2025: Words of Welcome & Gratitude from CHECH Board Members
May 31, 2025
Written by Jessica Counts, CHECH Secretary & Editor-in-Chief
In our work and standpoint in representing the greater Houston area, north, south, east, and west, we have worked for not only our particular calls to home education, but also for a more universal call to create a culture within our connected families and regional groups. This is a big task that we have undertaken through CHECH. Houston is very large with countless opportunities. We are constantly evaluating and collecting events and resources, and connecting communities. We do this in hopes of working towards the mission, which is: to create a Catholic Homeschool community in Houston connecting smaller groups to one another and assisting families with resources concerning Catholic education. We are "thinking outside the loop," so to speak, on how to make Houston a dynamic, engaging, holy place for Catholic home educating families and communities.
We, of course, always and fully recognize and embrace the truth that our only real obligation and accountable duty is to the souls immediately in our care and directly entrusted to us. But we know resolutely that our children will one day be in the world outside our home. It is this world we long to sanctify, alongside your families. With this publication and through our events, as we end our 2024-2025 year, we seek to ignite your desire for wonder, so that when you leave, you long to invite others into this relationship with God who is Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Creator, Artist, Lover, Father, Friend. Through creating the culture of your home, the culture of your communities, and orienting them towards this reality, you are in fact changing the world! The world our children will soon enter, equipped, we pray- we work, to give a reason for their hope!
We hope to inspire in you today, and always: wonder and awe, turning your heart to the transcendent mystery of a relationship with God, by means of His Church, and together with the people around us. May we encounter such beauty and wonder together. Remember Fyodor Dostoevsky who said, “Beauty will save the world,” and St John Henry Newman who said, “I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: "Go down again - I dwell among the people.”
May your homes be places to defend and uphold Truth, desire and encourage Goodness, encounter and create Beauty, and embrace and sustain Unity with the people in your midst and nurtured by your loving care.
Look up and wonder!!! Look down and love!!!
“People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas,at the long course of the rivers,at the vast compass of the ocean,at the circular motion of the stars,and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.” Saint Augustine
Thank you, families, for valuing home education within your home and supporting home education at large. The presence of your family benefits us all. Our strengths affect each other. We are the Body of Christ. And we need each other, the best of each other. CHECH’s mission is to support you, your family, and your community, through access to personal, social, spiritual, and professional development. By enriching your life in these aspects, we aim to connect and cultivate a larger community, that flows out into our parishes and cities. We long to help make a culture that embraces the whole person and their formation and education. We recognize that our model is first and foremost and ALWAYS Holy Mother Church. She longs to unite her children under the common goal of personal, familial, communal, and societal sanctification.
Just as Holy Mother Church asks us to gather in, we work to bring together families, to create culture for the whole person, the whole family, and communities. We are united in our common vocation to educate our children at home, yet unique in our approach and application. By coming together, we are in fact working to create a common community. This larger community, which always recognizes the necessary uniqueness of individual families, connects us, for we cannot do it alone. Again, we are the Body of Christ. Thank you for joining our effort.
Let us do this as friends, as comrades! As GK Chesterton said, "There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.” How wonderful, with the connecting of these families and communities, we then would know that together we have even more allies. We hope that the events we host create this foundation between like-minded families, who long to sanctify themselves, their children, and their communities, and work together, to create a culture that supports the mission of every family: “to guard, reveal and communicate love,” as St Pope John Paul II reminded. Let us together, as St Augustine said, “seek the good; cleave to the good; and, be the good.” Again, thank you, thank you, for your attendance, participation, and eager sharing of our mission and work. We aim to serve you, your children, your families, your friends, your community, your world!
Our Lady of the Pillar, first of the apparitions, pray for us.
Our Lady of the Pillar, basis of holy culture, pray for us.
Our Lady of the Pillar, who pondered all the good in her heart, pray for us.
Our Lady of the Pillar, patron saint of Houston Catholic homeschooling families, pray for us.
“At different moments in the Church’s history, the family has well deserved the beautiful name of ‘domestic Church.’ This means that there should be found in every Christian family the various aspects of the entire Church. Furthermore, the family, like the Church, ought to be a place where the Gospel is transmitted and from which the Gospel radiates. In a family which is conscious of this mission, all the members evangelize and are evangelized. The parents not only communicate the Gospel to their children, but from their children they can themselves receive the same Gospel as deeply lived by them. And such a family becomes the evangelizer of many other families, and of the neighborhood of which it forms part.” St Pope Paul VI
This article is republished from Volume 1 of the Annual Showcase Magazine "An Invitation to Wonder."
2025 Annual Theme | An Invitation to Wonder: A Culture of Learning at Home. Find more details on how to submit in the upcoming annual showcase magazine, more inspiration from the theme, and where to purchase a limited edition print copy of the 2025 magazine.
