Sarah tolerates a lot from me, the least of which is my religious fanaticism. Not being a cradle Catholic herself, GingerFace (as her appellation now goes approximately 90% of the time these days) still marvels at my absurd obsession with body parts enclosed in precious metals. On our honeymoon, I opted for the most romantic of destinations on our penultimate day in Europe: the motherhouse of the Lasallian Christian Brothers. I just really needed to see the remains of the patron saint of teachers, Jean Baptiste de La Salle, and I hoped that the Generalate would offer me some insight into the spirituality of the Brothers of the Christian Schools so that I might deepen my own affection for their particular charism.
When I moved into Lasallian education from the realm of Ignatius, I knew that a whole new world of lingo and terminology would come with the transition; and indeed, in two years’ time as a Lasallian, the unfamiliar virtues of “piety” and “zeal”1 have gradually replaced those once familiar terms of cura personalis and the magis in my imagination, despite the fact that I have always protested against the notion of becoming a pious zealot.The mother church of the Brothers rests in a relatively unassuming brick structure on the outskirts of Rome. Let past the gate by a man wearing shorts and a t-shirt, Sarah and I asked the receptionist if we could pay a visit to the chapel. She kindly directed us onward, and as we made our way through the Generalate, Lasallian educators wearing conference shirts milled about.
Christ the Child
He reminds me of the call to find Christ in each student I educate. Throughout my half dozen years as a teacher, I have been told to find God in students, although this phrase remained sort of veiled in my mind. How could I tear down the defenses of the most surly, difficult, tired, traumatized student and find the divine breaking through their teenage fissures? The key, I think, lies not in looking for God, but in looking for the student. Cliche though it may sound, education is a thing that requires relationship above and beyond any other quality. Important though mastery of and enthusiasm for content may be, a real teacher knows that his or her students will potentially forget almost everything they are taught. Ironically, I cannot remember much of anything from my own high school theology classes, but those teachers made an indelible mark. Relationship does not so much require that I be “liked,”2 but that a student finds my presence worthwhile, at the very least. Finding the kid involves coming to develop an understanding of their quirks, their eccentricities, their passions, their weaknesses, and offering to meet them where they’re at. Find the student, and then I’ll find God. Doing it the other way around, at least for me, results in the vice of thinking myself holy.
A Humble Reliquary
The empty chapel struck me with its simplicity and gentleness, for the palette of creams and ivories proved a stark contrast to the ostentatious nature of most Roman churches and basilicas. It seemed fitting that this chapel, serving as a reliquary for the bones of teacher-saints, would architecturally resonate with the very vocation of being an educator: simple, straightforward, without pretense. We walked the perimeter of the chapel, and paused before the small side altars dedicated to the various Brother martyrs, men who had quite literally died for love of their students; for these men, teaching was a seriously dangerous business, though they deemed the risk of empowering children on the borders of culture and society to be an important one to take. Being new to their world, I remain unfamiliar with their stories, but the beauty of the communicated message hit hard. It would be nice to die in the classroom, with my “boots on” as the saying goes, and here were folks who had done just that.
Sarah and I approached the sanctuary, where graceful angels bore the relics of Saint Jean Baptiste aloft. This dude, I thought, three and a half centuries prior, had corralled men whom society deemed unfit to become teachers into teaching youth deemed unfit to be taught. And here were his various remnants: skull, vertebrae, other bones I could not identify. Eyes that had once looked on the world, meeting the eyes of those who would educate and be educated. I paused for a few minutes, kneeling and praying for my own school and its various needs.
Before we left, Sarah and I sat in the second pew, gazing upward. The resurrected Christ hovering above the altar, I noticed, wasn’t Christ at all, but rather Jean Baptiste transfigured. Over the course of his life, he had become, in the words of C.S. Lewis, a “little Christ.”The Abiding Teacher
Before we departed the Generalate, we wandered a bit more and discovered the room vaguely resembling a gift shop, where Abraham from Ethiopia, who had spent much of his life working at the Generalate (no doubt after having been educated in a Lasallian school), helped me out. Nearby, Sarah and I discovered an odd statue of Jean Baptiste, arms raised high, with various cavities throughout his body. I walked around it, peering into these holes, and realized their significance.
Smaller figures filled these spaces: a child growing into teenagerdom, falling in love, becoming a husband and a father and an old man, and beside each of them was Jean Baptiste, grinning. He accompanies each student a Lasallian educator has ever taught, through each part of their lives. He becomes part of who they are and who they become. My eyes teared, and my memory flooded with all the teachers who had impressed their lives into my own: Dr. Carew, Mr. Watson, Ms. Johanson, Mr. Acosta, Mr. Talbot, Professors Mitchell and Ambrosio, and Fathers King and Schall. I have never taken a single course in teaching or education, but have modeled my own labors after theirs.
I’m not paid to teach, really, and neither were these men and women. Strangely, I think a Catholic educator makes his or her living by loving students into their humanity, just as my own teachers had loved me into existence. Their lives abide in ours, witnessing joyously and generously to what a life well-lived means. And unconsciously even, we absorb these models into our own ways of proceeding and being.
Who Would Know?
My dad, himself a professor of labor and employment law of over thirty years, liked to quote A Man for All Seasons when discussing his vocation. Richard Rich approaches Thomas More to discuss the profession, and More probes, “Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.” Richard replies, “If I was, who would know it?” and Thomas fires back, “You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.”
The classroom is a place where magic occurs. It’s one of few remaining places in the world where minds can meet without any sort of intermediary. Students and teachers hold truths in front of them, pondering and questioning. There’s a sort of intimate enchantment in this process, and like any real enchantment, it’s not broadcast for all to see. And the beauty of it all lies in this: the work of a teacher is to make it so that they are no longer needed, no longer necessary. There is, however, a tension here. Although our teachers phase themselves out of our lives, they remain entirely and wholly necessary.
1 St. Jean Baptiste offers twelve virtues of a Catholic educator; these virtues were widely publicized to many Catholic teachers into the early part of the twentieth century in various media, but they have since fallen my the wayside outside of Lasallian education.↩
2 More than any other prayer, Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val’s Litany of Humility has aided my teaching.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment