Standing Together

My Latin II students were reading the poem "Horatius" by Thomas Babington Macaulay today, and I could not help but think of the Summit families. It is a classic of English poetry and is based on the event in Rome's history when, in 508 B.C., just after the expulsion of the last king, a hero named Horatius Cocles volunteered to hold a narrow pass at the end of a bridge against the enemy if only someone would stand alongside him. By all means, take time to read the whole poem, but consider these verses.

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,

Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul,
With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?’

Already our families have answered the call of Horatius Cocles and are working together for the good of the school with which God has blessed us. And why are these families doing so, families who, like everyone, face the economic struggles of a difficult time? Perhaps it is because they know so well the value of the education their students are receiving. Perhaps it is because they hope that their children will, if needed, find the kind of solace that one Benson A. Koenig, Battery A, 10th AART Battalion, U.S. Army, North Africa and Italy, 1942–1944, did as he lay dying.

Those last three days, reciting from memory
Cicero and Vergil, you could quote
Long passages of Latin poetry.
It left us stunned. The only antidote
To poison in your flesh was blessèd words.
No other good thing comforted you when
Pulsating life, just like a flock of birds,
Gathered its wings to fly. The deaths of men
Can be as silent as the moon’s eclipse,
Spectrally speechless as fields after battle,
Loud as the riven sky’s apocalypse
With thundering noise—or mindless as a rattle.
Benson, your answer to encroaching dark
Was lustrous language, flaring like a spark. Joseph S. Salemi

Why We Must Support Christian Schools

Some of you may know of a man named Keving Jennings, who is currently the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education. He is also the founder of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network.

This post simply serves to direct you to excerpts from recommended books by the GLSEN. WARNING! It would not matter whether these excerpts were describing homosexual or heterosexual activities. They do not belong in books recommended for children. Period. To see just a litle of what I am talking about, read some of the excerpts here.

Until our Lord returns or calls us home, we must enage these issues on two fronts. On one front, we must do all that we can in the public square. Whether or not our children attend public schools, our taxes fund them, and we have the right and responsibility to address what goes on there. On top of that, many families will send their children to these schools unaware of what is going on. Families who send their children to Christian schools must never adopt an attitude of "My family is fine, who cares about the rest?" These are our neighbors, our friends, and our family. We must work within the sphere of public education to see that what is taught is what is true, good, and beautiful.

The second front, of course, is Christian education. We must support it at every opportunity. Just as families in Christian schools must work for and within the public square, so Christian families whose children attend the government schools must share in the support of schools where truth, goodness, and beauty can be explicitly taught and lived out.

Renowned philosopher and popular author of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote,

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. Adn if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.

Suffering to Aid the Suffering

I ran across the following line today in Vergil's Aeneid.

Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco. (Aeneid, I.630)

Queen Dido of Carthage is welcoming Aeneas and men to her city after they have landed on her shores thanks to a storm stirred up by their implacable enemy Juno. She says to them, "Because I am not inexperienced with misfortune, I have learned to aid those who suffer."

What a wonderful statement! Increasingly I find that when I suffer, and let's face it, any sufferings I am apt to encounter in this society are minuscule compared with the sufferings of most the world, I am better able to understand the pains of others. God did not need to become human and suffer as we do to understand our sufferings. His omniscience precludes such an epistemic necessity. Yet He did become human and suffer as we do, and the result is that we know that He knows our sufferings. Christ's suffering produced an epistemic certainty for us.

And because we know that He knows our sufferings, we also know that He knows how to aid us. Our knowledge is not rooted in just in our belief in His omniscience and omnipotence. Our confidence and hope in Him is grounded in our epistemic certainty that we have obtained through His human suffering.

Jesus says in Matthew 5:11-12, "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." Not only do our sufferings produce solidarity with and identity with our Lord, but they enable to say with Dido, "Because I am not inexperienced with misfortune, I have learned to aid those who suffer." In this way we are better able to accomplish the work to which our Lord has called us.