God Alone Gives Meaning


When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars that you set in place—
What is man that you are mindful of him,
and a son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him little less than a god,
crowned him with glory and honor. - Psalms 8:4-6


Dear Families,

“Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition.” - St. Leo the Great (Memorial was November 10)

The mornings feel a little different of late and I can sense something inside of me moving. Although I can’t quite hear it with my ears, I sense the reverberations of an echo. On Sunday, I was sitting on my porch in beautiful weather just trying to pick up the sounds. I wish I knew something about the way birds sing. Time seems to slow when there appears a shift coming.

I am praying there is a shift coming.
I am praying that silence becomes more desirable to noise.
I am praying that conversation replaces talking at one another.
I am praying that the powers of listening and observing are released.
I am praying that clear thinking leads to virtuous actions.
I am praying that thoughtful pauses lead to meaningful decisions.  
I am praying that we all hear that echo inside of us summoning us to God.

Even what is secular can see where we are going. Is technology actually bringing us closer and making us better?  

I am honestly praying that our children get off all forms of screens, as soon as possible. I think we are ten years into a depraved psychological social experiment on ourselves and if we don’t change our behaviors, we may be really incapable of re-learning how to be human.

In a sense, nothing has changed though. We are still trying to recover that authentic humanity we were made for. We can take solace in that at least and we are hopeful because we have faith in God.

Back to basics I say: God, family, and nature. Yes, it sounds corny to some extent. But those primitive priorities are what is most natural for us to do.

Social media and screens have only exacerbated those self-destructive tendencies where we close ourselves to God, dispense with real truth, and seek only to surround ourselves with a contained, fixed narrative. We actually can’t even hear others who think differently because our screens are only meant to confirm what we believe. Confirmation bias, negativity bias, social group theory - these are all deeply ingrained in our humanity because of original sin and we can’t even see the work of art God has put out there for us because we are too busy looking for comfort on a screen to confirm we have meaning.

We are made for eternity. God gives meaning, nothing else.

“The education of the human heart, then, represents not merely a training of emotions, but an integration of feelings and thoughts into a higher unity: that of the conscience or intellect that is our point of contact with God in the deepest recesses of our soul. It is a bringing about of self-knowledge in the possession of virtue, as Plato described in the Meno.” - Stratford Caldecott

- Mr. Derek Tremblay, Headmaster