Have Courage:
Parenting & Educating Our Children Amidst the Challenges of Our Times

A Patristic Paradigm for Education from the Three Holy Hierarchs: St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom; plus, St. Gregory of Nyssa

Archpriest Josiah Trenham, Ph.D.

West Coast Conference
Dunlap, California
December 2017

Transcript (edited for length):

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Courage, brothers and sisters, comes from deep conviction. Courage is a deep conviction that is combined with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and virtue. Without a deep conviction, it's not possible to be courageous in a Christian sense. What I’m hoping to do for you tonight is to help you have a deep conviction about the education of your children which will—combined with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and your embrace of your calling—produce in your life courage: courage to homeschool, courage to endure, courage to believe. 

Just think of the Maccabee children in the Old Testament and their martyrdom. Just think of those incredible seven sons recorded in the second book of Maccabees and their successive martyrdoms at the hand of that Greek pagan, power-hungry tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanes, who threatened them all and demanded that they worship the gods. They refused him one by one because they had a deep conviction of two things. They had a deep conviction that the Law of God forbade that kind of life. And they had a deep conviction that the Resurrection was coming, and that that Resurrection would, in fact, prove divisive of the whole human race, that those who had done good would have a resurrection to eternal life, and those who had done wicked would have a resurrection to damnation. It was that conviction, coupled with their virtuous upbringing by their mother, Solomonia, and the guidance of their spiritual father, Eleazar, that produced such examples, some of the key examples of courage in the Old Testament. We need to have that same deep conviction about the task of parenting—the holiness of the task of parenting—and of education.

St. Ambrose of Milan, that great 4th century Church father—bilingual in Greek and Latin, who wrote in both Greek and Latin, the spiritual father of St. Augustine—St. Ambrose says that the Church grows in two main ways. One way is through preaching the Gospel, the catechesis and baptism of the pagans, and today we might say secularists or non-Christians of all sorts. The second way is by Christian families embracing the call to procreation and the education of their children—having children and raising them in the discipline and the fear of the Lord. And St. Ambrose said, of the two, the latter is the most successful.

This was a man who believed in the power of the Gospel. Remember that St. Paul writes to the Romans that the Gospel is the power of God, unto the salvation of all who believe. St. Ambrose had no doubt about the power of the Gospel. He had seen it in St. Augustine's life. Augustine came to him as a pagan. Augustine listened to him because he was an incredible preacher, and his words conveyed the power of God. And Augustine couldn't deny it, even though he was a Manichean. He sat there listening to Ambrose, and the word of God changed his life.

St. Ambrose knew the power of preaching, but he said the long-term effect of parents having children and loving them and raising them to love God over the course of their youth, is the way that the church is built up. So, of course, when we see something like this conference happening, this is extremely hopeful for the Church and don't we need it? Don't we need it?!

The chronicler in the Old Testament recounts for us two types of men that were extremely courageous. There were the sons of Issachar, of whom it is said, “They understood the times and knew what God's people should do.” And then there were the men of Gad of whom it is said, "They were men of valor, trained for war, whose faces were like the faces of lions." Wow! Their faces were like the faces of lions! 

Brothers and sisters, this life is exceedingly dangerous. Your life is dangerous, and there is nothing that you are going to do that is going to change that. You can be a coward in the face of the challenges that are before you, or you can become like the men of Issachar, you can become like the men of Gad, you can obtain the face of a lion. You can learn to face your fears and overcome them. This movement to face our fears and not to be terrified by them, but to be confident in the face of the challenges that the Lord puts before us—this is something that we all can accomplish. 

We can develop courage in our lives. And it's not going to help for us to pretend that life is something other than it is. Our life hangs by a thread. We are, at all times, on the edge of a cliff. The Islamic invasion of the West threatens us. North Korea threatens us with nuclear holocaust. The drug addiction epidemic is killing us. Diseases and the outbreak of unique cancers are exploding. The family is broken, completely collapsed. Divorce, domestic violence, poverty, gender dysphoria—all of these are examples in our culture of what the Scriptures would consider a rescinding, a retreat of Grace.

