Employment, Freedom and Real Education

I saw something very clearly during Mass today that almost seemed to come out of the clear blue sky. All about jobs, education, human dignity and money.

Here's the insight: a "good job" is one where we are well-positioned to expand our humanity, to grapple with the things that enable us to give glory to God. And as St. Irenaeus said and Pope John Paul II liked to repeat, the glory of God is man fully alive. A "good education" toward a "good job" is one where we are in training to fully possess our humanity, to become fully alive, aware of ourselves, our capacities for good, our limitations, and to enter the true freedom of possessing ourselves in order to give ourselves in utter commitment to Christ and His Church.

When I faced college graduation, I struggled with my prospects for employment. The tacit assumption that a good job meant one that would pay me a lot of money made me very uncomfortable. I had nothing else though, except a vague sense of altruism and idealism as I launched out. Certainly I had no conscious conversations with others about discovering any personal goals. It was all so vague and murky.

So, I wanted only a good-enough job, and that's what I found. I earned enough money to keep my body and soul together, and I was very content to live in a dumpy, inner-city apartment building. Within a couple years of graduation, I was making what I considered a decent amount of money. As I recall, it was about 15k a year.

And there I was: a good enough job, using skills derived from my college degree. But I was so far from being fully alive, or even from having a clue about what that meant.

I had a college degree, and I had some important intellectual skills, but I had a great poverty when it came to possessing myself, let alone freedom to give myself. I could do what was required of me, but did not know how to require something of myself except for within very narrow confines of academic exercise.

I believe my truest education has come in the last nine years of marriage, and has increased exponentially with the entry of each of my children into our family. The job meant for me is to be a wife and mother, which is exactly what I longed to be since childhood. Only I didn't realize how ill prepared I was for that fresh out of college, and God in His mercy had many years of remedial Humanity 101 through which to walk me.

So, that's me. But I think these thoughts today in conjunction with my children and their intellectual, personal, and spiritual formation. If I am to train them at all, I want to train them to be free, in the Christian sense of the word: able to possess and give oneself. I frankly don't care whether either of them enter a career where they become wealthy. But because a human being fully alive tends to be extremely interesting, I'll bet that the ways they discover to live in this world will be well worth someone's investment.