Teaching Boys: Lesson #2

If Lesson #1 was that boys do, in fact, learn differently than girls, then Lesson #2 is not to make preconceived judgments about how boys learn or what they like to read.

Last week, I gave my Intro to Literature students a test on the basic literary skills we'd been learning for the first four weeks. For this test, I offer students a choice of several poems, ask them to pick one, and to thoroughly interpret it: find literary devices, write out a theme, and answer an analysis question that I wrote regarding the poem.

This year, the students were asked to choose between a nature poem about the starry heavens, a poem by a (female) slave celebrating her spiritual life, and a World War II poem. At first, I had considered assigning students poems: Some boys would get the war poem, some girls would get the starry nature poem, and a control group of boys and girls would get one or the other. Ultimately, I allowed students to choose, and here's what I found:

Only one boy (in a class of perhaps 12) wrote about the war poem. A girl also wrote about the war poem. The entire rest of the class was split between the slave's poem and the nature poem. Moreover, some of the most thoughtful, detailed responses were by men on the nature poem, or by men on the slave's poem.

Writers such as Peg Tyre in The Trouble With Boys do well to remind us that boys and girls learn differently. 5-year-old kindergartner boys cannot be expected to plant their bottom on a carpet square and stay there for more than a few minutes. 5-year-old kindergartner girls cannot be expected to react will delight and awe in a unit that studies bugs and insects.

Yet this example, similar to many Tyre herself gave, illustrates the danger of assumptions about how boys and girls react in the classroom. While biological reality dictates that (on general) little boys need more physical activity than little girls, biological reality does not dictate that little girls recoil in horror from slugs and snails. What dictates that little girls recoil from a fat, glistening slug is simply a stereotype: that a little girl, whose nails Mommy painted two days ago, could not possibly get dirt on her that Barbie-pink polish.

Thanks to the feminist movement, Americans are alert to stereotypes of women and vigilant in avoiding them. It is thus no shame to me, a woman, to admit, for instance, that I prefer Battlestar Galactica to Downton Abbey and have never seen Ryan Gosling in anything.

Unfortunately, Americans are less aware of stereotypes about men and less able to dismantle them for men who prefer subjects outside the assumed interests such as slugs, or (for older boys) cars and football. Tyre's book, though excellent in some regards, provides evidence of this: Suggestions such as picking books with boy-friendly content and inviting policemen to read aloud are well-meant, even useful, but also based on broad assumptions about what boys are interested in.

Gender stereotypes run deep in our society. Last semester, one of the classes I pulled up short when a young man announced that he loved to quilt. I have no memory of what brought on this confession, nor of how I responded. I do remember the sudden silence, in a class almost never silent, as we all mentally connected the student before us with an activity stereotypically enjoyed by your 80-year-old grandmother.

Between this experience and the test results, I have thus learned not to make assumptions about what the young men (and sometimes, older men) in my class will or will not enjoy.

Yes, J.K. Rowling was asked to use her initials instead of her name (Joan Rowling) to encourage boys to pick up the Harry Potter series. That her publisher, however, pandered to stereotypes about young men does not mean that we teachers should.

False dichotomies must be avoided in class planning and management. As a girl, I speak from experience: To assign us Anne of Green Gables is not to guarantee engagement in the class. Ender's Game may do the trick just as well. For boys, I speak from my observations: To assume that a war poem is more likely to grab their attention than a quilting manual (apparently) is to deprecate the lived experiences of the young men in our classroom - young men who like crafts, who enjoy studying the stars and nature.

Where does that leave me? After all, I rewrote my syllabus to include more boy-friendly texts.

I don't regret anything.

It is one thing to pander to stereotypes of boys' interests. It is quite another to read and discuss material that will affect most men in the population - in this case, the father-son relationship. The young man who quilts and the young man who hunts down slugs both have fathers, and both of them will likely become fathers by the end of their lives. Even gay men who choose to adopt will become fathers.

Moreover, the trades that I made were good. I gave up the beautiful but difficult "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot. In return, I gained the ambiguous, haunting and substantially more accessible "Those Winter Sundays," by Robert Hayden and "My Papa's Waltz," by Theodore Roethke.

Thus, the lesson to be learned about teaching boys is perhaps not, "Teach literature that appeals to boys' interests". Danger lies there: Not all boys have the same interests.

The lesson would be better worded like this: "Teach literature that is accessible and personally meaningful to all students". That literature may be written from a young man's perspective, as "My Papa's Waltz". It is equally likely to be written with a woman's voice, as in "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter".

What's important is not a pseudo-classification of poetry as "for boys" and "for girls" but the fact that poetry represents what both boys and girls recognize as their own lived experiences.

Gnosticism and Christianity

My next post, I hope, will return to the topic of teaching boys (I made an interesting observation during class a week or so ago which I hope to share). For this post, I would like to share something I posted as a note on Facebook earlier this afteroon. I've recently been reading through the Church Fathers (the current Father I am reading is Iranaeus), and I have discovered that what I learn about doctrine and Christian living from these men is often relevant to the thing we call 'real life' - in this post, to our understanding of doctrine. Enjoy!

