A friend of mine was a great mathematics teacher in the same college I taught in Ahmedabad, and when he retired he devoted himself to teaching bright students who wanted to excel in maths. He did so with great skill and dedication. Recently he has lost sight at a distance, though he can still see close by and can still write his equations on the blackboard given the way he masters the subject. Still, he has left teaching. And this is the reason he gave me: “I can see the blackboard and can write on it and even point out figures reasonably well, but I cannot see my students’ faces, and if I don’t see their faces, I cannot teach.”

That is a good teacher. The teaching is not on the blackboard but on the faces of the students. They tell how much they have understood, what is still unclear, what bores them, what amuses them. A good teacher teaches looking at their students’ faces. And if they cannot see them, they don’t teach.

When I taught mathematics in that same college I had more than a hundred students to a class. They psychologically and spontaneously arranged themselves in such a way that the best students sat on the first rows, and the slow ones right at the farther end against the wall. While I went on cheerfully writing equations on the blackboard I could see how the wave of understanding went on higher up from row to row from the first to the last. Faces opened up, eyes flashed, smiles bloomed…, while there at the far end dark faces and dull eyes remained untouched. I repeated and explained and waited and watched…, I’ve reached fifth row, eleventh, the last but one…, till the faces on the last row against the end wall would light up and I could pass on to the next theorem. That’s why I understand my friend’s decision. We have to keep looking at faces.

In the classroom and in life.

Every day he would ask God for the grace to find a treasure. He was toiling in the fields and thought God could easily reveal to him in a dream a hidden treasure for him to go, dig, and find it. Then he could live happily his whole life without having to get up early in the morning and toil and sweat seven days in a week. It was as simple as that. And he was sure God would sooner or later reveal to him the hidden treasure. God was omnipotent, and he had entreated him with full faith and devotion. It couldn’t fail.  

One night he had a dream. In a field close to his own, on the riverside, near a tree he at once identified in his dream, was the hidden treasure waiting for him. The next day he surveyed the land on the sly, and everything was exactly as in his dream. The field, the river, the tree, and there, a few feet from the surface, the treasure was waiting for him to make him happy and carefree for life. He could barely hide his joy, but he let the whole day go by, darkness to fall, midnight to come and go, and then he silently went with his pickaxe and his shovel to dig at the precise spot.

He started digging. In a hurry, on the one side, and with care not to make any noise on the other so that nobody would know. The treasure was to be for him alone. At long last the pickaxe clang on a metal surface. A large coffer came up gradually into view. After many efforts it came lose. He lifted it. It was very heavy. He placed it on the ground, eyed it with greedy eyes, broke open the lock with his pickaxe, and lifted the lid. Inside there was an envelope with a paper. He tore open the envelope, unfolded the paper, and read it by moonlight. It said: “Don’t think you can get a treasure by digging a hole. Those are fairy tales. Work on your field and you’ll earn your livelihood.”

God had heard his prayer.

John MacCain, the republican candidate for the White House against Obama in 2008, was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam war, was shot down and captured, and spent five years in a jail as a prisoner of war. He tells this anecdote of those days:

“As an American prisoner of war wounded in Vietnam my captors tied me very tight to torture me and left me alone in an empty room to suffer for the night. Later, a guard with whom I had not spoken came into the room, and, without saying a word, loosened up the bonds to relieve my pain. Shortly before sunrise, before his merciless comrades would come, he came again and readjusted my bonds. He never said a word. A few months later, on a Christmas morning, I was standing in the prison courtyard when the same guard came and stopped for a moment by my side. With the tip of his sandal he drew a cross on the dust. We remained silent side by side for one or two minutes till he rubbed out the cross and went away.” (“Lo que mueve mi vida”, Jay Allison, Plataforma Editorial, Barcelona 2007, p. 141)

The London Catholic weekly THE TABLET brings on one page the advertisement of the last record of the three Irish singing priests, and on another page a cartoon showing a man coming out of the confessional and saying: ‘Damn it! The priest has given me as a penance to buy his last CD!’

It has made me laugh. And it has given me an idea too. I can also set as a penance in the confessional that the penitent should buy my latest book. Though I’m afraid that would be the best way for them not to read it.