Today is Saturday, March 7, 2026 and I’m William Michael, the headmaster of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. If you’d like to learn about what we’re doing to restore classical Catholic education, and if you’d like to join us and study at no cost, check out our website at classicalliberalarts.com.
This morning, I was thinking through some frustration that I feel as I work in Catholic education, because I feel like Catholic families complain about modern culture and complain about modern education, but they never do anything about it, and even if they do make an attempt to do something, they usually quit and go back to what everyone else is doing. There’s this constant unwillingness to do what’s necessary for change.
And as I was thinking about it, I was asking myself, what’s really going on here? What’s the real problem? And I think that I have found the cause of this problem. And if you’re a Catholic who struggles with this, if sometimes you feel like you go back and forth all the time, you know, one minute you’re thinking spiritually, you’re thinking about eternal life, you’re thinking about your children’s salvation, you’re thinking about your own prayer life and need to study and worship, and then the next minute, you’re anxious about work or your lifestyle or your children’s future and college admission and all this stuff, you feel like you just get tossed back and forth all the time.
And it’s this back and forth, this instability that I think causes us to complain about the world when we’re engaged with it, and have thoughts at times of doing something different, changing what we’re doing, but then when we begin to make a change, beginning to think back to how things were before, and considering going back, and there’s this constant flip-flopping, as I say, this scene from the Book of Exodus came to mind, where the Jews, the Hebrews, at one minute, are complaining and crying out to God that they’re strained under the oppression of slavery.
They’re crying out, begging God for help to free them from this oppression, this crushing Egyptian slavery. And then when God sends them a deliverer in Moses, and Moses leads them out to freedom, they then start complaining about how good the food was when they were in Egypt. And I think this is a common spiritual battle that we fight, and it’s the cause of instability in our lives.
It’s why we are always struggling. We’re always going back and forth. We’re always wrestling with these problems. We’re always complaining about the world, and yet, we don’t commit to a solution, or we start and then we quit. We don’t have the principle. We don’t have a foundation. We don’t have clear conviction, clear goals, to actually fix our eyes on a target and never take our eyes off that target, and to order everything in our life at the bullseye on that target.
That’s how Aristotle taught that we need to live in the Ethics. He says, we need to learn what the chief end is of life, learn what the ultimate end is, and then we need, like an archer, we need to focus our eyes on that target and order everything at that bull’s eye. And this is what we fail to do. We fail to establish a clear target for our life, and then we go back and forth based on the events of the day.
James in the New Testament complained about the mind of an unstable man, that nothing that he does makes any progress, nothing that he does is stable because he is double-minded. He has got one foot in the world, one foot in heaven, and he can’t make up his mind where he wants to go, and so his whole life is this constant back and forth, this constant confusion and frustration.
And what’s worse is that as we go back and forth, because I was thinking about my relationship with my wife, and I was thinking about times where I get annoyed with her, and times when she gets annoyed with me and we may have arguments, my wife and I love each other. Amazingly, we’ve been together since we were 17 years old, and there can be times where I look at her and I’m as annoyed with her as I would be with anyone in the whole world, and it’s hard to make sense of how can these thoughts and feelings go back and forth so wildly at times.
And as I was thinking through this, what I realized is that not only do I go back and forth like this, not only am I unstable at times, but my wife is as well, and there are some days where we’re both thinking spiritually and we’re aligned. And there are other days where we’re both thinking with worldly minds, and even though our thinking is wrong, we’re aligned, and it feels like we’re at peace. But then there are other days where I’m having heavenly thoughts and thinking rightly, and she’s having worldly thoughts and thinking wrongly, and we’re at odds with each other.
And then the next day, I may be having worldly thoughts and she may be having heavenly thoughts, and again, we’re at odds, frustrated with each other, and it’s because not only do we go back and forth individually, but in our relationship, we go back and forth. Some days we’re aligned for good, some days we’re aligned for bad, and then other days we’re at odds with each of us looking in different directions.
And when I work with parents in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, I think the same thing happens. Usually when parents first show up, they’ve been in the world. They know all of the problems with modern education, modern schools, modern homeschool programs, because they’re in it. They’re like the Hebrews in Egypt. They hate it. They know what the problems are, and they’re desperate for a solution.
And they come to the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. They read the information there, and they say, Praise the Lord, this is it. I literally get messages like that from parents. You know, we’ve been so disappointed. We’ve been praying. We feel so hopeless. And then we find the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, and we say, this is exactly what we want. God has answered our prayers. It’s all this spiritual talk, all heavenly-minded and so on.
And then they get started in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, and the difficulty of the work begins to be realized just as the Hebrews begin to walk on their way to the Promised Land. And they realize that, you know, freedom is really great, but, man, I’m hungry. And they start complaining about the trip to the Promised Land.
