Love at the Centre

June is given over to the Sacred Heart, an image I used to find a little much and have grown into. A heart, exposed, on fire, wounded, still loving. It is not a tidy image, and I think that is the point. The love at the centre of our faith is not sentimental. It is the love Jesus describes in John's Gospel on the night before he dies, when he tells his friends to love one another as he has loved them, and then goes out to prove exactly how far that love will go.

I have been a writer and an actor for most of my adult life, and I have only lately become a teacher, and what ties all of it together for me is harder to name than I expected when I started. The closest I can come is this. Whether I am building a character, writing a scene, or standing in front of a class, the work only matters to the degree that it is done in love and pays real attention to the person in front of me.

That is what I hope to bring to a Catholic classroom, and to teaching religion in particular. Not a performance of faith, and not a set of facts about it, but the attempt to put love at the centre of the room and to let the students see an adult who is still trying, imperfectly, to live what she believes. That is the heart of why I want to do this work.