Your gifts and talents.

As you seek to integrate your upbringing into your life you begin to recognise your gifts and talents and to use them in a creative way. This happens especially through work and through responding to the Gospel. You should set about these with interest, diligence and enthusiasm.

Work is linked to effort and, in a specific way forms and creates the person. Effort is always creative. This applies to all kinds of work, intellectual and physical.

At this stage in your life it is your schooling and your education which is preparing you for the work of adulthood. Connected with this is the question of truth. Truth is the light of the human intellect. If the intellect seeks to know reality it does so in order to possess the truth and to live it. Such is the structure of the human spirit. Hunger for truth is its fundamental aspiration and expression.

Christ says “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:32) These words explain what the greatness and the dignity of the human person is built upon. The knowledge that frees man does not depend upon education alone, which should certainly serve truth, but also upon the way in which you serve truth with your life. In education you acquire knowledge and skills, but it is the way that you use your life in building true culture – culture that expresses truth.

Here let us speak about the relationship between education and work. Immediately we find problems: unemployment, does society need me? Will I find work sufficient to make me independent? After all, work is a human right. Economic policies must ensure that sufficient jobs are created for everyone. Through work a person achieves fulfilment as a human being and, in a sense, becomes more a human being.