And we read the story of the Hebrews, and we all judge them and think, oh my goodness, they’re so ridiculous. How can you be that stupid to think back to your slavery and say, oh man, remember how good that garlic was, but we do the same thing. We forget what the world was like. We forget what the problems were, because the right way of life has its own difficulties.
When we get our goals set rightly, we don’t move from difficulty to ease. We don’t move from poverty to prosperity. We move to difficulty for a different purpose, for a higher end. The difficulty remains, but the end changes. If we’re thinking rightly, that should inspire us, but when we think wrongly, that difficulty becomes unbearable, because we may have difficulty in the world when we’re just pursuing worldly things, but at least we’ve got a nice vacation. The food tastes good, the restaurant is great, the car is beautiful. We’re making lots of money. Our pleasures are being fulfilled, so we may bear with the difficulties of worldly life, but our flesh is comforted, the pride of our life is gratified, and so on.
And so we’re willing to deal with the problems of a worldly life because it’s pleasing to the flesh, whereas when we pursue a spiritual life, we’re willing to pursue higher ends, to escape the difficulties of worldly life and to gain honor from people who congratulate us for choosing the higher ends, but when the difficulties come and we realize that we have to live a self-denying life, and we don’t get to indulge, we don’t get to go splurge on a new car to take away the pain or to distract us from the stress. We can’t just run away on a multi-thousand-dollar vacation to just try to run away from the problems, but we’ve got to live a disciplined life.
The difficulty of the spiritual life becomes unbearable when we’re not thinking spiritually, and so we’re attracted back by the pleasures of the world. And we say, yeah, you know what? There were difficulties back there, but it wasn’t so bad. It’s worth it for the pleasures.
There’s a really powerful image that I remember reading in Augustine’s Confessions. St. Augustine, I mean, he’s one of history’s greatest rhetoricians, so we should expect to find powerful illustrations in his writing. But at the time of his conversion, he was really struggling, because he understood what conversion meant. He understood what this change would mean, and he was in his 30s and yet unbaptized, and he understood what baptism signified, that it signified death to that old life and rebirth for the sake of a new life. He understood exactly what that meant, and he hesitated to go forth with baptism because he didn’t know if he was ready to change his life.
In fact, there was one passage where he says something, this is paraphrasing. He says, I want to make this change, but not yet, not today. And he hesitated because the pleasures of life were still enchanting him, as it were. And then there’s a scene where he—I don’t know if it was a dream or just an illustration that he uses—but he said the world was speaking to him like a seductive mistress, and she was laughing at him and mocking him as he considered conversion and baptism, and she was laughing at him, saying, Do you really think that you can live without me? Do you really think that you’re going to stay away from me? Do you really think that that life is going to satisfy you, sort of laughing, confident in her seductive power, mocking him and telling him there’s no way you’re going to leave me.
And again, this was this beautiful, seductive woman who represents the world with all of its attractions, all of its baubles and bric-a-brac. And I think the reality is that as Christians, we’re constantly struggling with this. We’re constantly wrestling with this back and forth, and there are days when we’re thinking rightly and we’re making good decisions, and then the next day, it’s like we’re different people, and we can’t even remember why we made these decisions in the first place. We act as if we forget about the experiences and the frustrations that led us to seek changes, and it’s like two different people living day by day.
So I realize how important this is, and I realize that so many people, so many Christians, are stuck in modern society. They’re stuck in modern careers. They’re stuck in modern education, stuck in modern schools. They know that something’s wrong. They just feel it. They can just—it’s like when we hear bad music, and we just know that there’s something ugly about the music we can’t explain in scientific or theoretical terms exactly what it is, but we just know it’s bad.
And there are many people, many Christians, in worldly lives, in modern schools, in modern careers, and they just feel like they’re going in the wrong direction. C.S. Lewis said walking down the wrong road, like we’ve made a wrong turn somewhere, and we know that we’re lost. We know that we can’t keep going in this same direction, but we need to figure out where in the world did we get off track, and we need to get back to that place and correct the error that we made and get back on the right road.
And C.S. Lewis explained that sometimes in order to make progress, you have to go backwards. You have to back up. And I think that that’s what we need to do in Catholic culture. We know that we’re stuck in a bad place. We know we’re not on the right path. We’re stuck in what St. Augustine called the river of human custom. We’re just like stuck in the current, going downstream, and we know we shouldn’t be going in this direction, but we don’t know how to fix it.
And I think the Church gives us clear direction how to fix it, and it has to do with what’s called the hierarchy of ends. And this is something that’s not a religious idea. This is not something we believe by faith. This is something that Aristotle explained 350 years before Christ, before the Church was even founded. This is something that we can grasp by reason alone, by our own conscience.
