Hope and the Teachable Student

Let’s begin with a familiar image of the Christian life: the image of a journey, or more specifically, a pilgrimage. It’s an image used frequently and carelessly enough to suffer the indignity of becoming a bit clichéd. But for ancient and medieval Christians, the picture of a pilgrim on the road was not merely an inspirational depiction of all that happens to us between birth and death as journey, or a pleasing narrative pattern imagining our path towards the Heavenly City. For writers such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante, the idea of Homo Viator - “man the traveller” or “man the wayfarer” - is an indispensable fact of human personhood. It’s an image that speaks to our nature, to the kind of creature we are. 

When ancient and medieval Christians describe man as a wayfarer, they are drawing our attention to the not-yet-ness of our nature. We have a true and immanent createdness as bearers of Christ’s Image, but it’s a createdness we are meant to grow into ever more deeply and fully. We aren’t there yet; we are becoming. Our fallenness has inflamed this condition, causing the Image we bear to become tarnished, and our growing in His likeness to become more difficult. We are not yet all that we are meant to be, and the becoming is a struggle. 

This not-yet-ness or wayfaringness is a property of all human beings, but it’s a property that is sometimes more viscerally apparent when we consider children and students. Children are in the process of becoming in many dimensions at once - taller, stronger, toothier, more literate, more independent, more self-controlled, more knowledgeable - and we speak of “growing pains” for good reason. Teachers and parents alike are present with children as they travel the sometimes grueling terrain between what they know and what they need to know, who they are, and who they are becoming. We are shepherds of their wayfaring, as well as wayfarers ourselves. 

I told Dr. Small that I wanted to talk about Hope, because while all of the traditional virtues (Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Faith, Hope, and Love) are entangled with and dependant upon one another, there is something about Hope that seems particularly relevant in the context of a school like ours, which is a community, not only of learners, but of wayfarers - pilgrims seeking to become more like Christ. School is neither the only nor the primary place where our Christ-likeness is brought to fullness, but as a fellowship of Christians committed to the care of children in their various states of not-yet-ness, we would do well to start a new school year considering the pilgrim virtue of Hope.

Built into the ancient understanding of virtue is the idea of hitting a mark or target. To be courageous is to hit the target between the vices of cowardice and recklessness. Hope as a virtue similarly involves hitting a mark, avoiding the vices of presumption and despair. We can think of despair as a deficiency, and presumption as an excess, but what these two vices have in common is that they both lead to an abandonment of the journey, a rejection of wayfaring. The despairing pilgrim can’t bring herself to go on. She ceases to believe in the goodness of the destination, or in her fitness for the journey. The presumptuous pilgrim assumes that he’s already arrived at a satisfactory destination. He can’t imagine that there’s much more to do or to be than what he currently does or is, and so he ceases to travel, apart perhaps from whatever personally ambitious sidequests he might undertake as a means of flexing his existing powers. But if we see our wayfaringness as part of how God has made and is making us, then we can see why presumption and despair are dangerous temptations, and why Hope is considered a virtue, a power that allows us to eschew vice and live in pursuit of our proper nature. Hope is the wayfaring virtue - the virtue of the one who says “yes” to his nature as a creature who is still travelling, still being made. 

It’s painful and vulnerable to be still in the making, to know that there’s a gap between who you are and who you are meant to be. Part of what can make the life of a student so challenging is that this gap is set before you so frequently. You don’t yet know anything about A, but you’ve come to school with a notion that the good student is the one who knows things, and so the topic of A is a minefield of potential shame. You thought you had some skill when it comes to B, but it turns out what you can do is very little, and you’re daunted by the prospect of all you have yet to learn. You were utterly mistaken about C and deeply resent those who have made this fact apparent. You see no reason why you should care about D, and yet you are expected to devote an entire 15 minutes of your week to reading about him. E and F are clearly not as intelligent or well-behaved as you are, and yet the adult in the room expects you to treat them with dignity, which is not very gratifying to you at all. Everyone else seems to master G pretty readily, but your progress is scarcely discernable. You are a master when it comes to H, but H doesn’t seem to carry the weight with others that you thought it would.

The life of a student (at least, the life of a teachable student) is difficult because it is inherently a life of repentance, of conversion, of heeding a call and turning from one thing towards a better, truer, fuller thing. Look, hold your scissors this way. That word may sound like it begins with an N, but for wonderful and mysterious reasons, it begins with a K. Behold: the mathematical nature of a circle. There’s more to this poem than meets the eye. There’s more to your teammate than his failure to block a goal. 

Over and over again, in big and little ways, the student is called to see, do, understand, and love things he has never seen, done, understood, or loved before. The nature of that call, regardless of the subject, is itself instructive. It is an invitation to take the next step - a beckoning that can only be heeded by those who are willing to be wayfarers. The call to learn is a daily and even hourly reminder of our pilgrim nature. The life of the student is in fact simply a human life, albeit distilled in a particularly intense way. But wherever good learning abounds, the repentances and conversions of the student who moves from not knowing towards knowing can become a truly formative exercise, strengthening the soul for its deeper labour, its longer pilgrimage.

