Friendship, as C.S. Lewis explains in his wonderful book The Four Loves, has the particular character that friends are involved in a shared project and their interest is focused on the project, not so much on themselves. Even the love between parents and children has this outward focus – the child wants to be like his father, and the father wants his child to achieve some things: growth, curiosity, and specific competence. Friends and family have a direction that is beyond and outside their mutual relationship; it is about the world and how the world works and how we live in it.

With eros, by which I do not mean sexuality (Lewis called this subset of Eros, Venus) the focus is between the lovers. They are, as Lewis puts it, looking at each other, not at the world. We can say more: there may be, between such lovers, a time or a phase when they are friends, discussing mutual projects and long thoughts; then there is a time when all the other projects fall aside for the “making of love” – the mutual gaze. It’s not so much that the projects are completely dropped, though they might be. But it is more that they are, for the moment, irrelevant, forgotten. It’s just lover and beloved, face to face.

Mothers and babies also have this kind of mutuality and face-to-face relationship. The nursing mother’s milk lets down when her baby cries and this sometimes happens even when the baby is far away, maybe at home or at a friend’s house while she is shopping. The body link is quite surprising.

So the love I call eros has a mutuality, which is quite different from outward-gazing friendship; those who love in this way also share even their physical consciousness. Men experience their wives’ labor. Mothers experience their babies’ earaches; that’s how they know the problem is an earache.

And St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, and Padre Pio experience the stigmata. They share the sufferings of the Body of Christ – of the whole Christ whom they love so face-to-face that they share his sufferings even in the body.

So that’s the first two loves: one is a shared gaze outwards; the other is a mutual gaze into each other.

Before going on, I want to reflect, in relation to this second love, that our bodies are our subconscious. We think of our bodies as quite outward and our subconscious as quite hidden, but plenty of health-care professionals recognize to varying degrees that the body bears the weight of the inmost self, right out to the fingertips and beyond. For example, anyone involved with kinesiology is aware of the way that the body carries the mind, the feelings, and whole realms of unconscious relationship with the world and with other people, so that when we touch another person, we certainly make a subconscious contact as well as a conscious one. Bringing consciousness to that unconscious contact sometimes allows us to bring healing to others.

And that brings us to the third love, agape, or charity, the love that reaches out to everyone.

The problem with loving everyone is that it so easily slips into loving no-one. Significantly, the giving of funds to the needy is sometimes called charity, and it’s not necessarily love at all, right? Of course that’s not the charity I’m talking about, but just to point out that “loving everyone” is not a simple matter.

What other love can there be? Isn’t it all just mixtures and permutations of the gaze outwards and the gaze inwards? Doesn’t that cover the ground?

There is one more possibility. It is possible that the true fulfillment of the all-embracing love of agape is the love of Jesus Christ in his Body, which is both an individual body and also the Church; and the Church in turn is a universal that reaches out to all who seek God in any honest way. I don’t want to be sloppy here; I am thinking of Giussani’s book The Religious Sense and I am thinking of John Paul II’s book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. The Body of Christ is the Church, every member, including a membership extends beyond those who know baptism to those who have not even heard the name of Jesus but seek to do God’s will in their deepest knowing of it. This knowledge is always a revelation, and that revelation is related to the specific revelation of Jesus. Enough for now; this is a blog, not a book.

Think of Padre Pio, who prayed for people all over the world because his first love was Jesus, and indeed, traveled all over the world to be with those Jesus chose to visit in his person. Thus his face-to-face love for Jesus opened into his love for others. Or think of St. Francis, whose love for the birds, the wolf, the sultan, and St. Clare was all overflowing with his love for Jesus.

Agape, then, is love for everyone, the ultimate reach of friendship, through love for Jesus in his Body.

And that is why he gives us his Body in the sacrament of the Eucharist and why viewing this sacrament as a symbol is not enough. There is no face-to-face with a symbol; the powerful avenue to loving everyone without slipping into loving no-one is to love Jesus Christ, in his Body.