Think of St. Paul in Romans Chapter 1, where he describes the culture that refused to worship God. It refused to bow down and render the things due to God. And what was the result? The result is that they fell into all sorts of unnatural sins. Three times in that text St. Paul says as a result of their failure to give thanks, and as a result of their failure to acknowledge God and worship Him, God gave them over. God gave them over. God gave them over to unnatural lusts. He honored their freedom in asking Him to leave their culture. And He did. And the result of that was their undoing. And we are witnessing this tragedy now.

Some of the things I've mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg, and we could go on: the compromise of traditional American freedoms; the very serious threats to freedom of religion and freedom of speech; the out of control of scientism that is dehumanizing us all quickly; the eclipse of civility; the radical political polarization combined with violent intolerance. We could all write a litany of our society's collapse.

If we're afraid, we need to cut it out. We need to stop. We need to face these things and recognize this is reality. This is where we are. This is the world that the Lord God has chosen for us, each one of us, to live in—in His wisdom, in His sovereign arrangement of all things. The trumpets have summoned us to this hour, and we are to become beacons of light, the bearers of peace, and the communicators of love, so that men and women in these tragic times can find God through us. How will they find Him if we're gripped with fear? Fear is the diametric opposite of the Christian disposition of peace and trust.

And don't think that there's anything too unique about our circumstances after all, as horrible as they appear to devout Christians. The Apocalypse of John, the last book of the New Testament, presents to the Church five major enemies that threaten the Church from the first century until this day: the dragon, the beast, the false prophet, Babylon, that corrupt city, and those in league with Babylon and who bear the mark of the beast. These are our five enemies. They have different expressions in every culture and at every time, but they will remain our enemies until the dragon is slain, the beast and the false prophet are thrown into the lake of fire, Babylon burns to the ground as it does in chapter seventeen and eighteen, and those in league with Babylon—in persecuting the Church, promoting wickedness, and refusing to repent—mourn her collapse and in fear and utter terror beg the rocks and mountains to fall upon them and hide them from the wrath of the Lamb. 

This is our lot. This is our time, from the first advent until the second. Babylon will fall. And our sweet Savior, the Word of God, will ride his white horse and bear his two-edged sword unto victory and life until the heavens and earth are renewed, and the kingdom of God is here in fullness, and the unceasing happiness of the marriage feast of the Lamb is all that is left. This is what is coming. This is what should form your deep conviction about the world. It's falling. It has been falling. And it will be redeemed, and the people of God redeemed with it.

We must have the courage to embrace this vision and apply it to our task of Orthodox Christian education. We must heed St. Paul when he says do not be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. There are two parts to that command. First, we must reject the ways of the world. Second, we must—in not being conformed—we must conform ourselves to a beautiful reality, to the Christian reality, to the transfigured, renewed reality of Christian parenting and Christian education.  

We are called to be in the world, and not only in the world, but we're called to be going into the world. Those prepositions are both used by Jesus in John 17. We're to be in the world and into the world, but not of the world. How is that done specifically in the field of education? How are we to study and teach in the world, but not be of the world? 

I want to present now a partial answer to help you deepen your conviction, to have a clear Christian vision of what is your call as parents and as teachers of your children now in this world. I want to present a partial answer from the lives of the greatest of the Church fathers, the three holy hierarchs: St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom; and I want to add a little addition from St. Basil’s brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa. If you have the mind of these men, you have the mind of the Church. That's why they're called Universal or Ecumenical teachers. They're the ones we rely on the most. All these mighty men of the Church, these men of valor, understood the times and knew what Christians should do. All of them were homeschooled. And all of them were also educated by non-Christians, by pagans. They have presented for us the Orthodox Christian paradigm of education that we should follow: a patristic paradigm for education.

Saint Basil the Great

Let me start with St. Basil the Great. St. Basil the Great, in his old age, wrote a small treatise on education to his nephews. They were attending pagan schools, and he thought that the hour had come for him to tell them how they should do that. This little treatise is entitled: How the Young Might Derive Profit from Pagan Literature.

