All of us believe in a God who created this world, this just one world which is known, up to now, with certainty, to the human mind. He has made this world not in a monochromatic, monotonous and monolithic manner. He has created this world with many stories, with stories within stories, stories that span from the microscopic to the ‘cosmoscopic’ multiverse. From the stand point of the enormity of this cosmic multiverse, we do not measure up even to the size of a Higgs Boson which is supposedly the recently discovered fundamental-‘god’-particle of this tangible material world. Then, does an individual human being really matter?
‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour’ – William Blake
William Blake teaches us to see the reality through the eyes of God. When we look through the lens of God, the miniscule human does appear larger than the entire multiverse. This is the Christian humanism, the Universal Humanism which we Jesuits and Jesuit educational institutions follow as our philosophy of education. It is a human-centric educational philosophy. This philosophy holds humans as being created by God in the image and likeness of God to revere, love and serve Him. And each individual, each child is unique and has his or her own story template already implanted by God in his or her soul. Our work is to provide the environment and assist the child to write his own story, in his or her own time, in his or her own style and achieve human excellence.
On the contrary, the current education system gives us a mould and a conveyer belt model to put our children to mass produce humans who can fulfil the requirement of certain systematised ideology, certain tasks that serve that ideology, and eventually to serve the individuals who propagate that ideology for their selfish ends. The current ‘system’ gives us a self-serving, common story template which eventually stuns the total blossoming of the individual.
God is not one story, God is manifest in the many stories of every boson, every atom, every plant, animal, every created thing- seen and unseen. More than these God is supremely manifest in each individual human being, in every child, in and through a unique story. We can’t dictate or direct his or her script. He or she should not copy someone else’s story. The unique template of the story implanted by God, which does not have a match in the multi-universe, cannot be tampered with by the parent or by the system, because ‘your child is not your child’. Your child is also my child, the society’s child, a ‘child-citizen’ of this state, the country and this world of many stories. Parents and educators must embrace this world view in order to assist the child arrive at human excellence.
The Lebanese Philosopher-poet Khalil Gibran compares God as an archer, parent as the bow and the child as an arrow and the role of the parent is to simply bend like a bow and let the archer who is God to shoot it swift and far to bring gladness in the world.
‘……… Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts………………….
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
The parents and educators are mere bows in the hands of God to help the child to be shot into his or her own future of gladness. We are to merely set examples before them through our own life of human excellence. The four Cs of human excellence are 1. Competence, 2. Conscience, 3. Compassion, 4. Commitment. These four Cs give the child a tentative framework to write his or her own story. The unique story of each child will make the kaleidoscope of the many stories of this multiverse more colourful and bring gladness to all humans and the nature.
Let us, then, work together, let us think out of the boxes and moulds, let us collaborate consciously in this noble endeavour of providing conducive learning environments that are safe, nurturing, free, challenging, ingenious, life affirming and joyful.
Vincenti Dabitur!
