April 2008 Print

Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré

The Father's Role

Many of you will be surprised to learn that the word "leisure" comes from the Latin verb "licere"; it means "that which is permitted"...to remain or to become a man. One could well make a serious examination of conscience in light of this etymology from nearly every point of view: duration, frequency, morality–for it is not permitted to grant to man leisures that kill what is human. It is not permitted to turn man away from the ultimate questions, the ones that define him as "exceptional" compared to the rest of creation. "To distract" means "to turn one away from," and distractions that turn man away from his natural and supernatural chances for becoming "exceptional" are guilty leisures.

The minute a man gives expression to the life of the soul, according to the superior demands specific to the soul, he becomes exceptional. That is to say that he stops living according to the laws common to the rest of creation–laws of matter, the senses, the passions–and starts living according to what sets man apart and makes him stand out: honesty, conscience, integrity, obedience, duty, service, demeanor.

The primary service you can render to society or a country is to make a choice, within yourself, in favor of the exceptional–not in favor of leisure–that is to say, in favor of the deployment of virtuous, intelligent affirmations that will make you change your name; you will no longer be defined as a man, but as a character, a value, a conscience, fearless, a hero, a martyr, or a saint. You will have stepped away from de-humanizing leisures by granting them only the share that is permitted, to keep them from denying you the primary duty and the primary victory of man: that of distancing oneself from the mere matter dominating our dilemmas in order to taste the solution to our exceptional dilemmas dominating matter and maintaining us men.

This point of view has become fairly rare because it is rare to meet a man who does not confuse his own ultimate dilemmas with those he is striving to resolve by science, political or social economy, the planning of his leisure time.

Man no longer knows who he is. He contents himself with knowing what he has: a job, a title, a diploma, a checkbook. And after being constantly worn thin by what he has, he turns toward leisures in order to have otherwise and a little better and to be often a little less of a man.

A return to man's interior life would mean a rebirth for families and cities and homelands. The interior life comprises all of those demeanors that do not require a profession or social exterior to give man his exceptional hallmark, demeanors that do not depend on flesh or blood but make use of flesh and blood to prove themselves superior to flesh and blood. It would also engender respect–in general, and respect for the demands of the soul. Similarly with authority–in general, and the authority of government over what benefits the soul. Finally, there is also service–in general, and the service expended in deeds: example, kindness, influence.

The modern way of talking about man is descriptive: the newspaper report of the death of an official with no allusion to the question specific to man. Or a story about a priest and the afterlife; the account of a blessing of the sea, where everything is described including the clergy, but not once does the name of God appear. Likewise with a summary of a speech, where only the descriptive passages are quoted, and nothing that would perturb our complacency.

The press makes it a specialty not to set man above what he has in common with what we could say about the death of a cat or a dog. The result is that we get used to living in an atmosphere of what is not man, all in describing man. This is paganism.

Leaving the media aside, let's look at the realm of business, where we all consider man with that same descriptive mentality: We describe a man's business, placing it in relation to others, profitable or not. Our lives are ruled by questions of competition and advertising. All of that gives rise to currents of rivalry, struggle, measures taken purely in view of self-interest and success. There is no expression of man in all that. The merchant, the factory-owner come across as purely occupied and preoccupied with attaining their production goal. Action becomes pure materialism.

Let's move now on to the activity of Dad and Mom, attuned to worldly description, the elegant, the flashy, maintaining one's position in society, etc. Dad and Mom worry about the house only in view of shaping it around temporal realities–useful indeed, but secondary. What is their way of worrying about the children? One can only give what he has. The child is going to take on his dilemmas the way Dad and Mom do. He is going to describe his day in flashes of the fun he had, the pleasures or annoyances he went through, his successes and failures...and the family conversation will not go beyond the level of each members fortunes and misfortunes, evaluated according to their advantages or disadvantages. In short, it is the reign of profit and loss. It is the reign of an all-too-human mentality, but there is no mention of man.

By affirming his atheism very loudly, man feels pleasantly alone for a few moments. On the one side, there are the false efforts of exterior concerns; on the other side, the false courage of affirming oneself God-less. How do you expect to have men who are complete men, with the essential, inside regions declared off-limits by materialism? And yet only complete men, by their interiority and independence, can possibly ensure the reorganization of society and the family.

So how can we recognize a man's real value? By that interiority whose quality keeps him from seeking the exterior or the pagan before anything else. The influence of those ultimate questions proper to the mystery of man is so nourishing to the heart, the conscience and the soul, the brain, the imagination, and man's very love, that everything else pales and fades away in importance. A holy priest, totally absorbed by the absolute gift of himself to the care of abandoned children, told me not long ago: "In 26 years I haven't had a day of vacation, and I have never felt so rested."