I noticed this name because of its dates. We were singing the Salve Regina, and I noticed that the author was from the Middle Ages, a period I have been teaching this semester. Besides, his name was Herman Contractus, a name I recognized from my sister’s book, 1000 Years of Catholic Scientists. So I decided it was time to learn more about him.

Meantime also, a little girl with Apert’s syndrome, and therefore profound needs of many kinds, was born into our family. Herman Contractus is about that too. Here’s the story:

Herman of Reichenau, also called Herman Contractus, was born to a noble family in Althausen, in 1013, just ten years after the mathematician-Pope Sylvester died. Herman was profoundly disabled, with a cleft palate, spina bifida, and cerebral palsy or something like that. (It’s hard to know exactly what was wrong at this distance in time.) Anyway, he was very badly formed (Contractus means twisted) but also a very determined little child, and his family provided for him as best they could until he was seven. Then they entrusted him to the local Benedictine monastery in Reichenau. Noble families often entrusted their sons to monasteries for education, but in this case, it meant the added responsibility for all his physical care. The abbot was willing and was a gifted teacher.

Herman throve in the monastery. He learned Latin, Greek, and Arabic. He learned math and wrote about multiplication and division – using Roman numerals, mind you. He invented a math game.

He learned astronomy, and wrote about the astrolabe. (Who knows? Maybe he read Pope Sylvester’s work on this topic!) He invented a portable sundial called the Shepherd’s sundial. He suggested dividing the hour into minutes – a simple enough idea, but when all you have is a sundial, it is not so easy, and only a mathematician would think of it.

He learned music and wrote poetry and songs. He seems to have written the Salve Regina which is sung every evening in monasteries all over the world, and he wrote the Alma Redemptoris Mater and other hymns as well.

When he had read as much as he could, he decided to write a history of the world, so he did that.

Then he wrote some theological reflections for the local nuns and a witty little essay on the 8 principal vices.

And he was himself a teacher. He did not travel of course, but people came to the monastery on the Island of Reichanau, because he was really a good teacher with a sweet spirit, and that was enough to make a man famous in those days.

For some people, Christmas this year will be challenging because children are born who are not strong in every way that we would hope. God has a plan for each one.

The priest would always give some kind of explanation along the lines of Jesus saying what he said to test his apostles or to test the woman, but that kind of account never satisfied me; it wasn’t tender enough for my taste.

Yesterday was different. For the first time, I felt in my heart the sheer joy of this woman, and I recognized a sense of humor that could only have flowed from a complete confidence in Jesus. So I want to tell the story the way I saw it.

Jesus is in the region of Tyre and Sidon, so lots of pagans and non-Jewish folk about, and this woman calls on him to heal her daughter. He’s surrounded by his apostles, and undoubtedly by other believers and unbelievers both, and in the general tumult, he doesn’t answer at first. She’s a Canaanite, not a Jew, and that’s interesting; it means she’s recognizably from outside the Jewish Covenant.

Anyway, her pleading – shouting the gospel says – gets to the apostles. They ask Jesus to heal her because she’s shouting, as in, “Shut her up, Jesus. You can do it, and she’ getting on our nerves.”

That is not actually why Jesus came among us – to rescue us from other people getting on our nerves – and He brushes off the apostles with the suggestion that she doesn’t matter anyway since she’s not Jewish. What he’s really doing is confronting is their own impersonal response to her. Never mind that her daughter has a demon; they want the daughter healed so they can get on with their life without having to cover their ears.

Really?

So this is where it gets interesting. Jesus suggests that he shouldn’t heal her because she’s just a Canaanite and he was sent to the lost children of Israel. Oh, covenant! That’s the point. The apostles are brought up short with the smallness of complaining about the noise, and while they are trying to unrattle themselves, the women, now that she has Jesus’ attention, kneels at his feet and says, “Lord, help me.” So she acknowledges his lordship, and she is not just shouting to a powerful stranger who’s happened into town. What else does it mean to belong to the original Covenant other than to be prepared for the coming of Jesus? What else does it mean to enter the New Covenant than to acknowledge him as Lord?

