What Does A Lasallian Educator Do?
Luke Salm, FSC
Keynote Address
Christian Brothers Retreat House
St. Helena, California
February 12-14, 1988
The subject assigned to this presentation is:
What Does a Lasallian Educator Do? The answer is obvious: the Lasallian educator educates.
In an audience such as this, it might well be presumed that there is enough intelligence
and expertise to know all that implies.
The theme of the workshop is broader: Sharing the Lasallian Vision. How this presentation
relates to the theme may not be quite so obvious. There is that word Lasallian again. It
now enjoys a vogue that it did not have even a few years ago. Only recently have we been
able to agree on how to spell it. The word may now be in danger of becoming a buzz word
or, perhaps, a fuzz word. The word becomes even fuzzier when we speak of a Lasallian
vision. That envisions the visionary, the obscure, the ephemeral, the vision open to
annual revision.
The way out of this is to realize that the vision, if it is to be Lasallian, is rooted in
a tradition. Sharing the vision must, therefore, mean sharing the tradition. The most
recent General Chapters of the Brothers have tried to convince the Brothers that we do
have a tradition from the past and a vision for the future that are worth sharing. Now we
have to convince ourselves and our colleagues in the educational ministry that we are
willing to share the tradition and the vision.
The tradition is Lasallian because it is rooted in the life, the personality, the
accomplishments, and the writings of John Baptist de La Salle. The vision is Lasallian
because it is modeled on the vision of John Baptist de La Salle who was able to create
something fresh and vital in the field of education. His was a practical vision that led
him to seize with vigor and determination new opportunities in an educational climate that
was weighed down by complacency and cliché. All of us, then, as Lasallian educators, are
part of that tradition and share in that vision.
The vision part of it, however, is not the topic I have been asked to address. The two G's
who planned this workshop, Gary and Gery, the York and the Short of it, keep telling me
that they want this session to be practical: Get down to the brass tacks, the
nitty-gritty, as soon as possible! Tell them what a Lasallian educator does, with a
capital DO! To be honest with you, I can't really do that. It is not up to me to tell you
how to organize your programs, how to get through the school day, or how to deal with
unruly adolescents. You will have to do that for yourselves. This is supposed to be a
workshop. I'm willing to do my part of the work; you will have to do yours.
The best contribution I can make to the work of the workshop is to probe the Lasallian
vocabulary to find there some clues as to what the Lasallian educator does. In the
process, it will become clear that there is a necessary connection between what the
Lasallian educator is and what the Lasallian educator does. With this in mind, I should
like to examine four words in the vocabulary of John Baptist de La Salle that have been
particularly forceful in shaping the image of the Lasallian educator. De La Salle
described the Lasallian educator as a Brother, possessed of a certain spirit,
dedicated to the ministry of teaching, in the framework of a Christian
School.
It should be noted at the outset that this approach involves a real hermeneutical problem.
First, we must have some idea of what this language meant during the years from 1680 until
the death of the Founder in 1719. Then, from 1719 until rather recently, the traditional
description of the Lasallian educator was considered to apply only to the Brothers. If the
Lasallian vocabulary is to have any meaning in a workshop such as this, our hermeneutical
or interpretative principle will have to avoid two traps: anachronism and exclusivism.
To warn us away from anachronism, we have the 1967 Declaration on the Brother of the
Christian Schools in the World Today. That document, from the 39th General Chapter of
the Brothers, has this to say about fidelity to the Founder and fidelity to the present
age:
Fidelity to the present moment of history and fidelity to the
Founder, far from opposing or excluding each other, are closely related, provided we do
not expect St. John Baptist de La Salle to have known in advance all our problems and the
answer to all our questions... Fidelity to the specific intentions of the Founder and to
the tradition of the Institute is entrusted to us as living men. It is we who carry on the
task of discerning how fidelity to his charism can be lived in the present time.
Our traditional exclusivism is effectively abandoned in the
new Rule of the Brothers, adopted at the 41st General Chapter in 1986 and subsequently
approved in the Vatican. Article 17 reads in part:
The Brothers gladly associate lay persons with them in their
educational mission. They provide, for those who so desire, the means to learn about the
Founder and to live according to his spirit.
This principle is specified in article 17c which states:
"The Brothers' community makes known to the rest of the educational community the
essential elements of the Lasallian tradition."
This relatively new policy challenges us to keep in balance three levels of meaning in the
Lasallian vocabulary we are about to analyze: what the words meant to the Founder and the
early Brothers; how they apply to the Lasallian educator today; how they can be shared
with Lasallian educators who are not members of the Institute.
