Remnants of my Brain Explosion after This Morning's School of Community

It has been awhile since coming home from School of Community has made me want to run to the computer and work out more thoughts. That's probably not entirely because I haven't had any thoughts provoked; life rarely allows me the pleasure of engaging my intellectual interests at the drop of a hat, even if all I were to need were my own thoughts and a moment to think them.

But today I am brimming over with bits of wonderment. Let's see if I can grab a few and wrestle them out onto ... screen.

Indirect knowledge is faith. Faith is indirect knowledge. Faith is not how I feel about something, and it is not religious sentiment, like a warm glowy feeling you get when you look at a live Nativity. This was the point Giussani was making in the section of Can We Really Live This Way that we read and discussed today. I've got that. And I know that at one point in my life, when I was discussing "You've just gotta have faith" with a friend, I asserted that faith meant intellectual assent that something was true, albeit without any real impact on my conduct. There was also a sense in which faith meant what I hoped would happen, which is probably essentially this emotionalism Giussani is getting at. Reality and faith, however I thought of faith, were pretty much divorced in my mind at this stage of my life. This friend was trying to tell me that faith meant stepping out and believing something on the authority of God, as we understood His thought as it came to us through our preferred take on Scripture. I think what he was ultimately admonishing me to do was to be a good American: stick by your own ideals and don't let anyone stop you. There's value in that, but equating it with faith in God is dangerous and false (and could be described with probably many other adjectives).

Who do I trust, and who do I distrust, and why? This was the challenge Suzanne gave us as we parted ways. If I think about it in terms of people, I tend to trust readily, and perhaps this leads me to be gullible sometimes. The Scripture comes to mind that says Jesus did not need testimony about man, because he knew what was in a man. Jesus, in his earthly existence, demonstrated extraordinary trust in human beings. Consider that he chose Mary and Joseph. Consider that he entrusted the ministry to announce the kingdom to apostles in training and to disciples (and how many of the 72 stayed faithful until the crucifixion or after, I wonder?). Yet, because he had no guile, no sin, he was able to see straight through people. He knew what aspects of people could not be trusted, or how to understand their limitations. I don't think it is unwise or sinful for us to imitate our Lord in this, keeping open of course to the likelihood of our judgments being in error. Pride is therefore the thing that causes us to close down and refuse to see truth in places (coming from people) we would not suspect the discovery likely.

So what about that gullibility of mine? I keep coming back to my need to fill my science-shaped hole in my education. My friend Jeff is bringing this again and again to the forefront of my mind, as we have been in a bit of an on-going dialogue about evolution. As a child, I completely accepted what I was taught about the origin of the world, namely, a literal six day creation that happened roughly 6,000 years ago. I sternly argued against my 5th grade teacher who taught us about dinosaurs; since the earth was not millions of years old I did not accept that dinosaurs, said to have existed then, ever actually existed. I was vehement in defending what I had been taught, but obviously had not learned to grapple with tangible scientific evidence. I was an expert on distrust when I felt it was called for.

So now I am grappling with this huge sector of knowledge called the natural world (thanks also to my son, the budding scientist and our many trips to the Museum of Natural History). Doing the game of "if x is true, then what does it mean for y."

Which brings me to another point. This whole discussion of how we know what is true is fascinating in light of what for lack of better terms I call unschooling. Some people like to say natural learning, or just learning without school. Or learning in ways that learning best happens. Take your pick of how you want to say it. School learning involves taking in a lot of indirect knowledge. Any learning, of course, involves that, but the added filter of school, which involves the teacher, the learning environment, the textbook, the curriculum choice, various state and federal regulation, and time constraints (just to name the issues that immediately come to mind) brings a lot to potentially make learning a passive experience. Homeschooling is no guarantee that a child's mind will be actively engaged in the world, and there are parent/child relationships where kids are in schools of all sorts that help make the exposure to a lot of garbage (to be blunt) into a valuable learning tool. But for me, this discussion puts into bright highlight my own call to bring about the Catholic education of the my children. I must continually exercise and model critical thinking and wonderment at the world around me; these are the key tools for education, beyond the human person himself who, endowed with a soul, is a learning machine.

Then there's this question I have about medicine and the human person. How do we know how to care for our health? Who do we trust for advice on what is safe and beneficial or risky and to be avoided? I believe exploring this question has dramatically changed my life (especially considering all of the tendrils the question has entailed for me) in the last four or five years. And it is not only because three years of the best medical care rendered by the top Catholic researcher/practitioner of infertility medicine in the United States resulted in my endometriosis defying his statistics and returning, causing him to shrug with great, humble sadness with us after my third surgery. And it is not only because seven months later I became pregnant with my daughter after turning to "alternative medicine" which involved difficult lifestyle changes, but ultimately greatly improved my health in a short period of time. But that's a huge chunk of the story. I know that anyone who receives a great favor like this, a great healing from the Lord tends to glom onto whatever instrument got them there and promote it as THE savior. Gratitude and emotion can cause one to take up crusades, to want everyone to jump on the bandwagon. Here's where I need to sift through my experiences and the science (and politics, and economics, and all the rest) involved with healthcare: there is objective truth to how the human body works, and there are ways of being a good steward of the human body. There is significant genetic diversity among individuals; what is healthy for one person truly may harm another. So this is not like the realm of moral truth. But I am truly troubled by the limitations of Western allopathic medicine and even more troubled by the blind trust given it by much of our culture (I was once this person through and through), or the blind skepticism of any kind regarding health care. The capper of all of this irrationality is our bad habits which we expect to have no impact on our well being. I have them. But I am learning that their origins must either lie in ignorance, irrationality or addiction (and I'm not sure the last two should be separated).

Ok, here's a secret. I've learned I can compose blog posts on our old basement computer while a child or two is otherwise engaged in learning with our online computer. And with only a few dozen calls away! Great for this chance to work through my thoughts today. But the call to remain rationally engaged in my home responsibilities persists! Time to go bulldoze the dining room!