But Jesus doesn’t heal the daughter quite yet, because his apostles aren’t on board quite yet. He says, to the Canaanite women but also in front of them, “It’s not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the house-dogs.” Ooooh! That could hurt. But is it any worse, really, than saying, “Jesus, heal her because she’s too noisy for us?”

Even as Jesus is calling her a dog, though, this woman feels his presence as one feels the presence of a rescuer whose strong hand rests upon our shoulder as he prepares to lead us to safety. She knows that all is truly well, and her heart fills with joy. Yes, she is inside his protection and inside the covenant, even though she doesn’t understand either him or the Covenant, so she feels her way into the image of the house dogs, and then says, “Ah yes, but even the house dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table.”

It is a moment of sheer merriment between herself and Jesus. Right as she says it, she sees the truth, that Jesus has called her into intimacy and trust and that he’s saying something to his apostles which perhaps remains just outside her consciousness since it is not for her, but all is truly well.

The apostles are dumbfounded. Women who are desperate to have their children healed are a constant feature of human life; apostles who want their own comfort in the midst of others’ desperation are a recurrent feature also. But a woman who can ride an insult like a surfer laughing on the top of a wave is not so common. In the years to come, the apostles will understand that Jesus truly came for everyone and they will travel to the ends of the world, or at least as far as they can, Thomas to India, for example. For the moment, they are grappling with the nature of Jewish Covenant in relation to one loud, Canaanite women.

It was to the Jewish people that God revealed his nature – the One who Is – and it was their commitment to monotheism that made a place for the New Covenant to play out. They, and nobody else, made a place for the Incarnation, for God to become Man and credibly know his personal Father from within his humanity. Nevertheless, the revelation of God is for everyone, and the Canaanite woman felt it to be hers even while Jesus was suggesting that she was a little thief asking for her place in it.

When all the pieces were in place, then Jesus healed her daughter, saying, “Woman, great is your faith; let it be done as you have asked.” And the daughter was well from that moment.

Not so with us.

The right hemisphere is responsible for seeing the big picture; the left for seeing the small parts that make the big picture. So someone with a left hemisphere deficiency may be unable to read words; someone with a right hemisphere deficiency can read the words ok but doesn’t get what the story said. To those whose brains function normally, it seems incomprehensible that someone could read the words and not get it, but that is what happens. But how are you to get the large picture without going through the small? Sometimes it is just not possible. Other times it is possible to get a large picture, but it remains impossible, in the face of a left-hemispheric deficiency, to lay out your conclusion in detail. You just don’t know how to process the details.

Or someone with a right hemispheric deficiency may be very sensitive to flower smells, but not notice that the cookies are burning because it’s the right brain that processes bad smells, danger signals. You would think that smell is just smell, and if you can smell the roses, you can smell the smoke, but though this is true at the level of the nose, it is not how the brain works. Roses and lavender are details; smoke is a big-picture thing. The right brain processes bad smells; the left brain processes good ones.

Well, but coffee; where does that go? It’s a burnt smell, but aromatic, surely? So maybe that’s why it wakes us up — both sides may be at work. I don’t know. It’s all much more complex than I thought.

Another surprise is the distinction between food allergies and food sensitivities. Allergies are immediate reactions to various foods. Sensitivities can take much longer to develop, can last many days, or even weeks, and consist of things like irritability, fatigue, and bedwetting. Such responses are much harder to distinguish from the general run of life in an imperfect world.

You are thinking that food sensitivity is in the gut, not the brain; what are we talking about? But the maturity of the gut is related to the maturity of the brain, and it can fall behind in ways that leave the person unable to digest food normally. When the brain imbalance is addressed, says Melillo, food sensitivities often disappear.

Brain disconnection means a disconnection with ourselves, with the world around us, and with the people around us. On pages 7-8, Melillo begins his description of these difficulties.

