Drawing New Maps of Hope
Morris Caplin - And the Promise Written in the Morning Light.
There is a classroom somewhere at dawn. The chairs wait in silent rows. Outside, the city awakens: footsteps on the wet sidewalk, a bus pulling up with a sigh, voices rising like breaths in the cold air. Inside, the room watches. Chalk dust hangs suspended in the first rays of sunlight filtering through the half-open blinds. This is where it happens. This silent threshold where one human being waits for another, clutching something invisible: hope.
To educate is to make a promise before a single word is spoken.
The teacher arrives early, as all teachers do. She places her worn leather bag on the desk, the same desk where countless others have sat, each carrying the same mysterious burden. She looks at the empty chairs and sees not absence, but possibility. Each seat awaits a soul. Not a vessel to be filled, not clay to be molded, but a flame already lit, waiting to recognize its own light. This is the ancient mystery that Socrates described: education is the care of the soul, the care of that which already lives but does not yet know itself. (Cf. Plato, Apology 30a–b)
The students arrive. They shuffle through the doors, carrying the weight of their becoming: awkward limbs, uncertain voices, eyes that look away. They do not know what they carry with them. They do not know that in their restlessness lives a question older than any answer: Who am I? What am I good for? The educator knows this. Or rather, the educator believes it. Believes it before the proof. Believes it against all evidence. Believes it with the tenacious tenderness that distinguishes all true love.
That is why education is hope made visible.
“Every man is capable of truth, but the journey is much more bearable when one proceeds with the help of another. Truth is born of flesh, history, and companionship, not of abstract isolation.” (Giussani, Fraternity Exercises, 1989)
Truth is not discovered in isolation. It emerges in the space between two people: in the patient repetition of a difficult concept, in the silence after a question that has no easy answer, in the moment when a student's eyes suddenly focus and the room seems to hold its breath. These are the small resurrections that mark every day of teaching. The promise kept not just once, but constantly, in a thousand ordinary moments.
But what exactly is promised?
Not success. Not certainty. Not an easy path or a guaranteed result. What the educator promises is more radical: You can become yourself. Not what I imagine for you. Not what the world demands of you. But what you already are, hidden beneath the fear, noise, and accumulated weight of others' expectations. The educator promises to wait while you search. To support you as you stumble. To believe in your capacity for truth even when you have forgotten how to believe in yourself.
This is mercy. This is justice. The courage of truth and the balm of consolation, woven together in a single gesture of accompaniment.
Pope Leo XIV put it plainly: education is the decision to bring hope everywhere—“to draw new maps of hope.” Not optimism, that superficial cousin of hope that depends on circumstances. But hope itself: the recognition that the future remains open, that the fabric of relationships can be mended, that words can regain their weight, their sacred density of meaning. Those who educate look at others with the positivity and love they need.
The bell rings. The day begins. Outside, the city moves in its complex choreography of desire and commerce, anxiety and ambition. Inside this classroom, something quieter happens. A hand goes up. A question forms. The teacher leans forward, not to impose, but to serve. To help the other recognize what they carry within themselves, waiting to blossom.
This is education: a profession of promise, passed down from generation to generation like a flame passed from one candle to another in the darkness. The light does not diminish. It multiplies. And in that multiplication lives the only revolution that matters: the revolution of hope, a soul awakened to its own mysterious splendor.
The morning light grows stronger. The work continues. As always. As it always will.
Morris Caplin
Translation by the staff of Epochal Change
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