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PAGE 5—October 4,1973
Our Values Move Us to Action
BY DR. THOMAS FRANCOEUR
In this series so far we have considered the self-image from
which we operate, that source of energy that arises from
confidence in ourselves. Personal goals were then considered in
their relation to self-image and the heights of achievement and
being we aim for and reach. We heard Christ assuring us of our
worth and urging us on to the creativity that at times seems to
be the “impossible dream.”
A boy may work hard to save for a motor for his model
plane. A girl is motivated to buy a dress for a dance. Husbands
work for the people and things they treasure, and mothers and
wives for the people they love and give their lives of service to.
C atechesis
And Values
BY FATHER CARL J. PFEIFER, S.J.
I had just finished what I thought was a rather good
presentation on the Mass. My high school students seemed
reasonably interested. One of the major points I was trying to
make was how important the Mass is for Catholics.
When the class was over, the energetic teenagers quickly left.
One remained behind. When we were alone, this high school boy
told me with all seriousness: “Father, the Mass may be that
important to you, but it just doesn’t mean that much to us.
There are too many other things that seem more important than
going to Mass.”
He was not rebelling. He was being honest. In a way he may
even have been expressing a wish that the Mass might mean
more to him. He was open to explore the value of the Mass. But
he admitted that, even though he knew well the Church’s
teachings about the Mass, it just didn’t mean all that much to
him and his friends.
That experience brought home to me a distinction that has
serious implications for the religious educator-parent, teacher
or priest. Some 15 or 20 years ago two of America’s leading
theologians, Gerald Kelley and John Ford, both Jesuit priests,
described two kinds of knowledge.
One kind of knowledge is intellectual, true, accurate, even
scientific: “conceptual” knowledge. I have this kind of
knowledge of religion if I know, for example, the ten
commandments, the names of the seven sacraments, the
meaning of transubstantiation. Certainly, accurate conceptual
knowledge is an important goal of religious education.
The second type of knowledge they called “evaluative
knowledge.” Such knowledge affects my sense of values, my
judgment of what is important to me. I have this kind of
knowledge if my understanding of the Mass leads me to value
the Mass as important enough to go to regularly. I have
evaluative knowledge of the commandments if I try to model
my lifestyle after them because I appreciate what the
commandments single out as important. Ultimately it is this
kind of evaluative knowledge that is the primary concern of
religious education.
Gerald Vann, a great Dominican religious educator, described
this kind of knowledge more than a decade ago. He calls it
“love-knowledge.”
“This knowledge, then, is love-knowledge: not a cold,
academic apprehension of truths but an assimilation, an affinity,
a living and loving union with the truth who is also goodness
and beauty and light and life and love.” This is what the Bible
means by the word “know.”
While those we educate have a right to learn the facts and
truths of their tradition on the level of objective, “conceptual,”
knowledge, they also have a right to a more personal
“evaluative” response to what the Church considers important.
Enabling others to grow in a Christian sense of values is a serious
objective of religious education. It is however a delicate task,
blending respect for the other’s freedom with one’s own desire
to share one’s own values and convictions.
Fortunately today religious educators have the very hopeful
advances in techniques of value clarification (see Sidney Simon,
Values Clarification) to help them do what the Vatican Council
II urges:
“This holy Synod likewise affirms that children and the
young people have a right to be encouraged to weigh moral
values with an upright conscience, and to embrace them by
personal choice, and to know and live God more adequately.”
(Education, 1)
As religious educators in home or school we want our
youngsters to learn not only the concepts of Catholic doctrine,
but to appreciate the values of their Christian heritage. We want
them not only to grasp the meaning of the Mass, but to value it
as important in their lives.
They all know what they are capable of, and set their goals and
find motivation to acquire or accomplish these things they see
as valuable and good. This point occupies our attention here.
It is very natural for man to see value in things, people and
events, but these values are not fixed, neither are they naturally
ordered. If a boy tries to work out his life, study for a
profession, get exercise, eat well, read good material, in that
order, it is not a chance occurrence but the result of insight and
thought and experience. And this kind of ordering comes
neither easily nor quickly. We spend our lives clarifying and
adjusting.
