Young Andre Blue has a lot to teach us today concerning the speed of even small-town life in Louisiana.

And as he’s done for the first two efforts in this series, he doesn’t even have to wax political or philosophical to do it.

Although conservatives have spent decades fighting abortion, gender ideology, public-school indoctrination, and the governmental assault on parental authority, we have been much less willing to examine the everyday, mundane habits through which modern life has taken possession of the family anyway.

We even get excited about the commandments being up in public school classrooms and want to squabble with anyone contending otherwise. See, that is the binary trap we keep mentioning here—even though we may be dealing with liberal godlessness in some examples, does it really matter anyway if the commandments are up but we’re not taking care of the spiritual formation of our children at home?

“It’s better than nothing,” some will say. But even if that’s true, why do we settle for crumbs like dogs instead of coming to the feast Our Lord invites us to?

We rail and vote against the Left, but then organize our homes and schedules around many of the same assumptions about success, money, work, and time. And that’s not even getting into single-parent homes where the schedules are even more hectic, often through circumstances those parents never wanted in the first place.

Today, as we’ve done twice already this week, we’ll use one Andre Blue, a good-souled little boy growing up in Jeanerette and Franklin in the ‘80s and ‘90s to make our point. Let’s not argue. Let’s revisit our small-town Louisiana childhood for gold to mine, and perhaps for a soul to save.

Reading Andre’s story is useful precisely because he has no theory of “traditional family life.” He doesn’t work in the yard ruminating on Modernism or the collapse of Christian civilization. So he’s not arguing anything. He’s just living inside of a world he was handed.

How Andre teaches is by taking the energy to notice whether Mom is hurting. He notices Pop smoking and making both himself and Andre sick. He’s confused by Duncan being cruel but then suddenly being the best big brother in the world. He wants to excel in sports. He has this sometimes debilitating crush on Holly Gale. He gives Mom flowers. He allows Pop a break when he knows he won’t understand. And when something unusually good happens inside the family, it genuinely moves him, but he also sometimes starts already feeling emotions that aren’t there yet, anticipating the next argument, the next migraine, the next cigarette—whatever next disappointment that will inevitably come to eliminate the previous high.

Because children experience the order of a home, or lack thereof, before they possess the vocabulary to explain it, Andre gives us a way to look at them without immediately retreating into politics or philosophy. What owns Dad’s attention? What owns Mom’s peace? What owns Sunday? What owns the childhood imagination? Those questions get much closer to family restoration than another exclamation point about the Left destroying America.

SERIES

THE PERMANENT THINGS: Reclaiming a Louisiana Childhood Worth Saving

LIGHT FOR THE VALLEY: Why Conservatives Cannot Stay on the Mountaintop

The Two Masters

Today’s traditional Gospel of the Mass (Matt 6:24-33) puts the problem rather plainly: “No man can serve two masters.” Christ eventually names the competing master as mammon, then spends the remainder of the passage addressing the anxiety that follows when food, clothing, and tomorrow begin imprisoning the mind.

And there is another small providential layer today worth mentioning without making too much of it: Today is First Friday in the Catholic tradition, a day given in a special way to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The connection is difficult to miss. Matthew 6 asks whom we serve; devotion to the Sacred Heart correctly answers that question.

Are we answering it in the same way, is the question.

That word “solicitous” in 6:25 and 31 is especially useful here because it describes something more subtle than simple parental responsibility. A father and mother should provide the basics and care about what happens to their children, sure. Families should plan, sure. Our faith calls for leisure time amidst the noise, absolutely.

Yet there is a point at which such prudence can become servility to the expectations of the encroaching (already encroached) culture, reordering the household around fears and anxieties that make us say “it never ends,” but we never stop to think that it is our own fault that “it never ends.”

When Christ tells us to consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, He is not advocating irresponsibility—and yes, certainly, these types of Gospel passages give all sorts of excuses for the slothful. But that is not the good-faith conservative’s business; they will receive their consequence for deluding themselves. What we need to do is control what we can control, and that, Andre shows us, is in the home. Christ is exposing the vanity and futility in the presumption that enough planning, earning, scheduling, purchasing, and controlling can finally make a family secure, which is precisely the illusion modern life keeps selling us.

My wife and I are constantly making the comment, whenever life throws us a challenge or even right after we overcome the latest one: Just brace ourselves. Continue to pray and anchor our minds in Christ. It will never end on this side of Heaven. Heaven is the goal anyway, and the challenges are part of the cross in getting there.

It is a gift that writing about Andre has given me. He teaches me every time I present his world.