The first thing that a Lasallian educator is and does is to be a Brother and to act like
one. In the beginning the only Lasallian educators were Brothers who had been formally
received into the Institute: all male, all celibate, all living in community, all bound by
a common Rule, all wearing the same distinctive garb. The title Brother was chosen
originally to distinguish the members of the young Society from the ordained clergy on the
one hand and independent lay schoolteachers on the other.
But the idea of being a Brother need not be such an exclusivist or organizational concept.
The reality is much deeper. Brotherhood implies sisterhood. It expresses a personal
relationship on a common level, as distinct from the vertical relationship we have with
persons we call father or mother. Brother, and sister, are the words the New Testament
uses to express the relationships among all the members of the Christian community. In the
New Testament, only God is called Father and only Jesus Christ is a priest: in the New
Testament churches none of the ministers were called priests and no minister was addressed
as Father.
In the modern world, the words brotherhood and sisterhood are being used more and more
often to express the longing for community and solidarity: among nations and peoples
worldwide, or among persons united in a common cause, or within closely knit interpersonal
communities. That is why we Christian Brothers now more than ever want to share our
tradition of brotherhood. We can apply here a line from a hymn often sung at communion
time: "Our brotherhood embraces all, whose Father is the same."
In speaking to the Brothers of his time, De La Salle himself used the image of the older
brother to describe the relationship between the Lasallian educator and the students.
There is a bonding between an older and a younger brother that provides a special
relationship and a special opportunity to teach and to learn that is not present in a
youngster's relation to father, or mother, or uncle, or aunt. The l967 Declaration,
already cited, puts it this way:
In the words of the Founder, the Brother is with the students
from morning to evening. This means that Saint De La Salle conceived of education in terms
of a fraternal relationship between the teacher and the student. The Brother is totally
immersed in the life of the students: he shares their interests, their worries, their
hopes. He is not so much a schoolmaster instilling a set of teachings as he is an older
brother who helps them to be aware of what the Spirit is speaking within themselves, what
their own abilities are, and little by little how they may discover their true place in
the world.
The fact that Lasallian educators have traditionally been
Brothers rather than a "Fathers" helps to foster a significant
characteristic of our schools. They are not clerical, although the dignity of the
priesthood, and the dignity of biological fatherhood for that matter, are deeply
respected. But teachers with previous experience in schools conducted by religious or
diocesan priests will tell you that the atmosphere in a Brothers' school is different.
There is less pomposity and posturing, and more direct involvement in the concerns and the
lifestyle of the students.
The non-clerical aspect of the Lasallian educator that is implied in the title Brother has
special relevance in the Church today. The Christian Brothers and their colleagues living
in the secular world share a common status and vocation as lay persons. There are many
signs that the age of exclusive clerical control and clerical privilege in the Church may
be coming to an end. In virtue of their lay character, Lasallian educators have an
opportunity to be in the forefront of movements to claim for the laity their rightful role
in the governance and leadership of parishes and dioceses, as well as in the sacramental
life of the Christian community. The promotion of the laity has always been and continues
to be an important concern of the Lasallian educator precisely as Brother.
It may be that not every Lasallian educator would be happy to be given the title Brother.
The term may strike some as male chauvinist, and in a way it is. Surely, not many of the
increasing number of women who are or who want to be Lasallian educators can be expected
to be enthusiastic at the prospect of being called Brother. They might not want to be
called sister either, for fear of being mistaken for a nun. The same might be true of
Lasallian educators who are fathers‹either in the clerical or biological
sense‹or mothers, as some are. The point here, in focusing on this fundamental word
in the Lasallian vocabulary, is not what the Lasallian educator is called, but what such a
person is or does as a result. The essential thing is that the Lasallian educator
exemplifies all that being brother implies: personal relationship, freedom from
paternalism and clericalism on the one hand, solidarity in a human community of brothers
and sisters on the other.
A second element in De La Salle's description of the Lasallian educator is his use of the
word spirit. In the earliest version of his Rule that we have (1705), he wrote: "That
which is of the utmost importance, and to which the greatest attention should be given in
an Institute is that all who compose it possess the spirit peculiar to it... for it is
this spirit that should animate all their actions, be the motive of their whole conduct."
