Generational Knowledge, Part Three: Conclusion

Over the course of three articles, I will discuss the role of the family in handing on knowledge from generation to generation, and the role of the family as a school for humanity. This is part three. For continuity, I have included the last paragraph of the preceding section as the first paragraph in this section.

Since our environments help shape the person, we can say that every experience is a form of education, in one sense or another.  In the context of the family, this constant education and formation of the person takes shape not only from formal education but also in that immediate experience of mutual love and acceptance interpersonally experienced by the family members.  Family members are constantly exposed to each other’s persons and radical uniqueness, and are called to simultaneously find God and reveal God to each other “each according to his or her own gift… day by day [in the continual building of] the communion of persons” (Familiaris Consortio).  This formation of persons takes on a much more personal and responsibility driven aspect within the family than merely passive exposure to each other’s unique personalities: unlike the experience of the larger society, which is simply received by the senses and interpreted by the person, the environment of the family must be intentionally formed and constantly renewed in a perpetual communication and response to the subjectivity of those persons who make up the Communio.  Parents have the ultimate responsibility to continually renew their love and unity to each other and bear witness to that original community between themselves by continuing their openness to life in every aspect, including the intentional formation of their children.  Though the new Anamnesis created by the family and the loving environment therein belongs, educates, and is experienced by all the members of the family and not exclusively children, these youngest members of society are especially at the mercy of that intentional environment created first by the parents, since this community is all they have ever known and in the natural course of events is that community in which they are most fully themselves, most fully appreciated first as humans and then by the choices they make to become more fully themselves.  To this end, it is an especial responsibility of the parents to continually renew their marriage vows to each other and accept constantly their gift to each other now physically present in their children by ensuring that their children experience a world which embodies the “correct attitude of freedom with regard to material goods, by adapting a simple and austere lifestyle and being fully convinced that ‘man is more precious for what he is than for what he has’” (Familiaris Consortio).  This responsibility of the parents to their children can be described most accurately by what it is: truly a ministry to those most youngest members of the human family.

The ministry parents have to their children is of utmost importance, for it becomes one of the defining points now of their own identities and the unique manifestation of that new identity  created by the marital bond.  The formation and care of their children is now that which makes the parents more themselves as they choose daily to move in adherence to their inclinations of encountering God in the personalistic norm.  This manifestation of the family’s identity takes on in itself a unique character, “original and irreplaceable.  It assumes the characteristics typical of family life itself, which should be interwoven with love, simplicity, practicality, and daily witness” (Familiaris Consortio).  However, as parents endeavor to fulfill their ministry, and children in turn return this ministry to their parents as a form of education of gift and realization of the wonders and uniqueness of human life, the realities of human life in a fallen world necessarily seep into this safe environment of love.  Whereas families continue their attempts at mutual human life according to the personalistic norm characterized with the fourfold marks of love, simplicity, practicality, and daily witness, the hardest of these is the faithfulness required of the daily witness.

History and our own experience shows “how difficult it is to remain faithful to the Law of life which God has inscribed in human hearts” (Evangelium Vitae).  Love turns to frustration, simplicity turns to complex inter-personal politics, and practicality rooted in reality gives way to emotion and theory.  The level of commitment the constant renewal of the gift of self requires in order to provide a daily witness of the dignity due to human life is immense, and easily deteriorates under the natural course of time in a fallen world, especially when confronted with the realities of seeing human life under every circumstance.  It is a heroic task, but a task which truly makes the family the smallest unit of society.  The family is a learning place for all the family members, enabling the members of this smallest community to practice successfully navigating the frustrations and challenges to the personalistic norm which confront them individually in the larger society.  The family is a training ground, within whose context “citizens [of the greater society] come to birth and it is within the family that they find the first school of the social virtues that are the animating principle of the existence and development of society itself” (Familiaris Consortio).  Thus, the frustrations of everyday life are most appropriately seen as blessings in themselves, enabling all of the family members to learn to love God and encounter the human person in the face of what appears at times to be personal animosity.  Only a society that can encounter human life under the strain of real life and continue to uphold the love and personal encounter which the human person demands will ever be a society capable of justice and compassion.

The last two hundred years of world history have ushered in new horrors of human atrocity, wars, and capabilities of brutality which would seem to suggest that the state of nature is brutal, that instead of community being the first natural frontier upon which man’s original solitude is confronted, encompassed, and overcome, man desires as much as he can for solitude and autonomous freedom.  And yet, the real life experiences of people who live through such atrocities of the human making actually prove the contrary: what man does when he is free from the distractions of easy life is to actually hear with more clarity that identity which is the inclination upon his soul, directing him towards Communio with other humans and ultimately with God.  For one of the most striking comparisons of man as member of western society vs. man in a more simple state of nature we need look no farther than US pioneer history and the comparative life philosophies of the Indians vs. the settlers.  The Indians, themselves capable of atrocious brutalities to the human person, did occasionally incorporate captives into their tribes and adopt them as their own, who to the surprise of their rescuers “had no desire to return to colonial society… these tribes lacked the advantages of the arts and science and manufacturing, and yet they lived in a society where personal poverty was unknown and the natural rights of man were actively promoted”.  When man is left with nothing but his fellow man he remembers that it is the person who is the highest creation on the earth and with whom a relationship is sacred.  

The tragedy of the children in Quiet on the Set is destined to be repeated every other generation without the intervention of the family as a school for humanity, armed with the proper understanding of identity and freedom.  Man only realizes his own identity in taking on the original solitude of another person and encountering them, receiving them fully in mutual totality of self gift which in turn creates that most natural community of the family.  As the foundational block of society, whose formation creates within itself a unique identity, the family is in its own right “a subject of rights and duties before the State or any other community”.  Characterized by its own Anamnesis which inclines the family as a unit to seek God and recognize Him in the unique ways which mark the unrepeatability of the individual family unit, the family must experience the same freedoms allowed to the individual, that freedom of excellence to seek and choose the good as opposed to an erroneous freedom which seeks total autonomy of choice.  The freedom of society is not predicated on the preservation of the individual’s freedom but on the freedom of the family itself.  It is only when the family is permitted to be what it is, to move towards an ever increasing realization of its own nature and identity as the schoolhouse for society’s individuals can man hope to eventually “use the immense possibilities given him by science in such a way as to bring about the true advancement of the human person in his or her whole truth, in his or her freedom and dignity”.