Note:

When I was finishing graduate school, everything I encountered reminded me of my thesis. If I watched a movie, listened to a sermon or had a conversation, I could nearly always relate the topic to T.S. Eliot’s use of language in Four Quartets.

Reading Iranaeus’s debunking of Gnostic doctrine, I find much the same thing happening. Gnosticism is suddenly everywhere. Far from being a two-thousand-year-old dead cult, it is very much throbbing with life in the 21st century. Last week, I turned up a particularly egregious version of it on Matthew Paul Turner’s blog.

A fundamentalist-turned-liberal Christian, Turner blogs about events and key topics within the evangelical church today. I appreciate that he publically stresses the importance of Christian service (such as WorldVision) and that he challenges the church to examine whether particular practices are actual Christian truth or merely tradition.

Yet his January 16 interview with church leader Shane Hipps, who shared leadership with Rob Bell at Mrs Hill Church, is a much-needed reminder that the church is still in peril from heresy.  I am not bringing forward this example in order to start a witch hunt, beginning with Turner’s blog, but instead to remind whoever reads my posts that theology, which often plays second fiddle to relationship, is desperately important.

In the interview, Gnosticism crops up in answer to a problem that plagues the church today: What happens after life to good people who have never heard the Gospel? Turner recalls a hard-working Islamic man he met in a trip overseas and asks Hipps what hope there is for this man spiritually, since he clearly does not know Jesus Christ. Hipps responds like this: “I make a distinction between the historical person of Jesus and Christ, the power that animated him.  These two became one for a period of time.  But Christ existed before the person of Jesus walked the earth and Christ exists now that Jesus no longer walks the earth.”  What Hipps is saying about Jesus Christ is taken straight from a first-century Gnostic textbook.

Gnosticism also distinguishes between the man Jesus and the power of Christ. As you may know, Gnosticism believes not in one God but in a series of spiritual emanations from God. It is one of these emanations that produced Christ. Iranaeus writes that Monogenes, one of the earliest and most powerful, ‘gave origin to another conjugal pair [of emanations], namely Christ and the Holy Spirit’. Thus, the Gnostic Christ is not equal to God as Philippians teaches but rather descended from God, a lesser power perhaps most analogous to an angel. Moreover, Christ’s role in Gnosticism is not to reveal God to man but in fact hide God from the other emanations. Iranaeus notes that Christ “announced among [the emanations] what related to the knowledge of the Father – namely, that he cannot be understood or comprehended, nor so much as seen or heard”.  This, then, is the Christ of the Gnostics: not the way to God but the blockade preventing even God’s fellow spirit beings from complete knowledge of him.

Jesus, on the other hand, is seen by the Gnostics as an ordinary human being. Produced in the ordinary fashion by Mary and Joseph, the Gnostic Jesus is no more than the equal of any other Gnostic teacher. Iranaeus writes that at Jesus’ baptism, “there descended on Him, in the form of a dove, that Being who had formerly ascended on high, and completed the twelfth number, in whom there existed the seed of those who were produced contemporaneously with Himself, and who descended and ascended along with Him.” As a cup holds water but is not itself the water, so the Gnostics argue that Jesus holds one of the emanations (Christ) but is not Himself the emanation. Indeed, the Gnostic believers thought themselves spiritually purer than Jesus Himself. They, according to Iranaeus, believed themselves ‘produced contemporaneously with’ Christ. It was to them that ‘Christ made known the Father,’ though the chief emanation was not clearly known to Jesus or even to the various other emanations. Thus, the end of Gnosticism is to deny Jesus’s deity and to claim instead a godlike lineage for themselves.

With this background, consider Hipps’s theology again: To ‘make a distinction between the person of Jesus and Christ, the power that animated Him’ is to resurrect one of the chief principles of Gnostic doctrine and, in doing so, to swerve away from orthodox Christianity towards an affirmation of spiritual self-sufficiency. Just like the early Gnostics claimed special spiritual knowledge and privileges for themselves, so Hipps claims that individuals have the potential within themselves to access the power that he terms ‘Christ’ regardless of their theological beliefs. Talking of the Islamic man’s salvation, he writes this: “Jesus gave his gifts to people without requiring conversion or membership in a religion (woman at the well) or without people knowing his name (blind man with mud on his eyes).  So yes I believe Jesus is relevant and salvation is possible for your friend even if he doesn't know the name of Jesus.  That is how big Christ is!” In other words, because according to Turner the Islamic man is already a spiritual person, he is able to access the big, relevant power of Christ – in other words, to claim a status equal to or above that of the person Jesus, who led people to Christ. To paraphrase Ben Jonson, Jesus is for an age, but Christ is for all time.

This sounds very compassionate to modern ears: to ‘accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside.’ Yet not all that glitters is gold: To revive the Gnostic doctrine to favour a kind of half-baked universalism as Hipps does has certain dangers – most prominently, a denial of the Incarnation.