What Aristotle says is that there are three different kinds of people, generally speaking. Are people who live for pleasure. They consider the avoidance of pain and the enjoyment of pleasure as the definition of happiness as the end of their life. Seeing people enjoy pleasure to them is satisfaction, or enjoying pleasure themselves is satisfaction. Watching a mother, for example, urge her kids on to eat more, making them cakes and cookies, the most delicious recipes she can come up with. And watching her kids stuff themselves full, watching her husband stuff himself full, brings her pleasure, because the idea is that the enjoyment of pleasure is happiness.
And she calls her family happy because she sees them all gratifying their pleasures, and she does the same herself. Men will do the same thing. Men will go and work and progress in their careers, make more money, gain more honorable titles, bring that money home and indulge in all kinds of pleasure, and allow their families to indulge in that pleasure as well. And they’ll say, ah, is this not the good life? Is this not the satisfaction of our purpose? They consider pleasure to be the end.
But Aristotle says these people, even though it may be adorned with all kinds of appearances of professionalism and of civility, it’s really just another form of the same life that cattle live, that dogs and cats live, whose whole purpose in life is to avoid pain, to survive and to enjoy pleasure. That’s why the sheep recognize their shepherd’s voice, because he’s the one who feeds them. Our cat sleeps at my wife’s feet because my wife is the one who gives her her food, not because she has any sense of loyalty or any higher understanding. It’s just because my wife is the feeder, and many human beings, Aristotle says most human beings live for nothing more than pleasure.
We can make that pleasure look more impressive than some sweet feed for the cows, but it’s really nothing different. It’s just a life dedicated to pleasure. We see the whole obsession with medicine and healthcare retirement. It’s always the avoidance of pain and the enjoyment of pleasure that’s how most people live.
The second kind of person Aristotle says are those who live for honor. These are people who recognize that sometimes it’s good to suffer pain, sometimes it’s good to deny ourselves bodily pleasures. We can think of military heroes, men who were willing to suffer pain, endure difficulties for the sake of their countrymen, for the sake of their family and friends and so on. St. Paul says sometimes a man might be willing to die for a righteous man or for people he loves.
And we see this in military life. We see this among military heroes. We honor this. We give awards and honors. President Trump just honored a pilot who was shot in the legs and almost died, who risked his life to fulfill a mission for the sake of his own country. We honor men for accepting pain, even death. We say it’s the ultimate sacrifice, and we give out honors, and some men are willing to endure pain for such honors.
They’re willing to put in extra hours of study to be added to the Dean’s list or make the honor roll or gain admission to an honor society. They’re willing to work harder in order to be promoted to a higher position, not even because they’re concerned with the money, but because they’re eager for the title of that higher position. Mothers may be willing to sacrifice and go through the pains of pregnancy and childbearing, not because they really are concerned about bearing children, but they just want the honor in society of being mothers.
And so some people, Aristotle says, do not always seek to avoid pain and do not always seek to enjoy pleasure, because they value honor. They value status, and they know that no pain, no gain is the way to that status, to that honor. But the third—well, I should say Aristotle says that’s not, however, the best life, because honor depends on those who give it, and men don’t necessarily give honor where it’s due. They don’t necessarily give honor to those who deserve it. Sometimes they even give honors to those who don’t deserve them for corrupt reasons.
So Aristotle warned that a life devoted to honor is not a wise life. But what Aristotle did teach was that the third group of people, a very small group, a very rare number of people, live for the sake of wisdom. They live a contemplative life. They live for the enjoyment of wisdom and virtue itself. They don’t study to win awards. They don’t study to make more money. They don’t study to get better jobs. They study because they want to learn. They study for the sake of knowledge and wisdom itself.
They don’t work for the sake of getting more money so they can purchase more pleasure. They don’t sacrifice or work so that they can gain honor from other men. They don’t think about what they will get in return, whether it be rewards, financial rewards, benefits or honors. They work for the sake of a higher end. They see their work as a means to a more noble end than the avoidance of pain, the enjoyment of pleasure or the acquisition of honor and status. They pursue higher things, and Aristotle says that very few men do this, but these are the best men, and these are the men who actually enjoy true human happiness.
And Aristotle argues that their life is very stable. They’re not the kind of people who go back and forth. They’re not the kind of people who are blown to and fro by every day’s events. Every time things get difficult, they don’t shipwreck. Every time things go well, they don’t overreact and celebrate. They stay even-keeled because their attention, their eyes, their entire life, is locked in on the target, which is true human happiness, which is found in the enjoyment of wisdom and virtue itself.
