1. The year began with an introduction to the namesake of the course, faith. After learning Socrates’ key idea that “The unexamined life is not worth living,” the class faced questions such as, “What is faith?” and, “What is the difference between fact, opinion, and belief?” I know that this year will focus on learning the answers to these questions as well as others, and also to distinguish between reacting and reflecting, thinking and reasoning, and between reason and emotion. I now know to strive to be a boat with a rudder and steersman as opposed to a boat without a ridder or steersman that goes wherever the waves take it, and take control of my life as a purposeful person. My essay on whether Holden Caulfield was a person of faith taught me that there are no simple answers in anything. The class discussion on Gates of Fire further prooved the point of complex answers. After learning about matanoia, a change of mind and heart away from selfishness, ignorance and sin and towards truth, love, and grace, I learned about the need of something bigger than myself to have to hold on to for my personal happiness. I need to have faith in something if I want to be happy in life. As examples of this, we learned about Deion Sanders, Eric Clapton, and John Horman, all of whom turned their lives around after learning that what they were holding onto was an illusion of reality.
2. Three most important examples of what I learned in this unit:
a. To live happily, a man needs a polis, a city, a group of people, something in which to have faith. Bruxius told Xeones this same thing in Gates of Fire. Similarly, Holden has nothing onto which to hold, and is thus unhappy, our class determined. We as Catholics may find that something in our God and our Faith.
b. The story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. No one can see all sides of most ideas and topics. Thus, no one has the ritght to argue about their idea of a topic, because more than one idea may be right, or rather just different sides of the same “elephant.”
c. The story of Icarus and Daedalus. Icaraus flew too clost to sun and fell to the sea and died, all because he was trying to have fun and disregarding the voice of reason from his father. We too hava a tendancy to seek fun over doing what is right and can often hurt ourselves if we aren't careful.
3. Picture reminding me of key lessons:
5. To make myself a better, more faithful person from this study, I must always realize that I can never see the fullness of a matter and never know the truth, but I must strive constantly to find what is true, what is real, and the fullness of all matters. I cannot know these things, I can, however, come closer to them. I can come further out of the cave, still knowing I am in the cave. In order to do this, I must treat all people fairly and strive to remove prejudices from my life, and I must constantly reflect and search my life for what is real.
I have to realize my unfair biases towards or against the people and institutions around me, and seek to remove those biases. I cannot see the truth or know reality if the colored lenses through which I see the world are too dark to see through clearly.
I have to constantly examine myself to determine whether I am removing these prejudices.
Similarly, I must reflect and pray upon my life to come closer to the truth and reality. Without examination, I will never see beyond the shadows of reality for without examination I will find myself happy with all I see, even though it is a mere shadow of reality. I am like the prisoners in Plato's Allegory of the Cave who are chained down and only see shadows on the wall in front of them of what is going on behind them. I must work hard to free myself from this captivity and see reality, as deiiferent and possibly painful as it may be at first. For the truth, and reality, will be so much better and more fulfilling than any shadows I have ever seen, and even coming closer to reality and the truth will leave me more fulfilled than I would be looking at shades of the truth.
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