Christian schools will be effective alternatives to secular schools only to the extent that students at those schools are formed in a sacramental imagination that sees the cosmos as “charged with the grandeur of God.” Too often, Christian educators formed by the secular academy have unwittingly adopted modes of teaching and attention that impart a reductive, materialist understanding of reality.
Their materialist assumptions are often disguised by a veneer of prayer that is equal parts domesticated, distant, and safe. It’s easy to see why. While a handful of faithful families might reject a school that adopts the lens of the world, many more—hungry for their children to fit into mainstream American culture—will line up, especially if the school has a proven track record of finding places for their graduates at elite colleges and universities, which are still seen by far too many parents as the only path to a good life.
As families begin to see the dangers that secular and secular-adjacent institutions of higher education pose to their children over the next decade, and as alternative career paths in the trades become increasingly commonplace, it’s essential for educators at Christian schools to begin discerning a new path forward. Is there a different way to educate young men and women that avoids the college prep vortex?
Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry offers a helpful framework for thinking about what that return might look like in a way that allows us to move beyond increasingly ambiguous labels like “liberal arts” and “classical,” which have saturated the market in recent years. Boersma uses the phrase “sacramental ontology” to describe a mode of engaging with reality that emphasizes the sacramental character of creation more generally and of human beings in particular. Christian schools and Christian educators would be wise to shift toward a more integrated and holistic approach by focusing attention in four primary areas: metaphor, memory, liturgy, and creation. To that end, I propose four steps that can be undertaken by any school looking to reclaim a sacramental ontology for its students.
1. Immerse our students in metaphor throughout the day.
To the materialist, a mountain is simply a collection of large rocks pushed together by shifting tectonic plates over the course of millions of years. Of course, that’s how mountains are made, but that’s not what mountains are. Instead, what if our schools became places that habituated graduates to understand the natural processes by which mountains are made while also encouraging them to see through the material into the mind of God? To the one who has learned to think in metaphor, mountains are many things: a summit, a mystery, something to be conquered, and the privileged place of encounter between God and man. To a student who has read Dante’s Purgatorio, a mountain is no longer a large promontory of stone; it is a sign that points beyond itself and beckons us to Heaven during our earthly pilgrimage.
Of course, it’s not just literature teachers who can employ metaphor in the classroom. One need not read beyond the first few pages of Euclid to see how his geometric constructions reveal to us something significant that stands beyond the construction of propositions using a compass and straightedge. A Biology teacher might start every class period with a recitation of Joyce Kilmer’s lovely little poem “Trees” or ask students to think about how a blooming rose might offer a faint glimpse of the eternal. Every teacher in every subject can ask, “What if there’s something more going on here?” Even if it remains unanswered, a teacher merely asking that question opens up an infinite horizon of possibilities for the students who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
2. ‘Till and keep’ the memory.
Anyone who has taken the time to memorize a few verses of Scripture or lines of poetry will tell you that the words show up unbidden in the mind throughout the day, subtly transforming our experience of the object of our newfound attention and giving us a new appreciation of things that have otherwise grown ordinary and stale. A student who memorizes the first Psalm will likely never look at a tree the same way again. The notion that it’s “just a tree” will no longer make sense to him. How can it be just a tree, if it can show us something about what the life of blessedness is like? For the student who knows Psalm 1 (and doesn’t just choke it out to receive a passing grade), his imagination will have been baptized in a profound and irrevocable way.
It’s easy to see why schools have moved away from memorization in recent decades: memorizing is difficult and often boring work, it takes time and it cannot be faked, it cannot be done well in the presence of a television or a smartphone, and it doesn’t prepare students to pass Advanced Placement exams. Almost anything that can be memorized can be looked up instantly using a smartphone. Some students and parents will complain that it’s “simply” rote learning, a charge that is easily answered by reminding those parents that some of the greatest thinkers and saints in the history of the world were educated almost exclusively by methods that would be considered “mere” memorization today. To memorize a classic text is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our ancestors.
