All It Takes Is One Good Person

Last week I wrote about what it means to be truly educated – a piece that was adapted from a recent keynote I gave in Miami. Today, I want to continue where we left off…appreciating that a true education has a higher importance…that education is a loving profession…that it is a form of what C.S. Lewis called “Gift-Love” which is the highest, unconditional, and completely selfless love that originates from God, giving grace to all other types of love to naturally form.

For me, these ideas didn’t come together easily or quickly. My current thinking about education has come over many years of experience as a practitioner and as a researcher. But what I want to talk about more than anything else, is how I came to accept, appreciate, and embrace the idea of education as a loving profession, as a vocation.

Things really began to come together for me when I was studying Sr. Dr. Joan Burke’s anthropological work in the former Zaire; she was required reading in an anthropology in Africa course I was taking in Oxford. Immediately her work just fascinated me; I felt that someone understood me, my interest in religion and her work served as a moral support as I prepared to conduct my first research project in Kenya looking at Catholic values and cultural negotiations of women in Kenya who raise orphaned and vulnerable girls. It was as if her work said, “you can but more importantly you should do this work. Keep your interest!”

Sr. Joan Burke is an American anthropologist and religious of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. Burke focuses on members of her Congolese congregation and their identity development as African women, African women religious, and as members of their local and national cultural communities in relation to the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. Burke, in her 2001 work, attempts to understand the calling of African women to religious life describing the importance of “theologizing from the ‘bottom-up’ noting it as a similar approach to “Augustine’s describing theology as ‘faith reflecting on experience.’

In her work, Sr. Joan wondered why African women in lower Zaire chose religious life, because the European concept of religious sisterhood does not resonate in African cultures; “sisterhood” has been a metaphor for religious life most common in Europe. But across Sub-Saharan African cultures, motherhood as identity and purpose is foundational with enormously high value offered to mothers.

I saw this in my own work across cultures in Africa. Girls and women I met, whether teaching master’s students in Nigeria or studying orphaned girls in Kenya, all aspired to be mothers first and foremost. This is the crowning achievement, and it’s because these cultures understand and teach the high value of mothers in society.

So why would an African young woman become a religious sister and turn her back on motherhood?

As Sr. Joan learned and wrote about, it's because Africa’ women religious learned and embody a version of motherhood beyond biology. It’s an expanded motherhood that offers an opportunity to be mothers to and within communities as women religious. In the African context, religious life is viewed as an alternative form of motherhood seen as a spiritual and social mothers. Mothers beyond their immediate families. Mothers for and within communities. Mothers for all.

When I was researching in the girls’ school in Karamoja, Uganda, it was common for both students and faculty/staff to describe religious nuns as “mothers to our community” or “mothers within our community.”

This was not something I reached for or mistook for correlation. Students would use similes in describing female role models such as teachers, alumnae, female politicians and other women of the laity in leadership positions. One student described a school administrator as “like a mother to me” but described the administrator who is a religious sister as “one of my mothers.” And the other students confirmed this differentiation between women religious as “mothers” to them and women mentors in simile.

And so what does this mean for educators? What’s the purpose of this conversation?

I’m writing about this expanded motherhood in the context of educational professions because this idea does not belong only to Karamoja or Africa. I think it belongs to every educator out there.

 Each day an educator walks on campus, they are doing something beyond teaching a subject, or administering, or coaching or keeping the building running. Every single adult in a school, regardless of title, in a very real sense, is mothering and fathering their student community. This does not denigrate your profession. It actually gives your profession higher importance.

Schooling is for credentials. Education is for human flourishing. 

Each educator models for an eight-year-old what it looks like to be an adult who keeps their word.

Each male educator is the evidence that there are men who will not hurt children and both boys and girls deserve these kinds of men in their lives.

Each female education is the evidence that when women support each other rather than tear each other down, that a young person is far more powerful together than remaining alone.

Each educator has an opportunity to equip young people with skills, a reflective understanding of self, an obligation to others, and belonging in community that will offer students avenues to dream and become people who can flourish in every age and stage of their lives.

And so to end this post today, if you are an educator working in a school, think about this and how you enter your next Monday morning. And if you are not an educator, think about this as your invitation and opportunity to be a positive force, a guide, a mentor, and yes, a parent to the children in your community. Or children you see running in the grocery store. Or the child who is in restless in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Your grandchild, your niece, your nephew, your neighbor.

Inside and out of school, we all have the opportunity to offer a selfless gift-love and become a mother or father in our community.

If you think about it deliberately, offering gift-love will give you patience on a plane when the child behind you is kicking the seat (Trust me, I know). It will offer grace to the biological parent when their child is having a meltdown in public (They need it). It will give a child an opportunity to enjoy their first cello concert and develop an appreciation of music even if you want them to be quieter (I’ve seen it).

And it will offer everyone a slightly kinder, more loving world to be in.

I have a sticker quote on the back of my phone by Pope Francis that reads, “All it takes is one good person to restore hope.”

So why not you? You can be that one good person.