Throughout this treatise, St. Basil exalts, above everything else, the supreme value of Holy Scripture over every form of pagan literature. He emphasizes that Scripture is the very core of Christian education. Our education fails if we do not study Scripture our entire life. He doesn't say it fails if we don't study Scripture in our schooling. He expects it to be a simple matter of Christian living—because the Church while being more than a school, is never less than a school. We have one teacher, one master, and we are all disciples. 'Mathetes'—the simple word in the New Testament used for a follower of Jesus—means primarily 'pupil.' We are Jesus' pupils, and even when we're teaching our kids, we're all being instructed, throughout this whole life. We should study Scripture as seriously, in fact, more seriously than any other subject we study.

In describing how to read broadly and to follow a non-Christian curriculum in higher learning, St. Basil teaches in this treatise, the value of keen selection—keen selection in literature among all sorts of works. He says we must look for the honey and avoid the poison, avoiding completely those things that damage the soul. But he says there are many excellent examples that can be found amongst Homer, Hesiod, Theognis, Solon, Euripides, Plato, and others. These are St. Basil’s words: "The fruit of the soul is preeminently truth, yet to clothe it with external wisdom is not without merit, providing a kind of covering for the fruit."

St. Basil also wrote another small treatise called An Admonition to a Spiritual Son. This work is considered very valuable also concerning his mind on education. And in this treatise, he leans heavily on the teaching of the Proverbs, and says that that book should be central to the instruction of our children. It's a book of wisdom for us, educating us about what a sage really looks like, giving content to the wise man. St. Basil gives very practical instruction about how to interact with worldly education when you reach the age that you must swim in it. These days that often means when our kids go to college, when they move from deeply Christian influence to less than Christian influence, or sometimes radically pagan influence. Saint Basil says this:

I say to you, you who each day resort to teachers and hold converse with the famous men of the ancients through the words which they have left behind them, that you should not surrender to these men, once and for all, the rudders of your mind as if of a ship, and do not follow them wherever they lead. Rather, accepting from them only that which is useful, you should know that which ought to be over-looked. What these things are and how we shall distinguish between them is the lesson which I shall teach you from this point on.

Here St. Basil emphasizes the great necessity of discrimination, of selection, of discernment in study. One of the ways we know our children can move into pagan learning is that they have developed the quality of discernment—you know they have a sieve, that they have custody of their mind, and they're not going to give the reigns of that mind to any teacher at a pagan place or secular place of learning. Some kids may be able to have that early, some late, some maybe never. 

Next, St. Basil calls his nephews—and through them, all successive generations of Christian students—to study with an eye, one on the text and one on the kingdom of God. We study as an expression of seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. I would call this eschatological education. It's one of the greatest differences between how a Christian studies and how a secularist studies. This is why we Christians do not go for the obsession with business majors in the University. Do you know that in our nation, 55% of all majors are business and finance? I taught my children that has nothing to do with education. It might be a work that many of our kids are called to, but it is not education. Christians have never gone for the idea that education is all about this life, which is what the business major is all about. 

Listen to St. Basil himself. He says these words:

We in no wise conceive this human life of ours to be an object of value in any respect, nor do we consider anything good at all or so designated which makes its contribution to this life of ours only.

Of course, that just eradicates the whole obsession of our culture with science. And I don't mean to denigrate science. What I’d like to do is put science in its proper place. And she is not the queen, since she can only refer to this life. St. Basil says we don't even consider anything good, or dare call it good, that only makes a contribution to this life. He says:

Neither renown of ancestry, nor strength of body, nor beauty, nor stature, nor honors bestowed by all mankind, nor rule, nor any other human attribute that one might mention, do we judge great. Nay, we do not even consider them worth praying for, nor do we look with admiration upon those who possess them, but our hopes lead us forward to a more distant time, and everything we do is by way of preparation for the other life.

That's how we must study.

Whatever contributes to that life, we must say is to be loved and pursued with all our strength, but what does not conduce to that must be passed over as of no account. 

He encourages his nephews to read poetry that recounts deeds of good men, that use good words. He says, “familiarity with evil words is a road to evil deeds.” We have to avoid evil words by all accounts, “judging words to be powerful and creative of passion or virtue.” “We ought not praise the poets,” he says when they “define happiness in the wrong way.” Isn't that a plague today? Something we ought watch for.