To orthodox Christians, the Incarnation is the key aspect of Jesus Christ’s identity. Iranaeus writes, “Christ did not at that time [Jesus’ baptism] descend upon Jesus, neither was Christ one and Jesus another: but the Word of God – who is the Saviour of all, and the ruler of heaven and earth, who is Jesus, as I have already pointed out, who did also take upon Him flesh, and was anointed by the Spirit from the Father – was made Jesus Christ.” To put this bluntly, Hipps is wrong: There is no distinction between Jesus and Christ, and in Jesus Christ there is no division between God and man. He is not a mixture of two natures, but fully both, and as such the cornerstone of our faith.

Without the Incarnation, we are lost. John’s Gospel points out that ‘the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” In human language, words approximate ideas. Lewis and Tolkein felt that the word ‘tree’ was insufficient to describe the real thing, standing in the middle of a field or beside a brook in all its spreading glory. Surely the word ‘love’ does not do justice to the passion of a couple on their wedding day, nor the word ‘fear’ to the numb, shaking terror that we feel listening to the house creak at 3.00 AM. Yet Jesus Christ Incarnate is the divine Word: not simply a close approximation of God, but both the appearance and reality of God. Deny this, and you deny the only way that we human beings – spiritually lost and broken, whatever the Gnostics say – may understand God.

I began this essay with Eliot, so let me also end with Eliot. In the third part of Four Quartets, Eliot reaches what might be considered the climax of the entire series:

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers.

However much we humans desire it, there is in us ‘no source of movement’ – in other words, no spiritual spark or vitality. Whatever spiritual spark we mistake for independent life is simulated: It is ‘driven by daemonic, chthonic / Powers’. In the Incarnation alone is spiritual life found. Only ‘here the impossible union / Of spheres of existence is actual’: In one Form Jesus Christ united God and man, who were so long divided. Thus, Shane Hipps’ Gnosticism, loving as it sounds, ultimately robs Christianity of its greatest treasure. Where Hipps would affirm the spiritual spark within, Christianity affirms instead God brought near to us. This is the beauty of the Incarnation. Yes, we are still human and ‘flesh and blood cannot endure’ the full revelation of divine power. Yet in Jesus Christ, fully human and fully man in one person, we have at least a ‘gift half understood’: complete, final reconciliation between us and our Creator.

Interview link: http://www.matthewpaulturner.com/blog/2013/1/16/rob-bell-hell-the-jesus-we-sell-my-interview-with-author-shane-hipps

Teaching Boys?

Checking up on my favourite web pages last month, I stumbled across an intriguing book: The Trouble With Boys, by Peg Tyre. The subtitle of the book elaborates on what exactly the 'trouble with boys' is: that boys, compared to girls, are under-performing academically from preschool to their senior year of college.

My interest was piqued. Though my classes have had their share of problem girls, many of the most memorably troublesome students from the last five years are in fact boys: the young man who held a public confrontation in the middle of class discussion, the ones who have sulked in the back of the room, and the ones who have simply walked out mid-lecture. Inspired by a few fresh memories of student confrontations in the past semester, I caved and purchased the Kindle. I grew up without brothers (my cousin Dan was the closest thing I got to a brother, and he spent more time beating me in Risk and Axis and Allies than pestering me or laughing at body humour or more stereotypical boy behaviour). Thus, I hoped the book would shed light on how to best relate to and engage the young men in my class.

In the week since I've had the book, I've read about half and been inspired to change my Intro to Literature syllabus. The chapter on reading stressed that boys read best when the novel is action-based or when it involves a male protagonist. If I were a 5th-grade teacher, I'd assign students to read Hatchet or perhaps The Eagle of the Ninth. I am, however, a college literature teacher who assigns poems in order to give students a breadth of literary experience, and action poems are relatively rare. So I did the best I could: I swapped out several of what I perceived to be flowery, girly poems and exchanged them for poems with more masculine topics. When a particular "girly" poem was too valuable for me to remove it, I tried to balance it with a poem designed to help the boys in my class become men.

Here's a sampling of some of the exchanges I've made:

• "To Autumn," a rich poem about the beauties of fall, was dropped in favour of "The Destruction of Sennacharib," Byron's interpretation of the death of the Assyrian army attacking Israel. Much as I like "To Autumn," I worried that the men in my class would (at least subconsciously) conclude from the imagery (detailed nature description and a stanza describing Autumn as a woman with beautiful flowing hair) that poetry appeals to women. I had planned to open the semester with "To Autumn," and the last thing I want is half my class tuning out in the first week. The semester will now open with a poem that describes the preparations for war and the aftermath of the Angel of Death's visit, decidedly more gender-neutral (especially at a Bible college) than my original pick.
• "The River-Merchant's Wife" is a letter from a woman to her husband, absent from her and traveling on business. The poem, with its straightforward language and touching themes, has long been a student favourite, and I was reluctant to jettison it entirely. Yet I was still worried that the men in my class would be turned off by an entire unit of texts like "The River-Merchant's Wife". Thus, I made some space in my "Love and Family" unit to emphasize aspects of family life that are important to young men. My syllabus now includes two poems about fathers and sons: "Those Winter Sundays," by Robert Hayden and "My Papa's Waltz," by Theodore Roethke. My hope is that all students, regardless of gender, will profit from a discussion of good parenting, especially good fathering.  

