Mission Moment

Dear Covenant Families, 

I want to share about an evergreen memory, a holy moment from three years ago when a flash of eternity impinged on an ordinary day. It was early in spring and quite chilly with a strong breeze. My son Alex, now 10 years old, was (I think) seven, and his little sister Lucy was four. We were hiking out to the kids’ fishing pond near Ray Roberts Lake. Tall, yellow, dry grass swayed back and forth on either side of us. The grasshoppers hadn’t started hatching yet, or at least weren’t jumping. Two vultures circled in the distant sky over the oak trees on the far bank of the lake. Out past the tall grass and before you got to the trees, there were little marshes and puddles in low spots between the lake and the pond. Bullfrogs croaked from half a mile away. 

“What’s that sound?” Alex asked. “Go find out,” I said – and he and Lucy ran up the path ahead of me. I stopped and let them get way out ahead so their expedition wouldn’t be spoiled by the presence of their lumbering pedantic dad.

Here’s the moment I’ll always remember. I started walking again, and after a few minutes, I caught sight of little four-year-old Lucy. She was squatting next to a pool of water, maybe a foot deep, just watching. She was in shorts and a t-shirt, so she should have been cold. Her brown hair hung over the side of her face as she gazed down, and the mid-morning sun gilded her dangling tresses with a divine glow. I stopped walking. For five minutes or more – or perhaps for all eternity – she squatted there, watching. When she looked up and saw me, she suddenly smiled. “Tadpoles!” she said, and pointed down – then grabbed a stick and started playing with them. 

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton: every flower is a miracle, every morning a demonstration of God’s childlike joy – like the child in the old commercial who watches a sunrise with his dad and whispers, “Do it again!” The trouble with adults is that we have forgotten to see the world as children do, as a place of fantastic and improbable wonders. And unless we become like children again, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. 

There’s a misconception abroad about the habit of attention: that in the context of school, a child must learn to “pay attention” to the teacher, dutifully and obediently writing down all that the teacher says – in perfect silence and humble submission. Of course, attending to the teacher is important; but the merely compliant child may be well on his or her way to the dull predictability of adulthood. This is not the aim of education at Covenant. 

The student child who has truly learned Charlotte Mason’s “habit of attention” will be more interested – by an order of magnitude – in the subject being studied than in the teacher. Attention is due to the teacher as a matter of respect for authority. Attention is due to the world – to bullfrogs and butterflies, hoplites and handbells, asymptotes and assassinations – because the world is full of wonders. The attentive student cannot be bored by history or Latin, by astronomy or molecular biology; the attentive student is forever saying, with a hushed wonder, “Wow – I never knew that.” True attention always leads to wonder, and wonder to imagination. If there are tadpoles in the marsh, there are bullfrogs in the pond – and every bullfrog is worth seeing, listening to, remembering. Their audacious croaks still wake me up some mornings from three years and fifty miles away. 

This year at the Rhetoric School’s first assembly, I warned the students against apathy – against the “too cool for school” attitude that builds a barrier of ironic scorn between teenagers and their parents, their peers, their teachers, and the world. The things we study are endlessly fascinating, I told them: even your least favorite subject is a key that unlocks treasures left by God himself for us to find.

Your peers and teachers are made in the image of God. Even the person who annoys you the most, or who wronged you last year, is a soul of unfathomable depth and eternal worth. Their memories are full, like yours, of joy tinged by pain; their hopes, like yours, are plagued by doubt and fear; in their work, like you, they aim for excellence and beauty – on the field, on the court, in the art studio or the theater or the classroom – and like you, they often fall short. 

Our school, thank God, is composed of a wide variety of students, each with his or her own interests and strengths. Not everyone will be a star athlete or a straight-A student. But Covenant seeks to cultivate the habit of attention in every student. Attention is the tribute due to beauty. It is the seed of memory and the imagination, and the herald of glory. Each day I pray: Lord, let us attend to your glorious works.

Non Nobis,

Christopher D. Schmidt, Ph.D.
Rhetoric School Head