True Education: Seeing a World in a Grain of Sand

Last updated on: August 13, 2016 at 12:17 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

True Education: Seeing a World in a Grain of Sand 2016-08-13T12:17:07-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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William_Blake_-_The_Meeting_of_the_Family_in_Heaven_opt William Blake wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

If we can achieve this vision of Blake’s, then we will be happy in this life and the life that is to come. Sand, wild flowers, and hands are freely available to most of us . . . and any natural object contains the world, every beautiful thing leads the mind to Heaven, and every human being is the very Image of the infinite God.

This is poetry, but not as many of us were taught to use the word “poetry.” When I was a kid, some hard hearted souls thought of “poetry” as the “fake feelings” that we pasted on top of hard reality. Science taught you the real world and then poetry makes it bearable by creating an imaginary world in which we can take a mental break.

Christianity teaches that poetry reveals truth. There is what an object is made of and then what an object is. Both are real and so a star is made of gasses, but is also beautiful.

When we value both and see both, then we will be happy.

A good education will teach many things, but this is one skill it must teach. Parents and teachers cannot guarantee the future for any student, no matter how hard we try, how much money we spend, or how effective our plan is. Wealth comes mostly by doing good, but in an unjust society it will also fall to the wicked. More than one good student, who does all the right things, will be cheated out of the just reward for his labor.

It is a broken world.

We cannot find a mate for every student who wishes to marry. No school can promise an easy life or even an easier life. Civilizations come and go while individuals are caught in the rise and fall.

Yet happiness, true human flourishing, is available to every human. Aristotle was right: the wise man educates himself to love things that he can control, not things he cannot control, but because Aristotle did not know that God was good and loved His children, Aristotle also thought a man needed luck to be happy.

Christians have discovered otherwise. Martyrs have found joy in the flames . . . though they did not deny the pain. I am still learning this lesson: embracing pain leads to happiness, because pain will come and we must be ready for it.

A good school does not need to engineer the ups and downs of life: they come to every student. God forbid we make them worse! However, when pain does come, then we teach a student not to deny pain or cover it up, but to face, embrace, and live through it to joy. My best teachers moved me towards this ability, but it is a lifetime lesson.

Education helps when it is centered on virtue, wisdom, and joy. Virtue is allowing the Holy Spirit to discipline our actions, emotions, and will to follow God. Wisdom begins in the fear of the Lord, awe at God’s Holiness, and ends in an ability to understand all of reality. Joy is human flourishing: body, soul, and spirit.

No schooling can complete these lessons, but no school, college, or university that does not set out to do these things can achieve them. Every school that wishes virtue, wisdom, and joy must recall that it is not “by might, nor by power, by my Spirit . . .” says the Lord.

Come, Holy Spirit!

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