Obviously, this approach can be taken too far. Personal preferences are not divided hard-and-fast by gender; many men do like traditionally-feminine activities; I had a young man in my class last semester who loved to quilt! Attention to gender preferences must not become gender stereotyping. Also, I don't want to teach so many war- and father-related poems that I leave the girls feeling a disconnect to the texts we read. Yet I remember, as a girl, liking books for both boys and girls, so I figure the girls in my class will do just fine. Furthermore, I believe that it is the teacher's responsibility to, in the words of Bruce Wilkinson, "cause the student to learn" - in other words, do whatever is in my power to guarantee that students succeed in the class. If that means that I lose old favourites such as "To Autumn" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in favour of "The Destruction of Sennacharib" and "Those Winter Sundays", so be it. The latter poems are just as valuable and strong in terms of literary value, and perhaps stronger in terms of personal relevance to my students. 

My plan this semester is to tweak my teaching style as well to involve the men in my class: to call on them more, to build class assignments around competition as well as cooperation, to design assignments that go beyond arts and crafts and appeal to their more particular skills. My hope is that this class will both encourage the men to interact with the women and also teach them that literature can be a masculine activity, as well as a feminine. 

I'll let you know how it turns out. 

Apologies, by the way, for the long-delayed post. As a teacher, late November and December are to me what the first half of April is for accountants. Hopefully I will have time for a few months, at least, to keep you posted on a more regular basis.

Reflections on Poverty

Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. (James 1.27).

This weekend, my six Literature students are writing reflections on a recent service project we completed as a class in the downtown area. I decided to actually do some of the same work I assign my students and join them. My class completed two service projects (three students went to one; three to the other): I want to write about my girls' trip downtown to visit the Women's Life Center*, an education and mentoring program for mothers in poverty with young children.

As Women's Life focuses on long-term mentoring, my students and I traded hands-on service (such as cooking something or cleaning something) for a more formal orientation to the principles that make the center work. The director walked us through Dr. Ruby Payne's analysis of the resources needed to get out of poverty, then through the curriculum materials that clients complete with their mentors. After that, my students got to meet several of the clients for a short Q&A session on life in poverty and their time with Women's Life. Finally, they had the chance to talk with the center volunteers directly .

Tomorrow, I'll receive my students' reflections and find out what they learned and how they were changed or challenged by their visit. Till then, here is what I took away from the experience.

Americans in general and evangelicals in particular tend to approach poverty with broad, simple solutions: Get the poor off welfare. Get them jobs. If they don't want to work at a job, they don't get out of poverty. Simple as that. So widespread is this belief that the volunteers, Christian women active in their churches, confessed to this attitude when they started: the idea that the primary reason for poverty is bad decisions about jobs, family and money, that the primary fix for poverty is good decisions. Through the grace of God, the volunteers discovered that this solution was, in the words of H.L. Mencken, "clear, simple and wrong".

Personally, I felt that the visit corrected oversimplified thought about poverty (including my own) in two key ways:

Poverty is more complex than we think.
During the orientation, I asked the director about whether the clients and / or their husbands (partners) are able to find and keep work in the area. Turns out, that's a hard question to answer.

The first answer is, "Yes". My city has a relatively low unemployment rate (unfortunately, most employment is in difficult retail jobs but still - employment!), and managers will hire people that want to work.

Then the director qualified that "Yes" in detail. To someone in poverty, working a steady job takes a heavy toll on her family and on her finances. A job, of course, means that employees need to get themselves to work on a regular basis at the scheduled time. Kids spent little time with their working parents, probably less time than the kids of middle class parents. In the middle class, parents can afford to leave their children at daycare or at a neighbours' house, then pick them up at the end of the day. In poverty, that doesn't happen. Daycare is too expensive, and neighbours, the director told us, may be untrustworthy or abusive. One parent resorted to driving her kids out of the city every time she worked; they spent several nights a week at their grandparents' homes and very little time with their mom. Interestingly, jobs also take a toll on a family's finances. If parents try to pay for babysitting, that eats up money. Work uniforms may eat up money. What eats up the most money is, of course, the cost of fuel commuting to a job (or leaving the kids with family). A $7 / hour entry-level job may not make the costs of commuting feasible. In fact, one of the students in our group recently had a co-worker turn in her notice because working actually cost more money than not working.

I realize that there are readers who believe the $7 / hour jobs are not designed for parents to make a living on, or that the poor should simply go out and get higher-paying jobs. Unfortunately, the very poor do not have the education to get a better job, nor do they have the time or money to get the education. Without a job and / or daycare, they have no access to education. Without education, they have no access to a better job or daycare. Poverty, unlike people imagine it sometimes, is not a one-way route from "lazy" to "no money". For many people, it is actually a vicious self-sustaining cycle that lasts for generations.

