Do we all have a responsibility for the spiritual development of others or is this responsibility limited to professionals? Is spiritual development linked to religious education? Is it even a general non-religious term?

These are real enough questions for parents and educators who have to contend with world views which separate the spiritual domain from the secular and who may themselves assume such a separation to be the case. I would like to offer the point of view that all parents and educators have a responsibility to help the children of God to develop spiritually.

We all recognize that there is a distinction between what is cognitive, intellectual and rational about faith, and what transcends that. Teachers of Religious education know there is an assessable content, even assessable behaviour, but they also know that religious education in a Catholic school deals with a faith which is the personal knowledge of divine love as disclosed in the life of Jesus. While it corresponds to reason, it is responded to in hope (the possibility of finding meaning) and is lived out in action which, though it begins in oneself, then goes out to others. This is charity.

It is this faith, hope and charity of the non-assessable kind which forms the content of spiritual development and which all who believe in Jesus are called upon to develop in others. This is what mission is about.

Parents, then, will be the prime spiritual directors of their children. The Church needs to be engaged in the task of helping parents to do this better. Teachers and other adults associated with school (this lets in bursars, office personnel and other support persons) come at least second.

If spiritual development is not the same as religious education, then it will happen differently. I would like to put a case for osmosis. Teachers who rely on this fail in their task.. Knowledge of the cognitive, rational kind does not transfer by osmosis. A teacher with all the degrees in the world will not transform a class into a class of university graduates by dint of that fact. But put a person of simple goodness and profound faith in their midst, and something happens. Countless stories in the annals of Christianity testify to that. Faith, hope and charity are transcendent and catching! So, the first task in discharging our responsibility is to be holy, good, faithful and to love God; use whatever synonyms one likes.

The second difference between spiritual development and religious education is the most important one, but we forget it so easily. Yet, what a relief to accept it as true - ‘He whose power is at work in us...’ (Eph 3:20). Paul screams it out in his letters! While education undeniably includes the efforts of the educand, spiritual development is not essentially dependent on that effort. A better definition of spirituality might be ‘what God is doing to us’. Let us freely recognize and give thanks for a Father who calls young people, confirms them in holiness, makes them blameless, perfects them; and for a Son who redeems, directs them to his Father,, models life for them and continues to offer fullness of life through the sacraments; and for the Spirit who sanctifies, makes his home in them, gives life, freedom, holiness and personal charisma. Our next task is to actually have that daily-lived awareness that life is grace. If one is Christian and believes in the grace that Jesus revealed, then one cannot cloud over the recognition of God as giver of life. He does not suddenly cease to give life between the difficult adolescent years of 12 and 19.

I do not remember any specifics of my learning at Year 7, 8 or 9, but I clearly recall my teachers and details of their presence to me. Whether they knew it or not they were my spiritual directors. In fact, from the narrow vision of the child, I suspect that they were not seen simply as part of the Church or of God’s People. They were it! They were all God had to offer, along with my family. A sobering thought?

WHICH PUTS ME ON NOTICE IF GOD IS TO BE NOTICED

I am seized by a conviction that, on the face of it, is naive. It is the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth is alive and well in our struggling existences, creating the ‘new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth’ (Eph 4:24).

Is there anything odd about such a conviction? Well, yes! We are pretty much aware of our failures. Who amongst us has not made a dismal mess of some situation: a class, a confrontation, a falling-out with someone? We can and more often than not do look at our failures. Is it not a scandal that we assert on the one hand that Jesus’ Good News has come as ‘power, and as the Holy Spirit, and as utter conviction’ amongst us, while on the other hand we can point to the poor response of so many: proposals rejected, an increasing falling-away in faith practice, the expressed opposition to the message of Jesus?

Yes, it is a scandal, but no different from that experienced by two disciples as they left Jerusalem, the whole Jesus-scheme wrecked around them, the victim himself hanging powerless on a cross. What victory could be claimed there? And yet the two on that road were seized with a conviction because Jesus became present amongst them, and as a result of finally recognizing him they were challenged to reappraise his life; what he said, what he did and how he lived. Once they returned to the practice of Jesus’ life, they realized there were not two Jesuses. There was not a risen Jesus and a Jesus of Nazareth. The only Jesus they knew was the human being they had followed and listened to. He now seized them in faith, and for the first time in the history of the church we had a spirituality.

A spirituality is nothing more than the personal assimilation of Jesus’ life and mission by a follower. The two disciples were challenged by the risen Lord to see God’s breaking in in this very negative way (seemingly) as a new call, a beginning - and we know how this response of theirs was followed by the response of the new community at Pentecost.

For anyone who would educate as a Christian today, the key to effectiveness is personal holiness, a life founded on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. We need to live the Gospel call freshly. How can we live it freshly unless we have read it, pondered it, allowed it to challenge and change us? Jesus lived, taught, preached in a way that challenged the accepted ways of his society. In the parables, in the Sermon on the Mount, there are directives for us as to new ways of daily dealing with others. We cannot afford to ignore them or reduce them to simply human categories or systems. We cannot.

TO MAKE HOLY THE WORLD

It is not so common, these days, to find pictures of the saints hanging from our walls. Not that our respect for the saints has changed, but our taste in decoration has. I have recollections from my youth of many saints who ruled from their privileged positions on the walls of various establishments.

Personal holiness is an essential element in the way of life of an educator. In view of the all-too-common perspective that a saint is someone very different, it is appropriate to ask: in what do holiness and sanctity consist?