A school is an institution built with the aim of helping students move from what they currently are towards what they might become, and while we want at St. Timothy’s to honour and love children as they are now, teachers and parents are nevertheless tasked with helping students navigate that inevitably painful process of becoming. We embrace their wayfaringness, and in doing so, model what they must do for themselves. We know this is not easy. It’s natural to flinch at the vulnerability of not knowing and not being what we’ve been called to know and to be. It’s natural too, to want to lean on our existing strengths and certainties. The temptations to despair and presumption are real. But the teachable student, the hopeful pilgrim, does not recoil from the reality of being still in the making.

I want to be clear that Hope as a theological virtue is not the same thing as confidence. Confidence is wonderful when it eases our burdens and adds to the joys of our tasks and interactions. We suffer, sometimes deeply, when we lack it, and it’s understandable that we long for our children and students to be confident - that we long to be confident ourselves. But confidence does not have the constancy of a true virtue. Its provenance is notoriously dubious: some people are born with or nurtured into seemingly boundless amounts of it, whether they deserve it or not, while others struggle their entire lives through the lack of it, in spite of abundant gifts and abilities. Any teacher can tell you that confidence bears no consistent relationship to actual competence or teachability, and human experience reveals that it is no adequate substitute for true courage or wisdom. 

Confidence can be a guardian of Hope as a witness against despair, or an enemy of Hope as a handmaiden of presumption, but it is not reliably either of these things, nor is it a dependable guide to journeying well. The absence of confidence does not absolve us from the duty to proceed rightly, nor does the presence of confidence absolve us from the need to proceed with discernment. Others suffer, sometimes deeply, when we take confidence as our guide.

All of this suggests that confidence is not something we ought to spend a lot of energy pursuing directly. It is not a reliable power, and its products are of unpredictable worth. Hope on the other hand, and the virtues and disciplines related to it -  courage, obedience, perseverance, humility - are worth pursuing because they accomplish something real and lasting. A rightful and beneficial confidence is likely to grow as a result of these more solid pursuits, but even if it doesn’t, the power to act rightly and to go on learning and becoming is of far greater worth. 

Hope is different too from any ambition or goal, however noble, that we might have for our students, or which they might have for themselves. A teacher might use the word “hope” when expressing her desire for a student to grasp long division or write coherently. A parent might use the word “hope” in regards to his child’s academic, professional, or social success. A student might be said to “hope” to excel in some sport or art. But Hope as a theological virtue is not directed towards the fulfillment of such ambitions. To work towards a worthy goal is a right and proper thing to do, but the virtue of Hope points far beyond the attainment of any goal we might have for ourselves or the children in our care, and it endures when the most cherished of such ambitions are thwarted. Hope is directed, not towards what we would make of ourselves and our students, but towards what God has made and is making - something we, in all our intentions and strivings, see only dimly.

Because they empower us to act rightly, disciplines and virtues like Hope do happen to be very useful as we pursue excellence in any sphere. But again - a child’s growing competence, mastery, and success, while in some ways very much the concerns of the teacher and the parent, are not ultimately the things Hope looks towards. We do look forward to the time when our students can read, and add, and sing on key, and keep their fingers out of their noses, and open their own yogurt cups, and move through life without direct supervision, and make friends, and write well, and have intelligent conversations about things we value, and pursue further education, and get good jobs, and become independent, and hold some standing in their communities, and have children of their own. But what if it takes much, much longer than expected for these things to happen? Or what if it turns out that an individual can never do some of these things, or any of them at all? 

Hope is not a privilege reserved for those with what we commonly think of as bright futures. It is a virtue befitting the worshipers of a God who does not make creatures and leave them without some way of being what He calls good. No matter how deficient in discernable talents or enviable opportunities, no matter how short of the ideals of a culture or a community, there will always be something good for the human person to do and to be. To hope is to say “yes” to that doing and being, even if they look nothing like what we might have chosen or envisioned as excellence. Hope is also the seemingly incongruous posture of those who, however successful and accomplished, hold their achievements lightly, and never cease longing to be more like the One whose infinite goodness is the beginning and end of our own. 

A school is inevitably a place where our wayfaringness is on display, but without that uncomfortable pilgrim quality, we could not become what God is making us to be. Hope is an assent to our creatureliness, a faithful “yes” to the ongoing journey of being created. It is an indispensable virtue for all who learn and all who teach, helping us navigate failures and accomplishments well by calling us to humility, reminding us that it is He who has made us, not we ourselves, and that He is making us still. My desire for St. Timothy’s is that we will be a community that wisely and joyfully tends to the not-yet-ness of our nature, in our students, and in one another. Let’s begin the school year together in pursuit of the pilgrim virtue of Hope. 

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I first began to consider Hope in relation to education thanks to A Theology of Reading, by Alan Jacobs. Also in the back of my mind as I was preparing this talk were Josef Pieper’s Faith, Hope, Love, which is a helpful introduction to the theological virtues as they’ve been understood in the western tradition, and Miroslav Volf’s The Cost of Ambition, which makes a valuable distinction between competitive striving and a hopeful pursuit of excellence.

Emily Martin is the Grade 2 homeroom and Grade 3 Language Arts teacher at St. Timothy's Classical Academy. She also fills the roles of Lower Grades Senior Teacher and Curriculum Lead. Emily lectured in Western Literature at Augustine College in Ottawa for many years.