In light of this situation, welfare looks pretty appealing. People (including politicians) react to the cycle of poverty by thinking, "Oh, those poor people! We need to give them something!!" As the director explained, however, this solution is also "clear, simple and wrong". The poor desperately need a sense of individual power and responsibility to escape the cycle: Because their circumstances have controlled them for so long, they need to know that they have some control over their circumstances in order to improve their situation. Short-term handouts are often much needed: To the woman who finds herself unexpectedly homeless, to the people whose homes were burned to the ground or swept away in Sandy, immediate handouts are a lifesaver and a sign of God's love and compassion. Yet long-term handouts rob a person of a sense of power. The director at Women's Life stressed that the center tries very hard to avoid this problem. Women are only allowed to purchase items from the store (stocked with donated baby clothes, toys and women's clothes) with Mommybucks that they earn from attending mentorship programs regularly and taking other steps to improve their situation; they cannot use real money. The point is that because the Mommybucks are earned, the women feel as though they have earned the purchase and thus feel more capable of long-term, lasting change in their lives.

Arguments both for and against welfare, both condemning and excusing those in poverty, abound in our culture (especially a few weeks ago during the recent election). My visit to Women's Life provided a healthy dose of caution against buying in completely to any one of those arguments: The situation is far more complex than political or social argument would have us believe, and we must be wary of simple solutions. A dragon does not die because insults are hurled at it.

Solving poverty is about short-term goals, not long-term ones.
In spite of the warning against simple solutions, I still expected the Women's Life volunteers to offer a well-argued solution for the situation in which the clients found themselves. After all, why bother helping if nothing is ever going to change? If we know what's wrong, can't we do something about it? I wanted to hear a clear plan outlined to solve poverty, an idea or an outline or a project to start helping anyone who lacked the resources necessary to succeed financially. I wanted to hear the women at the shelter speak of progressing out of poverty towards the middle class.

I didn't hear that.

Yes, one woman wanted her son to go to college, which seems like a fairly middle-class move to make. However, she wanted him to graduate from high school first. Another simply wanted her children to have a happy, healthy childhood, because she herself didn't: Her husband was working at a local fast food chain; she was caring for her babies, and she was the happiest she'd ever been in life. A third simply wanted to live and be around for her children well into their adulthood, because her own parents had died early. A fourth wanted a crib for her new baby.

Given the complexity of poverty and the often damaging assumptions we make about how to fix it, I think we do wrong if we approach poverty (or really, any social ill) as essentially a problem to be fixed. Sometimes, life does not need an academic solution. As a dramatic academic, this is hard for me to say: I see a problem, and I want to quantify it, describe it, analyze it, evaluate it, solve it. I want to study it. But how do you quantify the progress out of poverty when there's one woman sitting in front of you with her baby, talking about how happy she is? How do you quantify the stories that are told?

As believers, "the desire to give is blessed". Academic solutions, however, do not make good gifts. Perhaps this is partly what James meant when he warned us against wishing that people "be warm and well-fed" but doing nothing practical to help. To truly give (whether the need be financial or emotional, or the needy one be in poverty or wealth), we must put away the desire to quantify and control experience. Instead of focusing on theories, we need to focus on people: to see that individuals are indeed warm and well-fed, that that they are loved.

T.S. Eliot warned his praying readers,

"You are not here to verify / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity, Or carry report. You are here to kneel/  Where prayer has been valid."

Here, much the same warning applies. A worshiper cannot come to God as to a Theorem, expecting to "instruct himself" on the nature of the divine or "inform curiosity" about religious experience. Just so, we cannot come to social work expecting to "carry report" and publish papers or to "verify" the truth or error of claims about poverty. The best work is done when we forget the reports and verfications and theories (or at least push them to the back of our mind, to be studied later) and focus on people.

In Conclusion
Last spring, my students were assigned the short story, "A Wall of Fire Rising". In that story, a Haitian man was confronted with the reality of the social cage that his poverty placed him in: In spite of his intelligence, in spite of his ambition, the only job available to him was temp work cleaning toilets. In spite of his young son's intelligence, his son would be lucky to end up with a job in the sugar mill. Guy ends the story by stealing the mill owner's balloon, a symbol of freedom and fulfillment, and then falling (or jumping?) from the balloon to his death.

Commonly, students react to this story by condemning Guy, the Haitian. "He should have been content," they say. "He had a wife and a son." "They had sugar water and bananas to eat!" "At least he could clean toilets every now and then," they say, as if that was the fulfillment of all Guy's ambition.

Let me be clear: I am not condoning suicide in any circumstances. Yet my students' responses (and other students; a quick Google search shows that theirs is not a limited problem) lacked something: A sense of compassion or understanding for the difficulties that drove Guy to make the decisions he did. As a student this semester pointed out, an interpreter is on dangerous ground if she tries to condemn (or vindicate) Guy without having walked in his shoes; she has never had to confront his reality of a life of poverty. To recommend with ease that Guy simply "be content", from someone who has no personal experience of the challenges of poverty, is to recommend a solution which is "simple and wrong". 