We can fall into the error of allowing a single historical period to colour our opinion and our theology. Our own period is understandably a major influence on us, but it is not the whole story. Holiness belongs to no specific era but to the entire history of human endeavour under God’s grace. While the last few centuries have produced a whole galaxy of saints, the concept belongs as far back as Old Testament times. Certain Old Testament heroes were not known for their moral perfection at all times - Moses, David, Jeremiah, to name but three - yet the Hebrew language unashamedly calls them ‘Saints of the Most High’ (Dan 7:18). Essentially, they were called by God.

The New Israel, Christ’s followers, came to be known as the ‘dedicated ones’ (Acts 9:13). Not all would have qualified for haloes, but they acknowledged that sinners though they were, the grace of Jesus Christ was busy within them forgiving, strengthening, transforming. Paul had little hesitation in referring to many of his co-workers as being amongst the saints; if you accepted Jesus Christ as your Saviour then nothing, Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans, ‘can separate us from the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ’ (Rom 8:39). The end result was logical for Paul: one’s very presence made holy the world.

So many of us can, in some small way, make holy the world around us. We should be convinced that making holy the world is not to be left to a Pope John or a Mother Teresa. We are called to a holiness which is not for our own sake, but to make holy the world - which includes the machine shop and the playground. We may even be sick at home; it matters little. Holiness does not float above the world. We who share Christ’s being share in his holiness and are the sacred touch that gets to work on the world wherever we meet it. A smile at the right time, quiet attention to the job, vigorous involvement in a game. It can be as much a touch of God’s presence in the world as anything.

TO PRAY

Prayer as belonging to one’s quality as a human being before it belongs to anything else; prayer being what one is rather than what one does; prayer being presence to oneself, God, others - and in that precise order! Those sorts of realizations seem to touch a nerve. To look at the matter simply, we would want to claim that somehow as Christian teachers, parents and helpers along the way, we have enabled others to pray and to have an encounter with God. That is not a denominational issue - only Catholics may apply! In itself it has little to do with sacraments, priests, prayers or one or other kind of spirituality. Of itself, I say. Clearly all those other matters can have a bearing. But what is this experience of God, this noticing of God, this encounter with him?

Of course, I am talking about prayer, but inviting the reader not to jump to the usual conclusions too quickly - for the conclusions are often of this kind:

I am not very good at prayer myself...time....knowing how.....feeling a bit dry.

It’s a bit hard to teach...it should be caught from an early age...a bit late now to do much about it.

I haven’t had much that I could personally label as encounter with God.

I’m afraid I’m in the grip of the ‘nothing will ever happen’ feeling about prayer.

It may all be true, but it should not engender thoughts of hopelessness about prayer. A few simple things about prayer are very clear to me, and I offer them for consideration.

1. We have a responsibility which we may not shirk to help others to pray, in particular our young people. We should be seeking to pass on a skill that is authentic - so that it will be recognized as true.

2. Prayer will only ever be true if it begins as inner attention. This is real ‘noticing’. This presence to oneself can lead to God; it has a very strong scriptural warrant for doing so. But the guarantee that it will do so is on God’s side, not ours. Let’s not make prayer too much of a mental effort until God gives us the grace to do so willingly.

3. Jesus at prayer was the one going out to meet the One who was coming to meet him. This is not meant to be a vague and confused image. Jesus named the One as Father, and the meeting that the image implies was so vivid for those first followers of Jesus that it directly associated the man Jesus with the God that he named as Father. The New Testament witness to Jesus as divine is more a witness to moments of prayer (Jesus seeking the Father, the Father seeking Jesus) than it is a carefully worded theology. We can learn much about prayer from the New Testament; much about the ways that Jesus noticed his Father, other than the chapter containing the Our Father.

There are methods of prayer, of course. But the methods are not the prayer. The way you are is your prayer. Let your method call your attention to that. Set out on an imaginary road, hoping to meet God. You will meet a lot of others along the way. And, I do believe you will also meet Him coming towards you.

AND TO NOTICE MY NEIGHBOUR

A schoolyard never ceases to fascinate me. Hundreds of moving bodies. Hundreds of interesting histories criss-crossing in a universe of youthful exuberance. How easily we assume that most of these histories are strangers to one another. Not so! Look at it from this point of view. Human beings are really very self-aware creatures. Even alone in a crowd each of us is in continual dialogue with himself or herself. By just being us we are dramatising our existence to one another, hoping someone will notice. Every moment, even standing still, is a way of saying ‘This is me’.

Does it strike you just as strongly as it strikes me, then, that the only strangers in that schoolyard are the ones who have deliberately jammed the messages that their being sends out, or who themselves deliberately ignore the messages they receive?

Human beings are communicators first, and by nature; they are strangers second, and by deliberate choice. That kind of shakes you up a bit when you fully realize it. May each moment be for us a moment when we seek to build upon our God-given desire to be before another, which is another way of saying that we really believe we are important enough to be recognized by the other. And may each moment also be a moment for recognizing the other as important, simply because the other is experiencing what we are experiencing. May we be tempted to ask why this is so, and may we be open to the possibility that it is so because God made us for the same reason...He thought He was important, and wanted to address that to someone!

May none of us be strangers to one another. May we seek to remove any jamming from ourselves or others that give rise to the word ‘stranger’. There is much talk of peace. The gathering of a group of total strangers in the ancient city of Assissi by Pope John Paul II in 1986 was one of the most startling actions for peace the world has seen. Peace, in this gathering, emanated from a simple premiss: the simple openness of the spirit of St. Francis who was stranger to no being. Every being, even animal beings, can lead to contemplation of our importance to one another because we are important in the eyes of God.