1)    Children with FDS are disconnected from their bodies and do not have an orderly sense of gravity. They do not sense their relationship with space in a normal manner and they have problems with balance, rhythm, and timing. The physical awkwardness that we see comes from a place that is much more significant than a merely physical handicap would be. They do not sense where they are in the world. We feel something of this disconnection when we are dizzy or weightless, or perhaps when we are slightly drunk; they live with it and their clumsiness is an effort to cope with it.

2)    They are disconnected from their senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, pressure, and heat — or from some of their senses, because they are unable to process certain sensory information, or unable to do so quickly. Many are unable to process material from several senses at once and that is one reason why they are so easily distracted; they are easily overloaded. Sometimes these children process one sense and not another – they may be almost exclusively auditory learners, or almost exclusively visual learners. Many have a poor sense of smell and need to be trained because the olfactory processing area in the brain is so close to centers of social, emotional, and attention processing.  A poor sense of smell is also associated with immune and digestive problems. Wow! The sense of smell is not just a decoration! It needs to be “educated” if it’s not working right.

3)    Children with FDS are often emotionally disabled. There are mirror neurons in the brain that cause us to mirror the expressions and body language we see in others; this mirroring is how we recognize their feelings. We mirror what we see in subtle muscle tensions and we recognize how we would I be feeling if we were making that face, slouching that way, etc. But if a child cannot properly feel his own space and his own sensations, he cannot get any information by mirroring others’. As a result, emotional messages are not received, emotional exchange does not go well, and isolation deepens.

Is there really a cure

It’s very strange, but the diagnosis of these problems is oddly archaic. It is based on the child’s (or paretns’ or teachers’) answers to a list of questions first composed in the 50’s and updated twice since then. How the questions are asked and how the child understands are huge variables. No wonder some people think the whole thing is a crock.

Even so, the proportions of the epidemic are immense. Autism used to be a 1 in ten-thousand; now it is 1 in 150.  If you add up all the other forms of learning disability, as many as one child in six is likely to suffer from one of them. That would be an epidemic by any reasonable definition.

But getting back to the question of cure: yes, many of the children who have come to a Brain Balance center have gone on to lead completely normal lives, and if they are tested again, their answers to the questions are different and the diagnosis is normal. We are just coming up with various ways to image and measure the brain structures that underlie the whole problem.

Here are some articles from Melillo’s website, including a short testimonial from a homeschooling mother of seven children. There is also  a speech he made at an autism conference in May of this year. Very interesting.

Basically, the premise of the book is that autism, asperger’s syndrome, dyslexia, and the rest of the related alphabet soup of learning-disabled sufferings have a cause and a cure. The cause is weakness in particular parts of the brain which failed to develop on schedule and were therefore unable to make proper connections with other parts of the brain; consequently their functions are not properly integrated into the total work of the brain.

The cure is to stimulate the particular part of the brain that is behind and give it a chance to catch up. Stimulating the whole brain equally is not necessarily helpful because the problem is in the imbalance.

Well over half of these problems are in the right brain, and boys disproportionately suffer from them because the right brain in boys is larger and it develops more in the early years of life so any failure of development takes hold early on. In girls, it would take a larger failure of right brain development to cause as much damage. But that’s a very quick summary of a very fascinating piece of research.

The great thing is that for fifteen years, Dr. Melillo has worked successfully with children so that they become able to study, learn, and enjoy their playmates in a normal manner. He starts the book with this quoted exchange from a little girl named Becky, aged 12:

My teacher asked if anyone in the class ever heard of autism, so I raised my hand and said, “I have because I used to have autism.”

My teacher said, “That can’t be because nobody used to have autism; you have autism.” Then I stood up and explained to everybody about Brain Balance and how it made my autism go away.

I will spend some time reviewing this material because it is so important. There is so much suffering out there, and so little hope. Furthermore, even if you don’t have autism, you have a right and a left hemisphere in your brain, and it’s interesting to understand them better. I just love it that he explains the way they work together; we need both!! It is very complex, very wonderful.

Melillo has two books. I have read only a few pages of the second, called Reconnected Kids. Apparently, it is a discussion of how to help the renewed child integrate into his family. Sometimes, we are so defined by a suffering or disability that if it is taken away, we get lost, and he found that he had to address that as well.

