Equipped to serve the Temporal and Eternal Good of Students

The Teachers for Christ program has been wonderful. I often look around with wonder at how I ended up so blessed. We live such balanced lives here. God has used the Augustine Institute and the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE) to give us a year of copious study, prayer, reflection, leisure, and friendship. Life is still life, and even in ideal conditions it is normal to feel sad on occasion, but this year has felt like oxygen to my soul.

I did not realize how badly I needed a quiet environment for many months of prayerful study until somewhat recently when I realized that I have been learning not just how to be a Catholic teacher, but even simply how to be a human being, with natural powers and graced endowments, with natural desires for natural goods and the burning desire at the center of our being that was made by and for God. This year has simultaneously been a garden showing us God’s generosity, teaching us to trust Him, as well as a desert to take our minds out of the world for a time so that we can gain clarity before being sent back into it.

The renewal of Catholic liberal education felt like a fairly distant reality to me until we started visiting schools, and I began to see kids formed by an education that seeks to develop their intellectual powers to their greatest capacity, not just to “prepare them for the real world” or simply for state testing or admissions. Just today I watched Socratic discussions in which 13-year-olds cogently analyzed the qualities of various friendships in Alcott’s “Little Women” and Emma’s (hitherto non-)growth in virtue in Austen’s eponymous novel.

They distinguished between virtue and action, became impassioned, invited their friends into the conversation, listened carefully, referenced specific events from their respective novels, saw comparisons to St. Ignatius of Antioch and company, referenced Tolkien, and more. It was a beautiful thing to behold. These kids are beginning on the shoulders of giants who themselves stand on the shoulders of giants. Steeped in Catholic tradition, these students ought not to be called “ahead” or “behind” the curve of the average public school student, because they are in many cases doing something qualitatively different: a passionate pursuit of well-rounded humanity.

There are many ways in which I feel more equipped to serve the temporal and eternal good of the human person as a potential Catholic school teacher. Here is one: we have thoroughly and repeatedly read the crucial first section of Pope St. John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, which has opened my mind to a simple concept of truth that had somehow escaped me up to this point: that the truth is more expansive than it is restrictive; in fact, our Lord tells us that the truth shall set you free.

We often tend to think that the truth is something like the correct multiple-choice answer among countless wrong answers. This makes us, as a culture, say silly things like, “Well, you’re only a Christian because you were raised by Christians.” Well, of course that’s true! Jesus built a visible Church, after all. What really makes it silly is the concept behind the statement though: that in the question “Which religion is true?,” we essentially circled “(A) Catholicism” and the truth of religion is found in circling the right answer.

The free mind, the person educated into the confidence that true discovery is never to be feared, refuses to stop at the true realization that Jesus founded the Catholic Church: Apologetics is succeeded by wonder, which is succeeded by ratiocination, which is succeeded by contemplation, which we call in its everlasting state the Beatific Vision. In other words, part of my preparation to be a Catholic schoolteacher has consisted simply in teaching me not to fear circling the wrong answer as much as hope that there is ever more truth to be found.

The Truth, because it is found ultimately in the Creator, goes ever deeper and wider and warmer; Truth is infinite. Investigation, therefore, ought to work upon an assumption not of the scarcity of truth but of its overflowing abundance. Truth is around every corner. It may at times feel difficult to hunt down and trap, but what feels like our trapping of truths is really the One who is Truth coaxing our minds out of “that double darkness into which we have been born, namely, sin and ignorance,” into the full wisdom of Christ our Teacher.

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