Testimony of a Homeschooling Mother

Learning about the true Church’s teaching on Creation has really changed my life and the lives of my children. I first heard about it more than ten years ago, when I heard from people at our parish that Mr. Hugh Owen was giving a talk or a series of conferences at a nearby host family’s house. Many people I knew were going, and afterwards I heard them talking about how good the presentation was, and how many of them were convinced of the truth of everything he had said. I myself hadn’t been able to go because of some schedule conflict, probably involving young children and naptimes. But I wished I could have gone, and I remember asking some people about it. Someone directed me to a video talk online of a similar presentation by Mr. Owen, in which he explained the difference between the two worldviews of special creation versus the evolutionary worldview of things coming about by death and decay. Everything made complete sense to me when I heard it, and I was completely convinced.

I had no idea that the truth about origins mattered so much because I hadn’t been informed about it before, and I didn’t think it affected our Faith. I had been a Catholic all my life, and I had studied apologetics in high school.  As part of my formation, I had gone through the Fr. John Laux series on Apologetics. I seem to remember that Fr. Laux taught in that course that evolutionary claims could be compatible with the Faith as long as one saw the long ages of time as corresponding to the six days of creation, and as long as one saw the evolutionary process as only forming the body of man, as a “way” that God might have made his body from the “dust” of the earth, but not as part of the formation of his soul, and certainly not as an atheistic alternative to creation that dispensed with the need for God. Because of this, I was convinced that the Catholic Church taught that it was all right to believe in theistic evolution and that it was compatible with the Faith. And so, I didn’t think it was an issue that mattered much.

I had no idea that embracing the traditional doctrine of creation would affect my concept of God. I never believed in evolution, because as a child, I always thought that it was silly. We always used textbooks in school that were written by Protestants who had a strong belief in special creation, and so I never thought that evolution was true in any way. But when I learned later about this supposed “compatibility” of it with our Faith, I just thought it was somehow just more liberal-minded to not argue about the position, as if it doesn’t really matter or affect anything whichever way a person believes, because either way they hold to the Catholic Faith and believe in God. I was always aware that Protestants were fixed on creationism, but I thought that this might reflect their “fundamentalism,” and that Catholics could take a more moderate position. At the time I was mainly concerned with showing that none of the apparently valid claims of evolution supported atheism, because none of them removed the need for God. Once I wrote a paper in high school about Big Bang cosmology, and how the evidence for the Big Bang hypothesis provides no support for atheism, because it still requires God to have caused the initial “explosion.” But, in reality, I was only drawing the line between atheism and an interpretation of these hypotheses that could be understood in a “theistic” way, without actually reconciling them with the authentic, traditional, orthodox Catholic Faith.

When I heard the talk by Mr. Owen, and how he described the way that God had made everything special and beautiful for us in the beginning, and how the world and man were before the Fall, this was something I had never been told before, ever. It was so beautiful. I had no idea that it would change my concept of God so much, but it did. I had a pretty strong prayer life by that time and used to practice mental prayer and made a Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament almost every day. I used to contemplate the attributes of God, and ponder things like “Why is God good?” Or, “If He is All-powerful, why don’t I trust in Him?” And, taking lessons from those attributes, I tried to apply them to my life, appreciating the fact that if I REALLY believed that all those things were true about God, that He is All-knowing, All-wise and All-good, etc., I would probably never get upset about anything anymore, or fear anything happening, or be offended by anything, or doubt that whatever might happen was His doing. I remember I contemplated a lot of things about who God is, and what that means for my life. Also, sometimes I would say the Creed slowly, and stop on a line, and think about that until I could try to understand what it meant. In general, I was building a habit of contemplation, but I had an idea of God that was based on a lot of abstract things. I was trying to know Him, but I felt as if my ideas about Him were just floating in the air a little bit. I was thinking about things I knew to be true, but I was trying to see how to bring them home to me in my life, and feeling a little lost about that. I was trying to believe that God was good, but I could not quite understand HOW exactly He was good.

But the day that I heard that talk, something changed beautifully for me. I received that truth very easily and believed it immediately with no resistance. It was overturning what I had been taught before, but I wasn’t resistant to that. I wasn’t programmed against these doctrines in any way. I just had truly never thought about it or known about it before. And when I heard it, my concept of God changed. Very suddenly. I saw that God had made everything beautiful, and that the plan of redemption by Christ was to restore all of that, and that it was all meant for me. I thought, “Wow, if God did all of that, and made it all so beautiful for us, then He really is good!” I was so touched. I felt very close to God for the first time in a completely new way. I really felt that God loved me. If He would do all that for me, He must really, actually love me. I remember there was a sort of “honeymoon night” for me with God after I heard about that, because I just wanted to think about God and be very, very close to Him that night. Looking at the stars meant something new, thinking that God made them for me. Thinking that everything in the world was a sign of His goodness to me changed my spiritual life.

