This is a Convocation Address I gave at Providence Classical Christian School where my son is in 1st Grade.
Finally, thankfully, heroically, hereitisatlastedly, summer is over and school is back in session! I know you’re stoked, you’ve all been waiting for it, for true rest, for contemplation, for composed engagement, for leisure. Welcome back to school. I hope you brought your leisure suits. What am I talking about? We get our word “school” from the Latin word—who knows it?!—schola, and that from the Greek word skole which is the word for leisure.
How do you get from school to leisure? Who would ever equate the two? In his essay Leisure, The Basis of Culture Joseph Pieper reminded the post WWII Germans who brooded on the all the work they had to do in order to rebuild their country that “we work in order to have leisure”, and this leisure was not an idleness or laziness as we would understand the term today. Pieper says “Leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of the creation.” Leisure is what is required at school: attentiveness, inquisitiveness, joy, desire, interest, diligence, curiosity, soul and humor. Leisure is the taking in of creation, of gaining knowledge and wisdom through experience of the world that reveals the person and work of God. School is not for work, but work for school. This is why, part of the reason at least, your parents are working, right? To pay for this! So you can prepare not just to do a job, but to live a life. If life is more than working a job, then education is far bigger than getting ready to work that job.
It’s going to happen soon. If not this morning, this afternoon, and if not this afternoon, tomorrow. You are going to get an assignment in a class from a teacher you don’t even like. The like part referring to all the above. Is that too cynical? I hope so. And you, in your teenage brain, are going to say “Why am I doing this?” and “What use will this ever be to me?” And I’m afraid that, worst of all, someone might try to answer your question on your terms, as if the primary goal of your education was to be strictly useful. As if something is worth doing if you can track it to something you will have to do at the job you end up working. But it’s not. What use was yesterday’s glorious sunshine, or the way it shone off the water, or the Crab Nebula, or billions of galaxies, or my wife’s laugh, or our country, to God? Does he or did he need any of it? Did it increase his riches, or will it keep him afloat in a recession? Did it complete the triune life? God needs nothing of what he has created, and yet he is, if I can speak this way, excessive, overdone, careless, abundant, and unpredictably disproportionate both in creation and history. He sent a multitude, thousands, of angels, to some graveyard-shift-working shepherds in the Judaean fields to sing about the birth of his Son to a teenage girl. He builds Fibonacci sequences into artichoke flowers and pine cones, and tree branches, and pineapple fruit sprouts. He makes the bombardier beetle which when threatened by a predator combines hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, boils in its abdomen and combustively explodes it out its backside. God does and creates things that are, by our lamely practical standards, useless. And he does this because he can, and because he is glorious. We are made in his image and we imitate this, learning all sorts of things about him and his world, and imitating his frivolousness. This is why you are here. To learn stuff that makes you into a person, not a worker robot, to be made and being remade in the image of Christ.
You have nine months of leisure before you, nine months to learn and be shaped not just for a job, but for a life. Nine months to enjoy these friends and teachers. Nine months to learn to be gracious to people you don’t easily get along with—a very useful skill indeed. Do you think you’ll ever work with anyone, or live with anyone, you don’t naturally or easily get along with? Maybe you’ll get married. You have nine months to work at subjects that aren’t necessarily your favorites—actually, another practical skill since you will have to do things not preferred. I could set you up to do some gritty pastoral counseling, or you could end up an accountant working to reconcile misplaced numbers as you balance a budget, or you could be president and have half or more of the country publicly disapprove of you. You could be a teacher, and do lots of grading. At home. In the evening. Sometimes on weekends. Even the best jobs have these things. But I digress. You have nine months to read and write and speak and sing and recite the lines in Mr. Forester’s play, to memorize Latin vocab and become better students of words because you are disciples of the Word himself, nine months to win and lose and get injured on the sports field. Only nine months!
Some of you are going to need to work harder, to buckle down and bring your grades up, to work late and hard. Others of you this year are going to need to lighten up, to not worry so much about your grades—I likely won’t get asked to give this charge again!—but some will need to get a life outside of academic marks. We’re called to be delighted in subjects, not in our performance in these subjects. And there is a huge difference between the two.
Enjoy this year; you’ll never get it back. Learn the mighty acts of God in history, wonder at his artistry in science, see his order and precision in mathematics, learn about the Word in the words of English, Latin, Greek, Swahili, learn to make a joyful noise and not a screeching one in music. Solomon said “Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting, to eat, to drink and enjoy oneself in all one’s labors in which he toils under the sun during the few years of his life which God has given him; for this is his reward. . . . He will not often consider the years of his life, because God keeps him occupied with the gladness of his heart” (Ecclesiastes 5:18, 20). We’re confident of great things from you, so have a leisurely year.