by Marco Aleo

Dear friends: I want to tell you something about the school where I teach boys in junior high. One day, I posed some questions to my students that I had prepared with Martino. The first was, “What do you expect this year?” The answers were all more or less the same: “I want to pass my exams; I want to be a good person.” All intentions directed to the future, but where was the present? What had happened to their desire for a full life today? Is it possible that under the pressure of their cultural climate their highest aspiration was to be beunas personas? I began the next lesson with another provocation: “What’s the difference between what I want to be and who I want to be?” We got talking about the promise in every beginning, in every adventure. Henry the Fifth’s cry before the battle comes to mind: “If the heart is ready, then all is ready.” It’s crucial to discover your own heart. When you are thirteen years old, with your life ahead of you, you cannot start off with your desire already reduced. So another question came out spontaneously: “What is the heart?” One boy thought he was answering me correctly by saying, “An organ that makes the blood circulate.” But we reached the affirmation that our heart, today, desires happiness, fullness of love and beauty, and then we went on to other questions. I asked them if they had ever been sad. In the end, we reached the conclusion that sadness is a sign that we want to be happy. But this is not enough, and I pushed them further: “So does being happy mean not having any problems?” And I went on, “Have you ever seen someone ‘happy’ in the midst of problems, someone capable of going through them?” With this question and with their enthusiasm in answering, the lesson came to an end. A lesson like this is an event for me. I cannot plan it, but I can prepare for it. It is hard work, since it cannot be taken for granted–you can imagine what it means in a class of 46 thirteen-year-old boys! Counting so much on their self-awareness is the most effective way to lead them to Christ, because it’s this awareness that kindles interest for reality that is born from a real commitment with it. We’ll see what happens next. In any case, I intend to go ahead on this road.
First and foremost, it’s good for me.
Greetings