Tag: teaching

Down by the River

Photo by Ruedi Haberli on Unsplash

“But to come to some understanding of God, we must let the story question us . . . When we write, we should become a question to ourselves.”1

Part way through the thirtieth semester he rebelled. Quietly. He wondered who he thought he was and why he was advising students how to live their lives. He wondered if they believed him. When they bent over their notes or looked at him quizzically were they listening or were they merely hearing the noises he made with his mouth?

He’d lost any clear picture of his own life, obscured as it was by the constant intrusion of doubts and sleight of hand. What gave him the right — or duty — to tell other people what they should do?

He didn’t lie to others; that just wasn’t right. But he’d convinced himself he was invisible to most people and that when he left the room people forgot about him. Occasionally he doubted he could be found. And there was the stuttering moment when all his choices held an acorn of truth, every one a potential oak and no foretelling which of them would flourish.

Teaching was the vocation: to free the truth was its compelling subversion. At first it was simply teaching as he had been taught. Later, with more experience, there was something else — call it true north — needle quivering on the compass, pointing to Truth and Beauty. The goal, he thought, was to reach that which must be believed to be seen. “Faith seeking understanding,” said old Saint Anselm. But should we trust ourselves in the seeking?

There was the pebble he’d touched in his pocket all those years when the ethical and theological theories he presented became lighter than air. The pebble carried weight, had balance and smoothness, a reality that could not be kicked away. It represented the solid earthiness of humanity. It asked, “What are you going to do?”

He’d become a teacher because there was nothing he’d rather do than learn and to share what he’d learned and to bring others to the door of their own learning. All those years later he smiled, remembering that young man entering the classroom for the first time. He had seen himself part of a great stream of educators, the people who ‘lead others out’ into new places and new ideas.

He’d discovered along the way that people wouldn’t travel to places they didn’t think existed. Or turn aside for a burning bush. Yet there were days when curiosity and imagination flared up in the classroom and the breath of the Spirit could be felt. When the light flicked up in a student’s eyes, he felt he was on holy ground.

Every day he carried the tools into the classroom where the students and he were building their boat of common learning. Everything they brought to the classroom went into building the boat: the scrap bits left over from previous boats, the new pieces cut and shaped for this one, parts they discovered that no one had known were there.

What they learned together would create the boat and the boat would carry them across the river at the end of the semester, and what they had learned about themselves in the building of it would help them find their paths on the other side.

There was always a river to cross in life. This would not be their last. Crossing rivers was sometimes an escape, sometimes a transition to a new life, sometimes just what had to be done at the time. What happened at the riverbank was always about making a decision.

The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord at the River Jabbok had always transfixed him. He’d been wrestling with God for years. ‘Where are you?’ he’d ask at four a.m. “I’m at the end of my world.”

Then he’d put a brave face on it, stride into class, and mask his fear with a discussion of God-among-us — Jesus. The same Jesus who, struggling to know himself, asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”

And then, “Who do you say that I am?”

He knew this was the most important question in his life, but at four a.m. he had no clear answers. He thought he knew who he was — “I am a teacher” — but that was collapsing like a riverbank undercut by the torrent. Eventually, everything he said in the classroom sounded to him like clanging cymbals. He wondered if the corrosion within showed on his face. If doubt and hope had finally fought each other to a standstill.

Some thought Jacob’s angel was really God. That God had come to strip Jacob down to his true self and whatever transpired on the riverbank that night could only be done by God himself, face to face with Jacob.

In the darkness a figure touched him on the shoulder. He spun around, almost screamed. He was outmatched, overwhelmed. Desperation gave him tenacity. As he fought, his determination surged as his strength diminished. He’d lost himself back there, but he was ready to find himself again, even if it cost him his life.

  1. Cording, Robert. Finding the World’s Fullness: On Poetry, Metaphor, and Mystery. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019, p. 66. ↩

This is Only a Test

1NBMLabyrinth

Man is always being challenged; a question is always being asked of him. Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

When I walked out of my comprehensive exams at graduate school, it was a beautiful Southern California day and I thought, “That’s it, I’m done. No more exams!” Of course, I was wrong, which is concrete evidence of how much I still didn’t know. Life is a series of tests, none of which we can cram for and many of which we will not see the results of until long after we’ve forgotten what we were tested on.

It’s not that I hated exams; I rather enjoyed the opportunity to explain, describe, and analyze complex issues. It was the build-up to the exams that brought anxiety, the persistent feeling that no matter how thorough your preparation there would always be some question designed not to show what you knew but to punish you for what you didn’t know.

When I started teaching, I kept in mind how I felt about exams. I steered clear of minutiae and tried to design questions that gave students an opportunity to take a long view. I made it clear I expected accuracy in portraying the positions of others, honesty in expressing one’s own position, and clarity in writing. Nobody was getting paid by the word; brevity and conciseness were virtues. On questions of ethical practice as distinguished from analysis of ethical theory, I blessed responses that were exploratory and forward-looking. I encouraged students in philosophy and ethics to use their imaginations as well as their reasoning and analytical powers. Above all, I asked them to see themselves as both teachers and learners.