T.S. Eliot writes that "As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated". In fact, recognizing complications in one's understanding of life (the 'pattern' that Eliot refers to) is in fact not only a product of growth but also a mark of it. Let me illustrate with a lighthearted example: A child who dislikes vegetables may not believe that anyone could possibly like lima beans or green peppers or tomatoes. As an adult, she may still dislike lima beans, but she will understand that other people love them because she has met people that do. The "pattern" of her life has been complicated, to a good end.

Apply that now to the literature of diversity: A child reads Guy's decision to steal the balloon and jump as inconceivable, utterly wrong. An adult may still recognize that his is the wrong decision, but because she has more experience with people in depression or people trapped by poverty or other social circumstances, she realizes how very troubling the circumstances are that led up to that decision. To put this in biblical language, St. Paul warns us that as adults we must "put away childish things" (I Cor. 13.11), among them a belief that we always have a perfect answer for a difficult problem.

Visiting Women's Life challenged me to put away simple answers. As a philosophical person myself, theories and argument are clear and important, but I was reminded that people are more important and that sometimes (not always) the theories do not matter. I hope that my students also learned that, in some way, "the world is stranger" and "the pattern more complicated" than they first believed.

*Women's Life: Not its real name; changed to protect privacy

Ice Cream

My last post, on the balance of power in the Christian church, was philosophically heavy. My next one, on the medieval writer Lady Julian of Norwich, will also be philosophically heavy. I want to take this post to share something more lighthearted.

Last week was stressful for me: I had a run-in with a few people, taught an extra writing class, received thirty papers to grade, and sat through a few long meetings. Thursday night, I arrived home exhausted from a grading session, pulled out nice things to eat and drink, and crashed in front of the Internet for an hour.

At 9.45 someone pounded on my glass screen door. My first reaction was annoyance: I was just getting ready to move from the table to the couch for the remainder of the evening, and here I had to answer a knock at the door. My neighbour's cable guy sometimes confuses whose sliding glass door is whose and has inadvertently knocked on mine before. I imagined that I was fielding another visit from the confused cable guy and got up to send him around to the neighbours'.

My visitor was not the cable guy.

It was two close friends. They grinned at me from the  dark, their hands cupped in little tents as they leaned against the glass to see inside. I pulled back my safety bar, pulled back the blinds, unlocked the door (yes, my father taught me security) and let them in.

I then saw they carried goodies: a bag filled with three little pints of ice cream. These, they promptly unloaded on my counter and started searching for the spoons. I, on the other hand, was stunned into inaction and speechlessness: I stammered, told them to pull out the spoons they know, and started washing a few leftover dishes (a favourite recourse of mine when confused or placed in an awkward situation) while I repeatedly instructed them to help themselves to whatever items they needed out of my kitchen.

Gracious enough to ignore my confusion, they offered me my choice of ice cream pints (mint chocolate chip vs chocolate chocolate chip - what a choice!) and handed me a spoon. (At this point, my reaction was happiness!) For the next thirty minutes, we all circled about in my kitchen, digging into our respective ice cream pints and sharing the stressful stories from the last week. I shared about my week, then my two friends each took their turn venting about the various troubles and concerns that pile up at this point in the semester. When we put the ice cream, half-melted in their e pint cartons, back into the freezer, someone made tea and we kept talking as we sipped. Not until 11.15 did we look at the clock, decide that Friday was indeed a work day, and say our goodbyes.

When I was still an undergraduate student, a few friends and I met every weekend for tea: Our tea sessions served much the same purpose. We met late at night, brewed tea in electric hot pots, and sat on the hard floor to talk about what had been troubling us and what had been going well. Neither a Haagen-Dazs session nor a tea session actually solved the problems, but ice cream and tea, and particularly friends, absolutely make troubles more bearable.

I think there are two aspects of these experiences that makes them so refreshing (Yep, analysis. I'm an English teacher. I do this.) It's important, first of all, to have someone who will simply listen to your problems - listen, plus nothing. In Christian circles especially, conversation partners sometimes want to say something and not just listen: Perhaps they want to fix your problems, or perhaps they want to help you see the silver lining and be content about your problems. Trouble is, stressed-out people are often not immediately ready to fix their problems or even reach contentment. What stress needs, first of all, is an emotional outlet. Think of stress like electricity: While electricity should be controlled and managed so it can be productive, it needs to be made safe first. Long before the light bulb was created and used regularly, electricity was discovered, made safe and studied by scientists. Problems are like that: Eventually we'll reach a solution and (or?) contentment with that stress, but before that happens, we need to find an outlet for the stress. I have been and am still grateful for the people in my life who've volunteered to be an outlet for my stress, and I try to be an outlet for theirs as well.