He says we should avoid prose that is profane and shallow, and especially despise lying in great speakers and especially deceit in the system of law and litigation. Ha! What would he say to us in our American legal system? We are literally dripping in deceit, every aspect of our culture. And St. Basil says we should despise it. It will infect us if we don't. 

St. Basil sets forth—in this context—his famous analogy of the bees. 

We ought not to be like flies who love to hover over feces, but rather we should be like the bees who don't approach all flowers equally, but approach flowers of nectar value, and take what they want from this one, and then they fly to the next. Like working with the trimming of roses, we should watch out for the thorns, and while pursuing the beautiful, we must guard ourselves from what is harmful.

Thirdly, we ought especially to apply ourselves to what is said by poets, historians, and philosophers, about virtue, because virtue is the purpose of education. The true value of life is virtue and its acquisition, since it alone is not stolen by death. We must be those who don't just study virtue, but bring it forth into our lives and into our professions. Note that St. Basil does not believe the goal of education to be to obtain a career, to make money, to buy a house, to be smart, to get a job, none of it. The goal is to become virtuous, in fact, to be like Christ.

And lastly, in this beautiful treatise, St. Basil moves from literature to musical education and art. Art and music are neglected in America today to our detriment. The power of music and art over the soul of man is immense. St. Basil calls the young men of his time to completely abandon association with what he calls base music, that is designed to inflame the passions. 

He tells a beautiful story of Alexander the Great, sitting with his court musician, Timotheos. Timotheos was at a very nice banquet and performed an experiment about the power of music by playing a marshall ballad. In the middle of it, Alexander lept up from the table, grabbed his weapons, and ran to the door, and as he did it, Timotheos stopped. And Alexander regained his composure, recognized what he had just learned, and returned to the table with a new appreciation for the power of music. 

Just think of our own scripture stories. We don't have to refer to Alexander the Great. Just think of the power of David's harp over the horrible mental state of King Saul. He was tormented by demons, but even the power of the demons went flat when David played his melodious harp. Music, brothers and sisters, must be a part of our education of our children, and we must respect its power to create saints or to create devils. Especially think of the power of the Divine Liturgy—a beautifully sung Divine Liturgy—and what it does for us.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa

St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Basil's brother, wrote a magnificent treatise, amongst others, entitled On the Life of Moses. Perhaps some of you have read it. He wrote this at the end of his life, in the 390s. He calls himself, in the introduction, ‘an old man.’ In this magnificent treatise, Gregory uses the life of the holy prophet and God-seer Moses as an example of the acquisition of virtue, of growth in goodness and spiritual life. 

In book two, he addresses the proper relationship of a Christian to a pagan education. These are his words,

The barren daughter of Pharaoh is philosophy. When we attain maturity, we don't want to be called her children, for truly barren is profane education, which is always in labor but never gives birth.

It can't rejuvenate the soul!

If we should be involved with profane teachings during our education, we should not separate ourselves from the nourishment of the Church's milk…

Here the image is us nursing on the breast of the Church, and he says that position must be the position we retain while fulfilling our education at the hands of non-Christians. 

…which would be her (the Church's) laws and customs. By these, the soul is nourished and matured, thus being given the means of ascending the heights.

The fight between the Egyptian and the Hebrew he interprets as the fight between profane doctrine and true doctrine. The foreign wife of Moses, Zipporah, represents that there are certain positive benefits that are derived from profane education as long as this union introduces nothing of a foreign defilement.

Then Gregory turns his attention to explaining the meaning of the Israelites plundering the wealth of the Egyptians. These are his words: 

Those who follow the leader to virtue must, I think, not lack the wealth of Egypt, or be deprived of the treasures of the foreigners, but having acquired all the property of their enemies, they must have it for their own use. Moses commands those participating through virtue in the free life to equip themselves with the wealth of pagan learning by which foreigners to the faith beautify themselves. Such things as moral and natural philosophy, geometry, astronomy, dialectic, and whatever else is sought by those outside the Church, since these things will be useful. Those who treasured up for themselves such wealth handed it over to Moses as he was working on the tent of the tabernacle, the tent of mystery, each one making his own personal contribution to the construction of holy places. 

