P R A Y I N G W I T H T H E C H U R C H
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INTENTION : |
That all teachers may know how to communicate love of the truth and instill authentic moral and spiritual values.
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Perhaps one of the questions most discussed in our century and our world today is education, teaching and learningˇK We scarcely feel certain of choosing the word to describe it, still less do we agree about the most suitable methodology, about the hierarchy of objectives, about the priorities of the values involved in it! It is a subject for great intellectual, political and economic discussions in some parts of the world, and a subject glaringly absent in others. Millions of illiterate women, millions of children without education, millions of schools destroyed by warˇK.
While in Europe we have heated debates on the advantages and disadvantages of applying the Bologna agreements on higher education, thousands of children in Africa walk barefoot for hours to attend school. But wherever the place may be, we meet the figure of the teacher, the educator: in the west, a figure who has suffered an alarming devaluation and a progressive lack of recognition, for whom the Pope invites us to pray, and to pray something very specific - that s/he may know how to convey love and truth. For education is not solely, or chiefly, instruction, transmission of information, but care for an individual person whom we look at every day, and to whom we want to offer something more than a collection of information directed only to the head.
The teacher has to take on a mission as valuable as it is difficult. Each life is a potential history and the possibility of a new world in the making. We do not know the influence that each person who comes to our classrooms may have in our society. It is possible to hold back and crush this future, or to support it, foster it and leave it open.
The challenge to the teacher is growing: to teach to learn, teach to think, teach to discern, to integrate; to mature his or her own conscience to the point of being able to teach love of truth. And for that s/he has to be able to arouse desire to know about things and about life, has to be able to introduce the pupil into reality and invite him or her both to immersion in the mysterious inner world of each one, and to openness to the mystery of the world and of the other person; to educate men and women who are passionate about seeking truth. Not philosophical truth, not truth considered as a selection of contents imposed on others, but the truth offered by the Gospel, which is inseparable from love, which is shown in the close coherence between doing and saying, between knowing and working, in the testimony of a life which exists in order to be for others.
Certainly there are ample reasons to pray for teachers. To them is entrusted the difficult task of journeying towards this truth, showing that it is lovable, which is to say, arousing fascination with it to the point where truth itself shapes the one who seeks it, in such a way that s/he feels impelled to put it into action, with joy and happiness. This truth has been revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Only this truth is lovable, worthy of faith, way and life. And finally it is only the Spirit who can guide us towards it.
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