“Intentions often melt
in the face of
unexpected opportunity.” 
Shirley Temple

If you know me, you may or may not be aware that my professional career has been one of responding to unexpected opportunities — St. Augustine’s College (Nassau), Bellarmine College Prep (San José), St. Christopher School & Parish (San José), St. Lawrence Academy and Parish (Santa Clara), St. Victor School (San José), and, most recently, the Adult Education Program of Santa Clara Unified School District. This list represents more than 40 years of employment as an educator. 

In the ‘sixties and early ‘seventies, my intention was to work as a firefighter in San Francisco. That changed as a result of having been offered a full-time teaching position at a catholic school in the Bahamas. Following my graduation from Santa Clara University, my intention was to continue teaching at Bellarmine, where I had been a part-time teacher for three years while completing my undergraduate degree. That changed when there were no openings at the South Bay’s finest high school that year. In 2015, after 31 years at St. Lawrence, my intention was to retire from teaching and devote my time and effort to writing. While I’ve done this, I found myself back in the classroom at St. Victor School as an emergency long-term sub in 2019. After leaving that job in June 2021, again my intention was to focus on writing. The unexpected invitation to teach two writing courses for adults in Santa Clara beginning in the fall of 2023 led me back to the classroom once again.

My professional career has been a delightful spiritual journey. There were certainly some bumps in the road along the way, but I’ve learned to see those challenges as opportunities for personal and professional growth. I also learned the importance of embracing The Serenity Prayer when confronted with situations over which I had no control. As a friend had warned me back in the fall of 1984, working for the Church did challenge my faith. My faith in God was, and is, unshaken. My faith in the Catholic Church as an institution of credibility and integrity has been shaken to the core.

So yes, I still consider myself to be retired. I teach only one day each week for Santa Clara Adult Education — a Creative Writing course on Tuesday mornings and a Poetry Writing course on Tuesday evenings. I am enjoying the experience immensely, so much so, in fact, that I simply cannot consider this to be “work.”

I have always embraced my teaching career as a vocation, much more than just an occupation. As American author and educator Parker J. Palmer pointed out, “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening.” He goes on to say that we must listen to our lives, and try to understand what they are about — quite apart from what we would like them to be about. If we fail to do this, our lives will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest our intentions.