Heightscast

In last week’s episode, we considered how beauty is a special combination of order and surprise. To behold beauty, we learned, is to contemplate the dynamism of a being on the way to its perfection. It is to see the rose emerging from its seed.  This week we talk with assistant headmaster, Tom Royals, about learning to see the beauty—albeit often messy beauty—of our own growing children. To be sure, in this adventure, we may find more surprise than order. Nevertheless, in learning to see our children with loving eyes, we learn to better understand them. And in better understanding them, we are better able to accompany them along their paths, each of which has its own peculiar order. In this episode, Tom encourages us to avoid thinking of our children as projects and instead to learn to contemplate them as free persons. For it is only in becoming contemplatives of our children that they will know themselves to be understood and loved, as they are. This knowledge, more than anything, will become the basis of t