De La Salle is very explicit as to what that spirit is: "The spirit of this
Institute," he writes in Chapter 2 of the 1705 Rule, "is first, a spirit
of faith... Secondly, the spirit of the Institute consists in an ardent zeal for the
instruction of children." In the next chapter he uses the word spirit again when
he writes "A true spirit of community shall always be manifest and maintained in
this Institute." The spirit of the Lasallian educator, therefore, has three
components: faith, zeal, and community. These are not three distinct spirits, but really
only three aspects of the one spirit of faith, overflowing into zeal, and lived in a
concrete way in an apostolic faith community.
The Lasallian educator motivated by a spirit of faith is necessarily a religious person.
That idea may scare some people, but it shouldn't. Religiousness need not be confused with
religiosity‹church attendance, devotional practices, adherence to church teachings,
and the like‹however important these expressions of faith may have been and still are
to many people. In sharing this spirit with our colleagues this does not mean, either,
that we expect them to adopt the lifestyle of professed religious living in community. In
using the word spirit in connection with faith, De La Salle intended something more
profound than any merely external expression of religious faith.
Rather, in his writings on the spirit of faith, De La Salle urges the Brothers to develop
a faith vision that would enable them to see beyond appearances. He wanted his Lasallian
educators to be able to find God, that is, ultimate meaning and value, in the street
urchins they faced every day in the classroom, in their colleagues, in their personal and
professional failures as well as their success, in the reversals that beset the Lasallian
movement as well as in its providential growth, in their material poverty as well as in
the richness of their association together. In the Lasallian sense, then, the spirit of
faith has to do with the perception of value, ultimate value. The spirit of faith gives
the Lasallian educator an uncanny ability always to suspect that in persons and events
there is more than meets the eye, to catch a glimpse of the divine spark that is hidden
beneath the external appearance of the most unlikely carriers of divinity.
The spirit of faith that characterizes the Lasallian educator is not something that can be
taken for granted: it has to be cultivated. In order to be able to see persons and events
as God sees them, the Lasallian educator must learn how to be in touch with God, that is,
to pray. Prayer in this sense is not the same as saying prayers: it is more meditative,
more personal. It is the discovery of the divine spark within oneself. It takes place in
those moments when we open ourselves up to that something "more" that
always seems to be just beyond us. Saying formal prayers can help, of course, especially
in communal and liturgical prayer that breaks through the formulas and routine to become
itself an authentic faith experience. The spirit of faith can likewise be nurtured by the
kind of reading we do, reading that forces the right questions on us, that challenges us
to come to grips with who we are and the ultimate reason for what we are doing.
The Lasallian educator possessed of such a spirit of faith cannot help but want to share
it. That is why De La Salle describes the spirit of the Lasallian educator in terms of
zeal as well as faith. Faith overflows into zeal; zeal is a manifestation of faith; the
spirit of faith and the spirit of zeal are in reality two aspects of the same spirit.
De La Salle refers to this aspect of the spirit of the Lasallian educator as an ardent
zeal, that is, a zeal that burns, that sets us on fire. It isn't easy to experience that
day after day in the classroom, as we all know. That is why De La Salle again uses the
word spirit. It suggests something more than merely being zealous, that is, keeping busy
all day, doing one's job, earning one's pay. Neither does the spirit of zeal, even zeal
rooted in faith, refer primarily to a crusading zeal to get the students to go to church,
or to stay away from drugs, or to bring their sexual urges under reasonable control.
Rather, the zeal of the Lasallian educator is an insistent and dynamic urge to want to
share the best of oneself with the students: to communicate one's sense of ultimacy or, in
other words, to share one's faith; to share what one knows and has experienced; to put
one's personal values and vision into creative tension with those of the students. In
short, the spirit of zeal drives the Lasallian educator to make the students aware that
their lives have meaning and value.
As we all know, you can fool some of the students some of the time, but not very often and
not for long. Whether or not this or that teacher really cares about them is something
they discover soon enough. Perhaps the best test of whether the zeal of the Lasallian
educator is authentic, is whether or not the students are set on fire with the same zeal
to share their values and vision with others, to make sacrifices for the cause of justice
and peace, for example, or to find other ways to break out of their characteristic
adolescent preoccupation with themselves.
A third element in the spirit of the Lasallian educator is the spirit of community. A
community is the context in which one lives the spirit of faith and zeal. Strangely
enough, De La Salle did not use the term community to refer to what we call community
today. When he wants to speak of the local community of Brothers, he uses the word "house."
For him the community was the Institute, the spirit of community was the esprit de corps
that held together the whole Society he had founded. This was especially important at a
time when the very existence of the Institute was precarious, when its distinctive
character was continually threatened by those who wanted to take it over and turn it into
something else.
