The Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:11–12)
In a Catholic school, assisting God in forming minds and souls is our mission. It’s how we help the young learn to be free and responsible. To grow in knowledge, wisdom, and holiness. To become fully alive. It’s about developing good habits of heart and mind—about inculcating virtue. All this is becoming more challenging these days. There’s so much wind, earthquake, and fire that the quieter voices of nature and grace, which are the matter for our mission, can be harder for students to hear.
I was at a Catholic school leaders’ event near San Francisco in late February. Having flown in from Minneapolis, I was delighted by the balmy if unseasonably cool weather there. But my app cautioned otherwise: “Current location: high 52, low 41. Extreme Cold Warning!” A few weeks prior, we had our own such warning back home, when it was twenty below. Most Twin Cities schools, out of abundance of caution, closed that day. Ours did not, which earned me some student disgruntlement. I pointed out that this is Minnesota, after all, and we have the wherewithal to get on with life in winter. Further, I suggested that “there are forces in this agitated world that would make you overly cautious, soft, and fearful. People are more easily manipulated and controlled that way. We would rather form you in fortitude and other virtues to become free and responsible adults.”
I’m starting to think about virtue inculcation in a new and simple way. Our children and youth are having their amygdalas “pinged” all the time, and we need to counteract that barrage. Are kids getting a weather notice? Ping! A notification from Instagram? Ping! A text from Mom? Amber alert? War in the Middle East? Earthquake! Fire! Ping! Ping!
The amygdala comprises two little almond-shaped parts of the brain that detect threats. It plays a critical role in fear and anxiety reactions. But God created us to be able not only to react to stimuli but to evaluate them and make judgments about responses and actions. The brain’s prefrontal cortex, only fully developed by age twenty-five, manages higher-level functions like impulse control. God has put parents and their representatives in Catholic schools in charge of forming minds and souls so that the young have adult influences in making good choices and judgments before they are fully able to do so themselves. All that pinging complicates things, making kids unnecessarily anxious and fearful.
Dostoevsky, St. Augustine, and Dante have things to teach, not data to download or process.
There have been precipitous rises in youth anxiety and depression in recent years. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt associates much of this with “phone-based childhood,” well analyzed in his book The Anxious Generation. What strikes me most as a school leader, though, is that much of the K–12 educational world seems more inclined to stoke and harness fear and anxiety than to allay them. Whether the issue is climate, political polarization, race, gender, immigration, economic prospects, or public health, schools can be catalysts and affirmers of groupthink and catastrophizing. While it’s a complex story, the point here is that Catholic schools owe children and families help rather than hindrance, a space for calm rather than agitation.
When in the Bay Area recently, I brought these matters up over dinner with three graduates from our school, all of whom are professionals at the cutting edge of digital technology and one the founder of an AI company. They see clear and present dangers to children of a hyper-stimulating world, most represented by smartphones and social media. Apps vie for eyeballs. Sites curate information onslaughts with what most stimulates a given user. Users receive “hits,” a term associated with drug abuse. Artificial intelligences vie to simulate personal relationships with users; what’s missing, of course, is a person.
What to do? Our graduates agreed that keeping smartphones out of the hands of children is key (at least at school. And otherwise until age fourteen? Sixteen? Very difficult with contemporary familial and peer pressures). All acknowledged the societal influences that exacerbate fear and anxiety as well. But more focus was given to what a Catholic school can do.
“Keep teaching books” was a theme. As was “have students write essays and do problem sets in class, with pencil and paper.” Straightforward enough: a traditional approach that is “how we have done it” for a very long time. But the emphasis was less on the how than on the why. Why linger with Dostoevsky, St. Augustine, Dante? What is lost by neglecting their works or by just scanning AI summaries? Why linger with long-form math and science problems rather than tapping a few keys on a computer? The conversation alighted on the imperative of forming human persons created in the image and likeness of God. Mathematics is the language through which God ordered the cosmos, from the immeasurably great to the unimaginably small. To learn it is to learn something about him and his creation. Dostoevsky, St. Augustine, and Dante have things to teach, not data to download or process. They have beauties to show, humanity to convey, virtues and vices to illustrate. They are persons reaching across time and cultures to other persons, beckoning, “Hearken, and live!”
The devil is delighted when needless fear and anxiety are on the rise.
Persons are far more than digitizable intelligences in mammalian bodies subject to stimuli. Persons need time, space, and quiet opportunity to linger.
“In God alone my soul finds rest,” sings the psalmist. I recall the high school senior years ago who was responding to a hypothetical question whether a mandatory weekly Mass should be made optional. “Oh, no!” she said. “We need to be free to go and have time to pray and be with the Lord. If it were optional, we’d always find something more urgent to do!” Time to linger with God—required time—in order to be free.
Do we still believe in the incarnate Logos? In the mind, reason, purpose, and meaning of God himself pitching his tent with us and taking on our nature and form in Christ Jesus? Do we believe that truth and goodness and beauty and love are one in him? Do we believe that he is the prince of peace, and that his peace passes all understanding? Then students must spend time with him. And time learning and reflecting and imagining and praying. Students must—we all must—linger with God and his creation. In ping-free zones. Fearlessly.
In our majestic local Cathedral of Saint Paul, there are mosaics depicting the four cardinal virtues: fortitude, prudence, justice, temperance. The cardinal virtues have always been taken to be natural, habits that can be developed in anyone even if only perfectible in light of faith. And, following St. Thomas Aquinas, C. S. Lewis famously said in The Screwtape Letters that fortitude is “the form of every virtue at the testing point.” It takes courage for young people to make right choices, to stand for the truth when falsehood is popular, and to resist temptations. The devil is delighted when needless fear and anxiety are on the rise.
In our cathedral, the cardinal-virtue mosaics sit at the four corners from which the dome soars upward. From the solidity of that natural foundation, in the quiet of a holy place, the eyes and spirit rise to contemplation of the Holy Spirit and his gifts depicted high above. In our agitated world, our young can still be invited to “be still, and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10).