Wow! This is what my mom used to call a “happy problem,” — success so great that it actually makes a new problem! We could wish for more of those! They are altogether real and no less demanding, however.

Because Melillo is not a Catholic, or at least his work is in a secular setting, the terms in which he addresses the problems of reintegration could occasionally be a little grating to Catholic home educators, but his insights are altogether worthwhile and exciting.

It is a long time since I thought about memory in a philosophical way, about memory as something fundamental and profound, something that underlies our very identity.

Furthermore, memory is related to imagination because of course the things we imagine are made of the things we remember, only placed in new relationships. Imagination, in its turn, is related to hope because hope is the ability to maintain the image of a positive future.

Now, hope directed to holiness is one of the three theological virtues, the fundamental strengths of a relationship with God, so it’s important to develop it. Sometimes we see definitions of hope that are indistinguishable from faith – such as saying that hope means “believing” in God’s promises. Well, it’s by faith that we believe things as ideas, and the ideas of our creed, if truly held, shape our understanding of the world. So far, so good.

The difference with hope is that it involves imagination and memory. For example, our hope of heaven is an image of something lovely – fields of flowers, choirs of angels, a fireside meeting of friends, or simply the embrace of the Beloved. Our faith in heaven is the maintenance of an idea that is always present in our thinking so that we never say death is the end; we never allow the feeling of loss to overwhelm our concept of the power of God. Even reflecting on war, we remember that those who die stand immediately before God; once dead, they do not, themselves, bleed on the battlefield.

But concepts do not alleviate sadness; it is the image of our friends finally free and of ourselves going to meet them that comforts us. That is hope; that gives us courage.

Faith underlies hope because if the idea that our hope may be false becomes strong, the image fades or is carried away in a tide of grief. We must believe that hope is more than imaginary. Faith is clinging to God with our minds; it invites hope, which is clinging to God with our imagination.

Then, since imagination depends on memory, we must be attentive to memory and, to the extent of our power, provide images that support hope. I think of a Cuban prisoner of conscience who tells of lying in his cell and thinking of crashing waves and blazing sunsets. I think of an American in a Viet Cong prison, with the image of a stained glass window from the chapel of his childhood.

These reflections return us to the question of education and motherhood: part of our responsibility for education is a responsibility for the formation of memory and imagination. This means we are called to provide beauty, at least to notice it, so that hope has its proper soil.

But nothing from God is simply inferior; each of our gifts has a perfect place, and memory can be full of sweetness and beauty. Its evocative power is famous and powerful. But this is not going to be about that sweetness, though, or that evocation, or even about how much we forget, but about how memory makes a self possible.

Suppose you had no memory, seriously no memory, and you went to get a glass of water. Halfway to the faucet, you forget why you are going there. People do this all the time in nursing homes. Weird.

But it can be much worse. Suppose you forget what the faucet is for. My mother-in-law had such an incident once after a stroke. She went to the faucet, glass in hand, and then couldn’t remember how to use it.

Still, it could be worse. Suppose you couldn’t remember what a glass was, or what water was, or what you were supposed to do about thirst. Then what?

Everything we do depends on the way that memory stitches life together and gives meaning to the objects around us and to the words we use. Life would drift along meaninglessly if it were not held together by great networks of memory.

Similarly, eternity holds time together and makes it meaningful. The whole of time sits in eternity, which is not just a very, very, very long time. Eternity is not time at all. Eternity takes all the little experiences that are strung along time for us and puts them together as aspects of a meaningful whole. You need eternity to get the most out of time, to see the whole in relation to all its parts.

Like memory, eternity gives us our selves.

a mother provides for the education of her children.

Nobody can absorb the primary responsibility of parents

for the education of their children,

and whatever support the family receives from others

in this venture,

it is the parents themselves

who bring their children into the culture of life

or not. 

The Church teaches that parents are the primary educators of their children. This is deeply set into the dignity of becoming parents. We are not incubators, then babysitters, then chaperones, and then somehow responsible for the character development of our children. It doesn’t work that way.

