A family member posted an interesting meme on Facebook. The quote, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, starts like this: “If you count the tail as a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”
So, I asked my youngest children.
These guys are in the grammatical stage of classical learning, the poll-parrot stage it is sometimes called. This is where children memorize, learning by heart provincial capitals, poetry, math facts, and Catechism questions.
They are being led into the dialectical stage of questioning, arguing, and reasoning, but aren’t quite there yet.
So the question I posed for them is simply mathematical. It sounds identical to the math problems they are forced to work on, day in and day out.
“Five!” they answer in unison, proud of their quick arithmetic skill.
I move on to my oldest, heavy in the rhetorical stage of learning. “Four,” he responds quickly. “Even if we count the tail as a leg, it isn’t actually a leg.”
And all of my homeschooling hopes and dreams are fulfilled in one question from the grave of Abraham Lincoln. At least one of my children can smell and articulate truth, when it comes to counting limbs anyways.
Truth is true, no matter how the question is asked. I would say that all of the battles of our time revolve around the matter of truth. There is a violent, unceasing, spasmatic attack on the word “truth”, and the concept of it. There is nothing much left un-assaulted.
In the 1800s a new idea called modernism came forth. It spread rampantly and has become so commonplace that we don’t even recognize it anymore. It seeps its way into our minds and souls. Modernism forcefully breaks with the past to create its own expression, and philosophies. It claims that truth is changing (a contradiction and lie of Satan), and that it cannot be contained and dictated by one people for all people. You can see it in the art of our times, as Picasso breaks apart the human figure and pastes it back together out of shape and context. “What is a man? Who can define or dictate?”
Our education system celebrates those who break the rules and challenge authority. Children are taught, wrongly, that they can be whatever they choose, in matter and form. Modernism is the mother of the expression, “Celebrate Your Truth.” If it is only your truth then it is no truth at all, just a hallucination, a gratifying but perverted indulgence used by the devil to promote anarchy.
Modernism is the greatest enemy of the Church, and yet it has seeped within it to a degree that many are led into relativism and heresy, without even knowing that it is relativism and heresy.
I remember as a teenager being told by a priest that all religions were essentially the same. I am glad to say I had already been convinced of the truth that all religions are not essentially the same. A quick reading of doctrines should be enough to know that.
I remember being told that it was unrealistic to try and “save myself” for marriage. That even good Catholics couldn’t be expected to do this in our day and age. I wondered how this new truth could contradict the truth my mother had, thank God, instilled in me from a deposit faith, given to her by a universal family of believer: “Sex is meant for marriage.”
I also remember being told that perhaps I should open my mind to the consideration that Christ did not work miracles as a fantastical kind of magic. The real miracle of the fish and loaves, for instance, was that he inspired people to share from the abundance they had hiding up their sleeves. “Wasn’t this even more of a miracle?” I was asked.
Every one of these challenges was set before me with no purpose other than to make me doubt, question, and, in the end, rebel against an “old white-man’s religion that sought to force a morality upon other people.” Thank God for his graces, and for protecting me from these deceptions.
It is no strange thing to hear a Catholic question the meaning of marriage, the purpose of sex, the integrity of the body, the primary dignity of humanity, the rights to life, the scientific definition of gender, the reality of heaven and hell, of sin and virtue. They question these things because their minds have been infiltrated with the heresy of modernism, and they now question the truth of God himself. God’s nature, his love, his justice, his purpose for man, they say, these are all “ideas” from the past that deserve a fresh take.
I’m not sure what the enticement is in these lies. While they are certainly rampant in our day, they are taken from the old seed of heresy, and offer no freedom. The reason I am a Catholic is because it is the only faith that has a line of truth that goes back a promise made to the apostle: “He will lead you in all truth.” (Jn 16:13)
It has a deposit of faith that never contradicts itself (even when those in authority do). The Church respects me enough to never seek to make me comfortable in my sin. It teaches me of God’s perfect justice, his expectation that I work to perfect myself in love of him, and of my neighbour, with no exception.
My sins are always offensive to him . . . and yet! And yet I am taught that he loves me despite them. I am taught that his mercy makes no excuse for my vice, but it offers to pay for them. He seeks to wrap me in his extravagant love and share with me the truth of what it means to be his daughter, and what he was willing to do to make me one. That is the purpose of our faith. And it is the unchanging gift of truth.
