Oh - to be a clown!

At the End of the Year Performance (this year on June 12), every class puts on a little demonstration of what they learned during the past year. Hopefully you can see how much fun we had from the pictures!

The Holy One of Mary

by Father Leonard Feeney, M.I.C.M.

Tonight it is raining - so no new pictures. This is our outdoor Nativity Scene from a past year.

And this is He Whom Heaven hymns,
All trembling in His white young limbs,
Whom choirs adore and seraphs bless-
Unspeakable His helplessness.
A Baby’s cheek the wind would kindle.
Ah, holy weaver and blessed spindle,
That spun the little swaddling clothes
To sheathe so sweet, so fair a rose!
Dull stable-lamp, my love you are-
Shine bright and be His morning star.
Full many a moon would give her light
To hang upon your beam to-night,
And flood the wondrous sanctuary
And shine on Him and His Mother Mary.

O Sacred Love and Life and Law
Whose mercy-mingled power I draw
To live, to breathe, and be aware
Of sunlight and the brimming air!
Great Bosom whence my spirit sprang;
For Whom my soul in hunger sang;
O white with Age that overflows
The showering of a million snows;
Sinew and Strength and Might unriven
Upholder of the stars and Heaven,
How camest Thou to choose a stall?
Ah, Little Brother, how small, how small!
What need to know the bitter cold
Eternal One-an hour old!
And yet did not the Eternal Three
Foreknow how bitter the cold would be!

The dark comes over this little town,
A woman is pulling her shutter down;
A woman is making her window bright,
To welcome her Saviour on Christmas night.
The clouds are draping the starless hill,
The moon is quenched at the Father’s will,
The Angels are crowding the snowy moor,
A lantern hangs on the chapel door,
The sounds of the singers arise and  pass;
A beggar is crawling to Midnight Mass.
The shadowy winds are still awhile
The children turn in their sleep and smile.
May God have mercy and shield us well
Who hear the stroke of the midnight bell!

“Good-night, sweet Jesu, and take Thy rest,
Be happy now in Thy narrow nest,
Thou must not notice Thy mother weep-
Hear her lullaby and go to sleep!”

One of our own roses

Maria Walks Amid the Thorn reminds me of another poem from I Sing of a Maiden, this time a medieval Mary-song (author: Anonymous).

Rosa Mystica

There is no rose of such virtue
As is the rose that bare [bore] Jesu:
Alleluia!

For in that rose containèd was
Heaven and earth in little space:
Res Miranda!

By that rose we well may see
There be One God in Persons Three:
Pares Forma!

The angels sang, the shepherd too;
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Gaudeamus!

Leave we all this worldly mirth
And follow we this joyful birth:
Transeamus!

(For those who are confused by the Latin, I here append a translation of each phrase. For reciting out-loud, remember that in Latin each vowel is pronounced — there are no silent “e”s — so “pares” is “par – ez”. Each of these final lines has four syllables. “Rose Mystica” = Mystical Rose [one of Our Lady's titles in the Litany of Loreto]; “Res Miranda” = Wonderful Thing; “Pares Forma” = Equal Natures; “Gloria in excelsis Deo” = Glory to God in the highest; “Gaudeamus” = Let us rejoice; “Transeamus” = Let us pass by.)

Sister Maria Philomena, M.I.C.M.

Today is the feast of Our Lady of the Expectation. This feast has an interesting history that Brother Andre reviewed for us this morning (one aspect being the deferred feast of the Incarnation — Annunciation — from the days when no feasts were kept in Lent). In Spain, this feast day is Nuestra Senora de la O: Our Lady of the O, the “O” coming from the expression of longing said in the office of the Mozarabique Liturgy. In the Latin Rite, today’s feast comes in the middle of the “O” Antiphons (where we get the words for the hymn Veni, Veni, Emmanuel — in English O Come, O Come Emmanuel).