And I don’t want to separate wisdom and virtue as if they’re separable. They’re not separable. So if we put wisdom and virtue together and keep them together, fix our eyes on the enjoyment of wisdom and virtue as the whole purpose of our life, and the reason why wisdom and virtue go together, because wisdom has to do with the intellect, with the understanding, and virtue has to do with the will. So it’s like the completion or the perfection of the human person, and just enjoying our own perfection, enjoying being what God intended for us to be as human beings. He intended for us to be wise and good.
And when we can focus on that end and lock our attention on that end, we can enjoy a stable life. We can make good decisions. We can make progress in the pursuit of wisdom and in a virtuous life. And we don’t allow the opinions of other people, the decisions of other people, the headlines or current events. We don’t allow these things to direct our activity. We fix our minds on the chief end, on the best end, and we accept whatever conditions may come for the sake of that end.
And this creates a different hierarchy of ends in our life, and this is where the problem is that I would really like to dig into. A worldly mind, the person who is thinking about pleasure or honor has a certain hierarchy of ends. Whether you’re seeking pleasure or honor, you need wealth and status, or you need to enable others to have wealth and status. But it all comes down to wealth and status.
And so if we set pleasure as the highest end, the end that comes before pleasure is wealth. If we set honor as the highest end, the end that comes before honor will be success, worldly success, or wealth, or status of some kind. And then when we ask the question, how do we become wealthy? How do we gain status? The answer in the world is education.
Education in modern society—in older times, where the economy worked differently, society was ordered differently—almost everything was accomplished through connections. You had to make connections, and the connections would be people in power, and those people would raise you up in society, appoint you to different positions, give you wealth, give you status, and so on. So almost the entire work was trying to impress those in power by flattery, bribery, doing things that pleased them and so on.
American society doesn’t work like that. It does to a degree, of course, but not as it used to. The educational system has been established as a kind of social escalator that we can climb up. And so if you look at the educational system, and you ask, what is the goal of this educational system? What’s the goal of this school? What’s the goal of this curriculum? The answer is, this is a step that helps us to move towards wealth and status. This is a means to wealth and status, so kids are sent to school to try to get good grades so that they can gain admission to a good college.
In order to get admission to a good college, you’ve got to win awards and separate yourself from your peers in high school, so you’re motivated to do good things in order to gain admission to a prestigious school. That’s how you get status. You get to announce to all of your friends that you’re on the honor roll. Your parents get to tell their coworkers and relatives that you’ve made the honor roll, that you’re in the top 10% of your class, that you’re a National Merit Scholar, that you were admitted to an Ivy League school or a great, highly ranked school.
You see how this all becomes a source of status which is desirable, and you’re willing to do the work, you’re willing to go to the practices, you’re willing to do the studies, you’re willing to sacrifice the parties and the social events. You’re willing to sacrifice, you’re willing to endure pain, you’re willing to deny pleasure for the sake of honor, and that’s what motivates most, quote, unquote, good students. But it’s all directed at an inferior end.
And there are other kids who study not because they’re concerned so much with status or honor, but they want pleasure. They want to be able to date beautiful women and enjoy all kinds of physical pleasure. They want to be able to go out and enjoy the finest foods in restaurants. They want to be able to go on vacations. They want to be able to live in a big, comfortable house where every room is designed as a place for comfort and ease.
And when they think about what’s needed to do that, what’s needed to have that, they say, oh, you need a lot of money. You need to be wealthy. And then they ask, well, how can I become wealthy? And they say, oh, well, these careers, these careers earn lots of money. These careers will make you wealthy, and then that becomes the end. And if that requires study and good grades for a time, they’re willing to do it. They’re willing to do the work of studying for four years of high school, they’re willing to do four, five, six, seven, eight years of college, driven by this dream of the future gratification of their desire for pleasure, and so they may not care about whether they go to a prestigious school, because they may find that that really isn’t necessary for making the money, but they’ll make their decisions as they go with money as their object, because their goal is pleasure.
And then we can, of course, find people who have a mixture of these different ends. So it’s sort of a spectrum. So there’s an appearance that people are doing good things, and the same is true for things like eating healthily, exercising. It’s not all done for the sake of virtue. It’s not done for the sake of temperance. Much of it is done for the sake of sexual immorality. Much of it is done for the sake of honor. Much of it is done for the sake of one’s profession, so one looks a certain way because it’s helpful in business and so on.
These lives are focused on inferior ends, ends that are not worthy of human lives, and so when we’re in the world, we can feel all of this pressure. We can feel this pressure to be wealthy. We can feel this pressure to have honor. We feel the pressure of our bodily desires. We feel the pressure of pride. We feel the pressure of the opinions of those around us. We call that peer pressure. And that pressure, the difficulty of that life, can become overwhelming, especially if we are not successful. It can become intolerable, and then we begin to think about hitting the eject button and getting out of the rat race, as it were.
