For back to school, being students in the School of Jesus

As I write this column, all the flyers in the mail and all the banners in the stores proclaim the same message: “Back to School!”

Kids groan, because it seems that they’re losing their freedom. But, if they approach their studies the right way, they come to realize that they’re storing up the knowledge they’ll need for an adulthood of maximal freedom.

I’m still trying to store it up, and I hope you are too. I want to be a perpetual student, immersing myself more deeply every season, every year, in the mysteries of Jesus Christ.

On college campuses there’s a species of undergraduate called “perpetual students.” They spend far more than four years at the task, and they never seem to draw closer to graduation. They change their major often. They seem to thrive on campus life and classroom lectures, and they never want to leave. Since they’re usually drawing down money from somewhere (parents, grandparents, loans), they’re often on the receiving end of a negative judgment.

While I understand the judgment, I also understand the hunger to learn without ceasing.

You and I should want to be perpetual students in the School of Jesus, where class is always in session and there are no semester breaks. Another word for that kind of perpetual student is disciple.

This is key to our vocation. The Fathers of the Church knew it. In the second century, the African teacher Tertullian reminded his contemporaries that they are students in “the school of heaven.” A generation later, the Scripture scholar Origen noted that at baptism we are enrolled in “the school of Jesus Christ.” St. Augustine referred to Christian life as “the school of your heavenly teacher.”

St. Pope Leo the Great called Catholicism “the school of truth,” and St. Pope Gregory the Great named it “the school of the heart.”

Whatever you choose to call it, you can find joy in your studies there. You have the best teachers — the apostles and martyrs and all the saints. You have the most motley classmates, many of them struggling the same ways you are, and others struggling in ways you cannot know. But we’re all learning together, and we can help one another to go forward.

School’s always in session, and we never graduate.

I want to propose a few modest, practical approaches you might find helpful in your studies.

First. Declare your major now, and let it be the Mysteries of Jesus Christ — not current events, not churchy gossip, not ecclesiastical speculation, not critical studies of the minutiae of bishops. Those are blind alleys. They’re distractions. Major in Jesus.

Second. Lean into the liturgy. Go to Mass more often. If you’re already going daily, then listen more attentively, be alert to the Holy Spirit, recognize that God is urgently speaking to you through the Scriptures proclaimed every day.

Third. Think about joining a Catholic Bible study or starting one.

Fourth, and most importantly. Pray. Pray that your own conversion will be ongoing — and true to your school.