Remember the wealth that the Israelites got from their neighbors—when Moses told them to ask the Egyptians to give them their gold and silver—that wealth they brought, and what did they do? They contributed from it for the creation of the portable temple, the tabernacle, that God commanded Moses to build.

It is possible to see this happening even now, for many bring to the Church of God their profane learning as a gift to the King. Such a man was the great Basil. 

Here he is referring to his own brother, who had died. He loved him so much, together with his sister Makrina. Basil had died in 379, so this is about 15 years after the fact. “Such a man,” he says, “was the great Basil who acquired the Egyptian wealth in every respect during his youth and dedicated this wealth to God for the adornment of the Church.” 

From St. Gregory of Nyssa, we derive these principles: Our goal is, in fact—he doesn't say this is possible, he says its Moses’ command—to steal the foreigners' treasures. Our goal is not exclusively Christian education, but as a Christian to use all helpful pagan—today we would say secular—education in the service of Christ. We are to plunder the secularists, to seize the wealth of the Marxists who run our universities, and bring this wealth of education and training to the service of Christ and the Church in order to build holy places. 

Each one is to make his own personal contribution to God from his own learning. We are to execute this dangerous but necessary work while remaining close to the Church, drinking her milk, and following her laws and customs. We are always ecclesial in our education, even if we're studying at places like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, or someplace like this. We have to study in the midst of prayer, worship, fellowship, service, and alms-giving. We study as an expression of personal piety, for we're striving to make our own personal contributions to the work of Christ here and now.

Saint Gregory the Theologian

St. Gregory the Theologian’s mother, St. Nonna, was—like St. Emmelia, St. Basil's mother, and like St. Anthusa, St. John Chrysostom's mother—extremely zealous, as are the mothers here, for the purity and holiness of their sons. St. Nonna was deeply worried about the world's influence upon Gregory, lest he lose his holiness and closeness to God, and become defiled. This is how homeschooling works with pagan learning. Those who are most invested in their children's education—their mothers—must keep a strong hold of their sons and daughters. 

St. Gregory the Theologian relates in his own writings that his mother, St. Nonna, was so zealous for the protection of her children from the world and from pagan education, that she would adamantly refuse to allow even the mention of a Hellenistic myth or of a pagan practice in her house. Out! Out! She wouldn't permit it! She would stop their mouths! She wouldn't let them be even mentioned! That's in his 18th oration. 

St. Nonna made sure that while Gregory was advancing to the centers of pagan Hellenistic learning, he was also under the constant care and tutelage of some of the greatest Christians of his time. He progressively went from Econium to Caesarea, later to Caesarea Maritima, which was the closest thing to a Christian university town of the 4th century. This is where St. Gregory the Wonderworker, a spiritual father to many of the influential Cappadocians, had studied and lived. Then he went to Alexandria and then to Athens. Can you imagine? All those places to do higher learning at the hands of pagans. She made sure that every single place that he went had a serious Liturgy, led by very competent priests and Christian scholars, and she put him in contact with them to watch him and to help him. 

In fact, it was on his way to Athens that he was absolutely traumatized by a 20-day storm at sea as they were rounding the island of Rhodes. He says he spent most of his time during that 20-day terror prostrate in fear for his life on the ship, crying out to God in prayer, and evidently, occasionally to his mother. St. Nonna stayed in such close contact with her son, physically and spiritually, and showed such care that a young boy traveling on the ship—going through the same trauma of tempest that Gregory went through—told Gregory later that during the storm he saw Gregory’s mother Nonna, whom that servant knew, walking on the water to the ship, grab the ship with her hands, and drag it single-handedly to the shore to answer her son's urgent need. This is the role of mothers! And that came from the most gifted, the most profound of the Church fathers. His mom kept him moored!

Saint John Chrysostom

No Church father has made a greater contribution to Christian education than St. John Chrysostom. Chrysostom says this: “The downfall of civilization stems from disregard of children.” Our civilization is falling downward. If someone was to ask us what is the primary cause of this, we should answer it in the same way: the disregard of our children. “Many seek the preservation of their estates,” he writes, “but not the preservation of the souls in their care.” This, itself, is criminal, and in his words, "tantamount to child murder."