And I’m sorry to mix all of these different images, but there are so many different descriptions of this common experience and problem, and so people start talking about things like getting out of the city, getting out of the corporate world, getting out of the suburb, moving out to the country, living a simple life. And they talk about religion as an escape from this modern world, and they cry out like the Hebrews under the oppression of this Egyptian slavery that they’ve been born into. They talk about wanting to be set free and wanting to go to the Promised Land instead, where they can worship God and enjoy freedom from all these things.
But something really bizarre happens. They often do separate themselves, but what we find is that they’re not actually interested in the freedom that they talked about. They’re not actually interested in escaping from the rat race. They’re just looking for another way. The ends haven’t changed. The inferior ends, the ignoble ends, remain the same, but they think that classical education, or Christian life, the Catholic faith, may be an alternate route, a shortcut to those same ends.
And so we see this in Christian circles. With all the prosperity nonsense, we see people turning to God, not for his own sake, but because they think he might help them to bypass the difficulties of that worldly life. They think that God might be able to transport them to wealth and status without that worldly competition, and they literally pray to that end. Their prayers are only about the avoidance of pain, the enjoyment of pleasure, the acquisition of status and so on.
We see this all the time. When people ask us to pray for them, what’s the object of their prayer requests? It’s almost always carnal. The object of their prayer requests is almost always, oh, pray for my aunt Meg, she’s going in for surgery. Pray that her surgery is successful. To what end? That she can be free from pain and enjoy pleasure. Pray for my son. He’s got a big exam this week. Pray that he does well on his exams. For what end? Oh, that he makes the Dean’s list and gets admitted to the graduate school he wants to go to.
We’re just trying to use an alternate route in pursuit of the same ends. And many people come to the Classical Liberal Arts Academy for this purpose. They think that classical education will help them to be more successful in applying for a prestigious university pursuing a wealthy career. They say, oh, you know, we need an advantage. We need an advantage in the admission process. We’d like to stand out when we apply to Princeton or MIT or Cal Tech or Stanford. We’d like to be distinguished from the other kids. So we’re thinking maybe if we pursue a classical Catholic education, this will spice up the transcript and make the application more attractive.
They’re coming to a system of education. They’re coming to a culture that serves a completely different end, and they’re seeking to use it in order to accomplish the end that the world is pursuing. And of course, this never ever works. It never works because classical Catholic education is very, very difficult. It’s very difficult, and people who have their desires fixed on worldly ends will never be able to complete the work required for a classical Catholic education. They’ll have no taste for it, they’ll find it to be pointless. They won’t think it’s helpful.
They’ll ask, how is this going to help me fulfill my goal of marrying a supermodel? How is this going to help me fulfill my goal of having a private jet or living in a certain neighborhood, or being able to retire when I’m 40, so I can spend the rest of my life at the country club and traveling the world. And the answer is, you’re right. This is not going to help you with any of those things. I have no idea why you’re enrolled for classical Catholic studies. You might as well just go to the public school.
But this is what I experience in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. If you were to look at the courses being studied, you would find for all the people that are registered and enrolled in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, you’ll find very few studying the seven liberal arts. You’ll find very few studying classical philosophy. You’ll find very few studying scholastic theology. You’ll see that the emails and the assignments that are submitted, the questions that are submitted, they’re all coming from modern math and science classes, because these people think that classical Catholic education is an alternate route to worldly ends, and they’re going to get neither.
Neither will they be helped towards these worldly ends, nor will they have a classical Catholic education. They will do neither. In the worst case situations, people are enrolled in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy only because it’s a cheaper option that allows them to keep more of their money. And I’m just being honest when I tell you, this is the reality behind the scenes. I’ve often had parents contact me for tutoring, and after the first and second meeting, I can see that this is their intention. Their intention is to use me to help propel their child forward in the race for worldly desires. That’s all that they see tutoring to be useful for. It’ll help the child get ahead in the rat race.
They want to talk to me, a classicist, a lay Dominican who knows Latin and Greek, the classical liberal arts, classical philosophy, scholastic theology. They want to talk to me about algebra and pre-calculus, biology and chemistry, as if that makes any sense. And the reality is that these modern classes are not difficult. These modern classes are not difficult. And the kids who are Catholic kids, they’re not even getting to the point where they’re getting into historically Catholic studies. They’re just satisfying worldly requirements with their eyes fixed on worldly ends, and there should be a completely different set of ends, a completely different hierarchy of ends for Catholic men, women and children.
