At the moment, I am living in Mexico where I was asked to spend a year of my formation journey. One of the activities that they have asked me to help with is the tutoring that happens in the parish. Along with me, there are three parishioners and teachers who dedicate two afternoons a week. The activity consists in doing homework, more specific work on a subject that is weaker, having a snack and then going to play in the park next to the church. Before entering seminary, I had studied Mathematics. It was therefore normal to be perceived with surprise when to the question “Do you want to be a teacher?”, I would respond confidently and already prepared: “No! I could never be a teacher. I do not have the patience that it takes.”
Up until last year, this activity was directed above all to the middle school students. This year, instead, by request of a few parents, we opened up the proposal to kids in elementary school. And this brought about the arrival of two little hurricanes: Felipe and Mateo, little boys in second grade, who did not know how to read, write or do basic arithmetic. Besides the scholastic difficulties, they were also lacking the ability to concentrate. Immediately, with the three teachers, we began to discuss how to help them and created strategies to keep them under control so that they could learn what their teachers had not been able to teach them. Despite this, our efforts seemed useless. Between an “I don’t want to”, an “I’m tired”, a “when is snack?” or a “when do we go to the park?,” at times our claim on them or even a certain desperation due to the lack of results seemed totally counterproductive. Before them, I felt incompetent and irrelevant.
It was no longer the difficulty or the end result that would color the hours spent together.
The change arrived picking back up The Meaning of Charitable Work. I had forgotten that I do not decide their need; it is a measure given by God. Giussani said that “‘laws’” and ‘justice’ can be crushing if they forget or claim to substitute themselves for the only “concrete” thing that there is: the person and love for the person.” And so, beginning from this premise, I began to present myself, every afternoon that we spent together, with the desire to look at these boys as only God can do. Without taking away their and my difficulties, but aware that it was no longer those or the end result to totally color the hours spent together.
At the end of the school year, Felipe and Mateo did not become geniuses of literature or mathematics, even if they did improve. Mostly, I changed. A few months ago, a few of the kids who came to study with us asked me, over cookies and ice cream, “How did you come to have so much patience?”. This question totally bowled me over. It was true: I had a patience with them that was not my own. Thinking about it, the only reasonable response that I have found has been love; beginning to love the kids as I am, desiring that they encounter the beauty of Christian life as I have encountered it: experiencing the love of God, despite all of my limits and sins.