The proper education of children was something that he gave much attention to. He, like the other holy fathers I’ve mentioned, benefited greatly from classical Greek education. ‘Enkyklios Paideia.’ But he made a frontal assault upon the educational norms of his society. He argued for what he called a 'Paideia en Christo.' Taking the Pauline image of what the Christian life is—life in Christ—and saying that is what education should be. 'Paideia en Christo.' Education in Christ. The educational goal is no longer to be that established by the Hellenistic rhetoric, but by the Christian formation of the child as a spiritual athlete. That is the goal. 

It is difficult for us to understand how radical Chrysostom was being in attacking Greek education. This form of education had not only been established for centuries, but there was virtually no viable Christian alternative in the late 4th century. What Chrysostom was promoting was both radical and novel. It could be compared, I think, in gravity, to a wholehearted rejection of state education in the post-Christian West. 

The system under criticism was immensely dominant. The chief among the criticisms that Chrysostom made of traditional Greek education—of the normal education of the state—was the great fear, or what he calls moral danger, that it placed Christian youth in. And the great fear at that time, the great abuse, was pedophilia. He said it was simply rampant. Young men would be the students of older men, and they would be abused, sexually used. Does it sound familiar? It should. 

Chrysostom lamented that so many parents knew how their children were being morally polluted, but they tolerated it as the status quo for the sake of the education. These are his words: “But the parents of the children who are being violated bear it in silence." I can't help but say this is exactly what's happening with the majority of our Orthodox Christian youth who are in the state system. Their parents know it’s not good. They know their souls are being damaged because they're being taught everything without reference to God. They're having immorality presented to them as normal. They're being taught that if they have questions or concerns about these immoral, unnatural practices, they are bigots or racists. And we are tolerating it in silence way too often. 

This is what Chrysostom says:

The parents of the children who are being violated bear it in silence. They do not bury themselves in the earth along with their children, nor do they think of some remedy for that evil.

This is what he says they should do: They should dig a hole and get in it. They should hide themselves from the sight of this filth, or at least if they don't do that, find a remedy, confront it, and cure it.

If it were necessary to take the children to a foreign land, to save them from an illness or a sickness, or to the sea, or to the islands, or to an inaccessible land, or to the world beyond us, should we not do and suffer all these things so as not all allow these defilements.

He's saying these same parents would do anything to cure their children’s physical maladies, but now when such a great plague has spread everywhere, not only do we ourselves drag them down into the depths, but we drive away those who wish to set them free, as if they were corrupters. What rage! And then here's a classic Chrysostom line used many times: “What thunderbolts do these crimes deserve?!” Yes, indeed! 

He says that the best context for Christian education is the pedagogy of monastics. The best context for Christian education is the pedagogy of monastics, but since this is not always possible, the parents must make sure that the children have as monastic and spiritual an education as possible.

It's incumbent on parents to exert the greatest concern for their children's education. He lamented that so many parents directed their efforts to ensure their children becoming rich instead of wise. Typically, parents took great pain to give their children training in arts, literature, and speech, but paid no heed to their acquisition of virtue. Just as some conscientious parents show immense care to ensure that their children are progressing in secular learning, so they should show the same care to ensure that their children are making progress in the school of the Church and in Christian development. 

Christian education was a theme that St. John visited in many contexts and at many times. When he was a priest in Antioch, about the year 388—this was ten years before he was captured and taken to Constantinople to become patriarch—At that time in 388, he delivered a very famous homily, “On Vainglory and the Proper Upbringing of Children by Their Parents.” This treatise was dedicated to providing a paradigm for the Christian education of children. It's the most dense portion of his corpus given to Christian education. This is what he says. This is kind of a summary of his points: 

He says, first, the pedagogical task is the responsibility of parents. They are the ones ultimately accountable for the education of their children, and if they are to enlist the assistance of tutors and pedagogues, they must take thorough care that these are positive influences and helpful in the goal of acquiring virtue. We have to be very selective in who are going to be the tutors of our children.

He continues and says that parents should regard themselves as artists. Like painters or sculptors, they must fashion their children. As painters place their canvas on the easel and add to it day by day, so parents must inspect their children each day giving them leisure time for the improvement of the artwork, adding what is lacking, removing what is superfluous—little by little, here and there, lifelong project. 

