Invincible Vision
“Be Thou My Vision,” Stanza 1:
Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.
As we move into a deeper appreciation of Paideia’s School Song, “Be Thou My Vision,” we have a provocative question to ask: when we sing this beautiful hymn together at Convocation and Commencement, do we recognize that we are actually joining in the everlasting song of Heaven that the Seraphim sing to one another as they worship God in His immediate Presence?
If not, we should.
Last month’s article, “School Song, School Spirit,” made the point that every stanza of Paideia’s Song conveys a truth about the immutable character of our God. What, then, do we learn about Him from Stanza 1?
We learn, first of all, that it is He, the God who IS, whose personal presence lights the way for us to follow along the often murky paths of our lives. It is He who captivates the errant affections and motivations of our hearts, fills our rebellious minds with thoughts that please Him, and desires to be our constant companion, everywhere and at all times, whether we are wide awake or sleeping peacefully. In short, He desires us to keep our eyes so focused on Him that He becomes our very Vision.
But what exactly does this mean? What are we requesting of Him when we ask Him to “be our Vision?” We must seek to answer this question by employing the same method that we teach our students at Paideia to use: careful textual analysis.
The answer begins to emerge in the second line, where “Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art” which simply means, “May nothing else matter to me, except that You exist and that You never change.” Immutable!
But there are further investigations to pursue. First, we must recognize that the word “vision” has multiple meanings in English, and we must decide which one is meant in that first line of our Song.
One possibility is that we are asking God to give our eyes the power to see more clearly, as the author of Psalm 119:18 did when he prayed, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.”
Alternatively, we might be asking God to be our focus, the object upon which we gaze. This certainly sounds like what the author of Hebrews 12:2 meant by exclaiming, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith . . .”
There is also the possibility that we are asking God to grant us moments of supernatural insight into His transcendent future purposes, like those He gave to the Old Testament prophets. Isaiah recorded just one such vision in a passage beginning with the words, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne, and the train of His robe filled the temple.” (Isaiah 6:1)
Beyond defining “vision,” we must cull additional clues about the word from the context surrounding it in the hymn. The lyrics that follow are of great assistance. From them, we learn that the type of Vision being requested has the power to transform our hearts (so that they acknowledge Jesus as their Lord) and elevate our thoughts (so that they become the best we are capable of whenever they form in our minds).
The impact on us of transformed hearts and renewed minds, in turn, is that we will spend more and more of our time in His presence, “walking in the Light, as He is in the Light” (1 John 1:7).
It is because we want our students to experience this kind of character-transforming Vision that we employ the classical model of education to train them to fix their eyes -- and their powers of thought -- in focused contemplation in every class on that which is good, true, and beautiful. We provide the subject matter on which students gaze, along with opportunities to analyze and evaluate it in depth by reading, discussing, writing about, and debating the Great Ideas of Western Civilization as they appear in Scripture, literature, art, music, science, and mathematics.
What is more, we have set before ourselves and our students a formal School Vision that, to paraphrase the words of Dr. Timothy Dernlan, “ignites the imagination, inspires hope, and aspires to influence our culture through the quality and power of our students’ characters.” This transcendent goal is encapsulated in one of the School’s most important documents:
Paideia’s Vision Statement
Paideia will raise up generations of wise and virtuous
Christian disciples, scholars, and citizens,
who love what is true, good, and beautiful,
who are grounded in Scripture,
who are equipped with the tools of learning,
and who are formed in godly character
for the glory of God and the good of their neighbor.
Paideia will partner with parents and
the broader Christian community
to accomplish these goals.
But we have not yet discussed the one remaining kind of Vision that infinitely surpasses all the others in magnificence and rarity, for it is both perfect in itself and unattainable on earth. And that is what Christian theologians call the Beatific Vision: the everlasting, undiluted state of perfect blessedness that the redeemed will experience in Heaven as they gaze, face to face, upon the transcendent beauty and perfect holiness of God. It is the ultimate reward of every believer and the content of the prophet’s vision in Isaiah 6:1-4.
It also brings us back to where we began: joining, as we sing our School Song together, with the angels in the everlasting song of Heaven that the Seraphim sing to one another as they worship God in His immediate Presence: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD God Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory.”
This is the Vision that we sing about in Stanza 1 of our School Song; and it is the Vision that we want our students to carry with them forever, after twelve years of classical Christian education at Paideia. We want them to be able to answer the Lord’s call, “Whom shall we send, and who will go for us?” in the same way that Isaiah did: “Here am I. Send me!”