Reflecting on the School Year: Jon Wisnieski

Coming into this school year at Dowling, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I hadn’t spent any real time around high schoolers since I myself was in high school. I consider myself an “old soul,” so I wasn’t sure what I would really have in common with teenagers. Quite a lot, it turns out. Even though the world looks different than it did when I left Dowling ten years ago (different cultural trends, different technologies, different geopolitics, and oh yeah, that little thing called Covid-19), teenagers haven’t changed. The human heart is one and the same. All of us, deep down, are after the same things: to live authentically, to love and be loved, to know and be known, to experience beauty, to have a sense of purpose and direction.

As I interacted with students this year, I was reminded of my own high school experience and the particular challenges and opportunities that I faced. There is both a tenderness and a tenacity to the teenage heart. For better or for worse, they feel deeply and act boldly, if not at times a bit irrationally. But on their best days, they are full of hope, full of what I would call a “healthy angst,” a dissatisfaction with the status quo. Perhaps there is nowhere that this is more on display than on Kairos, when we see students struggling mightily to manifest their own interiority and to say a meaningful word. It is a beautiful thing to witness.

There are two themes that have really characterized my year at Dowling. The first is one that I’m sure my colleagues are tired of hearing from me: “grace builds on nature.” Before students can begin to live the “superhuman” life of grace, they must learn to live a normal, natural, properly human life. My concern is that in today’s world, it is not only more difficult to be a Christian, it is also more difficult to simply be a human. There are an increasing number of inhuman forces at work in our culture that thwart genuine human flourishing. I have tried to get students to consider their friendships, their interests, their leisure, their technology use, and see if these things are truly satisfying their deepest desires for truth, beauty, and goodness. My hope is that by helping them to reassess their priorities and their daily activities, the soil might be tilled and made more receptive for the planting of the gospel message.

The second theme is drawn from Fr. Luigi Giussani, whose work I have had the luck of becoming acquainted with this year through the Communion and Liberation movement. Giussani was known for his outreach to youth and his work as a high school teacher. He spoke tirelessly of the need in students’ lives for the “verification” of the faith. For everybody brought up in the Church, he says, Catholicism is a “working hypothesis” that comes to us through tradition. It is the role of the educator to allow students to truly test this hypothesis against their lived experience. This, he says, is the “risk of education.” One must be given the chance to fully verify it and adopt it as one’s own, or otherwise to reject it; and there is no possibility of adoption without the risk of rejection. This is the drama of Catholic living: there is no such thing as an inherited faith. Each generation must embrace it anew.

Through the work of Ut Fidem, my hope is that students are given the opportunity to “test their faith” in this sense – not merely to learn it in a disinterested way as a classroom subject, but to really live the life. There is a vital difference between checking the specs of the car on the showroom floor, and getting behind the wheel and going for a drive. We need to put students in the driver's seat.

I see the task of Ut Fidem (and the work of Catholic education more broadly) as one of integration. Students who see faith as extraneous to the concerns of 21st century life must be shown, not told, how it is relevant to their lived experience and answers the deepest desires of their hearts. There is no better model for this task than the small group discipleship model that Ut Fidem uses. I am excited about what the future holds for this ministry!