Christian education must begin from the earliest age, for the lessons learned in early youth remain with the child for good or ill. Parents must make good use of the beginning of their children's lives. When children are young, he says they're like warm wax, and the impress that they receive will soon harden and remain. As young plants, they need the greatest amount of care, as do young children, and to this end, parents should give an incentive to goodness to their children from the very start, by giving them solid Christian names. It's not proper, he says, to name our children after our forebearers. No righteous man in the scriptures did this, he says. Rather, we're to name our children after the righteous, the martyrs, bishops, and apostles so that every time they hear their name, they will be encouraged to emulate their saints. 

He considered the most important instruction to be that concerning the Church's feast days. As God commanded the Jews to do, so Christian parents must teach their children the significance of the Christian feasts. To fail to do so is to be condemned as a neglectful parent, and to be such is worse than to be a murderer. There is nothing worse than to corrupt the soul of a child, and to harm the soul of a child is far worse than to harm the body, which we would never dream of doing.

Some parents allow their children to be formed, he says, by listening to what he calls satanic songs. He says such parents should be severely chastised. It's these neglectful parents who do not teach their children the scripture stories. Therefore, to fulfill their educational tasks, the parents must have Christian education themselves, and know the laws of Christ in order to pass them on to their children.

Isn't that one of the great gifts of homeschooling? Is that we're constantly schooling ourselves? And we're teaching our children from a position of humility because we ourselves are students. The Lord is parenting us as we are trying to parent them. Really, we're not very different from them; we're very close to them. Parents, by the way, who don't teach or discipline from that position of humility, but from a position where they think they know and have arrived, they're terrors, real terrors. Basic ethics, he says, must be taught thoroughly at home so that the priest at church can teach the deeper truths of Scripture. 

The proper education of children requires the consecration of their senses to God. He begins with the tongue. He says children must be trained from the beginning to speak only words of reverence, to give thanks, to sing beautiful hymns, and to speak about God. We have to help our children learn to speak about Him, to learn how to say, “Doxa Theo,” “Glory to God,” “if God wills,” and all the beautiful things that are in our cultures. We must especially teach our children to banish from their mouths the criticism of others, to banish evil speaking. By the way, he points out what is the worst four-letter word, and it’s not what you think. It doesn't start with an ‘f.’ It starts with an ‘m,’ and that word is ‘mine.’ 

He says attention, next, should be given to the ears. Nothing harmful should be heard by the child. Parents are to imagine that their child is a great and holy house being erected for God, and builders don't just let anyone approach their building while it’s in process. Only those that are well fitted to contribute to the building are allowed to draw near. Such should be the standard employed by parents for permitting associations with their young children. If the child has been around lewd speakers, the parents should punish, if possible, those so speaking and inquire zealously what was said in order to correct it. 

Next, St. John calls upon parents to protect the child’s sense of smell. This is interesting. He says to protect the child's sense of smell from the extravagant or fragrant scents and perfumes, which he thinks weaken the soul and make a masculine soul effeminate. He also says certain scents can fan desires. This is one of the wonderful reasons to burn incense in your house—not just because incense torments demons and drives them away, which it does—but also because it actually promotes prayer and connects the child to the liturgical life of the Church. 

Then there is the sight, what he calls the fairest of all the senses, but very difficult to guard. Remember, St. Basil says that the eyes touch. They have an ocular sense of touching. Here the parent must employ strict laws, and the first of these is never to permit your child to attend the theatre, so that he's not corrupted via his ears and his eyes. Remember the Greek theatre was so corrupted that on the catechetical lists that our bishops promoted, that occupation of acting was forbidden to anyone who was to be baptised. You could not be an actor or an actress because it simply meant immorality.

“When he is in public, and walking through the squares, he should have a mature companion with him.” He is making sure that our children are spending time with the mature. “And especially young men should be kept away from the sight of young women and should not bathe in mixed company.” Remember, the bath houses of those days are very much like a lot of our corrupt gyms—places like LA Fitness—which are just meat markets. Many people go to these places not to work out but to socialize and to gaze and to make contacts. 