All this reminded me of a poem combining these ideas that I discovered some years ago when I was doing research for an English Literature class. I found it in the book, I Sing of a Maiden – The Mary Book of Verse, edited by Sister M. Therese of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Divine Savior, Macmillan, 1947. Since the book is out of print, I feel justified in sharing the following with you.

Lady of O
by James J. Galvin

A Lily Among Thorns (a type of Our Lady - detail of a pillar in Norte Dame de Montreal)

By the seven stars of her halo
By her seven swords of woe
Oh Holy Spirit anneal my pen
To utter sweet words for the ears of men
In praise of Our Lady of O.

With seven O’s we salute Thee
Each evening as Christmas comes;
We hail thee adazzle with sunset gold
Repeating prophecies new and old
Like salvoes of guns and drums.

O Woman, the Word in Thy keeping
Thy secret from God most High,
Shall soon be whispered over the earth
And men shall listen and leap for mirth
Like stars in the Christmas sky.

O Lady, lone tent in the battle
Where our Leader awaits His time;
Though the day grow darker and Satan scorn
The tide of battle shall veer at morn
When He sallies forth to the cheer of horn
And trumpet and timbrel-chime.

Waterlily

O Stalk on the brink of blossom,
Shooting green through the frosty mire;
The peoples pray for thy Spring to come
And the mighty ones of the earth go dumb
For the Flower of the World’s Desire.

O Tower of Grace untrespassed
Since Eden by God’s decree;
At thine ivory spire and jasper gate
The pining kindred of Adam wait
For the turning of Christ the Key.

Morning (taken on the Auriesville Pilgrimage by Agnes Burki)

O Damsel more welcome than morning
To a world gone blind since the fall;
The stars go pale at Thy sandals’ sound
And skylines glimmer, and men peer round
For a virgin in simplest homespun gowned
With the Sunrise under her shawl.

O milk-and-honey-run Mountain
Whence the crystal Cornerstone
Shall issue unsullied by tool or hand
The Stone that shall fasten each race and land
Together like flesh and bone.

O City ashine on the hill-tops
The nations uplift their eyes
From rainy island and sunken sea
And the ends of the earth they throng to Thee
To dwell in thy Christ-lit skies.

By the seven stars of Thy halo
By Thy seven swords of woe
Forgive us, O Lady, these phrases worn
In praise of Thy season with God unborn
O ineffable Lady of O.

Queen of Heaven and Earth (picture taken in the crypt chapel of Saint Anne de Beaupre)

Truth, Goodness, Beauty

Plato and Liberal Education

III. The Epochs in Plato’s Educational System

The key for Plato’s system of education is the Greek word μουσικε (sounds like “musikay”) which has survived in our modern languages in such words as “music” and “museum”. To the Greeks the term had a wider signification, including within its comprehension all the liberal arts. Greek mythology personified the liberal arts, making each one of them a goddess, a Muse, who guides, inspires, and stands as a type and an ideal. Thus we have the Muses of history, poetry, astronomy, eloquence, music, dance, tragedy, comedy, and lyric poetry. The Greeks saw beauty everywhere; whenever reality is known, it reveals rhythm and harmony, and hence education must progressively direct the mind to higher and higher aspects of beauty. The mind rises from beauty in the plane of sheer sense experience, the rhythm and harmony of sounds, shapes, and movements, to the beauty of law and order manifested in the visible world, the music of the spheres; and finally to the source of all beauty, Beauty in itself, the eternal Logos, attained by the art of dialectics. Every one of the arts and sciences is called μουσικε in this sense; and it is in this sense that we must understand the passage in the Republic where Plato makes Socrates say: “When the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them.” Corresponding to the different planes of knowledge, we can distinguish four epochs in Plato’s educational plan. Here is a brief description of each of these epochs in their sequence.

