Is There a Place For Our Questions?
Simone Riva—This year, school starts in a strange way. Recent news has raised a big question: Is there a place where our most profound questions are heard?
The bandwagon of teaching, programs, schedules, questions, and tests will resume inexorably. But will children, when they walk through the doors of classrooms, have to leave out something, or will they have a chance to be taken seriously in one piece?
The dramatic story of youth gun violence around the world, paradoxically, has allowed words often ignored in the places where people live every day: malaise, lack of freedom, loneliness, oppression, feeling of being a foreign body, restlessness-things that many authors throughout history have written and built upon by many authors throughout history, the same ones we study in school, often without encountering them.
We have managed to pigeonhole them among the depressed, in the grip of teenage questions, people who never grew up. Just think of the end of Giacomo Leopardi in so many books and in so many lessons. Yet how many friends could our boys have had if only someone had introduced them to each other?
Augustine, Montale, Pascal, Rilke, Pessoa, Sabato, Luzi, Gaudi, Wojtyla, Merini... the list could be endless, and we should also push to supplement it with other names: Simba La Rue, Capo Plaza, Baby Gang, Marracash, Ultimo, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish... Men and women who, taking themselves seriously and uncensored, have spoken out loud forbidden words like the ones we hear these days. Words we are afraid of are better relegated to the secrecy of some psychological listening so that they remain outside the classroom. In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI, speaking to teachers, at one point said, "The task of the teacher is not only to impart information or to provide technical preparation to bring benefits economic benefits to society; education is not and must never be considered as purely utilitarian. Rather, it is about forming human persons and preparing them to live life in fullness. In short, it is about educating for wisdom.
True wisdom is inseparable from the knowledge of the Creator because "in his hands are we and our words, every kind of knowledge and every operational ability' (Wis. 7:16)." Perhaps herein lies the reason why, in the classroom, certain questions are left out, because, if we let them in, it is necessary to put into account that, sooner or later, the One who put them in our hearts will also show up.
And who would be willing to come to terms with Him and His stubborn risk with each person's freedom? We thought of a rule for everything and procedures for every eventuality, but we know that no codes will hold before Him. This makes us afraid. One thing, however, has broken through these days with extraordinary disruption, and it used the tears on live TV of Don Claudio Burgio, chaplain of the ItalianBeccaria prison: mercy.
The 17-year-old from Paderno, as soon as he saw him, asked for confession. Don Claudio recounts that the only thing he was able to do was to take his hands, still scarred and wounded from the terrible act he had performed. In the gesture of Christ's hands taking ours - for that is what it is about -marked by all kinds of wounds, the secret of all life is hidden. This year, as we enter the classroom, someone will feel like taking themselves seriously without censure. We will find that a flood of friends is waiting for us.
The article was published in the Monza Journal. The author did not revise the translation of the article.
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