As in all training, it’s not sufficient simply to shelter a child from corrupting influences. The parents must also expose the child to health and to healthy influences. The eyes must not only avoid impurity but be exposed to fair sites: beautiful art, the sun and its splendor, the flowers, the meadows, beautiful books. I love that! Let your children see and love beautiful books! Such sights, and others like it, nourish the child and contain them. This is why he recommends in other places that parents—besides making beautiful pilgrimages to monasteries which we should do; we urbanites should remove ourselves from the city and get to the monasteries—but he also says we should go out into nature regularly, extract ourselves from the burdening pressure of the tight dense city, and go see the magnificent wealth, the trees, the sky. 

He goes on with the sense of touch, which he thinks should be trained to be austere. He says that such strictness, such seriousness, about the regulation of the senses will be well accepted by a child if the parent also reminds the child of all the blessing that come, and what the parent will do for him or her, and that those who live this way will be greatly blessed by God. The parent must promise the child many tangible blessings from his own hand, like his effort to secure for him a beautiful spouse, a fitting inheritance, and an imminent wedding, recreation, the site of fair buildings, many gifts. By bestowing what he calls these harmless pleasures, the child will patiently bear the rejection of participation in immoral activities. We don't just say what not to do; we rejoice in the beautiful.

The most effective means of education he says is emulation. This is why we labor to associate our children with holy people, and especially why we’re laboring to become parents worthy of having our children. 

Many of you may know that beautiful text written by the Russian priest, Fr. Alexander Elchaninov. It’s called the Diary of a Russian Priest. In that text, published, I think, in the late 70s, by St. Vladimir’s Seminary, Fr. Alexander says this. He poses a question. He says, “What is the greatest any parent can give to their children?” And he answers it in these words: “The greatest gift any parent can give to their children is to have an active interior life.” To actually be above everything else, to have as our number one goal, not the education of our children, but the love of our Savior, the cultivation of our own salvation, working to become what the Lord is asking us to be—this is the greatest gift that we can give to our children. 

If we work like this and give our children these encouragements, they'll be enabled, emboldened, in fact, to turn away from what's popular but degrading. 

It's important, he says, for children to know their own bishop and their own priest personally, to hear words of praise from the lips of their bishop and priest, to hear their father priding himself on this before others. He says this intimacy with one's priest is a protection of chastity, and while helping their children to be near to their priest, parents should instill in their children a disdain for sinful ways through argument and mockery. 

The father must teach his son that the sight of naked women and the hearing of foul speech are for pathetic people. This is an especially important point for us today as we're drowning in the epidemic of internet pornography. Fathers should teach their sons that the sight of naked women and the hearing of foul speech are for pathetic people. 

St. John Chrysostom is very specific. He says fathers should take their sons, and they should go down to the tavern at night when it's late, and they should sit on the wall outside the door, and they should watch the drunks come out stumbling and falling as they're going home, and the fathers should turn to the son and should say to the son, "Son, what do you think about that? Do you want to be like that? Isn't there a better way?” Such mockery, he says, will strengthen the child's sense of reverence of culture, and help them understand that the Christian way of life is high, exalted, and lifted up. 

These are our best men. These are the three holy hierarchs, and St. Gregory of Nyssa. They provide for us, brothers and sisters, a beautiful vision of what it means to be a parent and what it means to contribute to the formation of our children, to what we would call their education. It is an outworking of our quest for the kingdom of God, something that we're doing as an aspect of loving God ourselves and striving to repent. 

We don't have to be afraid of anything at all. Nothing will dominate Christ. He has overcome the world, and He has made us coheirs with Him of everything. The kingdom will be here shortly, and then everything evil will dissolve and the greatest threat to us, the dragon himself, will be pinched by the angelic hands and dropped into the trash bin of history, into the lake of fire. Then the chorus will break out: “Alleluia! The Lord, our God, the Almighty reigns!” And the unceasing joy of the countenance of Jesus' face at the wedding feast of the Lamb will be ours forever. It’s coming. This is the hour of preparation—our own and our children's. With that kind of vision, with the help of the Holy Spirit, and with our free choice not to be afraid, we can do this. We can do this. We can hold on to each other and walk through this wilderness until the Lord comes. God help us. Amen.