It also changed my life as a mother. I remember thinking that I just wanted to learn more about this truth, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t have a practical way to implement this knowledge; it was just something I kept in my heart. I continued to do my prayer every day and I felt a newfound relationship with God as my all-loving Creator and Redeemer, and it became part of my contemplation. I used to take my children on little walks in nature, and I would show them pretty little plants and flowers and say to them, “Look at this beautiful thing that God has made!” I felt real joy and innocence together with them, like a child discovering God’s creation anew through their innocent eyes.

I also began to grow in a deeper awareness that not only did God make everything in all creation for us in the beginning, but I also began to realize that He was sustaining everything by His thought in such a way that each flower and each butterfly and each tree I would see, was not only God’s creation for me in a general way, but also specifically for me in that moment. For example, coming to realize that if I saw this little butterfly, or bee, or flower on the path just then, it was only there because it was God’s Will to show it to me, and for it to be right there at that moment, just for me to see. And it might be the only time it ever would ever be seen by anyone. Perhaps by the time someone else would ever happen to be in that place, it would have passed away, or flown away, or maybe they wouldn’t notice it. Perhaps God had made it just for me to appreciate.

And I used to walk by the pine trees and sometimes feel their soft pine needles and think to myself how, if God has made all these things in the world, then it is a sign of the love of the Heavenly Father.  And sometimes I would touch them tenderly, in gratitude for God, because He was showing me this sign of Himself in His creation.  It was like the feeling of pressing a special and spiritual letter to your heart which was sent to you from someone dear, because you know that he wrote it out of love for you, and that he is a beautiful and holy person. I was beginning to understand the ongoing love relationship that God has with us through His creation, constantly revealing His love to us.

When I would take my children on these nature walks to discover the love of the Heavenly Father, I began to understand that the way I was approaching creation was not the way the different education programs like the Montessori method and the Charlotte Mason programs that were popular at the time and which focused a lot on nature walks were teaching children about creation. Those programs do not speak of creation as something that reveals God. I saw many books promoting nature walks, and I noticed they all had the same problem. Nature was being separated from the knowledge of God and the doctrines of the Faith. These people’s nature walks had nothing to do with the Faith. They were always treating nature as if it existed for its own sake.

I began to realize that you can only understand nature if you have the true doctrine of the Catholic Faith to contemplate. When you know the truths of the Faith, then you can point at things in nature and see how they reveal Divine Truths. There are many saints who talked about the two “books” that reveal God: the “book of Scripture” and the “book of nature.” You need those two things, Divine Revelation and God’s Creation, to really understand Him. This is why St. Patrick could take a shamrock and use it to explain the Trinity, because he already knew the true doctrine that goes with nature and interprets it. If he had been told to just take a shamrock and come up with whatever he thought it meant, just guessing from some “inner feeling,” what is the likelihood that he would have seen the shamrock as an icon of the Trinity? It is only because he first knew the truths of the Faith that he could see them reflected in nature. That is why nature by itself cannot lead people to know God, although it can lead them to know that He must exist, and it can dispose them to desire Him. But ultimately people have to be catechized. Those methods of education that separate the study of nature from catechesis are insufficient to lead little souls to God.  All true understanding of Creation is Catholic.

As I continued to educate my children, I was hesitant to give them any teaching materials on natural science, because I could tell that all of them contained errors and included so many false ideas about the origins of man and the universe. I didn’t really know how to teach my children natural science without textbooks. So, I just prayed and trusted in God to help me. I made a decision that it was better not to study natural science than to instill errors in my children. When we read certain things in books on rocks or stars or other creatures, when they said the earth was so many millions or billions of years old, I just told my children, “I don’t believe those claims are true.  I think that all the people who wrote these books are mistaken.” And I began to realize that there were hardly any resources that had not been contaminated by these errors.

Whenever we went to public places, such as the aquarium, or the zoo, or national parks, we heard the same story, and so I just told my children, “Well, it isn’t true! God made everything for us perfect and beautiful, just the way it says in Scripture. These people just don’t know it, so don’t believe them.” I knew how to tell them what not to believe, but I couldn’t give them much in the way of “safe” materials. So I tried to focus our natural science education more on practical things that were less likely to contain errors, such as the study of living things, plants and organisms, gardening know-how, identifying pests and bugs, things that we see in creation or use as part of our every-day living.  I worked a lot in the garden, and I used to ponder the bugs, plants and animals, wondering what they would have been like before the Fall, if their self-defense mechanisms had not been needed or activated.  My experiences in the garden sparked many thoughts and questions about God’s creation.

It was a bit hard navigating the teaching during that time, because good resources on natural science were so hard to find. Everything in the world seemed corrupt to me. I felt like it was a big risk to just stay out of that area of study for a while in order to preserve the Faith and wait for some better solutions. But I just kept praying and studying other subjects and natural life and trusting God to provide. Years went by as I was praying for counsel on that and just feeling a bit unsure, but still very confident that it is better to keep the Faith than to be educated on a thousand false things. It seemed like a long time before my children and I were solidly established enough to study natural science as a subject without harm to their Faith.

