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“The Lasallian Educator: A Teacher’s Perspective”

By John Sudol - St. Raymond High School for Boys - Bronx, NY

When asked to give a speech on what I believed it meant to be a LaSallian educator, I thought it natural first to seek inspiration from the examples of our own patron saints. And, after some research, I was immediately struck by the works of St. Raymond Nonnatus: he had gone to Algeria in the thirteenth century to liberate captive Christians and, when the money for his cause had run out, offered his own life in its stead. His reward at the hands of his captors was humiliation, torture, and eventually the fettering of his lips with a padlock such that he could not preach the Word of God. Here was an individual who had gone into a foreign land, armed with nothing more than his piety and his zeal, gave his all for his fellow man and, with no one else there to support or rescue him, was prevented from doing the one thing he did best – teaching – by those who simply could not recognize the nobility of his mission.

I wonder if this sounds at all familiar to any of us. As LaSallian educators, we pour the entirety of ourselves into our interactions with our students and, if we are fortunate, we may ransom a captive mind, liberate a heavy heart, or lift a wounded spirit. But sometimes we may feel just like St. Raymond toward the end of his life and thus ask ourselves, “from where do I draw the strength to go on?”

You might be surprised to discover that St. De La Salle himself had these same doubts. “If God had revealed to me the good that could be accomplished by this institute,” he said, referring to the school he had established for underprivileged children, “and had likewise made known to me the trials and sufferings which would accompany it, my courage would have failed me, and I would never have undertaken it.” Yet, undertake such a course of action he did and, as a result, left a legacy of charity and perseverance that resonates with us today.

Who was St. De La Salle? He was born in 1651 to wealthy parents who saw to his every need as a child and encouraged him to enter the profession of law. Nonetheless, feeling an early calling to the church and moved by the plight of the poor around him, he abandoned his parents’ home after their death, renounced his own wealth, moved into residence with those teachers who would become part of the nascent Christian Brothers movement, and set to work on providing both academic enrichment and vocational training to the most delinquent and underprivileged children of his native France.

What allowed St. La Salle to both embrace an existence of austerity and challenge and to affect such change in the lives of so many? The observations of a Monsieur Lechassier, superior general of the Congregation of Saint-Sulpice, might enlighten us on this point: “De la Salle was a constant observer of the rule. His conversation was always pleasing and above reproach. He seems never to have given offence to any one, nor to have incurred anyone's censure.” Here was a teacher’s teacher: someone gentle, but firm; someone who always thought the best of those around him and, consequently, drew out the best qualities they had to offer as individuals; someone who sought first to understand before being understood; someone who lived by the Golden Rule in the knowledge that others would adhere to it were it modeled for them. As a result, St. De La Salle succeeded in creating a network of schools throughout France that integrated religious instruction with secular subjects, prepared teachers with a sense of vocation and mission, and involved parents in their children’s lives.

We can and should learn much when looking back on the respective ministries of Saints Raymond Nonnatus and John Baptist De La Salle. Perhaps this might take shape in first understanding that our students, cut from the same cloth as those children to whom St. De La Salle ministered in seventeenth-century France, do not have either appropriate role models or funds of knowledge (or both) and rely upon us to provide these, whether they understand this or not. Maybe this means that we must have patience in lieu of our students’ appropriate knowledge of social mores while endeavoring to draw them ever closer to the teachings of Christ. Such a ministry might even lead us to subsume our own preconceptions of our role within our respective ministries and hold that our first and foremost responsibility is to the education of the young men of St. Raymond’s as whole persons, rather than compartmentalizing (and therefore minimizing) them as “behavior problems,” “lazy,” or “basically unintelligent.”

Saints Raymond and De La Salle believed to the end of their lives that every student, every individual, had the chance to learn and succeed by the efforts of man and by the grace of God. May we all inculcate the patience, perseverance, and understanding of these men such that we may truly prove to be Lasallian educators.