“If any, question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied*.”
My children and your children, my grandchildren and your grandchildren, first and foremost and above all else belong to God, the Father of all, who by His will drew them out of eternal nothingness for a time and for eternity, and for a purpose. You and I have been blessed with them to nurture them ever more deeply into the image and likeness of the Father of all, who created them in His image and likeness. As Catholics and Christians we wholeheartedly believe , ” Christ Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). As Catholics and Christians we have also been infinitely blessed with Jesus’ “New Commandment: Love one another as I have loved you.” Therefore as Christians, who are parents and grandparents, we know, via Jesus, God Incarnate, what kind of God that God is, and we know via Jesus’ teaching by word and deed what God expects. This is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church (sec.1970, 2822) says of His New Commandment that it “contains the entire will of the Father as it should be done on earth and is done in heaven.”
The Christian has his or her guide for parenting or grandparenting and it is not primarily Dr. Spock or Mr. Spock. It is Jesus, God Incarnate, as the ultimate guiding norm to which all other norms and values in raising a child are subordinate. That the Catholic and other mainline Churches calculatingly hide, as well as they are able, the Jesus of the Gospels who teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, even lethal enemies, and refuse to teach how individual Christians and Christian communities across two thousand years have work to live faithfully to this teaching of Jesus is a hellish blot on all the institutional Churches. Those Churches who chose to lie by intentional omission about the past nonviolent history in the Church, thereby create in the minds of their membership a future for the Church that is a brutally violent mirror image of the violent institutional Church of the past for 1700 years. As the Institutional Church has traditionally been, so it will be in the future But, this is not the image of God that “Christ Jesus who is the visible image of the invisible God” left for His Church’s imitation and proclamation—and it is not the image and likeness of God bestowed without exception on each person by his or her Creator.
There is no way that my or your children or grandchildren are going to have the slightest serious idea of the true image of God that they are and that they are called to become, nor are they going to have the slightest serious idea of the Nonviolent Jesus in their minds or of His active presence in the Church for 2000 years via any mainline institutional Church’s catechesis. If the true image of God and the Gospel image of the Nonviolent Jesus is to be theirs to embrace and to live from and for and to, You and I as parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles have to present it to them. Otherwise tomorrow’s Trumps or Bidens, Netanyahues or Putins, will make our sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters their homicidal utensils in the hands and at the service of the economic and political elites and their disordered desires of achieving power, wealth and glory by inflicting pain and death on any and all others who get in their way.
So Christian Fathers (and Mothers) it appears that home-education is the only way that those whom you dearly cherish will ever have access to the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as the truth about the image and likeness of God and as the truth about God’s Son and all God’s sons and daughters.
One homeschool or parish starter program in Gospel Nonviolence that I know of is Our Golden Thread, www.ourgoldenthread.org . It has been in use for many years and comes with a plethora of suggestions and materials including the ability to contact someone who has taught it for many years for assistance. There is even a detailed video giving an idea of how to use the materials. Just watching the video can be enlightening.
My limited awareness, but not total unawareness, of materials and programs that are out there for teaching your children or grandchildren, or even the neighborhood kids, properly and accurately Gospel Nonviolence are not to be found in the religious education materials available in the Catholic or other mainline Churches. If nonviolence is dealt with at all in the religious education programs of the of these Churches, it will be as a political civil disobedience tactic and not the way, say, St. Maximus the Confessor** dealt with it, beginning with the reality of God all the way to the smallest intentional human choice.
I would therefore suggest looking for further home education materials in Gospel Nonviolence from the religious education offerings of the Churches sometime referred to as “Peace Churches,” i.e. Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, Bruderhoff etc.
But fathers and grandfathers, please do something to begin to nurture our Divine Father’s true image and likeness as revealed by, through and in His Divine Son Jesus in your children and grandchildren, and to stop the brutish, vile, ugly, evil images, value systems and disordered desires of self-glorifying murderous, avaricious, predatory men from capturing and enslaving your child or your grandchild’s mind.