What would it look like if every teacher at a school employed a version of a course catechism, such as Joshua Gibbs recommends in his wise book Something They Will Not Forget? What if schools set aside an afternoon every year for a poetry recitation competition where the winner is crowned with a laurel wreath and given some non-trivial school privilege as a result? What if those same schools heaped praise on students who successfully recite poetry the same way that many other schools heap praise on students who can successfully throw a football? A school that takes memory seriously is a school that takes the formation of souls seriously.
3. Remember that our students are liturgical beings.
In his memorable book You Are What You Love, James K.A. Smith reminds us that human beings are not Cartesian brains-on-a-stick, but homo liturgicus. Since we are body-soul composites, repeated bodily actions form the soul in subtle but incredibly powerful ways.
As a Catholic, I quiet my voice when I enter a chapel, I genuflect before I sit down in the pew, I make a solemn and reverent bow when I pass in front of the altar, I make the sign of the cross before I pray, I stand up when the priest reads the Gospel and I kneel for the consecration. For those of us who were raised in the Church, these actions have become so ingrained that they are pretty much automatic. We do them without thinking, and we do not need to be told what to do.
By reorienting our hearts in a particular direction, liturgies tell us something about ourselves and our place in the world. Every time I bow when I pass in front of the altar of a Catholic Church, it is a bodily reminder that something of eternal cosmic significance takes place on that altar. It is a formal and embodied acknowledgement that I am less important than what happens on the altar, but it is also an acknowledgement that what happens on the altar has something to do with me. It is a simple act—muscle memory at this point in my life—that reinforces and teaches me something about who I am, and where I belong. In a word, it forms me.
Schools that are explicit in their expectation that students use their bodies in dignified ways that glorify God and neighbor will have students who have repeatedly encountered the foundational truths that we are not gods, that our bodies are limited, that reality is objective, that men and women are different yet complementary, and that human beings are unique bearers of the divine image. Repeated bodily actions, even small ones, will teach our students something they can learn in no other way. Do we ask students to clean up after themselves, or do we do it for them? Do we ask students to sit up straight in class? Do we ask students to use names rather than casual pronouns when speaking in discussions? Do we ask students to wear their uniforms consistently and modestly?
Good teachers and good schools intuitively understand the truth that our students are liturgical creatures and that classrooms and hallways are para-liturgical spaces. If our schools are places of noise and disorder that promote self-actualization rather than conversion, then our graduates will increasingly fail to see the profoundly sacramental and grace-tinged nature of reality itself and instead adopt the default lens of secular modernity. If we aim to simply fill brains with information while students indulge their appetites, then our classrooms don’t become non-liturgical spaces: they become bad liturgical spaces, and they end up shaping our hearts according to the norms of secular materialism rather than Christian discipleship.
4. Furnish meaningful encounters with Creation.
From the deep Mind that turns it, it receives its image, and it makes itself the seal. (Dante, Paradiso, 2.131-132, emphasis mine)
Creation bears the imprint of the Creator just as the wax bears the imprint of the seal. What would it look like to reclaim this vision for and with our students? What are the habits that our students need to see the “many lights” adorning heaven and hear the music of the spheres? Dante, the embodiment of Medieval man, looked outside and above himself to see a cosmos replete with sacramental signs of the Creator.
Spending time in creation by itself is not enough, but when it is paired with a robust training in the aforementioned metaphor and memory in students who have had their habits formed in the liturgies of a well-ordered school day, it is an incredibly powerful reminder that we inhabit a story much larger and far more ancient than ourselves. A long hike through the Rocky Mountains is always beautiful, but it becomes a moment of profound encounter with the Incarnate Logos when we carve out a space for silence, and a habituated disposition of thanksgiving brings the words of Psalm 121 up from the depths of a well-formed memory: “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? / My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” An experience like that enables students to see that the Author of that ancient story is Good and has created a reality that has an order to it that does not always conform to my autonomous will. To gaze upon creation through a sacramental lens is to admit that God is God and we are not; it is an antidote to the poison of Genesis 3.
When our schools discover how to take seriously the power of metaphor, memory, liturgy and creation—a power that is far greater than the sum of its parts—our students will find themselves swept up into the same grand adventure that inspired so many of the great men and women who came before them. Perhaps then, we can all begin to see more clearly, as Dante did, “the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars.”
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