It's also important to have people who will encourage and build you up. I think sometimes we formalize "encouragement" too much. Perhaps it's an American thing: We have special "Secret Sister" events around the holidays, meals and gatherings with our church or employer, mentor relationships made through the church or another organization that meet regularly, at least once a week. All of these events are good, but not all encouragement needs to happen through an event. My half-pint of ice cream and four listening ears (two friends) were very encouraging. A colleague at work received an anonymous gift of chocolate, and that also was encouraging. Even the Apostle Paul depended on seemingly-insignificant encouragement: Luke kept him company in Rome, and Timothy brought him a coat towards the end of his imprisonment. Encouragement doesn't need to be a grand, organized event. Sometimes a coat, or a dish of ice cream, or a cup of tea, will do the trick quite nicely.

Liquid Encouragement. Drink with abandon.

Power

Looking back at the blog, I realize that it's been a month since I posted last. Whoops.

My second year teaching at my current location has, in many ways, been busier than my first: I know my job responsibilities now and so I'm working on both short-term and long(er)-term projects at the same time; I'm spending more time tweaking my projects and grading carefully than last year, where I spent some nights scrabbling to stay up with lesson planning. What this means is that I've had less time for blogging. Last week, however, was rich with thought-provoking material begging for a blog post.

Realization: At the heart of most of the world's religions (including Christianity) is the search for power. As in Lord of the Rings, men and women desire power above all else, and they have learned to exploit beliefs about moral behaviour and about the after life to supply this power.

Consider the biblical example of Simon the Sorcerer: Paul showed up casting out demons, and Simon tried to buy, with great sums of money, what he thought were Paul's professional secrets. It's easy to misread this gesture as Simon thinking that casting out demons is 'cool' or Simon misunderstanding the gospel. In fact, the gesture is somewhat more manipulative: To command the spirits was, at least in that day, to command people as well. The visible displays over power over unseen elements likely would have sealed Simon's political control of the island. To Simon, religious practice was simply a doorway to unimaginable power.

Besides Simon, countless other religious people have confused faith with a power source. Kings claimed to be gods in order to secure the people's loyalty: It is easier to die in a war that you believe is for your god than simply a quest to gain a few more acres of land. Ancient priests, including those in Egypt and South America, held the power of life or death over their citizens; they could spare them or sacrifice them with a word. In The Prince of Egypt, the Pharaoh's priests sing of the power they hold over Moses and the power they (think they) hold over Moses's God. Medieval Catholic priests pulled all the strings of most of Europe's governments, and not until the Renaissance did the kings finally start to break free of this control. Especially in a poverty-stricken feudal system, the priesthood was one of the few tickets to wealth and comfort, and the influence that comes with lots of money.

Mixing religion with power is not, of course, something that died out with the Knights Templar. There are, of course, the more egregious examples: Jim Jones, fundamentalist Mormon sects repressing women, extreme Independent Fundamental Baptist churches demanding a long list of strange moral and social responsibilities from its members. In each case, religious power is simply a method by which the leader bends the people to his own will and so secures from them whatever he desires. Yet the thirst for power runs deep, and other less obvious examples abound. In some circles, believers share "messages from God" with specific brothers or sisters: While well-intentioned, the divine intervention gives the messenger a certain prophetic power over the recipient. In other circles, worshipers suggest that to walk with God and believe His promises of happiness is to take the first step out of hardship towards wealth and comfort. A conservative variant of this belief suggests that God may punish his children physically for some egregious sin (a car crash, for instance), and so good behaviour and religious practice becomes not a matter of loving Christ but of taking control of life, at least in some degree.

Yet the faith authored by Christ is not a faith of taking power; it is a faith of giving power. Luke 5 records that "the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick". Yes, Christ had all the power of God. This power, however, was not used as the Pharisees used theirs: to demand honour and respect, to control the behaviour of those around them. Instead, the power of Christ was used to give power to others, in this case by restoring the sick beyond hope to a normal and fulfilling life. Indeed, the New Covenant itself is about the distribution of power: Whereas the Old Covenant kept men restricted under law (as a child, in Paul's analogy, is kept restricted under a tutor, the New Covenant removed the law and gave men the power to make their own decisions and hopefully the power to act for good, as an adult has power to do much good by virtue of making their own decisions. Even in His death Christ gave power to others: He who could have called down ten thousand angels gave human beings power, in order that they may kill him and salvation be accomplished.

A speaker at the college where I teach recently pointed out that the Christian God is not a glory-taker but a glory-giver: I would add that our God is also a power-giver. I see two possible applications from this fact. First, we who follow Christ must be on our guard against forms of our religion that seize power in any way whatsoever. Any form of religion that is about control is not derived from Christ; it is dangerous and must be avoided or at least reformed. Second and more importantly, we who follow Christ should also follow him in giving power to other people, of enabling them to live richer and fuller lives. To give other people power does not, of course, mean to agree meekly with others' opinions and to go along with all their ideas. I think it was C.S. Lewis who once pointed out that it is more polite to have and express an opinion about an activity than to submit, martyr-like, to an activity that you do not like; he suggested that such politeness inevitably ends with a whole bunch of people doing something that no one really likes.