In some respects, the situation today is different. At the same time, never before since
the time of its foundation has the Institute been so threatened by internal and external
forces. That is all the more reason to preserve the spirit of community in the Founder's
sense. That spirit is being translated today into the spirit of interdependence in a
worldwide community with a common mission; a community of apostolic communities implanted
in a variety of cultures, all sharing the same brotherhood and motivated by the same faith
and zeal; a community composed of Brothers, professional colleagues, parents, students,
and alumni that together constitute what we are beginning to call the Lasallian family.
Everyone here is part of that Lasallian family and shares in the challenge to exemplify
what De La Salle meant when he insisted that "a true spirit of community shall
always be maintained in this Institute."
The third expression in the Lasallian vocabulary that I would like to devote some
attention to is the teacher as minister. John Baptist de La Salle pushes his language to
the outer edges of orthodoxy when he tells the Brothers in his Meditations for the Time
of Retreat - "You are ambassadors and ministers of Jesus Christ";
and, even more boldly: "The Church, whose ministers you are, commissions you",
and, more boldly still, "You are the successors of the apostles in their task of
catechizing and teaching the poor... Thank God for the grace he has given you in the work
of sharing in the ministry of the great bishops and pastors of the Church." De La
Salle was enough of a theologian not to identify the teaching ministry of the Brother with
that of the bishop, but he comes awfully close.
Without doubt, one of the major achievements of De La Salle was to elevate the teaching
function to the status of a vocation, worthy of the dedication of a lifetime. We have to
remember that in the seventeenth century, schoolteachers, as distinct from university
professors, were recruited from the scum of society. Most of them were dropouts from
universities or seminaries, rough characters generally, barely literate and not much
better disciplined than their students. De La Salle himself tells us that when he first
became involved with the schoolteachers he thought of them as lower in status than his own
valet. He changed all that by transforming the function of teaching school into a vocation
and a ministry. That is one of the major reasons that De La Salle did not want the
Brothers to be priests: he considered the priesthood irrelevant and unnecessary, an
element that would distract them from the obligations and dignity of their vocation to be
teachers.
De La Salle knew full well that the dignity of the teaching vocation could not be
established simply by affirming it, even in the lofty biblical language of ministry and
apostolic succession. He saw to it that the Brothers were trained for their teaching
ministry. Much of it in those days was on the job training, but it was a corporate effort,
and the instantaneous success of the Christian Schools is proof that it was effective.
When special opportunities arose for the Brothers to expand their teaching beyond the
elementary level, De La Salle provided the necessary advanced training. On three separate
occasions he opened training centers for teachers who were not Brothers, thus extending
the principle that all schoolteachers ought to be and could be properly trained.
When he tells the Brothers that they are ministers of Jesus Christ and ministers of the
Church, De La Salle refers most obviously to the teaching of religion. In his day, and up
until recently, every Brother, and only Brothers, taught religion. Now it is more
customary to hand this part of the curriculum over to specialists, whether Brothers or
not. Important as religious instruction was and still is, it does not mean that teaching a
religion is the only way, or even the best way, to be a minister of the Gospel. De La
Salle never made a sharp distinction between teaching religion and teaching the other
school subjects, any more than he did between the religious life of the Brother and his
professional life as a teacher.
For De La Salle, the entire teaching activity of the Lasallian educator is a ministry, a
service in the name of the Gospel for those he described as "far from salvation."
De La Salle knew that salvation in terms of human dignity in this world was as problematic
for the students as their salvation in the next world; that the gospel of Jesus Christ had
good news to offer for this world as well as for the next; that the Christian School was
engaged as much in the struggle against human ignorance and poverty as against unbelief
and sin.
Just about the best expression of this Lasallian tradition that teaching secular subjects
constitutes an authentic ministry or "apostolate" can be found in the
1967 Declaration:
It is true to say that a Brother exercises a ministry
whenever he truly educates. It is apostolic to awaken in students a serious attitude
toward life and the conviction of the greatness of the destiny of each human being; it is
apostolic to make it possible for them, with intellectual honesty and responsibility, to
experience the autonomy of personal thought; it is apostolic to help the students to use
their liberty to overcome their own prejudices, preconceived ideas, social pressures, as
well as the pressures that come from the disintegration within the human person; it is
apostolic to dispose students to use their intelligence and their training in the service
of their fellow human beings, to open them to others; to teach them how to listen and try
to understand, to trust, and to love; it is apostolic to instill in students a sense of
trust-worthiness, brotherhood, and justice.
That, it seems to me, is one way of saying what
a Lasallian educator does: such a person exercises a ministry.
 
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