RISING FROM THE DEAD - A YOUNG TEACHER’S PERSPECTIVE!

Kevin Bates sm

Imagine I’m a teacher at a Catholic school.  I’m in my mid-twenties, I’m single, new into my teaching career and wondering about my future, especially in terms of marriage and family.  I’m spending quite a bit of time socially and enjoying that.  I get energy from friends and colleagues, though with my colleagues we do tend to talk about school a bit much! Sometimes you’d think that’s all we can talk about!

I was brought up as a Catholic, and while I still believe deep down, I’ve lost touch a bit with it all - there’s been too much else going on - my studies, my work, my social life and just starting to make my way financially - I’ve had a lot on you know.  I get to Mass now and then, and of course I enjoy our school Masses - probably I enjoy them the best, ‘cos we’re all more involved there in shaping the celebration.

When my aunty died last year, something stirred in me for a while and I felt I needed to be closer to God or whatever.  When I hear about the trouble we’re having responding to the asylum seekers, or when I think that as a nation we are becoming more hard-hearted about many things, something in me feels uncomfortable.  A child in my class was seriously ill a while ago, and that made me wonder a bit more about the meaning of it all - and what was really important.

I was listening to Savage Garden’s “Crash and Burn” the other day, and it made me feel good - like there was really love and compassion somewhere in the world, and that felt important and warm. A bit like when I was sitting out the back of my place the other night and watching the stars - how small I felt, and yet how much a part of it all.  The universe is so much beyond what I’ve seen and understood so far!

During Lent and Easter I heard through our school and a couple of times at church, something about death and re-birth, something that felt like it might make some sense to me when I’ve got time to spend thinking about it a bit.  I know there are things in me I need to work on, as a person you know, but a fair bit of my time is spent trying to be a better teacher at the moment, and also just coping with a couple of the parents who regularly get up my nose.  God give me strength!  There, I said God again!! I wonder is there something to all this religious story......the world is so messy and violent, I wonder what difference it makes anyway - after all this religious caper has been round a long time and doesn’t seem to have made much difference.

The ones I hear quoting God the most are the powerful and the violent! (Like the US General praising his troops after Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan recently.)

I don’t want to sound mean, but when I think of the church, I often think of people comfortably following their practices and beliefs, doing some kindnesses here and there, but generally living pretty comfortable lives - you know, with their four-wheel drives, their 81 cm tvs, their share portfolios, and their locked doors.  Even those who enter the church more full-time - seem to live a pretty comfortable life from what I can see - they are an interesting curiosity, but not many of them are significant in my life.  Some nuns I know do fantastic work, but there are others, clergy and others who don’t seem to be too happy in what they are doing.

I’m not sure what I think they should be like, but my sense of Jesus is that he was a person on the edge.  He pointed out the boundaries for us, so that we can learn well where our limits need to be.  He gave what I think are some pretty sound guidelines for good living - and then encouraged us to grow into and beyond these.  The guidelines as far as I can see were just to help us get started.  You know what I mean.  Like, when we grow up a bit, we look at some of the rules our family had when we were young - they made sense then and we trusted them, but as I’ve got older, I don’t seem to need these rules as much, and I can even see where they needed to be improved a bit.  Maybe one day I won’t need these rules at all - I wonder!

In the meantime of course, I’m busy teaching the children some of these rules and some others I’ve learnt, so that they can have a strong starting point for their lives.  Some of them seem to lack all sense of boundaries, and are lost.  Especially some of our older kids, seem to be saying to me and others, “Even though we’re pushing and challenging the boundaries you set for us, please don’t let them fall over” - I have a sense that they need them for their own safety - at least for the next few years.

Looking back, feeling safe and belonging, and protected, was really important to me as I went through school - even though I rebelled a bit - I knew there was a safe place to come back to.  I hope my students feel the same way.

The guidelines that Jesus suggested to us, really need to be understood and explored and worked on I think.  Maybe that’s the church’s job, to work on these guidelines with us and help us find our way through them.  When it’s all boiled down, there are only a few central things that he was on about, which he kept putting in all sorts of different and interesting ways.  Love, forgiveness, justice, gentleness, truth and so on - all things I know deep down that we all think are important, regardless of our religion or beliefs or lack of religious beliefs. 

It’s like we have to take these guidelines as each new group of students comes along, and learn them all over again, ‘cos every time I look around, there is a new language, a new set of pressures, a change in the family structure among our students, a new economic situation facing the kids when they leave school and so on....so I think maybe, it’s not good enough just to keep repeating Jesus’ teachings and then expecting the kids to pick them up and run with them.  I think it would be good for us to listen for what’s going on in the kids’ lives and then name the points of connection between them and Jesus’ teachings, and seeing if they can find a bit of hope, or a bit of meaning, or a bit of purpose there. 

