Br John-Paul writes about teaching students and how it has changed his life.
Please accept the short block of my experience of teaching. What it is done to me and my spiritual life and my perspective of giving serving and receiving. During COVID I decided to train in another profession. From the time I was 15 I thought I would be a priest. And from the time I was 22 I was a youth minister. But in the middle of COVID I did a lot of soul searching,and praying and I realized that though my call to serve hadn't changed my concept of serving had. So, I left paid ministry and went to teachers college. I'm not the first friar to ever gone to teachers college and God knows I won't be the last. But let me tell you what I found at teacher's college…
When I decided to go to teachers college I thought of this story of the Greeks in the temple before Christ's passion. In the gospel of John chapter 12, "Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus." My thought was that I need to take Christ to the marketplace. To introduce the teachings of Jesus to a greater community beyond our Parish churches. Funny enough when I got there I found that in fact it was not the children who waited for Christ, but it was Christ who waited for me in the children.
Throw my time as a youth minister I came up with all kinds of adventures games and fun for young people to understand more fully and apply more deeply the gospel to their lives. When I got to school I had to relearn math to teach students math. It never occurred to me that sitting next to a 10-year-old whose eyes were filled with tears because they were having issues subtracting while all of their classmates were doing division, that I would see the face of my Lord looking back at me. But I do, every day in so many ways, Christ cries out, for love, for affirmation, for acceptance and most of all to be seen and not dismissed. Now I have many things to talk blog about, with regard to teaching
How to teach the gospel without using the name of Jesus
How deeply I feel the impact of what it is to be a religious (brother) who is teaching, in a country where 'religious teachers' destroyed the indigenous culture of my country.
The joys and sufferings of watching students make the same social mistakes I made.
Watching from the other side as students are bullied, ignored or even develop an over abundance of victim-hood.
Over over the last few months, I have come to understand my life as a teacher not from the perspective of the Greeks in the temple. No, my perspective has become that of the apostles in Chapter 13 of the Gospel of John as I sit around the table trying to understand what Christ was doing. "When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place.” “Do you understand what I have done for you?”, he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet." (John 13:12)