As soon as the deeper life takes possession of the outside life, it turns into action and turns away from the useless. It turns into an absorbing interest, forgetting artificial distraction. It becomes rest and relaxation, because nothing is restful like creating a superior harmony in oneself, capturing the accents of the Gloria in Excelsis Deo. Nothing is restful like the heights of vision and reflection. I am beginning to fear that all these vacations are turning into a pleasant neurosis for the dismantling of human energies.

No one is trying to throw discredit on relaxation. The nature of relaxation is to compensate in re-creation what was expended in efforts and application. But as soon as that relaxation has filled its role, the excess of repose which we begin to seek there is just as harmful as the excess of efforts, because it has all the negativity of excess. How many children have told me honestly that they are bored, near the end of August or the beginning of September, or that they are "tired" (notice the expression) of inventing distractions. If leisure means the time which every person is able to spend without failing in his duties, isn't one already failing in his duty as a man by preferring the artificial tiredness of endured distractions to the genuine repose of formative activities? And here is where we are able to invite parents to discover an enthusiasm for those formative activities, all through the school year as well as during the long period of school holidays (too long, in my opinion).

The father of a family often has the legitimate temptation to consider that he has done his duty toward the education of his children because he has generously given his maximum yield of professional activity over the course of the day, to the benefit of the financial and material guaranties that education presupposes. May he allow me to call his attention, in a friendly way, to the expression "maximum yield." It is a technical expression, one too materialistic for a father conscious of his spiritual mission, taking absolute priority: the mission of molding the souls of his children toward becoming adults who will not be a detriment to society, either by their ignorance or by their dominant faults or by their lack of character or by their preference for leisure. In order for a father to take an interest in the formation of adolescents, he must act in light of the ultimate questions: the conscience, honesty, duty, sacrifice, virtue, gift of self–in a word, the interior, spiritual, supernatural meaning of why he calls himself a man. To do so, the surest means is for him–a man married in the Church, a practicing Christian–to take on his professional life with first and foremost an attitude worthy of those same ultimate questions.

Where does professional monotony come from? From the lack of soul. The danger of this monotony is that it facilitates the base appeals of an overly materialized action, and that it eliminates from the workplace those interior activities which consecrate a man as superlatively valuable and haloed with a prestige of moral authority, as an example, as an influence, which would maintain him in a profound, solid state of soul, strangely contrary to monotony and yet restful, because it is a fullness of gift of self to a human activity.

If Dad were armed with that state of soul when he comes home after work, he would feel the need to continue to live by it, in transposing it into an affectionate concern for his children. He would find it normal to verify whether, in their turn, and on a level with their age, the child's day was lived according to the questions that mold a character, a conscience, and a man. The father of the family would take advantage of a mistake in behavior, a lack of respect, a failure to obey, in order to rectify in the child's mind the sense of what one ought to be. He would do it all the more naturally, and therefore with all the more authority, if the child senses that his father is only expressing what he himself lives by where he works, and the grace of marriage–which not enough people believe in–would give to Dad's formative comments just that tone of persuasion and of "indisputability" that would act on the child more than the comment of any teacher is able to do, even if that teacher is a priest. You have received the sacrament of life in order that your tone might preserve and guarantee that life in all its chances for affirming itself spiritual and truly Christian.

It must be thrilling for a father to shape the intellectual and moral form of a child or an adolescent, glimpsing, through his offspring, all the fruit it will bear for the Church, society, and the homeland: fruits of blessed influence, of kindness toward the small, toward the weak, of true and amicable justice in the child's future relations in society.

It must be a great incentive to shower mercy and blessing on that father, crushed under his temporal concerns, when God sees him intent on ensuring that "Christianity will continue" through his own children.

The duties of an educator are necessarily carried out in a closed-off environment, because it is a family environment, and therefore it, too, is rather quickly invaded by routine and monotony. But what an inexhaustible variety of reasons there are to act, to hold on, to put things in order, when the interior gaze of the father, looking exteriorly out the windows of the home, glimpses far in the distance all those who anxiously await the spiritual formation of that child, breathing in the atmosphere of the ultimate questions that he might teach their value and their fecundity to hundreds of other people. He sees the lineage, not only the physical but also the moral lineage of that influence carried on by his children from generation to generation.

Without taking anything away from the human and pleasantly natural rhythm of family life, you need to ensure the circulation of those mighty currents of interiority which resolve so many conflicts of character and temperament.