I think one of his great things, was that he made contact with people, and they felt loved, or challenged, or encouraged, or healed or forgiven, or had their eyes opened to new perspectives  when they met him.  Wouldn’t it be good if my students felt like that when I’d finished with them!!!  Wouldn’t it be good if I felt like that when I heard the church doing its thing.  Now and then I do, but often enough the connections don’t happen for some reason. 

Back to me and my religion for a moment.  Now that I think about it, when I hear Jesus and his teachings, I do feel that I connect in some deep way with him - sometimes I feel a bit unsure as to how close to get to him, ‘cos his teachings are often a bit uncomfortable, and when I’m quiet and listening and bit more fair dinkum, (don’t you just squirm when John Howard uses that phrase! - He never quite sounds like he’s comfortable with it!), I know that Jesus meant for the world to   improve, and for us to take a hand in it, and for that to happen some things will always need to change.  Sometimes though, it might mean that I just do what I do with new spirit and energy and love - that might help a bit I suppose.

Now that I’m thinking a bit more about it, it’s hard to live the gospel in a world where everything seems to be about getting ahead, about beating the next person to that job, about building a nest-egg for my future, about finding security, about having a few comforts along the way.  It’s all about me, my culture - all about ego, about popularity, image and wealth.  We seem to  admire  relationships that are built on wealth, ego, image and power.  Jesus was the opposite - he kept telling us to let things be, to hold things lightly and let them go when it was time, to give, love and forgive, rather than to hold, fight and squirm our way up the ladder. 

If I listen to him I’ll never feature in “New Idea” - Damn it all!

It’s so hard not to become a casualty of this ego-ridden system, to play the game, to get on board - even as a Catholic in a Catholic school, I find we compete with each other, our union insists on our rights, and sometimes fails to give equal weight to our responsibilities.  We’re often “us” working against “them” - and then we try and teach religion! Far out!  Something aches in me when our school becomes a competitive bunch of departments or groupings, instead of a community - our motto says we are a community - but sometimes our faces don’t!

Why am I thinking about all this now?  I had a really strong grounding now that I think about it, and as a child really loved God very much.  I loved receiving Jesus in Communion as we called it, and I felt safe and on my way to heaven well and truly.  I was fascinated by the idea that we live on after we die!  Now sometimes I am reminded by my colleagues and my students that such a simple faith is still possible.  Sometimes I wonder whether life before death is possible at all, let alone after - it all becomes so competitive and harsh and unyielding, and task driven.   I have to be able to name a strategy and an expected outcome for just about every inch of the journey.

If I am serious about being a person of faith, then what Jesus says can get me started again maybe even if I’m not all that religious in a sense.  Even while I am teaching the guidelines and practices to the children, I can see that they are good starting points - good babysitters if you like, and now that I have questioned them a bit, I believe differently somehow, and the rules, while they are still there, are not the first place I look anymore. (Gal 3,24) It’s a bit like Jesus rising form the tomb - I’ve started to learn to rise from the tomb of the rules and regulations and really live a bit.  It was important to be in the tomb for a while, just to get my legs, but now I can move on.  You can’t rise form the tomb unless you’ve been in it eh!

When I look at the church, I see some people who have no time for the rules or the boundaries - they’ve never been in the tomb, and as a result they don’t know who they are.  They are not that effective as teachers either - the kids never know where they stand with them - they seem to stand for nothing. 

Then there are at the other end of the scale, people for whom the rules are everything - all they know is rules - at least they know where they stand, but in the end that’s all they do - stand!  They never rise from the tomb - and after a while it doesn’t smell so good in there!

I read the other day, “There is an essential sequencing between authority and freedom, between boundaries and knowing how and when to move beyond boundaries, between tombs and resurrections.”^[1] That made sense to me - a healthy tension between the tomb and the open air!  If you’ve never been in the tomb, you’ll never appreciate the space afterwards or know what to do with it!

Another way of saying it might be that you need the rules before you know how to break them, or as the Dalai Lama once put it “Learn the law very well, so you will know how to disobey it properly”.  I think I read something that St Thomas Aquinas said like that once too - so there is a wisdom that I might grow into if I learn to listen and wait, and understand when the right time is to leave the tomb, to move beyond the rules and structures, and still honour their place in my life.

Maybe then I can really teach and become a part of the church that really teaches, rather than simply preaches at people!

“Christ is Risen” we all cry at the Eucharist and with extra bells and whistles at Easter time. If we don’t learn ourselves how to go into the tomb, to place ourselves humbly before the universe, before the enormity of history, and I guess before God, then we’ll never learn to rise from the dead.  We’ll be just like all the others for whom power, prestige and possessions are all they seek.  These things all have to stay in the tomb if I am to rise from the dead, and realise that my life is about something bigger than my own self!

This is not a religious perspective only, it’s something deeply human and deeply born of common sense.

My own sense of what’s important seems to be not much different that what Jesus reckoned was important and precious and necessary.  That feeling of value and safety and purpose I had as a child just blew through my heart again...........Amen.