Celebrating little moral victories
Ah, for those days of yore when we were a half-dozen inseparable seminarians, together conferring and disputing, wining and whining, exchanging books and class notes, rubbing shoulders at lauds and evening vespers, congregating for impromptu floor hockey, and convening every Friday afternoon for the ministrations of Henri Richard’s now-departed tavern in mid-town Montreal.
We were a motley lot that would take motley career trips in subsequent years: one of us got bounced from parish to prison — as a chaplain; one melted into social work; one sandwiched an eon of civil servitude between years of ordained piety; one went to ply a divine trade in the north country; one languished in urban obscurity. Eventually, each of these theological pedestrians would evaporate into the anonymity of the rest home, the small-town bungalow, the middle-rise condo.
Except for one who, though a lousy soccer player, would rise to lustrous academic heights and would ultimately plop into a tenured chair of one of the country’s more prestigious universities. Actually he’d always been landing on his learned feet; his three advanced degrees would come courtesy of free-ride scholarships from various foundations across the continent. And while the rest of our itinerant six-pack was satisfying its lust for mediocrity, he was making a classroom legend of himself with thoughts and principles ... and stories that would do the rounds of faculty clubs and campus squash courts, and follow him to a recent grave. Here’s one of them:
It seems our friend’s moral philosophy classes were never terribly large and usually consisted of six or eight undergraduates looking more for birds than betterment and, in the case in question, included a young man who signed on in September, showed up for class long enough to get his name on the roll and thereafter fashioned an attendance record that would most charitably be described as intermittent. Still, as it happened, he managed an appearance on the spring day it was announced that there’d be no final examination, and that each student would assign him- or herself his or her own final mark, and then bring it to the prof to be recorded.
“How convenient,” thought the wayward pupil as he trotted an “A-minus” into the boss’s office. The mark duly noted, the kid was wished a good summer.
A morning later the youngster reappeared at the office door, begging an audience and confessing to a certain manipulation of reality.
“I don’t deserve that ‘A,’” the boy admitted.
“What should it be then?” asked the professor.
“Probably an ‘F,’” came the response.
“Very well,” said the teacher as he converted celebrity to calamity. “Have a good summer.”
By mid-afternoon the boy was back.
“I need this course to keep my bursary, sir,” moaned the lad.
“Whatcha need?” inquired the teacher.
“Pretty much a ‘B,’” was the answer.
“‘B’ it is. Have a good summer,” my friend answered.
Hours later the boy was back, sheepish, contrite, not a little embarrassed.
“I’ve really screwed this thing up haven’t I, sir!” said the young fellow. “Could you make it Cminus? It would save my year.”
“Sure thing,” said my pal as he deftly salvaged the miscreant’s scholarship, while bidding him a good summer.
My erudite friend dined out on that allegedly true story for a long time, pointedly suggesting that the kid had unwittingly learned — not by force but by feeling — to think about dilemmas, decisions, effects, accountability, grace, action in a civilized world ... oh yes, moral philosophy; he’d garnered more in those few closing days of term than he’d have wrestled from perfect attention to Immanuel Kant or Bertrand Russell.
The teenager, an unwitting beneficiary of his tutor’s ingenuity, had closed in on adulthood, had grown with clues about respect, remorse, consequences and fidelity on a road he (and my friend) had walked together with calm and reason.
Now that’s a good summer.