I GOT A J.D., NOW WHAT?

I find myself around the parish church a lot.  I get to do a lot of important things around campus.  I check the postings that deface the walls and take them down when the dates that they announce are many weeks past.  When the dates are still in the future and the material is not all wrinkled and torn I leave it up.  Many times during my quasi aimless wandering I am acosted by people of various sizes, ages and colors.  Most of the time they are lost and want to know how to get to an office that may or may not be occupied for the moment.  This is the easy stuff because I have been vagranting around the same campus for well nigh 12 or 13 years now.  Sometimes I get asked something interesting. Like a short while ago I was met by a quiet, soft spoken lad who, after the initial greeting formalities announced that he had just passed the bar...first try, too. I was impressed and then quickly unimpressed.  Soft spoken lad says to me, he says, "What do I do now?  I have a JD and I want to know where I can find work where my JD will give me an advantage."  Whooooaa!  Similar to a question that I had 45 years ago.  So, I am ready.  Here's what I say to my new found quasi child.

This is a question that drives me to my innermost, deepest conviction about education. I am convinced that human life is a complex of experiences, all of which make up the “university” of hard knocks. So, every day we live and breathe is a day at school. My father drilled that into me from the day of my birth, and maybe even before.

I, personally, have come to the conclusion that we don't have JD, MBA, Ph.D, etc. we live the initials we place after our name.  

EFR Dion had to leave school in his sophomore year because of the death of his father. My father was the eldest of 8 children and this was 1914, before social services were a common way of life. He grew up in a machine shop environment. His leadership skills put him in lower management at 22. Before he was 30, he was the superintendent of a 50 person machine shop. At 38, he passed the state of Massachusetts professional tool engineer certification exam on his first and only sitting. All along the way, he told me to knit all of my life experiences together so that everything that I did would be inter-related to make me more and more knowledgeable about many things.

I have a master’s degree in Theology. That means that I was in school a long time. I worked my way through a private boarding school for 6 years. I worked for the Church, so a lot of my education was payment for my “in-house” work. Along the way I married, fathered children, lost jobs, quit jobs, was in debt, out of debt, totaled a couple of cars, sold vacuum cleaners, painted, drove airport shuttle vans, security guard, teach Catholic doctrine, Bible studies, organize and host religious pilgrimages and make a little bit of change as a translator. Through it all, I was a missionary pastor, a canon law counselor, a personnel recruiter and a personnel director. How much of what I learned in school did I apply? All of it. However, not all at once, of course. We never apply what we have learned, in school or along the road of life, all at once. No matter how much life learning we knit together, we only use what is sufficient for the moment. Furthermore, while we are using, we are learning from the feedback that the job gives us.

Therefore, everything that you have learned, from the crib to now is going to be useful for you on your first job, assuming that you are talking about your first job. If not, realize that you already know a lot. The first day on the job is going be your first day at new learning experiences as well as a new day of practicing some of what you have learned, not just in school but also in life.

So, don't carry your JD around like a badge or a passport. Live it.  Do what you want to do.  No matter what you do, you will be better at it because you are a JD.

We entered the church.  I said a short prayer for him, blessed him and he left.  I suppose that the next time we see one another he'll be on St. Peter's Public Defender staff.

THE "OTHER" GOSPEL, THE MEMORY OF THE BIBLE IN THE EYE OF YOUR CAMERA

The one I had was brown

Have you ever been on a pilgrimage?  Have you ever read Geoffrey Chaucer?  have you ever heard of the Pilgrimage to Mecca?  Did you ever ask yourself why Jesus, Mary and Joseph were 100 miles away from home when Jesus got lost?  How often do you, if ever, dream of traveling to your favorite religious site?
When you think of that, what is your first preoccupation, after money, of course?  Is it your prayer book or your camera?  
Why do I bring this up?  Because it came to me the other day when I though that it might be a good idea to dig out some old pictures and give them to our sons for Christmas.  So, of course, I dove into the box(es) of photos and the box(es) of SD computer chips to see what pictures they might appreciate more.  The emotion that overtook me while I was doing this was quite a surprise to me.  I decided that none of the pictures that I was viewing would be of any real lasting value to either one of them.  Why?  Because it struck me with some emotional intensity that what I was looking at was interesting, but certainly not engaging.  The exercise was rather fun, but did not rise to the level of awe before a family collection of treasure.  So, I stopped myself from spending any more time doing this.
It came to me that the truly meaningful pictures were VERY few and far between.  How many pictures of 3 and 4 year boys are meaningful?  There is one that I like, but I couldn't find it, so that was a disappointment.  Or was it?  It made me think of the picture that I took with my Kodak Box camera of old.  It was at Niagara Falls somewhere in the 1957 range.  It was one where I captured the boat, "The Maid of the Mist" floating at the foot of the falls and surrounded by a very clearly defined rainbow.  I admired that picture for a long time, but then I changed my domicile so many times during the passing years that all I have is the memory.  I have the memory, and nothing else, of my favorite picture of EFR Dion coming down the back stairs of our house on Hartford Street in South Hadley that I took with the same box camera by Kodak.  I remember it because it was February, a few days after he had announced that he had now lived longer than his father had.  I could go on for some time reminiscing about pictures that I remember and about pictures that were never taken.  Those that were never taken are still vividly present to me.  They move me as much as those that occasionally fall under my gaze.  Despite the convictions expressed here, I still find myself clicking away on special occasions.
In the introduction I asked about pilgrimages and what is the more important, prayer or picture.  I wonder what the right answer is.  It is impossible to go to a revered location on the planet without capturing the reality of it on camera.  I have my favorite pictures of places that I have seen only because I went there to pray.  I don't look at the pictures very often, if ever, but the fact that I stopped and captured a rare reality helps vivify my memory of it.  It is like multi-media impact on the brain.  It is rather certain to me that the effort that it took to stop, assess the angle of importance, check the position of the sun, wonder if I should have Belle there or not, should I activate the flash, how close do I want to get, portrait or landscape mode, etc.  All of this activity contributes in some way to the memory of the event.  In many ways it makes viewing the picture less important down the line because the memory is all the more explicit.
Think of it this way.  Mary and Joseph lost track of their Son one year during the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem for prayer.  They didn't need a camera to remember where they found him.  I think that He never forgot it either.  We don't hear a single word about him for another 20 plus years, except that when He got back to Nazareth, he obeyed them and grew in age and wisdom.  Period.
Who needs a camera for that?