From the first moment of conception, we are responsible for the formation of the child who lives within and this formation begins with what is in our hearts. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – that Mary was free from even the shadow of original sin and lived her entire life in grace – points to this truth: that the child lives in the universe of his mother and is in some measure constrained by the leanings of her heart. The Lord could, in his humility, be constrained by human flesh, but not by the immediate atmosphere of sin while he was within Mary. This doctrine only makes sense if we recognize that every mother is the universe of her child, and that our interior lives matter for our children, right from the start.

This first season of formation points to the reason why education is the primary responsibility of parents: nobody else has the center as a mother does, and while she needs the support of others, she cannot give up the primacy.

The most important single influence on the love that a mother can give her child is the love and support of her husband. If she can depend on that, then she can give her heart and her strength to their child, and if both spouses live in the presence of God, their mutual support, and thus their relationship with their children, has a transcendent stability, which is their first gift to their children. Education that takes place within the context of such a stability forms a child to use his mind boldly, because this stability is not just ease (a good marriage is not “ease”), but it is clarity, the start of a clear path.

If we allow anybody else to have primacy of education, we are giving up a privilege that inhabits the center of parentage, not just an allied responsibility or a social afterthought. Even a good school must be the satellite of the home, and not the other way, because in school, teachers change from year to year and have many students; it is the parents who choose, support, and supplement the deficiencies of the teacher; they are the ones who have first authority and first responsibility in the context of their first love. It doesn’t work the other way.

This Christmas, I learned my location, in South America, — the sanctuary of Las Lajas, near Ipiales, in Columbia.

A minor basilica of stunning beauty marks the site of a sweet apparition of our Lady to a poor woman who was traveling from her own small town of Potosi to Ipiales and back again, through the mountains and through the spectacular gorge of the Guaitara River. On her back she carried her little deaf-mute daughter and in her heart she carried the old fear of the haunted cave she must pass. Nevertheless, after her climb, she must stop to rest by the famous rock slabs (Las Lajas) not far from the cave, and her little girl jumped down to play.

A bit later, the child came running out of the cave crying, “Mama, there is a beautiful lady in here, with a boy in her arms.”

Maria Mueses de Quinones grabbed her child and hurried home. She told the story to her friends, unbelievable as it was, but on the other hand, little Rosa was talking for the first time in her life, so people wondered what to make of that… And when Rosa disappeared a few days later, Maria hurried to the cave and indeed found her playing with a little boy whose lovely, smiling mother stood nearby.

Eventually (storied differ in their details) the townspeople came to see the cave themselves, and though the miraculous mother and her little boy were not to be seen in the flesh, their image was there on the wall, along with Sts. Francis and Dominic. It is a deeply beautiful image, even with the clumsy addition of two crowns made with more love than skill by a grateful pilgrim of later years: one for the lady, and one for her child.

There is more.

The townspeople built a small chapel, and then, in the early 20^th century, set about replacing it with a breathtakingly lovely neo-gothic church, complete with stained glass windows depicting various other apparitions. It stands on an arched causeway that crosses the gorge, and was designated a minor basilica by Pope Pius XII, probably one of the most light-hearted acts of his difficult papacy.

And the image remains.

But how was it made? With what paint and by whose angelic skill in that old out-of-the way cave — in 1754?

No paint; no painter.

Look at the image again. Except for the sweetly incongruous crowns, the colors are the normal colors of red and golden sandstone and various brown and blue-gray shales; indeed, that may be exactly what they are, yet the image is no surface drawing or mosaic, but is as deep-set into the rock as if it had been formed by the action of the same geological forces that occasionally leave dramatic swirls and pseudo landscapes printed in the sedimentary rocks all over the world. Yet this image is no vague outline filled in with happy imagination; it is as detailed and specific as the unpainted image of our Lady of Guadalupe.

It is truly a word of love there in the rock. The earth is not our mother, but our mother can print her love in the earth for she really is its queen.