Learning the language of Christian culture begins with God-given reality, which explains our emphasis on the outdoors and on horsemanship; it explains our technology policy, which helps students avoid an algorithmically manipulative virtual reality; and it explains our four years of classes centered on the Great Books, an encounter with the greatest thought of the Western tradition.
One of the many pleasures of the arrival of freshman at Wyoming Catholic College every July is seeing them look about with the expectant uncertainty that always accompanies a great transition. Their parents (and often their siblings) are still with them, but they are already making the turn toward life away from home—a transition almost as momentous as marriage in terms of the shape their lives will take.
On Tuesday afternoon when I spoke to the parents and freshmen, I emphasized our gratitude for their choice of WCC and tried to explain our uniqueness in the world of higher education. The reasons for our founding in 2005 go back to the work of Dr. John Senior and the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 1970s. Our first Academic Dean, Dr. Robert Carlson, studied with the famous trio in the IHP—John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick—and based our Philosophical Vision Statement (the PVS) largely on the thought of Senior.
Already in the 1960s and 1970s, Senior saw that many of his students grew up watching television and largely cut off from the rhythms and realities of the natural world—the natural sources of feeling and thought—that those in previous generations would have known in their bones from the demands and rewards of life on a farm. Long before the increasing unreality of internet addiction, immersive video games, and VR masks, Senior saw what it would take to recover these natural sources. In his book The Restoration of Christian Culture, first published in 1983, he writes about the relation between sense experience, emotion, and higher thought: “The restoration of reason presupposes the restoration of love, and we can only love what we know because we have first touched, tasted, smelled, heard, and seen.” For example, we do not love “dog” in the abstract or even Lassie (whom readers of a certain age will remember), but the smelly part-Labrador mutt (what did he get into outside?) who wags himself into a knot greeting us, howls at the siren on the fire engine, and tries to get the hamburger from any unguarded plate.
“From that encounter with exterior reality,” writes Senior, “interior responses naturally arise, movements motivating, urging, releasing energies … of intelligence and will.” Experience with real animals (as our students always discover with horses) teaches us to understand ourselves. As one student wrote, ““Horsemanship has helped me to clearly see the similarities and differences between sensitive and rational souls, which we’ve been learning about in philosophy, and the relationships between God, man, and creation which we’ve been touching on in theology.” Three weeks of backpacking in the wilderness with experienced leaders similarly transform students through knowledge of themselves and others, as this year’s freshman will discover starting on Sunday.
Contrast the manipulative ideologies that characterize much of higher education today and influence a generation of teachers. Does the recent epidemic of gender dysphoria (amazingly unprecedented in human history) owe to natural sources? Hardly. It does, on the other hand, owe to something in human nature—the vulnerability of those unfamiliar with nature to indoctrination and the tragic susceptibility of children to the power of suggestion. The mind structured by false premises, as Senior puts it, has “an order but a tyrannical order, that is, an order imposed from without.” The cure comes through a real experience of “Christian culture,” Senior argues, which is “the natural environment of truth, assisted by art, ordered intrinsically–that is, from within–to the praise, reverence, and service of God Our Lord. To restore it, we must learn its language.”
When I spoke on Tuesday, I told parents and students that the one thing that best summarizes the PVS and characterizes the education at WCC is “the encounter with reality.” Last night at the President’s Reception for parents, one father told me that he had expected me to say, “the encounter with Christ.” But he had been thinking about it since, he said, and when I responded that the encounter with reality was the encounter with Christ, he was already nodding. Why? Because “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”
Learning the language of Christian culture begins with God-given reality, which explains our emphasis at WCC on the outdoors and on horsemanship; it explains our technology policy, which helps students avoid an algorithmically manipulative virtual reality; and it explains our four years of classes centered on the Great Books, an encounter with the greatest thought of the Western tradition. It explains why we have two chaplains, Byzantine and Roman, and why the naturalness of worship breathes here with “both lungs” of the Church.
Suffering, too, is part of the encounter with reality. No one can avoid it. Yesterday morning in Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss, I read a passage about the rare cancer that led him to the series of meditations on faith that constitute the book. The fact of his pain “searing through all the circumstances of [his] life” did not lead him into an abyss of meaninglessness or of “the utter illusion of God,” as some of his friends were confident that it would. Rather, Wiman writes, he felt “an excess of meaning, for which I had no context.” Wiman’s conclusion is especially moving: “it was the world burning to be itself beyond my ruined eyes. It was God straining through matter, to make me see, and to grant me the grace of simple praise.”
I love that last sentence especially. What we describe as “poetic education” at WCC and what we hope for these new freshmen is an awakening of wonder, not a sense of “woke” grievance at prevailing injustice. We hope for a response to the grandeur of God that is a prelude to the beatific vision itself. May they be granted “the grace of simple praise.”
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.
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The featured image is “The Country School” (1871) by Winslow Homer, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.