The Task of an Education
Homily for the Huether Conference for La Sallian Educators
You do not need much time in your average high school today to discover that life is very hard for the kids out there. I spend at least a few hours most weeks hearing confessions and offering Masses at one Catholic high school or another in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and a constant theme of these conversations is the simple fact that life is hard for young men and women.
How hard?
I suppose that life has always been hard for youth, and there is no doubt that today young people live in a world replete with the good stuff that comes from economic opportunity and scientific knowledge incomparably greater than previous centuries. Examples of the good stuff that comes with modern life are easy to find: mosquitoes no longer need to kill millions each year; a family member can leave home for a better job and the goodbye does not mean that no one will ever see one another again; and you have at least a puncher’s chance these days of living a different kind of life from the life you are born into if a different kind of life is what you want for yourself—which is more that can be said for most centuries in world history.
Those are just a few examples of the good stuff that comes from life in the modern (or post-modern) world. The youth who live in the culture today are the recipients of immeasurable graces that are unique to our moment in time. There is much in the world today for which we ought to be grateful.
But we know that life remains hard for the kids out there.
How hard?
A friend who teaches at a local Catholic high school sent me an article the other day describing research recently published in the Journal for Sociology and Christianity. The researcher compared and contrasted data from the Department of Education, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the Pew Research Center, and Public Religion Research Institute and identified a correlation between the absence of religious belief and increased rates of rape and suicide in our culture.
I suppose that social scientists and culture warriors take turns arguing the data sets and research methodologies in these kinds of studies, wanting to make more or less of the published conclusions. But my question for you is more intuitive and experiential: as someone who works intimately with young men and women in the culture today, would you even be surprised to learn of increased rates of violence and mental health struggles for today’s youth? And that maybe, just maybe, the absence of religious belief makes it harder for some kids to get through the day? I can’t imagine that you would be. For the many great goods that come from the modern world, we find ourselves buried under stresses and anxieties and burdens that reveal a crisis of meaning in our culture.
We have never in the history of the world been capable of doing more to save and dignify human life than we are today, and still sometimes it seems as though life has never been cheaper and empty of lasting value.
I do not mean to portray religion as an opiate for the masses that helps people to get up in the morning without committing random acts of violence or succumbing to mental health struggles. My meaning is more about mission and purpose: education matters a great deal, and you all are in the education business. What you do matters.
I wish I could tell you that my favorite quotation about education comes from St. John Baptiste de La Salle, or perhaps from one of the good and faithful Christian Brothers who formed me many years ago, just up the road at Calvert Hall. Unfortunately, my favorite quotation comes from another source, an Italian priest, now a bishop, who is still alive today and belongs to a religious community that is definitively not French in origin. The priest wrote once in a book: The task of education consists precisely in enabling the student to discover the eternal within time.
The eternal within time: there is a source of meaning for anyone who needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning. It matters more than any other fact that has ever mattered that there is a God who loves so deeply that he creates and redeems and does not allow a broken, disordered world filled with sin and violence and disaster to collapse in on itself and implode. It matters more than any other fact that has ever mattered that the God who loves and creates and redeems enters the world through the life of Christ and remains alive in the world through the two-fold gifts of the Church and the Holy Spirit. It matters more than any fact that has ever mattered that the disordered world in which we live is life-defining for exactly no one because Christ makes all things possible; in Christ and Christ alone is found freedom from the crap and meaninglessness of ordinary, daily life lived in a messed up, broken world.
You need a reality from outside the world to give real, eternal meaning to life lived in the world. The world as we know it is passing away, says St. Paul; nothing in this world is eternal. But Christ is eternal, and in him is found freedom and meaning of incomparable value.
We talk a lot about education and economic opportunity, and we should. But we should talk even more about education and anthropological opportunity, theological opportunity. A real education forms you in Christ to become good, and true, and beautiful, a living witness to the fact that matters more than any other fact: that there is a God outside the world who loves the world, and that God can change your life forever.
But only if you discover the eternal within time. And only if those who educate remember each day how much an education matters, the difference in life that real education can make.
I hope you each know how much you and your work matter for our youth. I am priest and for the most part people are happy to talk to me about the deep cuts in life: tough stuff like illnesses and deaths and job losses and marriage struggles, and awesome stuff like new life and conversion and love and the joy of the Gospel. I talk to people a lot about the deep cuts in life, and I can only hope that our conversations are meaningful. But I promise you that I cannot remember the last time I talked to someone about the deep cuts in life for more than 1 hour. I love talking to students about what matters in life and how to find meaning and why a real education can be a life-transforming event for anyone who is open and curious and desirous for truth and goodness and beauty. But my average conversation with a high school student lasts about 4-5 minutes, and at the end of the day, I can only hope that those 4-5 minutes make a difference in someone’s life.
Educators spend hours with students each day, each week, each year. What you do matters because almost no one else gets the time needed to help young men and women discover eternity, to find meaning and freedom in a world that is passing away. By the time a student is in high school, teachers and coaches and counselors get about as much time to spend with students as parents. I hope you each know how much you and your work matters for our youth.
Today marks the 333rd anniversary of the heroic vow made by John Baptiste de La Salle, Nicolas Vuyart, and Gabriel Drolin to form a religious institute dedicated to the education of youth; no matter how difficult the struggle nor how impossible the task—even to the point of begging for alms and living on bread alone, these men professed. If you read about the context and circumstances of the heroic vow, you will learn that these promises found inspiration in the lives of St. Jean-Jacques Olier and his companions, who 50 years earlier had formed a new religious community of their own.
Three men in 1641 made a choice to follow the will of God for them, and 50 years later, in 1691, St. John Baptiste de La Salle and his companions found inspiration in their lives and professed a vow to follow the will of God. 311 years later, I graduated from a high school that exists because of what these men accomplished, having received an education of my own. And each of you gathered here this evening have found your own meaning in the life, work, and mission of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. 1641, 1691, 2002, 2024: you do not need to look far to discover the presence of the eternal within time. The will of God made known to each generation, to be discovered and followed, giving meaning and freedom to human lives lived in a world that is passing away.
The task of an education is to help a student discover the eternal within time: the life of Christ, the life of God. Nothing else gives meaning and freedom that will last, and kids these days are smart, perceptive, aware; they know the culture is selling them short, and most of them are out there on a search to find anything, something, someone, that gives freedom and meaning that will last.
I hope you each know how much you and your work matters for our youth.
Homily preached on Thursday, November 21st at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore