Children always in party
Autumn is synonymous with returning to the classroom, to work, to the tasks that require our effort. In our role as parents we have to achieve the challenge of awakening in our children the true value of everyday life, so that they live it as a party.
September and October are, by far, the most unpleasant months of the calendar for a good part of our family. Only the youngest live this time with emotion for the reunion with their friends and school playmates. For them, life is a game and the passing of months only worries them about the change of the place where their hobbies are celebrated: the house, the beach, the mountain or, as of September, the school.
However, for the rest of our children, September and October are presented as inexorable poopers year after year. These months are the cause of "watering the party" to a life without an alarm clock, without books, without homework and without exams; to a life of comfort that they had been enjoying continuously for almost 90 days.
How can I help my children overcome this trance that involves going back to school and studying after such a long holiday? Is it only that I confirm the resignation before the inevitable? Where do I find words that encourage you to embrace this new time that now begins with joy and enthusiasm?
In the first place, there is a question that I ask my children and myself so that we all answer frankly. What is the party for us? Is it something external to our person or does the party come with us? Are we men who live in a party or who only live at parties?
I mean that in Spain and in the rest of the so-called welfare societies, we find people who only live at parties. The rest of their time, they wander like specters. They are young or adults who sadly drag their dead bodies after long days of work or study; without any other stimulus than discounting the remaining hours until reaching the weekend or the party that was. They are dejected men who long for the party to recover the joy that, supposedly, the work or the study would have taken them during the week.
Is not it a bit tragic that, if this is our fate, most of our life is a "death" life? Because my children have all three months of summer vacation, in addition to Christmas and the occasional local festivity. But I, at least, have only 22 working days to distribute throughout the year. Black panorama appears to them if only during that handful of days they manage to be men and women in celebration.
Perhaps for this reason, many people reject faith today. Simply, because eternal life in these circumstances does not seem desirable to them. To continue living forever - without end - seems more a condemnation than a gift (Benedict XVI, Spes salvi).
Is it not dramatic to consider that our happiness comes from the month in which we find ourselves or if we are at school, at work or on the beach? Of uncontrollable events, external to ourselves?
I do not want a weekend life for my children, I wish them always alive, always awake. In the study and at rest, in October and in August. For that reason, I am eager to discover the deep meaning of study and work. Because if they do not succeed, their entire existence will be reduced to mere sterile and disorganized activism.
Student time is transcendental. And many young people can apply what José María Pemán related beautifully in the verses of "The Impatient God":
You are a vacant stream that, through the deserted rock, is untied and brave. While the river is falling, the garden is drying up!
I know that my children are tempted to study the minimum to achieve the pass, to perform their tasks in a mediocre manner and to listen to the lessons of the teacher anodynely. In conclusion, to unleash its potential in "desert rocks".
In the words of G.K.Chesterton "Mediocrity, possibly, consists in being ahead of greatness and not realizing it". This is our mission as parents: to help them to get rid of that mediocrity and discover the greatness that they have before them and of which they do not realize; show them the magnitude granted by the knowledge and wisdom that study gives.
Saint Teresa of Jesus affirmed that "the Lord walks among the pots." And in the same sense, the monk from Trappist San Rafael Arnáiz explained with humor that, on a rainy day in December, while working in a store of the monastery cleaning lentils, peeling potatoes and turnips, imp implied: "Let there be I left my house to come here with this cold to peel these ugly bugs !! It's really something ridiculous about peeling turnips. " A short time later he answered the imps' question about what he was doing there saying that he was peeling turnips for love of Jesus Christ.
Santa Teresa and Brother Rafael help us to help our children start the new course with vigor. Because the Lord also walks among the books. The cold months of autumn and winter will arrive and there will be times when certain imps overwhelm them in silence suggesting that studying does not make sense and that it is ridiculous to listen to a certain teacher or perform certain tasks. Other imps will confuse you by evoking the summer months and imagining an easy life without effort or study. And they will ask you what they are doing sitting there at your table with their eyes fixed in front of a book.
That's when I invite you to respond firmly to these imps. What am I doing? I am studying for love, for love of Jesus Christ!
