Obviously there is, or can be, care in our role as teachers; and if it encompasses the material needs of education, and is at all psychologically aware of what’s going on in the education process, and if it accommodates what Victor Frankl used to say is our instinctive and necessary need for a relationship with transcendance, then it is pastoral care. And obviously there are limits to this in loco parentis – we’re not the parents in the room, and we’re not psychotherapists, and we’re not priest-confessors. Nor are we Pals, or Friends.
Out in the state school system, if we manage these things well, we get called Mentors. In our Catholic school, I like to think of us as Companions.
In the manner of hospice companioning
In the manner of birth companioning
Like visiting the sick or the lonely
Like helping celebrate marriages
Being with people … truly present, not just there as consultant professionals
Companioning our students, or I should say accompanying them, I believe is the sine qua non of growing people into maturity. Without it, nothing besides the ability to write essays and do problem sets, happens. There is no growth. Nor will the essays or problem sets feel like they matter to those who learn how to do them.
Accompanying, even if the language and the interaction never departs from the teaching subject at hand, is the reason we remember our golden teachers. For me, it was Herr Zarr, at East High, back in the ‘seventies. It was Herr Zarr for hundreds of us there, especially the boys. As near as I can tell, I appear to be becoming a Herr Zarr. It’s why I tend not to have discipline problems in my room. It’s why kids come in and out of my room all day, before school and after, over lunch and during free periods, to do homework, or play board games, or just to BE; and they bring their friends. I only ever talk business with them, as Herr Zarr did, but they come, I think, so that they have someone they feel is accompanying them in their journey through school, which is to say mid-trajectory adolescence.
I can’t write down a job description for teacher-companion. But there are features. Good luck trying to make them into a formula. Good luck making it a system. If it is a system, I guess it’s a systemless system. So it’s hard to teach.
But it can be demonstrated.
In Notre Dame last summer I met Sr. Mariae Agnus Dei. She is a former neurosurgery intensive care nurse, and now belongs the Order of the Sisters of Life. They accompany women in their harrowing journeys through things like abusive marriages and abortion. She gave us a talk on what she does, and was gracious enough to speak with me after. She gave me vocabulary for Accompaniment, and she showed me how it’s done.
I was mesmerised by her. She is only the second person I have ever met who I believe was utterly transparent to the Spirit. Glenn Gould, the pianist, used to say there are two kinds of soloists: the kind who impress you with their virtuosity, and the kind who make themselves invisible, and connect you with the music. The latter give better concerts. Sr. Mariae is like this. (Note the grammar: she isn’t Maria, she is Lamb of God OF Mary, having given up entirely her former identity.) I was confused by how I felt around her. Was I in love? Not after 11 minutes of conversation with her, I wasn’t. I realised I was in love with the Holy Spirit, shining through her. I joked, and she indulged, that I just had to stand in her space.
She said this to us, if I can paraphrase a bit: For the intimacy of companionship, read ‘love’. Love is why each of us came to be. Love is what keeps us fed and housed. Babies who are held and cuddled do better in neonatal hospital. We receive our very Selves from the love of God, and like God, we’re made to love. So every heart cries, ‘Tell me I’m loved!’
She says that’s why we use the word, ‘Accompany’. It derives from Companio = sharer of bread, and for bread, read ‘life’. When we have imortant meetings, or when we go on dates, don’t we eat together?
I’ve realised that in the classroom just like everywhere else, our gracious acceptance of companionship from each other is the medium in which we mirror God. Yes, it takes time. Persistence has got to be the single most important factor on the ground in education. (Education, I mean, distinct from training.) It takes time, but it does create the environment in which we grow. People need people first, just to be people. It’s like claws being given to bears, so they can do beary things. Our relationships are not add-ons. They are essential before all else.
Thus accompanying our young charges in the classroom … It looks, in practical terms, like tenderness toward individuals’ lived experiences. We’re not reckless do-gooders, a phrase straight from Sr. Mariae. Accompaniment is considered, and recepptive, and generally very slow. It needs to match the pace, and it needs to match the direction, of the accompanied. I learned that long ago. When someone comes to me with a need, or a triumph, or any other kind of passage they need to make, I think, ‘Let it bleed’ … they will show me what they need when they’re ready. That way, our young people’s dependency on us, and their vulnerability, is not at odds with their dignity. Accompaniment is patient, and kind. It does not envy, or boast. It is not proud. And it does take time. The kids sense what we’re doing, and they open like roses.
I say to them, ‘Y’know, I don’t see you as people with souls … you are souls. There is mystery in the creation of each one of you, and we’re gonna let it come out.’ These young souls have bodies, sure. But in the classroom, in our mutual exploration of the things about creation that our bodies make present to us, I think we’re growing in ways unseen, merely and precisely because we’re doing it together, sharing physical space. We’re unmasking our imagined, occasionally counterfeit, conceptions of our Selves along the way. We have to be together to do it.
I draw on Irenaeus and on John Damascene here. If God is the uncaused cause of being, we are given the conceptual ability and the rational agency to do nothing less than co-create, with God and with each other. We’re formed in God’s image, but it’s in our lives together, and that includes school, that we children of God grow into his likeness.
That’s Accompaniment. I have said more than once in class, when kids remark that they like it in my room, ‘That’s because it’s a garden here. And while I can’t grow you –I can water you; and to the astute, when they ask eventually, I add yes, and I am also growing, with you.’