Our hopes for our children reflect those that Mary and Joseph had for Jesus, Vicar of Education says

Taylor Swift, as any school-age student will tell you, is a huge success. Her Eras tour, which has now been extended into 2024, is the first tour to pass one billion dollars in ticket sales. I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Swift when she says, “This is a new year, a new beginning, and things will change.”

The school years of any person’s life are highly transformative. Parents of kindergarteners tearfully drop off their children to school with great expectations and dreams, older grammar school students warily wander into middle school, teenagers wonder what high school will be like, and tearfully again parents drive home from leaving their adult children at college. It’s a generational cycle. Every family has stories from their school days, and most of the stories end with: “but it all worked out.”

Liminality is a wonderful concept and one of my favorite words. It is about the transitions across boundaries that all of us make every day. Limen is Latin for threshold. We cross thresholds all the time, most often imperceptibly, but the thresholds that pertain to the growth of children are particularly poignant because of the deep love we feel for them at their every milestone. Their everyday minor accomplishments are already setting them on their own individual paths, and when the time comes for launching out on their own, we know how hard it will be to let them go!

Thousands of children in our great Archdiocese will begin their new school year this month. I, too, am logging another year as the vicar of education. I have had the privilege to meet so many of our amazing and dedicated educators during my first 12 months on the job. Our students’ lives are forever changed for the better thanks to the hard work and selfless dedication of these wonderful women and men.

I am reminded of Saint Pope Paul VI’s beautiful 1964 address when he spoke about the house of Mary and Joseph in Nazareth as “the school of initiation into the understanding of the life of Jesus, that is, the school of the Gospel.” Jesus did not attend school as we know it in the 21st century. He was taught sacred scripture by his parents and the local rabbi. His liminal moments were enveloped in the lessons of silence and of day-to-day kindness in family life, and he learned about the dignity of work as the son of a carpenter.

Even though Mary and Joseph and the young parents of today live more than 2,000 years apart, the basics are the same. Jesus needed to be fed, clothed, and loved, and like any parents, Mary and Joseph hoped for Jesus to be successful in every way. Their dreams and struggles clearly mirror our own. They were tired at the end of the day. Jesus might not have always left his sandals neatly at the front door, and even though weariness may have set in from time to time, like us, there was deep familial love and loyalty.

Parenting is no different today. We make sure our children are cared for and are trained to be noble and kind people, who are well versed in their Catholic faith and their love for God and neighbor. We ask for our children’s obedience, and we trust that one day we’ll be able to present them to the world as fine examples of responsible and moral citizens, and eventually parents of the subsequent generation.

No wonder with so much emotional investment of ourselves into the nurturing process of our progeny, when the day comes for all of this to change, the hearts of all mothers and fathers alike resist. When hands must let go, tears are inevitable. Yet, in just a few more years, joy replaces tears, when the child returns as an accomplished adult and ready to create their own legacy as an upstanding Christian in our world.

Saint Luke (2:52) tells us that Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” No longer a child running to hug his mother around her waist, Jesus, the man, hugs his mother lovingly and protectively, and feels her head nestled under his chin, as his was under hers so many years before.

Our hopes for our children reflect those that Mary and Joseph had for Jesus. They wished to impart to him the life lessons of love, kindness, and mercy. As adults today, we strive to inculcate these identical life lessons of love, kindness, and mercy in our children. It is essential to prepare these young people for their roles in “real life” with these fundamental attributes. The Latin phrase “non scholae, sed vitae, discimus” beautifully summarizes this reality. It means that we do not learn for school but for life.

We all have a busy and exciting academic year ahead of us. Whether student, educator, or administrator, let us all bring our best efforts to the classroom to let wisdom and kindness mold our futures.

In closing, I remain a fan of Taylor Swift’s eloquence, when she says, “No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.” My hope for all the students in our archdiocese is that they will embrace the Christian education they receive in these formative years and find creative ways to imitate Jesus who “went about doing good” as we are told in Acts 10:38.

Father Fichter is  Episcopal is the Vicar of Education for the Archdiocese of Newark and the Pastor at Saint Elizabeth of Hungary Parish and School in Wyckoff.