Last week the Church celebrated the feast of St. Augustine, the great convert and doctor of the Church. I first read his Confessions in my undergraduate studies as part of a philosophy course I was taking. My first read of the text, then, was with the eyes of a student, and I can say with certainty that I learned much from this great scholar. The pages revealed to me a man yearning to find God, engaged with all the strength of his being in overcoming his passions, or rather, reorienting them and directing them, along with his whole mind and will, toward the pursuit of His Maker. As students, of course, we examined the philosophical aspects of his writing as part of the larger history of philosophy, but what has stuck with me in the intervening years is not so much the particular details of Augustine’s thought as it is the deeper truths that life has revealed over time: that saints do not spring from the womb perfectly virtuous but rather God makes great saints out of great sinners; that His Word can pierce and transfix our hearts at just the right time and in just the right way; the power of a mother’s love, prayer, and perseverance; the intensity with which we must pursue God and the love and gratitude that He is owed.
A few years ago, the book club I was part of decided to read St. Augustine’s Confessions. I was excited to revisit it and remind myself of the beautiful truths it contains, but not in any way prepared for how differently I would see it some fifteen years after my first read. Reading this text with the eyes of a teacher was an almost entirely new experience. Even now, I still have the sticky notes in my edition with my various thoughts and reactions. In the first book alone I jotted down a variety of notes about the importance of balancing play and discipline in the classroom, of studying topics at the appropriate age, of giving students literature that holds up good examples for them to follow and of the foundational role of imitation in forming hearts and minds.
Yet those beautiful truths that I first gleaned from this text when I was a student are still a part of my being. And this brings me to the crux of the matter: that Truth is infinite because God is Truth. He speaks to us throughout our lives, sometimes in new ways, but often and perhaps most effectively in helping us come to a new and deeper understanding of something already familiar.
I write this at the beginning of a new school year as a reminder, or perhaps a reassurance, that our students will form a unique and ongoing relationship with the things they read. Not that truth is relative; there are certainly objective truths present in the texts we read together that I want my students to encounter. But how they know and understand those ideas will grow and develop over time and ultimately form who they are and how they see the world.
As teachers, we can easily fall prey to the illusion of being “done” or of fretting over whether we have “covered all the material.” The more we can see that the great works of the tradition will be teaching our students in new ways for the rest of their lives, that the work of education is never “done,” the more free we are simply to delight in the present and let God work in His own time in our hearts and minds and in those of our students.
My prayer for teachers as a new school year begins is that we may be ever open to new ways of seeing. May our teaching and learning be ever inspired by the yearning that seeks rest only in God.
St. Augustine, pray for us!