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Inspiring Our Children
by a husband, who is the father of six children and a businessman

“Youth was not made for pleasure, but for heroism.”
– Paul Claudel

Like most parents, i’m concerned about the many temptations and pressures our children face. It seems more young people engage in sinful behavior at younger ages. To protect our children from harm, my wife and i say “no” on a regular basis. It takes diligence and hard work to teach them to recognize and avoid sin, especially when it’s so prevalent in today’s movies, books, social media and peer interactions.

But sometimes i wonder that while we’re watching for the dragon at the gate, we’re don’t notice the seemingly harmless snakes that slip by and which later turn out to be venomous. In the constant fight to defend our families against the open evils of our day, are we losing a hidden battle when we allow our kids to watch or read anything they want, as long as it’s free of obvious violence or sexual immorality? Is the mediocre, inane drivel we say “yes” to really that much safer just because, compared to the blatant stuff, it seems “neutral?”

If so, then we as parents must firmly re-establish the practice to measure every book, movie, song and video game against one standard — the good, the beautiful and the true.

Make Mine Super-Sized
We all know that when we eat too much junk food — high fat and empty carbs — and don’t exercise, that our bodies become overweight and vulnerable to serious problems. It’s the same thing with the images, words and messages that feed the minds and sensitive imaginations of our children. Too much “junk food” and their souls become bloated, sick and vulnerable to spiritual ills.

Unfortunately, many of today’s youth and their parents no longer realize how poor their “entertainment” diet is. Michael O’Brien’s book, Landscape of Dragons, states it well: “Films, videos and commercial television have come close to replacing the Church, the arts, and the university as the primary shaper of the modern sense of reality” (pg 61).

If so, then the vision of reality for most of our young people is small, mean and perverted. Their’s is a world where parents, especially fathers, are inept buffoons. Representatives of the Church are repressive and dangerously intolerant. Young people are always smart and insightful, “champions of materialism, sexual libertarianism, environmentalism and feminism” (Landscape of Dragons). Emotions reign, pleasure is king, good and evil are the same. Occultists, vampires, rock stars and rebels are the new heroes.

Make Them Eat Their Veggies
It’s time to feed our kids’ minds and souls the most healthy, nutritious stuff out there! It’s time to inspire them with the true vision of reality, with stories about glory, honor, majesty, sacrifice, joy, duty, heroism, splendor, nobility. Without knowing it, our kids crave stories and examples that inspire them to be heroic, to make sacrifices for a higher good. It’s how they (and we) were created!

When was the last time they read a book that made them yearn for glory in battle against evil, defending the powerless and weak? Or to serve those who are suffering? Or to lay down their life for a noble cause? Have our teens experienced something that made their hearts “buckle” from its sheer beauty?

My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
(The Windhover, To Christ Our Lord, Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Give them only the “healthy” stuff and we’ll be showing them facets of God Himself. As Peter Kreeft says: “[T]he true, good and beautiful are the only three things we never get bored with. And never will for all eternity. Because they are three attributes of God.” (from a talk, Oxford, England, July 28, 2005). The Church herself says, “That his creatures should share in his truth, goodness and beauty — this is the glory for which God created them” (CCC, 319).

Ultimately, the salvation of their souls may depend on our efforts to pre-screen and filter what’s filling our kids’ minds. May God grant us the grace to do whatever it takes to bring our children, like Frodo, to the eternal shores: “The ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise” (Return of the King, JRR Tolkien).

Vinculum members of Miles Jesu live the charism of Miles Jesu in their families and in their workplace.