Notice, I didn’t just say children. Catholic men, women and children should have a totally different set of goals, a totally different hierarchy of ends. And we can see this in the religious orders that have been approved by the Church. Let’s look, for example, at the Benedictine Order. The Benedictine Order and the Rule of Saint Benedict is considered to be the foundation of European civilization, the foundation of medieval or Christian European culture. When we talk about Western civilization, some people talk about Greece and Rome, but that’s really a bunch of baloney. Western civilization is really about Benedictine culture. It’s about Catholic culture rooted in the Rule of Saint Benedict.
And if you think about the motto of the Benedictine rule, it’s work and pray. Or, I should say, pray and work. Ora et Labora, pray and work. That’s the mission of the Benedictine life. And when St. Benedict wrote his rule, he wasn’t saying this is the rule for a life of anyone who wants to be a Benedictine. St. Benedict was saying, this is the rule of life for one who wants to live like Christ and be a Christian. This is what it means to live the Christian life in the world. We live to pray and to work, to pray and to work, and when we look further at this life that was established by St. Benedict, and we ask, okay, so what is the ordering principle? What is the organizing principle and focus of this life? The answer is prayer.
Prayer is the ordering focus of this life. And when we talk about prayer in a Catholic context, we’re not talking about wacky individual private prayers of modern Protestants and evangelicals, the kind of stuff we see in the White House, just embarrassing, cringeworthy religion. We’re talking about public prayer. And when we talk about public prayer, we’re talking about liturgy. So we’re talking about the Liturgy of the Mass, the public worship of God, and we’re talking about the Divine Office, the Liturgy of the Hours. This was the ordering principle of the Christian life. This was the ultimate end.
In fact, the old catechism teaches, what must we do to save our souls? In order to save our souls, we must worship God. To save our souls, we must worship God. If the ultimate end of the Christian life is to save our souls, the means to that end is to worship God. And so when we look at the Rule of Saint Benedict, we see a rule of life where the chief end is to worship God. The schedule is set by the hours of prayer. Worship orders the life. Worship orders the day. Work is scheduled around prayer.
And think of how backwards that is compared to modern Christian living. For most people, they’ll say, well, I can’t pray because I’m busy working, or I can’t pray because I’ve got school, I can’t pray because I’ve got football practice, I can’t go to Mass because I’ve been scheduled to work on Sunday. In the worldly life, work is given precedent and the life is ordered around work. The Benedictine rule does exactly the opposite. It says, no, that’s disordered. Life cannot be ordered around work. Life is ordered around worship. Life is ordered around prayer, and we work so that we may worship.
We work so that we may worship. We work because work provides us with stability of life. It allows us to have our food and clothing. It allows us to have a place to live to be protected from the elements. It allows a family a place to live where a pregnant woman can be safe. Young children can be protected. We work for the sake of stability, and the end of that stability is worship. So ultimately, worship serves as the end of our work, and what determines whether our work is successful, whether our work is sufficient, is whether it provides the stability of life that’s necessary for worship, and if we are worshiping according to the teaching of the Church, then we’re fulfilling our end, and that is a successful life.
The purpose of work is to establish the stability of life that allows us to worship, and if we’re worshiping according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, not according to our own design, if we’re worshiping according to the rules, as it were, then we’re fulfilling the end of our life and accomplishing the salvation of our souls. Now, it gets a little more complicated, of course, because what the Catechism teaches is not simply that we need to worship God, but in order to save our souls, we must worship God by faith, hope and charity. By faith, hope and charity. So we’ve got to live a life that’s charitable. So it’s not a selfish pursuit. It’s not to provide for ourselves, and then stop and say, I’ve got everything I need, so now I can worship.
This is especially true in a family where a father is responsible to provide, not only so that he can worship, but also so that his wife and children can worship. And he may also need to provide for others that they may be able to worship. If there’s someone who’s unable to work, a righteous man may desire to help provide for that person so that he may have the stability of life that allows him to worship. And by the way, it’s an obligation of those who receive alms to pray for those who show them mercy and give them alms. And so you can see how that becomes a part of worship, both the giving of the alms and the thankful receiving of the alms. That’s how Christian society is supposed to work.
We’re also responsible to make the means of worship available by supporting the Church materially, but you can see that work has its true end. And it’s also important to note that work has its true limitations. Work has its proper limitations. Work is for the sake of worship. It’s not an end in itself. If you look at work as an end in itself, there’s no limit. How much money is enough? How much money is enough?
