An alienating culture: no sense of the sacred.

I have friends who have decided to teach their children at home. We considered doing this briefly, when our children were young, but thought that they needed the socialization (a word often used against advocates of home schooling) that comes with spending a lot of time with other children, and believed that they needed adult influences other than ours. We sent them to parochial schools, and they survived, as we have until now.

The friends we had who decided in favor of home schooling ranged from left to right politically, but agreed that the consensus to be found in public schools was so damaging that they did not want their children exposed to it. I once thought that this was an exaggerated fear, though we had chosen to send our kids to parochial schools. I'm not sure, now.

Is there a point at which it is a good thing not to be socialized into a culture? Your kids may seem odd to their friends if they are not allowed to watch everything they want on television and wander the malls with kids who've been body-pierced. Is that bad? Is this a culture within which you want your children to be at home? It may be better if they feel alien from what surrounds them, not at all at home, since what surrounds them is really a corrupt and dreadful, a death-dealing, empty world. To prepare them for this world, to make them feel at home in it, is a form of child abuse.

When you haven't seen television for a couple of years and then are exposed to it again, it comes as a terrible shock: it strikes you - literally strikes, in a physical sense - as a lurid, madness-producing thing. It jumps from one demanding and vivid image to another disconnected but demanding image, from piled-up corpses to sitcom previews to carpet sales to sex to laxatives. The effect is not so much a leveling as it is an insane mosaic in which it could be that everything matters or nothing matters at all, but either way everything glitters and shines.

This is the culture that surrounds and defines our children, limited only by what happens when they transgress the other defining thing, the law. There is no other common culture. Television and school and work are the loci of family life, the home being the filling station that provides food, a place to sleep, and the occasional conversation. The deterioration of family life is a fact, not just something Republicans trot out to savage Democrats with. The church and synagogue and (increasingly) the mosque may be places to which parents take themselves and their children once a week, or a few times a month, or a few times every year, but this is often a form of nostalgia. It is what we come from; it isn't what we are. Or we think we can juggle: it is part of what we are, the religious part. This is the space we would check if the census demanded it, which it doesn't. It has no real effect on our lives.

At work and school, any spiritual understanding of life is silenced. Your religion is private, personal, not even marginal (because you can see margins). You can act this peculiar way with others who share the interest, but as part of a common understanding, religion is something like foot-fetishism, something embarrassing that might be tolerated in the obsessed person but is ignored in any wider circles, for reasons of politeness.

It could be argued that religion is getting a better press these days, with new attention to the need for core values in public education, but this is a form of civic religion in service to a secular agenda: people don't like their children having to wear bullet-proof vests to school. The real values informing our public schools (and many parochial schools) are essentially secular. There is little or no serious questioning of the premises that move our culture. This questioning should be the beginning of education, especially any education that deals with questicns of value and meaning. For Christian parents, an education in the humanities which neglects - indeed, systematically excludes - the central fact that human beings are made in God's image, and that the universe is the place of God's presence, should at least be problematic. Education is finally about how we understand the world: What do we want our children to know? What do we think is so important that our children will be harmed if they are not exposed to it?

Wendell Berry is a poet and essayist who is always worth reading, a solid and careful man whose sense of the world and our place here is genuinely sacramental. So I was intrigued by a reference in a Berry essay to the Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard and his statement that "Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden being." I read Sherrard's The Eclipse of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modem Science (Inner Traditions/Lindisfarne Press, 1987), and although Sherrard does not directly address the question of Christian education in his essay, the book's thesis has a direct bearing on the subject.

In his conservative way Sherrard is every bit as radical as Ivan Illich, and it is easy to see why Berry quotes him approvingly. To summarize his argument much too crudely, you could say that Sherrard traces a line of thought from Aquinas through Descartes and the Enlightenment to modem secularism, one which has led to a scientific world view which finally desanctifies nature and dehumanizes all of us. This way of thinking separates reality into the material world of phenomena on the one hand, and the reason which seeks to understand and analyze that world on the other. In criticizing the elimination of the possibility that in addition to rational understanding there is such a thing as an even more authoritative spiritual perception, Sherrard insists that "modern scientific thought has no complexity or depth whatsoever," and makes a strong case for this unfashionable point of view. He argues for a restoration of the understanding that all ideas, even the most materialistic ones, ultimately rest upon metaphysical assumptions.

Finally, he says, our view of reality must be sacramental, which means that

nature is not something upon which

God has acted from without. It is regarded

as something through which

God expresses himself from within.

Nature, or creation (the terms are

interchangeable in this context), is

perceived as the self-expression of

the divine, and the divine is totally

present within it....Like Eucharist,

nature is a revelation not merely of

the truth about God but of God himself.

The created world is God's

sacrament of himself to himself in

his creatures: it is the means whereby

he is what he is. Were there no

creation, then God would be other

than he is; and if creation were not

sacramental, then God would not be

its creator and there would be no

question of a sacrament anywhere.

If God is not present in a grain of

sand then he is not present in heaven

either.

Sherrard does not counsel hopelessness in the face of the nonsacramental world view which currently dominates us; he says that we "demean our own dignity" when we regard a materialistic and manipulative view of the world as final, as something that will inevitably lead to our extinction. If it does, he says, "this is our own responsibility."

The restoration of a sense of the sacred and of the world as the place where God is present is essential to our collective sanity. It has a lot to do with what education - our own self-education, and what we hope to pass on to our children - should be about. Reason is not enough, Sherrard argues. Spiritual, sacramental insight is essential, and an education that does not place it at the center is not worthy of human beings.