On being a Catholic teacher in a time of confusion

Education is not the acquisition of marketable skills, or self-improvement, culture, personal fulfillment or even knowledge—though these benefits normally occur; but, essentially, it is a call to something higher than ourselves. — John Senior

The school year is well underway, and with it, the difficulties of teaching in an increasingly confused world. Being a Catholic teacher is challenging these days, and one thing that can help restore the art of education is the often-overlooked importance of simple, proclamatory clarity.

Clarity has been lost in an overly and deliberately complicated world. Catholic teachers and parents, to be clear, must not only be soldiers of Christ but also train soldiers of Christ. If anything is clear in this world, it is that a war is waiting for our young ones, and we must prepare them to fight in it with a united front. That’s the truth.

But it’s also true that we cannot be united—as a people and as a Church—without clarity. What is right and what is wrong? What is true and what is false? What does the Church teach and what doesn’t she teach? What does God ask of us? And what does He forbid? We must have clarity about how and why we need to be unified.

Looking around, there is a fair amount of failure in clarity. The tragic situation with the SSPX is one example of something that is hurting the Church. But the crisis of clarity goes well beyond the obscurities of Canon Law. There are plenty of Catholics out there who believe that you can be in a homosexual relationship and be a faithful Catholic. There are a lot of Catholics who think divorce and Holy Communion have become compatible over the years. There are all too many Catholics out there who think that there is plenty of opportunity for salvation outside the Church. There is an abundance of Catholics who think that we should just mind our own business, adopting an assimilationist mentality, and go along unobtrusively with the rest of the proverbial handbasket.

Only dead things go along with the stream—and we are a people risen from the dead. Let’s be clear about being Catholic—and have the courage to be clear. Love one another as I have loved you—and love is tough. That’s what it means to be Catholic. Without clarity, without tough love, we will only have a Church of confusion. And that is what we largely have right now, and that is precisely what the devil wants. The Way, the Truth, and the Life is not apparent to a mind that is distracted, desensitized, or divided. We need the clarity of Christ, now more than ever in our culture of deafening, blinding clutter.

If there is one thing polluting the minds, and therefore the souls, of people, and especially young people, it is that cloudy subjectivism which leads on to a corrupting relativism. We’re all becoming numb to it, almost as a survival tactic. You do you… Love is love… Live your truth… What does any of that actually mean? Whatever you want, I guess—I’m not sure, but I am sure that truth is not in the eye of the beholder—and neither are the most essential aspects of beauty. The good is not up for debate. It is one of the eternal transcendentals, whose being is not up to anyone.

But it is up to us to be clear about what they are. And in these days, we must do so in order to give young people the experience of a clear, hard-and-fast position on certain indisputable truths.

And I’m not talking about some sort of kung-fu intellectualism here. I’m talking about being clear—clearly saying what is good and what isn’t; clearly stating what is true and what is false; clearly showing how an adult takes pleasure in the beautiful. That is cutting-edge these days. And it doesn’t take much to realize that the devil lurks in the lukewarm, as Uncle Screwtape counseled Wormwood regarding his patient: “Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.”

My old teacher, the man who taught me how to teach, once told me that the whole art of education consisted of pointing out things that were good, true, and beautiful, and identifying them as such. That’s it. Too simplistic? Too easy? I think teachers often believe they have to be profound to be effective, but we are just proclaimers of profundities. Not progenitors, necessarily.

My teacher used to do this sort of thing all the time: he’d read the death of Roland and then pause, look up with a grim grin, and say, “That is great.” That reaction was a real lesson. It was great. It was right to simply say so and let it be, acknowledging first the truth of the matter before delving beyond its surface or using it as a point of departure. And it was clarifying to see a man do that and invite us to do it with him. He gave us permission to think good things were good, and to say that they were good.

So simple—but foundational things often are. I have many memories of him doing that straightforward act of identification, and it made a deep impression on me. His ways have often reminded me of Christ the Teacher’s “Come and see,” Who used this method all the time: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

In my career as a teacher, the best moments I have experienced are not because of something I explained or defined. It was when I allowed the excellence of the material to just be excellent. Sometimes it seems that part of the problem of education is that we approach it like a problem—something to be solved or checked off, rather than drawing out into “the light of things,” as Wordsworth says, where the mysterious manifests itself. And those moments when a teacher I had, or I as a teacher, identified something as mysteriously and wonderfully good, true, or beautiful, were poignant moments for their inherent clarity.

These are “come and see” moments: moments such as reciting “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and just saying, “Man, that’s a good poem.” Or when I get all my students to look out the window as the sun bursts from a rainy bank of clouds over the mountain and I say, “Look at that, what a beautiful day.” Or when I finish up a book of The Iliad and say, “This is so true, this is a story to live by.” That’s when I see eyes meet mine that glint like swords.

Is it so strange to think that children, and the men and women they will grow up to be, will never know what is good, true, and beautiful if no one ever tells them what is good and true and beautiful?

Think of it this way: education is all about the cultivation of taste, and taste is something that doesn’t always come naturally, but it is so important in judging what is good, true, and beautiful. Most people won’t know what good wine is without someone telling them, “This is good wine.” Many won’t necessarily know what beautiful art is unless someone tells them, “This is beautiful art.” And that cultivation of taste is so important to live a life attuned to the things that enrich us, that humanize us, that move us with something higher.

C. S. Lewis wrote that education should make the lovable beloved and the despicable despised. I don’t think that would be the motto of many schools in our day and age. We have grown allergic to clear distinctions, even fearful. It is true that the ancients loved exploring the gray area in their mythologies, especially the Greeks, but these classical dilemmas and riddles were for the sake of exercising the mind towards the strength of clear judgment, not to acclimate people to a cloudy, chameleon-like attitude toward reality.

As Chesterton said, “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” We are drowning in muddy open-mindedness as an end because, ultimately, it allows for selfishness and power.

Education is not, however, about being successful in the worldly sense. It is about discovering the truth of things. It’s about applying eternal standards to fleeting conditions. It’s about seeing Who God Is and what He has made. And that takes some clear distinguishing, some plain clarity—a clarity that kids aren’t given readily anymore. It takes telling the story of the Prodigal Son and getting the Rembrandt painting in front of students, and saying, “You see that? That’s God, and that’s you.”

That clear proclamation of a definite thing is not something young people hear very often. In a world that is so accustomed to politically correct jargon, non-committal terminology, diabolically middle-of-the-road thinking, and perpetually scrolling appetites, there is nothing like saying that this is that without apology or qualification. That’s a moment that can last a lifetime—even an eternity.