Training our youth for love

In this column, I quote my generation’s favorite mentor – Bishop Fulton Sheen. It will serve as a valuable reflection for the family during this summer break.

Promise

Every man and woman in love promises each other something that only God can give. It is as if each is giving the other a title to a river, which empties into the ocean.

Why is love so rich in promises and so miserly in fulfillment? The promise is in the future, and therefore is infinite in possibilities. The present is “cabined, cribbed, confined,” and therefore finite in realization. Every lover thinks that love is like an electric switch, which each turns on to produce the light and heat of love, never mindful that the power plant, the dynamo, the reservoir of all that power is outside each.

Almost all love songs are in the present or in the future tense: “I will love you ‘til the sands of the desert grows cold …,” or “We will raise a family …,” or “I’ll bake a cake for you to take for all the boys to see …” Where are the songs about the same lovers 10 years after marriage? Had the house been built? Had the cake been ever baked?

When a man promises an infinite ecstasy of love, he is lying. He is selling what he does to not possess. There is much unhappiness ahead when the flickering, smoldering candle promises the light that belongs to the sun. The ocean is jealous of its depth, and will revenge itself in the little stream that promises the forests a fountain of water equal to the sea.

Possessing another

If one asks a young woman who was a college graduate to tell the year in which Jose Rizal was born, or the forces that were engaged in World War II, or who was Socrates, she could answer. But, if she is asked what to do when a husband snaps back an answer or slams a door, she has no ready response. Marriage is about the only lifelong profession in which there is no preparation or OJT (On-the-Job Training).

Young people say that they are marrying to find happiness. They really believe that happiness is identified with possessing a partner, just as one might enjoy possessing a beautiful car or a country house. How pleased one is with a new car! But, after six months one does not notice its tail lights or upholstery, all of which were so important the day when it was purchased.

To marry someone with the idea of possessing him or her is to rob that person of the precious endowment of liberty. If that other person is “mine” like a cocktail drink, then he or she can never make a present of himself or herself. What I possess I can no longer receive as a gift. You cannot receive a gift of a hundred pesos if you already have it in your pocket and you own it. The whole meaning of union breaks down at this point, for the very word “conjugal” means “with a yoke” or “con jugum.” It is not a dead yoke, but a living relationship and an adventure in constant development.

There is such a thing as “wave length” in which there is a kind of harmony reached between two persons. This “wave length” accord is not just a few minutes a day, but for life. At first the tempests of the sexual encounter, its stormy concentrations, create the illusion of harmony. But, later on, there is a realization that the other person is never completely possessed. The basic reason is the other person belongs to God.

Parents and children

Just as painting is learned best from the great artists, music from its masters, and literature from its inspired poets and dramatists, so too the art of parenthood is best learned from those who have raised good children.

Theologian Horace Bushnell was once asked: “After all, must not our children answer for themselves?” He responded, “This very often amounts to a negation of the responsibilities of the parental office.” Such parents subside into a habit of negligence, like the ostrich burying its head in the ground.

The burden of a father and mother toward children is not diminished, but increased by the personal liberty of the children. It would be far less cruel to be negligent of their bodily wants, for the body will maintain its growth even when poorly clad and fed upon the coarsest fare. But the mind or soul, born to greater perils than weather, waits to be led into choices and tastes, and finally into habits that is to be its character for eternity.

Some parents are timid about the moral and spiritual training of their children because of their own failures to be either. Celebrated engineer and economist Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play once wrote, “Until I can say grace at meals without astonishing any of my guests, I will not believe that I have done enough for the return of good habits.”

French novelist René Bazin relates how awed he was while visiting in the north of France to observe how the family of an industrialist had said grace faithfully before meals, “assigning each child a day to lead.”

A mother, who was conscious of the training of her children for life, gave each of them a watch at the age of 12. On each she inscribed the words, “May all the hours of your life to the very last, mark the good you do. May you never have to blush for one of them.” At that early age, she trained them to offer sacrifices to bring blessings on their future homes. “Offer that up for the one you will one day marry.”

Youth

Our contemporary world knows two false views concerning the training of the youth: one is an error prevalent in the Western world; the other is an error prevalent in the Communist world. The error of the Western world is that of ‘emancipation.’ The error of Communism is that of force and violence.

Youth is badly trained when emancipation is understood as freedom from control of the teacher, freedom from correction, freedom from restraint, freedom from obedience, freedom from the compelling force of an ideal, freedom from the limitation of law, freedom from homework, freedom from home and freedom from work. In these cases, emancipation becomes identified with lawlessness and freedom with tyranny. Progress, instead of being understood as working toward an ideal, is interpreted as merely a motion.

No care is taken as to where youth is going. The important point is that he be on his way. He may, under such a system become as little green mangoes, separated from the trees with no roots in the earth and with no branches pointing to the heaven, devoid of tradition on the one hand and supreme ideals on the other. When duties to the community and high moral purpose are gone, youth begins to acquire a false value in itself, like an immature plant that is uprooted from the earth. It is then the elders expect the youth to create what they themselves have lost.

Communism: No distinction between right and wrong

As the Western world gives up discipline and restraint, Communism picks them up and utilizes them for the sake of the totalitarian state. Communist infiltration begins in a democracy by stressing that there is no distinction between right and wrong, virtue and vice. Communists add to this the false theory that there is no such thing as personal guilt. There is only social guilt, which generally is private property or what they call ‘capitalism.’ Communism will go so far as to incite immorality and addiction to prohibited drugs in order to intensify the change from liberty into license. In this stage, the youth is encouraged to do everything in the name of ‘freedom’ to repudiate their elders and superiors as belonging to an old order, and to live without discipline, correction or rule.

As the Communists take over a country, their attitude completely changes. The youth is now subjected to a discipline of iron. They must surrender their will, liberty, opinions and personalities, in order to establish a revolutionary society. Sacrifices and self-surrender, self-discipline and asceticism now become the pattern of Communist training. They are asked to renounce family, friends, thoughts and even themselves. As one Communist youth booklet put it, “If you seek your personal perfection, you deceive yourself. There is but one commandment, OBEY THE PARTY.”

The error of the Western world is to train the youth in love without discipline, which is softness. The Communist error is to train the youth in discipline without love, which is hardness.

Freedom through discipline

The Golden Mean or the correction principle of youth training is FREEDOM THROUGH DISCIPLINE. As a garden is cultivated only by pulling the weeds, as a young horse is broken for service only through the training of the horseman, as atomic energy is utilized for industry rather than for the bombing of a city, so too youth is trained through discipline to realize the glorious freedom of the children of God.

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