When I was teaching as a Christian school teacher, my first jobs teaching, I was making $3,000 a month, and my wife and I, with a few young children, lived comfortably. Our life was focused on worship, and we had sufficient. We had a stable life. We had plenty of money to provide for our needs, provide a place to live and enable us to focus on worship. So if that life can be lived at $3,000 a month, let’s say more children come. Those children grow up, their needs increase. More income is needed. We can see how there is a challenge to earn more, but again, there is still a limit and an end. Work is not just this wide open race to get as much as possible, and so work can become disordered. If work takes you away from worship, it is defeating the whole point of work.
So again, to start with, we can look at the Benedictine life and see that that was the foundation, that was the organizing principle of Christian culture. And when modern culture criticizes medieval culture, we say, oh, look at them. Yet peasants like working with hand tools. You had monarchs ruling over kingdoms. There was no democracy. There was no social mobility. Different genders were limited in what they could do. Now, everything’s wide open. There’s no more restrictions, there’s no fence lines, there’s no limits, and that’s boasted about as if it’s good, where I would argue that all of this freedom that you’re boasting about, it doesn’t lead us to the chief end, which is worship.
And the principal concern of that medieval culture, or I could say the boast of medieval culture, was that it was all ordered toward worship. So, yes, they may not have had all of the medicinal knowledge that we have. But what was different was that they were prepared to die well, and we’re not. So we’ve got to consider which end is actually more noble, and I would argue that their life was ordered to a superior end.
Now we can move on from the Benedictine life. Go 600 years further into history, and we have the rise of the Dominican Order, of which I’m a member. The Dominican Order has a different motto. It’s not pray and work. The Dominican motto is to contemplate and share the fruits of contemplation. To contemplate and share the fruits of contemplation, and to share the fruits of contemplation means to preach and to teach, to help others worship. And so you see, this is an expression of that charity, which is a part of worshiping God.
And as we go through our Dominican formation, this is exactly what we’re taught. We’re taught that the Dominican life begins with a focus on the first of the two great commandments, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, to devote ourselves to contemplation, which means to study divine revelation and to love God, to know and to love God. As we grow in our knowledge and love of God, and look around at our neighbors, we see that our neighbors don’t know and don’t love God, and therefore our apostolic work as Dominicans is to share the fruits of our contemplation, to share what we’ve learned, to share what we know about God with others that they may know and love God.
So the end of the Dominican life is the same: to save our souls by worshiping God through faith, hope and charity. And we see the end of this life is preaching, making God known so that others may know and love Him and may worship Him and may be saved. So we see this hierarchy of ends develop. We do not see that education is for the sake of work, and that work is for the sake of wealth, and that wealth is for the sake of pleasure, or that work is for the sake of status, and that status is for the sake of honor. That’s not the hierarchy of ends in the Christian life. In fact, it’s almost the opposite in the Christian life. It works the other way around.
Work is for the sake of worship. Work is for the sake of worship, and then study is for the sake of worship, and worship requires charity, and so our work and our study are for the sake of sharing so that others may worship, because that’s the end. And so if we’re not worshiping, we’re failures. We’re failures as human beings. We’re human beings who do not fulfill the end for which we were created.
And that’s why Jesus asked the question, what does it profit a man, a creature made in the image and likeness of God, composed of body and soul? What does it profit for a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul, which is more valuable than the whole world? And you see this question, which seems so simple, but it condemns all of our lives. What are we going to gain by having more money, more land, a bigger company, more play? What is that going to profit us? We’re going to die and be immediately stripped of everything. What is it going to profit us to succeed in the rat race, to gain all of this worldly pleasure and honor and to forfeit eternal life? Because to save our souls, we have to worship God, and we’re not doing that.
So what Christians need to think about, what Christians need to commit to, is this proper hierarchy of ends. We work so that we may worship, we study so that we may worship, we work so that we may preach. We work to provide an education for our children, so that they may study, so that they may worship. And there’s no distinction here. There’s no problem here, because a person who is wise with respect to the knowledge of God, who is virtuous, he’s never going to have a problem earning by work what he needs to fulfill his end. That’s never the problem.
If I were to ask, what do I actually need to earn to fulfill my end, the number would be very low. It would be very easy to obtain. That’s never the problem. There’s almost no one who struggles to obtain what’s needed through work to fulfill our end, to worship God. All of the stress, and the New Testament warns about this. It warns that the love of money is the root of all evil. I think it’s St. James who warns that those who desire to be rich bring upon themselves many sorrows.
Even with respect to prayer, I’m not sure who taught this. It’s in the New Testament, but we read that you ask in prayer, it sounds like something that James would say, you ask in prayer for things, but you do not receive them because you ask wrongly. You ask that you may spend it on your lusts. You’re not even praying. You’re not even praying. You’re asking God to gratify your lusts and calling that prayer. Jesus says God loves to give good gifts to his children, but he clarifies that in another place and says, God loves to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him. That’s what we should be praying for.