But, finally, after the children were almost ready for high school, I rediscovered the Kolbe Center and found out that they had produced some trustworthy materials for high school students, so I had a way to proceed. At first I thought that maybe I had not prepared my children well enough for those things during elementary school, but as it turns out, it was not actually difficult for them to figure it out and get up to speed on things. I was also able to find a number of other good textbooks from some Protestant sources that had a pretty good worldview, although not perfect, and my children were able to “catch up” on some of the things we had skipped over. In one year, my children made up for all that they had “missed” during their elementary school years. Their ages and increased maturity allowed them to learn things very quickly, instead of taking years about it. Now they are strongly established in the truth and no longer in so much danger of being corrupted by errors in their textbooks. They really know their Faith and can defend the truth. Even if they were to read something false in a book, they are not likely to be injured or misled by it. But, of course, I am still actively overseeing their curriculum to be sure that no one is teaching them lies without me knowing about it.

God has really provided for me. During all that time as they were growing up, I felt like I was on my own, just avoiding the “system”, and doing something a bit unprecedented and what other education “experts” and homeschool curriculum providers would have probably thought was irresponsible. But it was an act of trust in God. I am now able to see that God has used that initial encounter with the Truth to help preserve me, although I was alone, but after a long time of waiting and “holding out” against the errors, so to speak, I see that God has made my children strong and solid, and then in addition to that He has begun to provide our family with the resources that we need to make sure that we are well-instructed and well-informed. I worried for a long time that I wasn’t doing a good enough job as a home educator, but I didn’t tell anyone. But I can see that God is vindicating this choice and trust in my life. My children haven’t really missed out on anything. I feel like it is a case of the Scripture coming true in which Our Lord said, “Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Mt. 6:33). It is amazing how God works!

The Kolbe Center offers many materials and articles which prove the truth of the Catholic Church’s traditional doctrine of Creation, and show how a false evolutionary worldview gained acceptance. We are living in the time about which St. Peter, our first Pope, warned, when he said that “scoffers” would come in the last days saying that all things have been how they were from the beginning of the world (slowly and gradually developing at a constant rate), and denying the Scriptural testimony to Creation and the Flood (2 Pet. 3:3-7). This is exactly what modernists and evolutionists do. It should be completely obvious to anyone who studies the evidence, that natural science actually confirms the true doctrines of our Faith rather than being opposed to them without requiring our Faith to be reconciled with these supposed “discoveries,” which are mostly frauds and forgeries. I think someone would have to be blind not to see the evidence in favor of creation, and that there is really no solid evidence in favor of evolution.

I believe that the articles and materials which the Kolbe Center offers are really a gift to people in our times. I am constantly grateful for the fact that this truth is being spread and shared, because without this knowledge being made known, no minds and hearts would be changed, and no one would be converted. I know that for many people in our times, these ideas are a challenge, because they go against everything that they were taught in schools and textbooks. And so, besides the challenge of acknowledging that those ideas were false, it is also a suffering to recognize that the teachers they had trusted were not as reliable as they had thought. And so it is a deeper trust issue when people struggle inside with the realization that they have been told a lie all their lives, even by well-meaning people. That is why I think that promoting this truth is not just an intellectual but a real spiritual challenge for people to have the openness to receive the truth, and also not to be injured with regards to trust.

For me, to stay out of the natural science realm so as not to get indoctrinated with error until I knew I had truthful materials was a difficult act of trust in God, but I believed He would one day provide a solution. But people coming from the opposite direction, who were indoctrinated with all those errors and are now having to change, there is a different challenge of trust.  That is to see the goodness of God in revealing this truth to them, to free them from bondage to false thinking that, most likely unknown to them, has been affecting and limiting their relationship with Him in a big way. This also shows the goodness of God!

I am grateful to the Kolbe Center for the resources that it provides and for its mission to help people understand this true doctrine of creation as the foundation of our Faith, because it is so necessary for a true knowledge of God. I believe that once Catholics return to this belief, and reject the compromises made by theologians who, deceived by false claims, came up with the “synthesis” of theistic evolution to justify their abandonment of the traditional doctrine of creation without having to fight for it, people’s spiritual lives will improve.  In time, as more and more Catholics believe this truth and work together to build up Catholic culture and the rest of society on that basis, there will be more books, resources and materials to support a correct worldview.  I also know that even in these times, when the true doctrine of creation has been obscured, we should always be confident that, when we follow God, love Him above all things, and trust in His truth, He will take care of all of our needs and provide for everything! I pray that God may bless every family and help all children to grow up in the sweet innocence of knowing God as a loving Father. I will always be grateful to the Kolbe Center for having been an important part of that journey for us. I am very grateful for the graces God has given me and our family. May He be blessed forever, and may His kingdom come!