One day around 4pm as I was passing in front of the door of a school surrounded by parents waiting for their children, I overheard the following conversation between a father and his son:

"Good afternoon, son. How was school?"

"Good, Dad."

"Did you have lots of fun?"

"Oh! Yes, Dad."

"Well, then, your day wasn't wasted. Off we go..."

One could not be more materialistic, and that child could not help but form his idea of the way his father works from the way he questioned him about his own work. What we need is men.

As for those longer and longer school holidays, they could be an exciting way of obtaining a moral and human formation within an entertaining, restful environment. They ought to be a time of friendly collaboration in which the head of the family gives a higher meaning to the enjoyment granted; in which the time of healthy, enthusiastic amusement does not eliminate the complementary moments of spiritual life and Sunday Mass; in which the joy of living develops into a little bit of kindness and affection for those deprived of that longed-for joy by their poverty or illness. They remain holidays and their enjoyment, far from being weighed down, would be lightened by the slightly immaterial way in which one invites the children to live them. The common expression that identifies holidays with lack of discipline and general permissiveness is a way of undermining their whole reason for being.

Resting means governing one's relaxation, and governing means guaranteeing to that relaxation something which never wearies: the quality and moral value of the enjoyable, of pleasure, and of action.

They say that Colbert¹ used to take his vacations simply by varying his work and studying the less stressful or less serious problems of state. He stayed in one place but interiorly he changed place by letting enjoyment and value relax his attention and engage his reflection.

A sheer quantity of toys has never "relaxed" a child–you have only to open that toy-cemetery of certain closets. The child is waiting for someone to make him discover, with the help of his imagination, that which always relaxes: an activity whose amusing side brings him a healthy nourishment, valuable for what he longs to be. Personally, I grew up at a time when toys did not come in such variety, in such technical perfection and science–often infinitely too serious for toys, moreover. I am also of those whose childhood comforts never went beyond a certain norm, and I am not ashamed of it–and yet I wonder if a little boy of today, spoiled to the utmost degree by all of these toys, would be capable of having as much crazy fun as I did, playing with little sticks of wood carefully weighted with pieces of lead pinched from my brother's hunting cabinet and turned into admirable diving submarines that would travel under water and pop up five or ten yards away from me, as I went jumping up to dive them down again.

The role of the father is to make the child become a man, by using child-activities to foster his son's manly inclinations–the inclinations of an engineer, a builder, an explorer, a leader, and so on, and so on, and teaching his son to introduce into those inclinations the ultimate questions that we talked about in the beginning.

Understood in this way, education does not become an added duty coming after other more urgent matters but rather appears as the urgent matter of a father's whole reason for being, taking priority over all other duties. This is God's way of giving you a role in the spiritual and divine workings of His creation. A man's life only really attains a fullness when it freely and affectionately enters into the designs of God for the ordering of his time, for the ordering of his heart, and for the ordering of his soul–that is to say, for the exceptional destiny to which we are all invited according to our graces, temperament, capacities, and mission.

It is becoming urgently necessary to rediscover that exceptional meaning of man's existence. I was about to say that chivalric meaning, inscribing invisible realities into the temporal by visible, tangible supernatural results. The idealist tendency of confining Catholicism and virtue to affectionate or verbally affirmative words and then eliminating the concrete action and the deeds that God is waiting for in order to verify that we were not just boasting in the face of the Crucifix, is a tendency that arises from insufficient doctrine and an excessive spiritual emotivity that neutralizes precisely that thing it is always talking about–and always giving good reasons not to go beyond words.

The Mother's Role

I can imagine your surprise, seeing me speak about education without once pronouncing the word mother or her place and role in this program of the ultimate questions–although I am closer to the end of this conference than to the beginning.

The role of the father is to make you understand. The role of the mother is to make you love, that is to say, to add to the explanations given by the father everything able to make them enticing, attractive, inspiring, full of interest. The mother, in giving life to her child, gives it so like to her own that there exists on the natural level a whole batch of pre-established harmonies, constantly at the service of a beneficent resonance between her and each one of her children's temperaments. Maternal intuition is the most marvelous of radars; it catches the signal of an obstacle ahead before the child himself even imagines he has been figured out. The mother can sense the clear path ahead just as easily as the obstacle, and her thought navigates easily and surely over the psychological states and the psychological upheavals of her children.

Hence the maternal atmosphere, a veritable climate for which the woman has the responsibility of keeping it attuned to the ultimate questions–with the one difference that, whereas the father is responsible for applying those questions, the mother is responsible for fostering a state of soul: all those hidden dispositions that prevent the father from having to speak in a climate that is either empty of all warmth or even hostile.

