awfully sorry, but the commission decided, it wasn' me." The best part of all is that, issuing as it does from collectivism, modern authority naturally flows, anonymous and implacable, into that other collectivism of groups, of associations, from which their elite no longer dare dissociate themselves for fear of being singled out.

And here is the revenge: the appearance of the tyranny of regulations, hoops to jump through, anonymous obligations of which you would have to be clever indeed to name the author. It is what we call Big Government: up above, the anonymity of the few; down below, the anonymity of the masses; above and below, the passion for power wedded to the passion for non-responsibility, the whole animated by a slave-army of speakers, psychologists, pedagogues, specialists, delegates, representatives, who put the final touches on the construction of an absolutely depersonalized humanity, that is to say, the contrary of God, the contrary of Jesus, the contrary of the saints, the contrary of the Church: "Thou, you there–nobody else–Thou art Peter." Marxism has triumphed over the faith of many people by replacing the cult of personified and sanctified value with the cult of numbers and with many-headed Anonymity, to use the language of the Apocalypse.

Happily, we still have the Maternity of the Virgin, declared high and loud by the sole Pontiff responsible for the Church, and beautifully concretized by the official designation of Mary whose heroic obedience to the imperatives of grace earned us the recompense of her ineffable personality. With her, we know to whom we need to speak, and how to speak.

Happily, she dared to accept the risks contained in the free imperatives of the Annunciation. Happily, His Holiness Paul VI dared to run the risk of confiding the Church to her Maternity, recompense of the redemptive imperatives freely and intelligently consented by her strength of soul, fruit of her purity of heart. Happily, she remained a person without belonging to any group, that she might listen to the poor sinners animating every group, thirsty for her gentle and firm authority, which she uses directly–she, Suppliant Omnipotence.

Fortunately, with her, we know whom we are addressing: most humble dignity, most efficacious authority, most certain power–in a word, the One and Only who dares to risk everything without cowering behind brilliant anonymities.

What an admirable educator she was for the young humanity of Jesus, and what admirable obedience she received from the Child thanks to the divinity of Jesus.

To risk, you have to renounce the habits of pen-pushers and bureaucrats; you have to possess a capacity to know man beyond the airs he gives himself and beyond his vulgar spinelessness; you have to look at yourself with enough courage to refuse to see yourself in your original baseness by a will to start afresh, which is neither a caricature of authority nor a caricature of obedience. You have to be proud with the pride of Mary; proud enough to serve the authority of God in order never to be enslaved by the authoritarianism of men.

With God, there is no risk of being a victim of His imperatives. Absolute Intelligence, He knows His children to the last detail, and He measures out His invitations in proportion to their ignorance and their frailty. He asks progressively, but He asks; He proposes the risk affectionately, but He proposes. Never will He regret a single one of His appeals–He knew its precise quality; never will He regret having proposed a risk–He knew its marvelous suitability. On His side, nothing to fear, nothing to regret–He is the perfect educator: Pater noster, the Father of each one of us, and of all of us, conscious of the help which His Love brings with it and conscious of the implications of our refusal to run the redemptive risks solicited by His grace.

How can we yield to Him? Have the cool-headedness to understand that what He knows cannot be replaced by anything better; that the instant in which He asks for it "matches" exactly the validity of what He knows about us; that our only way of responding is by a consent filled full of understanding and overflowing with love; and that nothing is then more free than our spontaneous obedience. Let Him ask because He knows, let Him insist because He loves, and let us say yes because He does not deceive.

Among the artists of the 19th century was a Swiss composer, Niedermayer,  who wrote a charming prayer. I am going to give in to the temptation of quoting it to you as an illustration of a mother's understanding of her child–even if my memory stumbles over a word or two:

Over a cradle, the dream of a mother
Should always be but a prayer.
Deign, my God, to choose for my child.
You know better and You love him as much.

You know better (understanding), so choose Yourself, You who cannot be deceived, and choose for this baby who knows nothing, and whom You do not wish to deceive. As for me, his mother, it is a little bit my admirable function to dream for my child, whom I picture as one day being the most handsome or the most successful:

Angel from heaven, what will you be on earth?
A man of peace or else a man of war?
Priest at the altar, handsome officer at the ball?
Brilliant poet, orator, general?
As I wait to see...on my knees,
Angel from heaven, fall fast asleep.

As I wait to see the future with all its mysteries. The weight of the future: it so truly is the agonizing mission of a mother to wait, a heart full of dreams, a soul full of faith, and a life full of what we never expect.

God knows everything–what a comfort, and how the imperatives of Christian authority echo the knowledge of God to help little children and adolescents match up to the dreams of Mama kneeling at their cradle.

When you see your children pulling away in the name of freedom and a brave new world, ask yourselves what are the imperatives of love of which God asked you to be the echo for their heart hungry to trust someone, and to which you did not dare to give–I do not say the risk of an evasive or dilatory response, but the handsome risk of an authority indisputable by the truth communicated in nomine Domini, in the name of the Lord.

Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from Carnets Spirituels: L'Éducation, No. 7, January 2006, pp.34-46. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984.