Education is one of the many meritorious things that a sister fulfils, more or less well, like others. Can we attribute an added benefit to "the more" of passion, dedication, consecration…? Is it effectively more? Or, at least, different?

We can treat a theme of this type through the narration of one’s own experience, producing statistic data on the incidence of the contribution by the religious life; enucleating ideals, a dutiful being, inferred from the "nature" of our being women religious.

Though I am a teacher, and a happy one –at least up-to-date, every new school year being a bet- I do not hold any generalised experience as exemplar. The context in which we produce an educative possibility in the act of teaching is so very risky, particular and precarious as of not being reproducible and often even recommendable.

We are aware enough of the statistic data.

I shall risk, anyhow, to say something on the ideal, playing on some structural aspects of our being religious, which might have an educative relevance today, in this school, with subjects in evolution age.

We presume that a teaching sister is adult or at least almost adult

We do not expect a perfect adult person, but one who has matured some convictions, able to keep an asymmetric position before the interlocutor –an otherness without distance- who knows how to be of benefit to the other, placing at disposal what she is, in order to favour the growth of the other as an autonomous subject..

Do we want a secure and certain adult sister or disquiet and post-modern one?

It depends on how much we are in the bain-marie of the contemporary world: it depends on how the following of Jesus makes us to stay (or go beyond) in this story. There are adults who look backwards, to exalt the beauty of the past, or adults who feel at home in the present phase of cultural disorientation and, in transmitting it, wait for the new generations to bring a new culture to emergence.

To stay at banal level -that, anyhow, at communication level is never indifferent- a sister with or without a uniform or common habit, with or without veil, generates a series of prejudices, which would be interesting to bring to light. Not all of them are pertinent and positive in the play of expectations that a socially exhibited identity evokes.

In my younger age, I spent plenty of energies to fight against the most negative and hateful expectations/pre-comprehensions in a non-exhausted fight against windmills, regretting how they would arise intact from the very beginning.

Today (with the after wisdom) I would no longer spend so much time on it. The human, educative quality can be transparent beyond the stereotyped; of course, we need time and familiarity, but we have both of them in the school. It could be interesting to meet an adult who does not conceal the reasons that make him to live.

The vows are a thing that, whether declared or not, has its effect. I am not speaking of school votes. Without any presumption of making a theology of the vows, we can touch some hints of its educative valence.

If we live the vows limpidly, they have a considerable valence of personalisation. They help to start every day again the fatigue of the educative relation. They are also fruitful for those whom we go to, since it makes us available in history, -they show- a way of being human, strongly exposed to otherness.

Upstream of the vows there is the intentionality of our acting –because of Christ and His Kingdom- which must not make us to lose sight of the "like Him".

In these times of identitary re-conquests and renewed strategies of presence, a new edition of the historical praxis used by Jesus, a return to the Gospel would give us the criteria to discern (beyond the right and the left, beyond the ideological toils) what benefits the human, respects and provokes its fulfilment. This would try to assume the relational modality of man who welcomed and let himself be welcomed; that evoked everywhere subjects capable of word and decision.

Like Him, we are to know how to take the question of God outside the temple, into our daily life.

How much should we be imbued with the Word to say God newly, not only during the hour of religion, but in all questions of life, in the questions of sense, in the appreciation of cultural processes?

How much should the Word penetrate us so that we may say It "afresh", not "all over again", but in an unheard and vital way?

We must not undervalue, even if it is impalpable, the contribution that a religious community can give to the establishing of a context/climate in an education environment.

Without illusion or rhetoric, we must say that it is neither easy nor automatic, but it is doubtless that formation work –or co-formation- with the teachers contributes to create a climate, a style that innervates the didactic practices and exalts the education efficacy.

The sweet scent of a school remains attached to its pupils much more than the cultural contents. Even a small group of persons who live in a place, confer stability and continuity to the sometimes more sporadic and fragmentary contributions of the lay teachers, thus constituting the indispensable reticulum that turns a school not into an anonymous place, but into an environment in which one can live and go back again.

This benefits everybody (pupils, teachers, parents), it reweaves and re-composes the bonds; it generates little and sufficiently stable islets, compact but not auto-referential, in the social liquidity.

It would be a true sin if the eschatological emphasis that we attribute to the religious life found a symbolic and concrete evidence in the education practices, above all of this time.

Here the risk is considerable and the choice is inescapable. In the educative action we have always asked ourselves about the relation between the transmission of the cultural data and their betrayal. In this historical juncture, in which a secular cultural synthesis is showing signs of collapse, we cannot subtract ourselves from the responsibility of choosing what we must transmit, what is to be omitted, which not yet practised roads can be indicated, which competences and qualities this transition demands.

Are we adequate –I shall not say exhaustive- in pursuing this road? Are we spiritual enough to look lightly at what disappears and to indicate what sprouts out or, at least, equipped to catch and interpret it?

We often interpret the Catholic school, or the religious in the school on the side of the patrimony’s custody, of tradition, while we know that there is something else beyond every achieved synthesis; we know that no culture incarnates the Gospel fully and that no culture is totally stranger to it.

I believe that all the "historical" Congregations instituted for the education keep nostalgia for the poor, not only in their foundational books, but also in their concrete practices.

We are in a situation where we foresee a pronounced exclusion in various forms. I imagine the prophecy of religious life in an education context that care for those who are in a state of minority. There is a risk of gap and exclusion not only as attention, but as perspective, from which we can look at the type of society produced by one’s own education practices. Our social (and ecclesial) marginality is a condition to look at things differently, because man in prosperity does not understand….".

In this time, that lacks perspectives, not even we have a story of the future to narrate: Christianity offers us an abode of the time, but does not clearly delineate our tomorrow (Fr. Radcliffe). However, we do have a hope: it is not the conviction that everything will go on well, but the certainty that something will surely find its sense.

This hope authorises and enables us to educate.