How clearly we can see the importance of unity of soul between spouses–and, once again, how much the grace of the sacrament comes into play in this harmony between the parents, who become each one in his own way the two guardians guaranteeing the same type of moral security, of Christian formation, of intellectual and psychological expectations, so that their child may have before him only true arguments, able to foster his formation as a man and a Christian.

The mother has a right to dream, to be ambitious for her children, that they be exceptional–as a recompense for her exceptional generosity in having run the risks inseparable from maternity. Yet her moral value still has to purify that word "exceptional" from all taint of worldly pride, from all snobbery, which so robs the exceptional of its value as to vulgarize its beneficiary. We see it all through history: Woman according to grace, woman according to the Church, is ambitious for perfection and for virtue, as much human as supernatural, and becomes thereby a source of enthusiasm, of energetic action, of a thirst for nobility of soul, for magnanimity, for gratuity in gift of self–in a word, for an irresistible splendor of psychological health, conquering all resistance or hesitation on the part of the child because, if Mom is the one that says it, it must be good and far better than my own stubbornness or obstinacy.

The child needs to feel that his mother is preoccupied by something other than her leisure and her own enjoyment; that his mother is not a sort of employee at the beck and call of his whims and caprices. The child has a longing for moral prestige which parents do not suspect–his human respect keeps it hidden, but as soon as he recognizes the value and authority of it in his mother, he spontaneously lives up to what it demands.

The feminine role is essentially to help the child realize that he is more than a conglomeration of sense reactions; to draw him to appreciate his spiritual freedom for willing the good and preferring the best; for throwing himself wholeheartedly into effort, into sacrifice, into gift of self; and for neutralizing his natural selfishness.

The mother is just as responsible for souls as the priest is, though on a very different level. She is responsible for making souls healthy, for untangling them from the chains of the anti-spiritual, for orienting them toward a fierce love for integrity and truth, the necessary ground for establishing a natural harmony and resonance between those ultimate questions and the child's intimate reflections.

Mothers have no idea of the intensity of the life of the conscience and of the soul in the majority of little children; in their moments of free time, when they know they are alone and no one is watching them, during the few instants before they fall asleep, their head on the pillow, do not imagine that your children think first of the toy they broke or the entertainment you promised. They also think of the profound confidence that they wanted to confide or confess to their mother and the moment they could have done it, the great moral secret torturing them, their dreams of doing something great and noble, the torment they are going through about confessing the bad thing they did when nobody was watching.

In a word, they live in the real world, the world of the conscience and of spiritual secrets, and they are all surprised at finding themselves in a world that is very affectionate and materially attentive to their temporal existence, but so distant and foreign from their great secrets that what they learn to fear is the "knock on the head," shattering the silence of their confidences with an angry warning not to forget the "serious" things, such as standing up straight (not putting your finger in your nose) in front of Mrs. So-and-so because you are going to embarrass the whole family–except for God, Péguy might have added with a wink.

You ask me how I know?

Quite simply by what has been confided to me by adolescents of 18 or 20 who were literally possessed by a higher, spiritual sense of existence when they were between 14 and 18, and who missed the turn-off because of a certain mockery, claiming to be full of common sense whereas it was really full of nonsense, coming from the worldliness of the mother, the material concreteness of the father, or the pretentious superficiality of the big brother. The climate was hostile to that mysterious delicacy called naiveté by the big people, because big people are too often so little that they no longer reach the spiritual height of the little children.

 

But, when He found about what happened

Jesus got angry,

Opened His rose-colored cloak

To let him to hide inside.

And so brought Gregory

Into His Paradise

Saying, "My heaven of glory,

I say in truth,

Is for the little children."

Milady, yes indeed!²

 

If only the mothers, when they hide their little children in their rose-colored cloak, could give them the confidence of being in a paradise of understanding and approval of their great spiritual dreams, how society would be peopled with the elect, and how we would rejoice in feeling ourselves surrounded by the elect! The noble characters of children and of the future men of conscience, the future apostles, the future men of goodness, the future heroes, the future martyrs, perhaps the future saints, all depend on how their mothers lived out those ultimate questions.

It is such a serious thing to be a mother. It has nothing to do with belonging to a certain rank in society; it means belonging to the providential designs of God upon the world.

You can see how we need to untangle education from set phrases and formulas which are often helpful but more often insufficient. The road-sign gives you the set phrase of the path to follow if you are in a car–like everyone else, leveled out and enslaved to the universal manner of locomotion. But if you are necessarily on foot, because you are a hunter, an explorer, a forester, a farmer, that is to say, obliged not to hold to the road-sign but to prefer the charming, weathered paths which keep the soul attentive in spite of the activities of the earth, then you are obliged not to hold to the set phrase inscribed on the sign, because the set phrase explains in the average case how to inform the greatest number–but is the greatest number always the most developed and the most successful?