1. The first twenty years are concerned mainly with the body and with the organic faculties. The children, as early as the age of three are introduced to mythology; this is meant to train their imagination, and to cultivate love of valor and heroic deeds. The mythology must be purged of any references to the gods which might degrade the concept of divinity in the child. The fact that mythology does not give the factual or historic truth does not matter, but it must be censored and purified from anything that might give a permanently false impression of reality. Factual truth is not so important at this stage, because it is an intellectual concern, and this stage of education is mainly concerned with the senses. After mythology, follow in sequence: gymanstics, reading and writing, poetry and music, and mathematics, until finally this epoch is rounded off in two years of military training, from the eighteenth to the twentieth year. Plato recognized the imitative tendencies of the soul, and thus he prescribes that the child must be surrounded from early childhood with beautiful objects which embody the truth he will come to understand later on in life. Hence the surroundings and environment are tremendously important in this formative period.

Brother Francis (2003)

2. The second period, extending from the year twenty to the year thirty, is concerned with the sciences of measurement and understanding. Plato mentions plane geometry, solid geometry, astronomy, and harmonies. He conceives their role as a prelude to dialects. Evidently, he envisaged a patient treatment of these topics, with sufficient time for creative reasoning on the part of the students, and meditations on fundamental truths and notions which prepare the way for philosophy. This is clear from the amount of time he allows for this kind of work, although the amount of facts, principles, experiments, in such a variety of sciences, and in such a short time, that we leave him no leisure for reflection, meditation, wonder, nor for any creative work on his own initiative. Furthermore, the language of these experimental physical sciences today, is so little related to the language and truths of philosophy, that instead of being a prelude to philosophy as Plato intended, these positive sciences stand in our day as a tremendous handicap to philosophic thought.

3. The third epoch, which occupies the years thirty to thirty-five, is concerned with the art of dialectics, “the art which elevates the mind to the contemplation of what is best in existence”. This is the crowning mark of liberal education; the mind’s eye, which so far had been trained only to recognize the reflections of Good, must now be exercised to see the Good itself, the ultimate source of truth and beauty in the universe. To Plato, philosophy was not an organized science, or a system of sciences. The task of organizing truths of philosophy was to be carried out by his disciple Aristotle. This is why Plato was mainly concerned with the art of attaining philosophical knowledge, and this art he called “dialectics”. In our days, we possess not only the fruits of Plato’s and Aristotle’s efforts towards discovery and organization of philosophical truths. We have, in addition, the results of centuries of collective effort on the part of scholastic philosophers, ending in a body of logically related sciences, full of precise notions, clear definitions, and well established truths. This philosophic tradition was accomplished through gradual steps, beginning with sense experience and common-sense knowledge. We must remember that the individual also must grow to philosophic understanding through the same way. Philosophy is a science, but philosophizing is an art. If we realize this truth sufficiently, we would not depend so exclusively in our teaching on the presentation of philosophic truths as finally and definitely formulated. The dialect method of Plato can still teach us a great deal as to how to teach philosophy effectively, and how to train the student to raise philosophic problems, to attain a realization of a philosophic truth, and to formulate and defend this truth. We can make philosophy much more of a living tradition by reviving the Platonic method, if not the Platonic science of philosophy.

Not yet philosophers!

4. The fourth and last epoch, requiring fifteen years of life and terminating at the age of fifty, is a period dedicated to real experience in the world. It is significant that Plato did not try to carry the world into the school; the only way to know what life is, is to go through it. No man is truly wise enough to be entrusted with the destiny of a state until he has seen the real world in the light of universal truth. Philosophic ideas alone may be sufficient for the purpose of philosophic contemplation, but the philosopher-king, must make practical decisions for the common good, who must have more than ideas, namely, experience. Nor would experience without the philosophic discipline and knowledge of the Good suffice, because experience can move on a plane of insignificant facts unless illuminated by the idea of the Good.

It is twenty-three centuries since Plato opened his academy and invited the youths of Athens to seek the knowledge of the Good. Since that time, something has happened on our planet; the Eternal Truth, the very Person of Good, has broken the bounds of eternity, plunged into our world, and lived as one of us. If Plato were to come to life today, how would he respond to our tidings of great joy? What would he think of our response?

The End