I appreciate retreats and conferences because they are a
great opportunity for educators to stand back and take stock in the wonderful
chaos that we call teaching. It’s beneficial every now and then to hit pause in
order to take stock and take notice of the little things we do every day
without even acknowledging them. It’s nice to be able to stop, talk, and know
we are not alone in our instances we previously believed to be unique to us.
Every day at the start of seventh period at U of D Jesuit,
we stop for the daily examen that always ends with the prayer for generosity. If
you’re like me and most of my students, by now you can probably open your
mouth, have the entire prayer pour out in a trained and robotic manner, and you
didn’t even have to put forward any actual thought into the prayer at all. In
keeping with a retreat and conference theme, I’d like to take a moment to stop
and think about a prayer we say every day automatically without stopping to notice
what is actually being said.
The words are:
Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.
“Lord,”
This one word is easy to forget. Sometimes, I feel like this
one word comes on over the PA and it might as well be “Ready, Set, Pray!” How
many times does only one person say “Lord” while everyone else just continues
the rest of the line? The first lines are not “Teach me to be generous”; we
first need to address the prayer to our God. Who are we talking to if not our
God? The words “teach me to be generous” are not addressed to ourselves or the
universe. There is someone else we need first and without him, we can’t do
anything that follows.
“Teach me to be generous.”
The word generous to most outside of an educational setting
has to do with money. Maybe I should give a dollar to the guy on the corner of
8 Mile and Woodward. Maybe I should donate more as an alum of the school. But
for us, we know there is way more that can be given: our time to plan and
assess every little activity, our mornings battling copy machines and downing
coffee in preparation for the day, our lunch hours scarfing down a salad
because you told a student you’d be available for help, our evenings at the
coffee table grading essays during Grey’s
Anatomy, our Saturday nights to football games and dances, and even more:
our dating lives, our hair, our sanity in general. As teachers, we know what it
means to give, yet the prayer still asks us to be taught generosity. “Teach me”
is the common theme in this prayer. But this is not a grad school class you can
get through by just looking at chapter summaries, this is not a unit plan you
can download off of teacherspayteachers.com. This is something that you are
asking God for help with: am I doing this right? Am I truly being generous?
“Teach me to serve as you deserve”
This is not asking for a resume list of service activities
to get into a good college. This is not asking for total commitment in order to
be next in line for sainthood. This is asking to serve as God deserves our
talents to be used. At our schools, we often hear the word “magis” being used
freely. But just doing “more” is not truly what it means. If I already have the
fall play, a literary magazine, and the forensics team on my plate, that doesn’t
mean I need to add more to be fulfilling the magis. I need to serve and do my
best with what I have, dedicate my utmost to those before me, and not just serve
the school by half-heartedly attaching my name to a million clubs and
committees I will have no time for.
“to give and not to count the cost”
This is a hard one. It’s easy to rack up the cost being at
school has on our daily lives: the hours preparing, planning, instructing,
assessing, driving. It all adds up. But we do not give our time so we can hand
someone a bill at the pearly gates saying, “Look here, this is what I deserve
in retribution.” We do not boast about how I spent more time grading than you,
we do not complain about how my play practice ran longer than football. If we
do we are looking for something in return that we will not be getting. Being
truly generous does not mean receiving praise or accolades in return. We give
because we know it’s the right thing to do.
“to fight and not to heed the wounds”
It’d be very easy to look at my battle scars and question my
very purpose at this school. There always seems to be a battle going on: from
students who won’t do homework to students who want to receive points in the
gradebook for every activity they perform, from parents who will never respond
even if it’s to help their son to the nasty parent emails that scold you for
not doing enough to fix their kid, from struggling with Microsoft Word to get
your curriculum grids formatted just so to the colleague who sees no value in
your department meeting activity and flatly dismisses it, from trying to
inspire boys to submit creative writing and art to a literary magazine for
publication to teenage girls who text everyone about your horrendous fall play casting
decisions or start a coup and go to Salvation Army when the costumes you assign
are not form fitting enough for them. We do not stop and lick our wounds on the
sidelines. We adjust, we keep moving, and we become stronger along the way for
it.
“to toil and not to seek for rest”
We do retreats, we take on clubs, we join committees, we
attend professional development, we go straight from two weeks of fall play
technical rehearsals and shows to an all-day book signing to a plane that takes
us to an intensive leadership seminar. We go to home games; we drive 45 minutes
to un-ending cross country meets to see one student’s leg for 30 seconds on his
lap. We hit up all levels of athletics because each team is represented by a
student sitting in our desks. You want to quit and go home and put on Netflix,
but then a young man invites you to his Eagle Scout ceremony and you drop
everything to support him. We do not rest because that is not something it is
in our nature to do.
“to labor and not to ask for reward”
Sure, it would be nice to get teacher of the year or super
awesome presents at Christmas or in June, but these don’t always come and we
continue to work anyway. We don’t need printed certificates or stickers or
paperweights to keep doing our job because we know there is something better
out there, a larger purpose at work.
“save that of knowing that I do your will.”
And that’s what this is really all about: doing God’s will.
As educators, we are put here not to claim our own glory but to help our
students claim theirs. We don’t sacrifice for ourselves; we live the life that
Jesus taught us by giving up of ourselves in service of others. And we do get
rewards in some ways that make it all worth it: giving a student confidence
from an excellent show production after eight weeks of practice, making a student
proud to write poetry and let his classmates know it, providing a student a
sense of accomplishment by helping him finally earn that C. We live to serve
our students, and by doing so we live out God’s will.
Maybe next time you say this prayer, you will stop and think
about the words instead of just spitting out the phrases so you can start your
next class. Life gets busy back in the real world, but don’t forget the essence
of retreats and conferences to stop and listen and think.
In the famous words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty
fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” It’s
easy to get caught up in our lives or be too focused on an end goal. By doing
so, you miss the magic of the world around you. Here is a video to share what’s
been going on at our school for these first two months as a subtle reminder of
what it’s really all about.
Song: “Life’s Been Good”, Daniel Portis-Cathers
Have you taken the time to count your blessings?
Life's been good, life's been good.
Have you noticed how many times you've been rewarded?
Life's been good, oh, so good
You look up, look around
Why, there's no reason to be cast down
You work hard, to be sure
So now be happy while you stand secure
Have you taken the time to count your blessings?
Life's been good, oh, life's been good
You look up, look around
Why, there's no reason to be cast down
You work hard, to be sure
So now be happy while you stand secure
Have you taken the time to count your blessings?
Life's been good, oh, life's been good
Life's been good, oh, so good