We should be praying for the Holy Spirit. We should be studying to learn the Christian faith. We should be studying to defeat all arguments against the Christian faith. We should be working to establish a stability of life that allows us to worship. That should be the hierarchy of ends in the Christian life, and if we were to establish that hierarchy of ends and fix our eyes on that target, namely worshiping God for the salvation of our souls, and again, that’s not a selfish endeavor. It’s not worship God, so that I, myself may be saved. We’re also called to preach the gospel, to make disciples and help them to worship God, that we all may be saved, because this is God’s will, that all men may be saved. That’s the end of our life.
So the goal of our work should be to further that end. The goal of our education and study should be to further that end. If you’re studying pre-calculus and you don’t even know the gospel, your life is upside down. If your concern is teaching your children pre-calculus or chemistry, and your children can’t explain what the gospel is, your children don’t know moral philosophy, you’ve got everything upside down. You’re lost. You’re lost, and it doesn’t matter if you do it in the name of Christianity. It doesn’t matter if you have a Christian pre-calculus book that doesn’t make any sense. If your whole educational plan is aimed at ends that are no part of a Christian life, students will often say things to me like, well, I want to help the sick, and in order to help the sick, I’m going to need to go to medical school.
And I say that’s not true. You don’t need to be a licensed physician to help the sick. Was Mother Teresa a licensed physician? Stop using works of mercy as excuses to pursue high-paying, high-status professions. Stop deceiving yourself. You’re not fooling anyone. You don’t need to be an MD to help the sick. You don’t need to be a licensed engineer to help provide housing to widows and orphans and the crippled. You don’t need to become a famous architect who studies at an Ivy League school to do the works of mercy. All of this fake excuse-making to try to cover up worldly ambitions doesn’t fool anybody. You don’t need to go to Harvard because you want to preach the gospel.
Our studies should aim at worship, because if we worship, we’ll fulfill the end of our life. Our studies should end at preaching and teaching. Because if we’re preaching and teaching, if we’re worshiping God through faith, hope and charity, we’re fulfilling our end. And that’s what it means. That’s what it means to be successful. To be successful means to fulfill your end. And to fulfill your end as a human being, you need to worship God by faith, hope and charity. That’s the point of the Rule of Saint Benedict. That’s the point of the Rule of the Dominican Order: to be perfect, to be complete, to fulfill our end. That’s what it means to be successful.
So if, as a parent, you’re concerned about your children’s education, my first piece of advice is, focus on your education. Stop talking about your children, because I can guarantee that you don’t know what you can and should know. As a Christian, you should commit yourself to studying that you may worship in spirit and in truth according to the teaching of the Church. If you establish a life of devout study, a life of contemplation, of study and prayer, if you cultivate that in your own life, it will be very, very easy to share that with your children. You can simply say to your children, do what Daddy does, do what Mommy does, come follow me, do what I do. Very, very easy.
You don’t have to sit, stare at your computer or page through catalogs, wondering what your children should study. You should be studying it. And if you would do that and stop playing this hypocritical role, it would be very easy for you to understand what your children need to study. And it would be very easy for you to arrange for them to study that. This is the whole purpose of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. The Classical Liberal Arts Academy provides studies, classical Catholic studies for all ages. It’s a lifelong study program, and it’s intended for families to study for the sake of growing in wisdom, which means knowing God for the sake of worship.
We make it very affordable because it’s not a business. It’s actually an apostolate. It’s a Christian apostolate. It’s our Dominican apostolate. You can study with us for free if you want to, but the purpose of it is to provide lifelong studies that are actually proper to the Christian life. The program also provides in a reasonable way for the satisfaction of modern school requirements, because they are required legally. We provide for the fulfillment of our legal obligations by modern K-12 studies, so you can both provide for lifelong Christian contemplative studies in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, and you can also provide for your children’s compulsory education requirements by studying with us in the Academy.
If in God’s will, a child is called or has the opportunity to go to this or that university, the Classical Liberal Arts Academy provides everything necessary for that. There is no need to attend an expensive private school or do something else. The Classical Liberal Arts Academy is accredited. So you don’t even need to come away from accredited education to enjoy a true contemplative study program, and it’s for the whole family. So understand that this is the purpose of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy: to serve Catholic families or individuals who are studying for the sake of their actual end as human beings. That’s what you should come to the Classical Liberal Arts Academy for. That’s the only end that we’re going to give any attention to.
So if there is tension, if there is confusion or frustration, at times, I’d like you to ask whether this is the cause of that confusion and frustration. Our purpose is very, very clear, and it’s not going to change ever. We study to worship, and we would love to help you study to worship. I hope that’s helpful.
God bless you.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
https://classicalliberalarts.com
