In last week’s episode, we considered how beauty is a special combination of order and surprise. To behold beauty, we learned, is to contemplate the dynamism of a being on the way to its perfection. It is to see the rose emerging from its seed.
This week we talk with assistant headmaster, Tom Royals, about learning to see the beauty—albeit often messy beauty—of our own growing children. To be sure, in this adventure, we may find more surprise than order. Nevertheless, in learning to see our children with loving eyes, we learn to better understand them. And in better understanding them, we are better able to accompany them along their paths, each of which has its own peculiar order.
In this episode, Tom encourages us to avoid thinking of our children as projects and instead to learn to contemplate them as free persons. For it is only in becoming contemplatives of our children that they will know themselves to be understood and loved, as they are. This knowledge, more than anything, will become the basis of their growth. Like Chesterton said of Rome, they are not loved because they were first great; they will become great because they have first been loved.
Chapters
Also on The Forum
20 Ways to Improve the Family Dinner by Rich Moss
Against Indifference by Tom Longano
Ways to Foster a Family Culture by Alvaro de Vicente
On Home as Social Hub: The Importance of Hosting Our Sons and Their Friends with Tom Royals
Learn to Turn: Tom Royals on Parental Prudence with Tom Royals
Cultivating Friendship in the Classroom by Austin Hatch
Our Little Protectors: How Do WE See Our Boys? with Alvaro de Vicente