Our nature tells us what is important; it also allows us at
times to take the line of least resistance. Christ always cut to the
core of things and spoke directly with sobering demands: “Sell
all you own, give it to the poor, follow me.” “Be like the good
Samaritan.” “Do not store up treasures in your bams.”
This brings questions to our minds. Do I have to? Is there an
easier way? Do I have to neglect or avoid lesser goods, lesser
values? Is it all life and giving and no fun or relaxation?
This is not what nature dictates nor what Christ suggests. We
really need good cars, comfortable homes, chewing gum and
hair tonic. It’s simply a matter of putting things in their place,
and this not because of laws but because our hearts are happiest
when first things are first.
This is a religious fact in the broadest sense, in the sense of
man’s awareness of a loving Father, his awareness of deep value
of individual lives, of this life’s direction towards tender,
mutually supporting community.
What we see as good-will invariably moves us to action. If this
action is to be authentic to the mind of Christ, it must come
from a vision of the fundamental values of life, its sources and
purposes.
These Christ underlined without ever being a killjoy. He
enjoyed eating with his friends, celebrating with them, helping
them enjoy a full life. He also loved them so much that he
constantly urged them to ponder on values and meanings and
purposes that they might find happiness in life.
A sense of values is a recipe for happiness because it means
not only being focused on the essentials. It also means being
involved in an ongoing pondering and consideration so that like
the pilot we may continually correct our course and avoid the
dangers and losses of distraction and error. This ongoing
pondering may be called many things. It essentially is our total
prayer life.
(NC PHOTO)
“HUSBANDS WORK FOR THE PEOPLE and
things they treasure . . .They all know what they are
capable of, and set their goals and find motivation to
acquire or accomplish these things they see as valuable
and good.” A man holding a baby looks longingly at a
tempting craft on display at a boat show.
[Know Your Faith]
Home of the Dead Sea Scrolls
(NC PHOTO)
“THE SECOND TYPE OF KNOWLEDGE they
called ‘evaluative knowledge.’ . . .1 have this kind of
knowledge if my understanding of the Mass leads me
to value the Mass as important enough to go to
regularly.” A priest elevates the chalice in a striking
drawing by Eric Smith, designed to show the strong
impression of the action.
Care For The Sick
BY FATHER JOSEPH M. CHAMPLIN
I frequently visit the local hopsital around 9 p.m. At that
time my rectory appointments are over, the patients’ visitors
have left and the sick begin to settle down for a night’s rest.
On one of those visitations a troubled elderly woman spoke
of “being a burden” to her family. After weeks of
hospitalization, she happily looked forward to the return home
but still dreaded the prospect of inconveniencing her children.
Always a typical giving mother, it is now her turn to become
a receiver. Always self-reliant, a hard worker, serving others, she
must now adjust to the prospect of being served, not working,
becoming dependent.
In a word, this sick mother and grandmother needs to learn
that one of the highest, most demanding forms of love,
especially for a normally independent individual, is to let
yourself be loved and waited upon.
This can prove difficult in our work and productivity
oriented society which leaves an ill or elderly person like our
parishioner unconsciously feeling valueless.
It is for those who care about her to show, that on the
contrary, she does count, does possess dignity and worth. They
love her for what she is, not for what she has done for them in
the past.
The revised “Rite of Anointing and Pastoral Care of the
Sick,” soon to be introduced throughout the United States,
contains some beautiful guidelines for Christian clergy and laity
which touch upon this matter.
Article 33 of the introduction reads: “It is thus fitting that all
baptized Christians share in this ministry of mutual charity
within the body of Christ: by fighting against disease, by love
shown to the sick, and by celebrating the sacraments of the
sick.”
The next paragraph stresses and details the special
responsibilities a sick person’s family and friends bear on their
shoulders:
“It is their task to strengthen the sick with words of faith and
by praying with them, to commend them to the Lord who
suffered and is glorified, and to urge the sick to unite themselves
willingly with the passion and death of Christ for the good of
God’s people.”