One of the simplest examples is the flowers he gives Mom. He cannot fix headaches, the smoking, Duncan, Pop, or whatever suffering his mom is going through while her own mother is dying of cancer. But he can notice her, and he can come through on a promise he made to her when he messed up and really hurt her badly. So he gives her the flowers, after being inspired to do so in school through his reading of the novel Flowers for Algernon in school. How often do we tell our children that school, or English class, or reading in general doesn’t matter because you’ve made it through just fine? Andre’s small act shows that education, when ordered toward Christ, can form more than the intellect. And that act itself, when done out of authentic charity, is closer to restoring a home than much of what passes for “family values” in conversations that remain political.

And so, some gentle questions: Do we live within our means in terms of house, vehicles, boats, travel ball? Do both parents have to work, or do they both work simply because of the debt accrued? Do we bemoan the woke university system but do everything to corral our children right into it? Do we throw on our ballgame gear for the day, make it to Mass, but then spend the rest of the day at the ballfields playing sports that invite so much vanity?

This is where Sunday becomes more than a question of whether we made it to Mass. While I hesitate on some of his points, Padre Peregrino recently wrote about sanctifying the Lord’s Day, and I invite you to read it.

The challenge is not that Sunday looks exactly like Tuesday. For most families it obviously doesn’t. The harder question is what we keep allowing into Sunday once Mass is over. Travel ball. Unnecessary shopping. Laundry in crisis mode. Homework allowed to consume the family because school already owns the rest of the week. Drinking, grilling, and investing ourselves in televised sports to a degree that moves well past God-ordained leisure. Errands and chores that could have waited or should have been done already because we were doing all of this on Saturday and Friday too.

Because each one can usually be defended by itself, the cumulative disorder becomes difficult to see, which is how a day set apart for God can slowly become another arena for anxiety, or, as the Gospel terms it, solicitude.

We are not condemning choices here, understand. I have to look in the mirror personally on all of these, in both the present and the past, which is probably why they’re mentioned as examples here in the first place. What I’m asking myself and you, good reader, is whether the order created by all of these choices together is shifting the spiritual foundation and making it impossible to live out Christ’s words in today’s Gospel.

Andre helps me see that distinction too. Baseball and basketball (and football in the backyard only because Mom says I’ll break my “clavicle”) are good. Wanting to play ball in Jeanerette, or wondering whether Franklin might offer something more (because Reinhart’s going to bean me in the face, I just know it) is good. Wanting to play outside (but without breaking Mom’s flowers) is good. A child learning teamwork, discipline, and courage (but don’t charge the mound in practice, Andre) is good.

But once sports, school, money, career, or anything else starts determining the architecture of family life, especially if everything is being attempted and juggled at once, a good thing has begun demanding the privileges that only Christ our master should have.

That is where the mammon comes in for good-faith conservatives. We don’t mean to hurt Our Lord. But we’ve let our schedules get out of control to the point where we do.

Andre is here to remind you and me how to simplify, even as he himself worries about things we now regard as small.

And perhaps that contrast is the lesson. Adulthood teaches us to complicate what childhood still knows how to keep simple.

Final Thoughts

The traditional family question must become more serious to us than simple, paralyzing nostalgia. We are not trying to recreate an entire decade, a television kitchen with ugly green tiles, or some flawless version of 1955 or ‘45 or even 1776. We are talking about recovering an order in which God comes first, marriage and children follow, and work, money, sports, school, and leisure take their proper subordinate places.

We complain that progressives and the woke Left dismantled the traditional family. Yep, they did plenty of that, and continue to do so. But I’ve long contended that that whole sick world of the Left was created as a distraction, in the Saul Alinsky model, not just to derail us from the Way, but more importantly to give us a false measure of security in our rightness. When the tribal wars start online, of course we’re not going to side with them, so we choose the only other the algorithm allows. But do we consider the idea that we’re being presented a Hobson’s Choice, that neither choice is good, that the choice true tradition would have us make lies all over the Gospels, including today’s, and not anywhere near where the online argument has been couched—probably intentionally?

If we are serious about getting that family and small-town soul back in our lives, some of the restoration will require saying no not merely to liberal sickness, but to expectations derailed conservatives themselves have learned to treat as indispensable.

That may mean accepting fewer pleasures, less convenience, less status, fewer activities, or simply an unfinished chore once in a while, subordinating things that are not necessarily evil to things that are actually eternal.

And that will hurt. That will mean cutting ties with other conservatives who share many of our same values in other ways.

But that is where today’s Gospel cuts to the heart of the matter. It is a lesson we cannot escape, and as the story stands now, Andre is learning that lesson alongside us. Christ does not merely tell us what to reject. He restores the proper order, commanding us to put first what actually belongs first.

“Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Thank you for reading The Hayride!

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FIND ANDRE’S STORY HERE!

BOOK 1 OPENING ACTS (2015)

BOOK 2 PRICE OF ADMISSION (2023)

BOOK 3 THIRD BELL RINGING (2026)