How would they describe and explain what they knew to someone who was deeply interested in what they had to say, but lacked their foundational knowledge on the subject? Could such a person pick up their written responses and understand them? Could those responses be the starting point for a deep and exciting conversation? Could they lead others to see what they had learned? And could connections be made in all directions from the subject they were studying? What had they learned in their American history class that their ethics might address? Could their ethical theories apply to their health practices, their economics courses, and their intercultural communication?

“There is only one subject matter for education,” said A. N. Whitehead in The Aims of Education, “and that is Life in all its manifestations.”

***

There are two kinds of exams in education. One tests what we have learned (summative assessment) and the other tests what we need in order to learn (formative assessment). Generally speaking, the life of a spiritual wanderer, someone seeking the Water of life, is a process of formative assessment. If life is for learning, then we can look to every day as experimental research into that which helps us learn of God, of ourselves, and of others.

“Speculation does not precede faith,” says Abraham Heschel in God in Search of Man. “The antecedents of faith are the premise of wonder and the premise of praise. Worship of God precedes affirmation of His realness. We praise before we prove. We respond before we question.”

For those who have been on this path all their lives, and who find themselves no nearer knowing God than when they began, this may almost sound like mockery. How can a person in their fifth or sixth decade of life on this planet regain this wonder? “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” asks Nicodemus (Jn. 3:4). We get worn down by life; our capacity for wonder ebbs and our willingness to suspend our disbelief diminishes in inverse proportion to our need to appear objective and aloof. All the evidence that the world is indifferent to our struggle swarms before our eyes and we shake our heads in exasperation. Experience cannot be reverse-engineered back to innocence.

Heschel invites us to look again: “It is not from experience but from our inability to experience what is given to our mind that certainty of the realness of God is derived.” Our very lack of what we seek takes on the outlines of a God-shaped vacuum in our lives, the via negativa of the medieval mystics and contemplatives.

But we are twenty-first century people who respond more readily to the merest factoid, rather than venturing beyond our skepticism. The trust that is the DNA of faith does not come easily, despite the brave face of certainty that we profess when pressed. Instinctively, we believe that a testimony given must be anchored, not understanding that a profession of belief without the trust of commitment can sometimes be a grappling-hook thrown heaven-ward to draw us up.

Doing can result in being, a genuine form of faith.

But there are some caveats to the formative assessment of our education in faith. “Knowledge is not the same as awareness,” notes Heschel, “and expression is not the same as experience. By proceeding from awareness to knowledge we gain in clarity and lose in immediacy. What we gain in distinctness by going from experience to expression we lose in genuineness.”

It’s a risk worth taking. Heschel assures us that “To the prophets, wonder is a form of thinking,” a way forward when faced with the numinous, with the burning bushes, and the whispers of God within the hurricane. “Our certainty,” says Heschel, “is the result of wonder and radical amazement, of awe before the mystery and meaning of the totality of life beyond our rational discerning. Faith is the response to the mystery, shot through with meaning; the response to a challenge which no one can for ever ignore.”

For Christian existentialists, of whom I am one, authentic faith is a leap beyond what can be wholly certified through reason. “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable,” suggests poet Mary Oliver. That challenge comes in the form of questions put to us by God, corporately and personally. Some of them are formative: they shape us going forward. Others give us a needed pause on this journey, a timeout to catch our breath and look around us. They are summative of what we have learned through our experience.

***

These are some of the questions I am seeking to be shaped by and to answer to.

“Where are you?” – Genesis 3:10

“What does the Lord require of you?” – Micah 6:8

“And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” – Matt. 6:27

“You of little faith, why did you doubt?” – Matt. 14:31

And the most important question of all . . .

“Who do you say that I am?” – Mk. 8: 29

We are questions to ourselves. Life itself throws us demands that we may field as questions. The ones that draw us in, turn us inside out, and lift us higher come to us from the Spirit “who searches everything, even the depths of God (1 Cor. 2:10).”

Photo: Barry Casey

Down the Rabbit Hole

Washington Adventist Community

One of the purposes for which Washington Adventist Community, aka WAC, exists is to raise questions about the actions of the administration at Washington Adventist University, aka WAU. And there is no end to the questions that come to mind. In fact, trying to figure out the logic behind their actions can consume more time than any of us should spend. Nevertheless, we here at WAC do it so that you don’t have to. However, a word of caution: if you should plunge headlong down the rabbit hole into this alternate reality don’t expect to find your way back to the light without considerable effort. With that in mind, we’ll begin.

Despite almost seven years of contradictory evidence we continue to look for a clear plan for this university. We’re not talking about “The Plan,” the prosaically-named revision of the strategic plan of the early part of the century. We’re…

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