Diamonds in the Rough

Teaching teenagers is FUN. By fun I mean Frustrating, Unbelievably taxing, and No where I'd rather be. After all, it's the front lines. It's mission territory! And the grace and privilege of playing a part in forming young hearts in Christ is a treasure beyond words. Even when the treasures are diamonds in the rough.  

Back to the frustrating and taxing part. A high school teacher gets to empathize with the ancient prophets quite often. We feel like Jeremiah for instance, who was largely ignored in his instructions to the People. We say the same thing a thousand times. We "invite" the students to read the directions we so lovingly place at the top of the test, but alas, they often fail to see it. We'd love to give them more freedom, but too often it gets abused and we're forced to "take them by the hand" as God did in this Sunday's reading from Jeremiah. When the young "break the covenant" in the classroom we have to show ourselves the master, as in this first reading. Trust me, I'd rather have them drawn to the beauty of truth, and carried on the sweet aroma of Christ, than drag them along by the threat of "yes, this is on the test." 

But such is the human condition; we are out of sync. We're off key. Original Sin has caused the strings of our souls to go flat or sharp, and we need them to be tuned. That means we've got to be stretched (or loosened). We need music lessons again, because we've forgotten the original notes. It may take hours and hours of pounding those keys and getting our fingers calloused by playing the chords of the virtues over and over until they come as second nature to us. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews sees even Jesus, who was clearly without sin, as undergoing this stretching in order to teach us: "Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered." 

Maybe that's why St. Augustine called this life a "gymnasium of desire." It's a real workout! I learn in every lesson I teach how I am called to be purified as well. One of the best lessons ever taught was by the outdoor classroom teacher, John the Baptist: "He must increase, I must decrease." 

The Gospel this past Sunday from John 12 echoes this theme of self-sacrifice and self-discipline. It's the lesson of Lent, essentially; "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat." Wow, so that's it then, and no escaping it? "Is THAT gonna be on the test?" Oh yes, friends, it's the final exam. But don't look at it that way; like it's just work. It's the art of virtue. Imagine the magic that can happen when we learn our lessons well and listen to the Master. Sweet music! Music that swells up from within, inspired thoughts, incredible symphonies of virtue and holiness! Jeremiah foretold this day! "No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the LORD. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD..."

Why I Love Being a Catholic Teacher



I absolutely love being a Catholic educator and I cannot imagine teaching in any other realm, or in any other light than that of the Sanctuary Lamp, nestled near the Altar of God.


For me, it means Jesus is close at hand. It means the Master is just a heartbeat away, and He is the heart of my classroom. For me, being a Catholic educator means exactly the opposite of what some might imagine teaching religion to be (religio means "binding"). I AM FREE.




I am free to think, to question, to seek and to explore the universe God made and to find the truth of things and the inexhaustible mystery of things. I can live and move and have my being in a relationship that God has joined and no one can tear asunder: the marriage of faith and reason, biology and theology, heaven and earth, at once the mathematically measurable and the mysterious. 



“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and science... It is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute a truly religious attitude.” 

- Albert Einstein

As a Catholic teacher... 



I am free to inject into my words the beliefs of my heart. I can let the light of the name through Whom all things were made, JESUS, shine throughout the work of my classroom and not fearfully hide it under a basket. My Catholic faith takes me out of the present Dark Ages that divorce God and Science. In the world of Catholic education, they are still happily married.


In a noisy age full of distortion and media deception, my work can be a subtle kind of inception. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Inception, I am planting the seed of a thought into all of my students that they are called to greatness. A greatness not only in this world... in any field they choose, but beyond the rim of this world, in everlasting relationships expanding towards an eternal horizon.


I can tell you without hindrance that life is not just about acquiring facts but more importantly friendships. We are destined to be a communion of saints burning with the desire to know not only the world in which we live but the Word in Whom and through Whom all things were made.



I can be holistic in this call to holiness, weaving the threads of all things sacred and secular into the tapestry of my classroom, never divorcing what God has joined. Since the WORD became flesh and dwells among us.... everything is holy now.


I love being a Catholic educator because here I can “speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth..." so thank You, God.

But there are many false images of what Catholic education looks like in the media. Played to death is the idea that the Church hates and fears science, that it is outdated, antiquated, and always belated when it comes to new discoveries. This is a lie pure and simple. 

The Catholic vision is not to be confused with a rigid, fundamentalist, creationist view of the world so often ridiculed in the media. I’d like to shine some light on the lies and dispel the shadows:



Science was actually born in the Church, as was the concept of education as we know it today, the idea of the university.

Some Fun Facts (taken from the work of Ben Wiker and Jonathan Wright): 




Fr. Giambattista Riccioli was the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body. 

Fr. Athanasius Kircher has been called the father of Egyptology. 

Fr. Roger Boscovich has been called the father of modern atomic theory. Copernicus the astronomer was a Catholic, and later in life it is thought that he was ordained a priest and actually administered a diocese. 

Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk, is hailed as the father of modern genetics.

 Lazzaro Spallanzani, one of the greatest biologists of the eighteenth century, was a Catholic priest.


In the sciences it was the Jesuit order in particular who stand out as pioneers; there are some 35 craters on the moon named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

 By the eighteenth century, they had contributed "to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn's rings. 

They theorized about the circulation of the blood, the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics..." - Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189

"In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”

 (from this excellent article)

During this Catholic Schools Week, I want to invite all of us to meditate on a quote from Blessed John Paul II that I’ve often shared with my own students: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth - in a word, to know himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”