Untangle education, thanks to an educator clever enough, honest enough, and bold enough to dare to deliver the child according to his own mystery, in becoming for him an affectionate living echo of that mystery.

Untangle education from that elegant form of materialism, to dare to commit yourself beyond set phrases, in a spirit and state of soul that takes its inspiration from the spirit of God in the soul of a child and from the spirit of parents independent of the spirit of the world.

There is no dictionary telling us how to apply even the best of set phrases and formulas to man's ultimate questions; there is only the individual conscience, itself living by those questions, which is capable of grasping their urgency and their incontestable value.

Ultimately, the education of the child flows from the education of the parents, flowing from their type of existence, their way of thinking, of reacting; their more or less absolute attachment to what God expects of them. It would seem that our most urgent efforts should be toward recreating or developing this spiritual mentality in our families.

 

It would seem that the real joy of parents is to be found in expressing this mentality before their children, in a simple and natural way, until the child senses that it makes up the whole background music of the joys of home-life and of family behavior; that it is the cause of those joys. Their education is made all the easier once this background music begins naturally to alert the child as to what attitude everyone expects him to have; as to the act or the reflex of obedience or politeness putting him in harmony with this background music. I do not think that education is obtained by a series of enumerations of what is allowed, demanded, or forbidden, without any other link between all that than a spirit of voluntarism without any spiritual or moral connection. Knowing how to attune the child to all that superior (and therefore demanding) background music, will make it easier for him to accept spontaneously and without threats the practical or numerical demands which give flesh to that spirit, at given times and periods in the life of the family.

We should not turn up our noses at the expression "family spirit." Without granting it any kind of sacramental efficacy and without considering it as a closed circuit in which the father leads the way, automatically followed by the mother, who is automatically followed by the eldest daughter making sure no one is lagging behind, including the baby of the family who wishes everyone would just leave him in peace about all this "family spirit," there nonetheless does exist such a thing as a family spirit, which avoids that rigidity and that routine by its very quality, because it is a spirit that is genuinely a spirit. It is an active orientation toward fidelity to the ultimate questions, adopted and lived out according to the circumstances, and very naturally integrated into daily life without the head of the family's having to take out his watch and announce sententiously that it is "ultimate questions time," and everyone has to rectify his positions "because we are talking about the ultimate questions, my children!" When you have lived even to the slightest degree according to the demands of those great problems, you do not list them out, you emanate them by a look, a tone of voice, a smile, a silence, whose prestige immediately conquers that mocking adolescent sarcasm.

That is when a day's well-being is no longer judged in function of weekends or Sundays, of beach holidays or skiing–not that we should neglect those moments or that we should avoid including them in our leisures–but genuine well-being appears in the collective continuity of reciprocal dispositions to react in the same way: the way of moral nobility, honesty of demeanor, helpfulness toward a suffering neighbor–each one with his grace, his temperament and his faith, but everyone with the same fidelity.

How can you recognize that kind of a family spirit?–By something very simple: what takes priority with most families becomes secondary for them, and vice versa. The essential is not in the curtsy when you arrive in the drawing room but in entering the drawing room on a higher level than mere appearances, with an indisputable moral value. The essential is not in having lots of money but in increasing your moral fortune of intellectual or virtuous authority. The essential is not to wail over a failure but to wail over the evil which flows from it by a lack of character in knowing how to accept it.

When families will have re-adopted those noble customs of a spirit that has more authority over daily life than all the other, secondary, purely human incentives, on that day, a great happiness will take possession of family relations. And when happiness takes possession of a family, it overflows into society by the peace it brings and the confidence it inspires. By the grace of God, families will love re-instituting a Catholic family spirit.

 

Translated exclusively for Angelus Press by Miss Ann Marie Temple from Carnets Spirituels: La Famille, Part 2, July 2005, pp.18-34. 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.

¹ Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83), French Minister of Finance under Louis XIV.

² The last verse of a famous folk song from Brittany, "Little Gregory," written in 1898 by Theodore Botrel, about a boy of 16 killed in the Catholic resistance to the French Revolutionary Army. He had been sent away as too small to work on the farm, too small to be an apprentice in town, too small to be in the King's guard; he joined the peasant army and the bullets flew over his head laughing at him because he was so short. Finally a bullet strikes him dead; even St. Peter does not want to let him into heaven because what they are looking for is a mighty archangel. But then Jesus heard about what happened... (Translator's note).