FATHER XAVIER; AM UNCONVENTIONAL TEACHER

Father Xavier: An Unconventional Teacher

by John West

Kids can be very cruel. Woe to the teacher, fresh to the class, who shows signs of weakness. As soon as he steps into the classroom, 30 pairs of eyes will be picking him apart. (This story is about a boys’ school). If the new teacher is tall and confident and speaks with an assured voice, he is likely to pass initial scrutiny. But if he lacks these qualities, he will have work to do.

Any fault detected will be used by the class as an object of ridicule if it turns out the poor unsuspecting teacher is not popular with the kids in his class. They are looking particularly for signs of drunkenness, or other wayward behavior. We had such a teacher once, a lady, past her prime, who had a thick mop of orange-colored hair and horn-rimmed glasses to which she seemed ill-accustomed. Discovering one day that her choice of poems was being universally scoffed at, she sent the entire class to the headmaster to be caned one by one. We did not see her again as the administering of mass punishment was not in his curriculum.

At a Catholic school, I attended years ago, I recall one day, coming into our class, a teacher with whom we sensed at once we were going to have some fun. Not fun, fun, but nasty fun.

(The events I am about to relate are not to be taken in any, shape or form, as denigrating the Catholic faith, the school, or the teacher, who was a priest).

When I first arrived at the school, there were, apart from the other teachers, four priests teaching various classes. They were wonderful teachers. However, it was wartime, so some of them were called for duty elsewhere as teacher shortages quickly became more and more normal. Also one, a favorite of ours, a young good looking English teacher, left the school about the same time as the beautiful young lady who taught us Art. Some of us put two and two together; others, like me, less knowing, were unable to countenance such thoughts. After all, he was a priest, and he was very popular, and he taught us we should conduct ourselves with decorum. Our School was hot on decorum. If one of us failed to get up as soon as he appeared in the doorway, and the boy was still seated close by, the pile of books the priest was carrying would be swiftly dumped on the boy’s head.

His replacement, Father Xavier, was totally different. Diffident, and so thin, he had us wondering if he was on a permanent fasting regime. He would tiptoe into our class as if he feared he might be disturbing us. Wearing a long black cassock did not help. He stood before us, almost apologetically, and he would gaze at us with woeful dark eyes, while there appeared on the end of his long nose a drip threatening at any moment to drop onto the lower reaches of his cassock. It never actually fell, as the handkerchief produced from his sleeve always somehow managed to catch it. If he smiled, it was rare, and more of an afterthought. Father Xavier had a narrow, pallid, almost unhealthy face, with eyes disproportionately large for it

This was a teacher, therefore, who appealed to elements in our class ever on the lookout for another teacher to ridicule. Fortunately, such teachers were few at our school. Some minutes after the class commenced, a dreadful smell would permeate the class, and when the teacher’s back was turned, ink would start flying through the air toward the front where the teacher had been standing. This happened particularly during classes designed to teach us the joys of poetry.

Father Xavier’s poem of that day had the following first line;

‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.’

Now I had heard this poem being recited before in one of the other classes. Then, whoever was reading the poem, read it like the crack of a whip. Passing by in the hallway, I imagined the thunder of the horses’ hooves charging toward their target. Not so, Father Xavier. His rendering of the same passage was quite different. Here, there was no thundering of hooves. Instead, the Assyrian cohorts were approaching, in Father Xavier’s soft-spoken and deliberate voice, as if they were not too sure of their mission, or destination.

Finished with the Assyrian, he went on to read another poem about a girl leaning out of a window, by James Joyce. A short touching little poem was read to us in such a stiff and starchy manner, we feared the poor girl was destined at any moment to fall out of the window.

At the end of the week, Father Xavier would officiate at a Novena in the school chapel. This was a short service we attended to round off the week. By this time, most of us had our minds on the weekend and were not too inclined to apply ourselves to the finer points of passages in the New Testament. It happened that one of these Novenas fell on the last Friday before we were to graduate. Sitting there at the end of the day, my mind was totally off-kilter, and definitely not on the New Testament. That is, until the moment when, suddenly, Father Xavier started speaking about the sheep and the goats. For some reason, I sat up and became 100 percent attentive. God must have been prodding me. ‘Listen! John. You might learn something to benefit you.’

So, I listened. I heard Father Xavier explain to us that if we want to get on in life we should act like the goats and not like the sheep. Sheep just follow and are not pushful. That, in essence, was what I heard; or thought I had heard. It seemed to make sense. Sheep in business did not make sense; goats did. The concept, therefore, of the sheep and the goats carried me through the next 40 or so years until my son and daughter were just old enough to understand right from wrong. I had been dying to tell them as soon as they were born.

The time had come. I could wait no longer. The years harboring the golden words of Father Xavier, had built within me a yearning to let my kids in on the secret I had learned all those years ago from the priest who some of us at school had so often ridiculed. It was time to pass on the secret of success to my kids. I sat them down and I told them about the sheep and the goats and how they should avoid being like the sheep as it will get them nowhere in life.

My son did not look too convinced. But, my daughter took up the cause. She gathered her classmates around her in successive schools she attended, inculcating into each of them the secret of the sheep and the goats.

It so happened that later in life I started going to Church again, By this time, I was living alone, and had little to distract me. One Sunday morning, lo and behold, the theme of the sermon was that of the sheep and the goats. I listened as I did 70 years ago to Father Xavier, but this time I paid attention and heard. There it was, in Matthew Chapter 25 v 31-46 about the final judgment, when the sheep are cast as those who are blessed and the goats condemned to eternal punishment. So I was wrong, all those years. How could I have been so wrong? Was this not what I had heard Father Xavier tell us?

Too late to tell my daughter; she had passed. She was to be one of the first victims of the Covid pandemic. Although she spoke to me on the phone as she was dying, she sounded happy and it seemed like she was laughing. I did not have the heart to tell her my advice to her about the sheep and the goats had been pure poppycock

Last year, one night, my daughter came to me in a dream. I saw her clearly with her long black hair. She was laughing, telling me that she had been trying to convince Jesus he was wrong about the sheep and the goats, but she wasn’t having any luck.

There’s a lot to learn in this short story.

Firstly, because to some, a person looks like an object of ridicule, does not mean that you should join in. Maybe the person is unhappy because he has suffered a loss. Instead, rally to him and help if you can. Act like the sheep referred to by Jesus in the Gospel parable. Secondly, learn to listen and to hear. Too many people give the impression that they have heard and understood what you have been saying to them. I am guilty of it myself. Listening and hearing is an art. We should all practice it. We might actually benefit in helping to distinguish between truth and passing on lies. For a start, we may even remember peoples’ names.

Funnily, of all the teachers at our school, Father Xavier, scarcely a model teacher, nevertheless was the one from whom I learned most about the vicissitudes of life, such that he is the one I have never forgotten.

I heard recently that, not long after we graduated, and left the school, Father Xavier committed suicide.