I’m continually amazed by how much truth is nestled in a short student’s prayer traditionally attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. Every semester I begin each of my classes with the prayer and have my students pick out one of the things the prayer asks for that would be particularly helpful for the course they are taking. It allows them to dwell on the prayers words for a bit longer and gives me a sense of what they think our course will be like. Last week, I was struck by two parts of the prayer and convicted by another.
A lot of the students asked for “keen understanding,” and in the past I have emphasized that the word “keen” means sharp and asked them to unpack why they might want to think of their understanding as being honed like a knife. It was only this semester, however, that I understood what keen understanding might denote. Sharp understanding will be able to divide the subject matter under investigation into smaller more manageable chunks and will maintain the kind of precision and exactness that correct understanding demands. If your understanding instrument is dull, however, you’re in danger of destroying the thing you were studying. It’s not just that your understanding won’t be exact; it is that you will actually destroy the thing you are trying to preserve in your mind. You will mar it. This warning about the destructive potential of our own imprecise understanding was a good reminder at the beginning of the semester. When we purposefully exclude God from our Academic investigations, we inevitably dull our understanding instrument and guarantee we can never understand what we are studying fully.
Another request that students typically make is for the “ability to express themselves with thoroughness and charm”. This semester, I really felt the way in which thoroughness and charm complement one another. We don’t want to be superficial, and we don’t want to be rude. Thoroughness and charm are antidotes to those expressive ailments. But what I hadn’t noticed is the way that thoroughness prevents charm from being extreme and leading to deceit, or the way that charm prevents thoroughness from simply being and OCD-fueled laundry list of ills rather than a substantive and stylish message. I tend to use rhetorical charm as a cover for not being thorough, and I tend to tell myself that through and this is a good excuse for not having to be stylish. The prayer asks for both, and wisely instructs us to seek God for both of them in tandem.
Finally, I was again convicted by the first request made in the prayer: not for God to give something but instead for God to take something away. In asking for God to take away ignorance, we acknowledge that we do not know things. That seems obvious enough and does not necessarily entail any responsibility on our part. We were born ignorant, and as a result we do not have the awareness we need on around. Education is necessary. We have to be taught what we need to know. But to admit that our sin is an impediment to our learning is something else altogether. It says that one of the problems with our learning properly is our will. We could know the truth and not want to believe it. We could consciously mangle the truth, misinterpret it so that the truth says something it shouldn’t. Finally we could sincerely want to know the truth but because of sin we are blinded to it. All three of these scenarios as possible and for any true students who would knowledges that every good and perfect gift comes from God, the best gift can be the gift of salvation which is to say the removal of our sin that prevents us from learning.
I pray that I will return to these reminders I to find what God has for me in my teaching. I will also pray that he keeps my understanding instrument sharp, grants me not simply thoroughness but also charm, and that he takes away the sin and ignorance that so often limits my teaching.