These directions represent the natural outgrowth of St. Paul’s
words (1 Corinthians 12:26): “If one member suffers, all the
members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the
members share its joy.”
This renewed liturgy for the ill, when properly executed,
should give the sick Christian great reassurance. It tells that
anxious individual:
“We love you. We want you healthy again, back with us in
Church for Mass. We are praying right now with and for you,
hoping this will come true. But if that is not be be, know your
sufferings have value. They, like Christ’s, benefit the pilgrim
Church on earth and the suffering persons in purgatory.”
Rubrical directives urge those who prepare liturgies for the
sick to bring out this communal or community aspect of the
sacrament.
Next week we will describe how a small parish in Virginia did
that one Sunday afternoon.
BY STEVE LANDREGAN
In lands where a crusader structure built only 1,000 years ago
is considered new, one built in the last decade would seemingly
have little interest to the student of biblical antiquities. Not so,
the Shrine of the Book.
This striking, contemporary structure is the new city of
Jerusalem was built to house and preserve one of Israel’s
greatest national treasures . . .the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In order to understand the singular importance to modern
Israelis of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the other scrolls enshrined in
this unusual building one must grasp the relationship of these
antiquities of 2,000 years ago to the present State of Israel.
Shulamith Schwartz Nardi, author of “The Shrine of the
Book and its Scrolls,” sums up this relationship by stating: “For
the people of Israel, they have made audible the voices of long
dead kinsmen-other Jews who lived and worked in the Land of
Israel two millenia ago. loved and studied the Scriptures,
cherished a dream of a perfect society based on a cooperative
mode of living, used the Hebrew language to express the whole
span of human experience, from lyrical sorrow to political and
military concepts.”
The finding of the scrolls closely coincided with the
establishment of the Israeli nation, and the struggle by Jewish
scholars to obtain possession of the scrolls reflected the young
nation’s determination to obtain the documents as part of its
national heritage.
When the pursuit of the Dead Sea Scrolls was successfully
concluded, it became necessary to provide a proper santuary for
them and related antiquities. The architects, Frederick J. Kiesler
and Armand P. Barton, sought to capture the spirit of the
scrolls, their origin and their significance in the design of the
building that was to house them.
The Shrine of the Book is subterranean with only a stark
white dome and a free-standing black basalt wall visible above
the ground. Both have special significance.
Among the scrolls of the Essene community one relates the
story of the battle of light against darkness, good against evil. It
is this struggle that is symbolized by the constrast between the
white of the dome and the black of the wall.
The wall further calls to mind the heavy burden borne by the
Jews for 2,000 years, and the dome recalls the shape of the lids
of the earthen jars in which the scrolls were hidden for a similar
period.
A visitor to the shrine must pass down a long underground
passageway formed by staggered trapezoidal arches constructed
of black basalt. The effect is that of being in a cave similar to
those in which the scrolls were hidden by the Essenes.
Beneath the dome portions of the most important scrolls are
exhibited. In the center is a case that dominates the entire
building. It is fashioned to resemble the handle of a scroll and
was built to house the Isaiah scroll, the best preserved of the
Qumran collection.
Until recently, the Isaiah was displayed in the case which was
built for it. However, in spite of special humidity controls the
document began to show signs of deterioration and has now
been replaced by a photographic copy.
Beneath the Isaiah exhibit are several simulated caves
containing antiquities from the Qumran caves as well as other
caves in the same area.
The Shrine of the Book is as beautiful as it is functional. Its
treasures are not only the treasures of Israel but of the world. It
is a fitting sanctuary for these priceless links with our common
heritage.
(NC PHOTO)
THIS STRIKING, CONTEMPORARY made to resemble the handle of a scroll contains a
STRUCTURE in the new city of Jerusalem was built photographic replica of the Scroll of Isaiah in
to house and preserve one of Israel’s greatest national Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Book,
treasuress . . .the Dead Sea Scrolls.” A display case