We live in difficult times, but in truth, we have always lived in difficult times –it’s just we did not recognize the difficulties before us except in hindsight. These days, hindsight is fifteen seconds from now. Everything seems to be happening everywhere all at once. The reality is, as my sister wisely observed, “to love the ones in front of you.” That is the way out of darkness.
Saint Mother Teresa said, if you want peace, go and love your family. She added, ““Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely, right where you are — in your own homes and in your own families, in your workplaces and in your schools. You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have eyes to see.”
Look around, people are scared, they need to be encouraged, comforted. People feel uncertain, they need the steadiness of friendship, of kindness, joy and hope.
This morning, I saw an advertisement for t-shirts for teachers. One said, “I teach because their future is worth my time.” The English teacher in me wanted to tweak that message to have parallel structure. I thought, ” I teach because your future is worth my present.” Our goal as educators is not to indoctrinate, but to introduce. We want to be memories in the lives of our students, not of controlling or managing or even instructing, but inviting them into a larger deeper more meaningful world than that of tic-tok, instagram or anything of the internet.
It means we must use humor, story, light, kindness, poptarts, music, everything we know, to show them there is so much more to the world than they know. They’ve been exposed to only what the internet reveals and the stories are so much greater and more complex than the binary nature of news, politics, and everyday online life conveys. The future must be seeded today. Students need all the beauty of God’s reality we can offer. It serves as a contrast to the awful, harsh, deep and very real suffering the news, life, and the internet brings to us every day.
Lent is a time for discovering how we’ve crowded the desert of our souls with everything other than love of God and neighbor. We’re to pray, fast and give alms. There are times when the day in, day out of life makes one tired, but Lent helps to refresh the soul –because we recognize the ways in which we might have become spiritually stagnant. I was musing, “I buy a lot of snacks for my students.” when it came time to call home and check on some of my kids. Connecting reminded me why.
A few years ago, a student I taught, ran away. I knew the last thing he’d eaten before he ran away, was poptarts in my room. So I promised myself to always have snacks. That memory had begun to fade, but the phone calls home refreshed it. Calling home is a process we use to help students thrive, it also helps us to connect more. I know this in my head and my heart, but it is still a struggle sometimes.
Parenting works the same way. I can know what to do, why to do it, and somehow, I fail. I fall. I flail. Patience and forebearance witness best, but somehow I miss the mark in the moment because I’m tired, I’m done. In those thoughtless tired moments, I do not see the reality. I do not see the needs, I know my needs. Spiritually, going into the desert is finding out how much I need God’s grace to get through every day. That of course is the purpose of Lent, to discover how much we need God.
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