Yes, to surrender the power of choice to people around us is to imitate Christ, but that is not the only way to do so. Indeed, there are many ways to grant power to others. Consider secrets: To tell someone a secret, something about our spiritual walk or our struggles or our frustrations, is to grant them power over us. Yet sharing secrets is essential for our psychological and our spiritual well-being. So, we take a step towards godliness and give a trustworthy soul this power over us. Consider too how we enable other people: Even in situations that do not involve power struggles we may still be Christlike by helping people live a better life. As a teacher, when I present my lessons in a way that enables my students to master the material and (hopefully) develop into clear, loving communicators, I am enabling them to live a more complete, Christian life and thus I am being Christlike in my job. An administrator that frees up his employees to make their own decisions (and then stand or fall by those decisions) is a Christlike step. A parent that lets her children assume responsibility for their own actions is also taking a Christlike step. In short, wherever we can resist the allure of having power and instead responsibly give that power to others, whether power over ourselves or over life decisions, we are behaving in a Christlike manner.

As Christ gave the ancient Jews certain powers, so He also gives us the power to know Him and walk with Him and live righteously in a way that we could never do on our own. It is a good step in us to grant such power, of similar kind though not degree, to others.

Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, argues that TV shows are detrimental because they weaken people's ability to handle extended analytical thought. Instead, TV shows supply the viewer with all necessary background knowledge about the story line and characters and so convince the viewer, at least subconsciously, that no prerequisite knowledge or extended period of learning is necessary for real education.

It occurred to me today that a second fault can be laid at the doors of TV shows: They convince the viewer, at least subconsciously, that failure (or at least long-term, extended failure) is impossible. Even being wrong is a rare occurrence, at least according to television shows. This is not healthy assumption.

Please don't get me wrong: I don't intend to give up TV (or at least rewatching old shows on DVD, which is about all I ever do). I would be lost without Stargate: Atlantis or Firefly (my newest discovery!) to help me unwind in the evenings, especially after stressful days like the one I just had today (in about 30 minutes, I'm going to finish this post and watch Firefly.) But it's still important to recognize the faulty assumptions that TV shows coax their viewers to accept and guard against these assumptions.

Just as TV shows write episodes to stand alone for the viewer, so they also write episodes to wrap up quickly. Most shows introduce, build and then resolve tension in the space of an episode or two. Even the shows that have ongoing story arcs are segmented into small, stand-alone stories. Take the first season of Stargate: Atlantis for an example: While the entire season deals with a group of people stranded in space and unable to return to earth, there are a number of small and quickly-resolved stories within that season: the military takeover of their city, the bad dreams of one of their crew members, an unexpected encounter with a particularly vicious enemy. Each of these is resolved quickly. The main characters are successful within an hour. Even if the characters are momentarily unsuccessful, they swing back to being successful almost immediately: far more quickly than in real life.

Moreover, the individual stories of each episode are usually resolved with little or no harm to the actual characters. Star Trek's "Redshirt" term proves this: It is the unnamed and unimportant crew member (not an officer) who dies, never one of the major crew members. Obviously, killing off unnamed crew members was a much more viable choice for the show writers than killing off (and replacing) major characters. Game of Thrones is perhaps the only TV show (and book) that regularly kills off favourite characters. The main characters have their adventure, watch the unimportant Redshirt die, and then head off to live long and prosper.

In other words, the main characters are always successful nearly immediately and are rarely injured or hurt in the process. Even their guesses or solutions to the problem are usually right, even if they take all of ten minutes to hit on the correct solution to the problem.

In TV, this works fine. In real life, this is wildly unrealistic and harmful if we don't realize that TV unconsciously sells us the assumption that all our problems will be wrapped up neatly and successful in a very short time.

In fact, most of our conflicts will not be resolved in the space of 45 minutes, let alone the space of 45 days. Some conflicts will last years. Individual success is never guaranteed, and huge swaths of the Bible are devoted to helping believers to approach failure with the right mindset. In Psalm 73, the author writes that there is no point in all his righteous behaviour: The wicked are successful, and he is not. The Bible is not TV.

Nor is real life. Take me, for an example: I am starting my fifth year teaching (including graduate school). The last two weeks have been perhaps the most frustrating and disappointing start to a semester in all of the last five years. I have revised my plans already, not ten days into the semester. According to TV, I should be sailing off towards the horizon (or warping off towards it, given the examples I've used in this blog post). Five years in, I should be smooth sailing. At the very least, I should see the conflicts that have appeared so quickly in the last ten days disappear equally quickly. Neither one is going to happen. This will probably be a hard semester. I hope to resolve some of the conflicts, but I have little hope that they will all satisfactorily resolve, as if they had never existed. With some students my efforts to resolve conflict and teach material effectively will be, always, completely unsuccessful.

This is why TV is dangerous: Were I inclined to believe the TV, I would feel even more disappointed and even more like a failure than I already do. Since I don't believe the TV, I recognize that the feelings will pass and I go read Psalm 73 again. Even when the world is falling apart, there is still eternity to look forward to. My conflicts may not resolve in the sweet, nicely-packaged 45 minutes that I wish they would, but they will be resolved in eternity, and I know the God who is in control of eternity.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go numb my frustration by watching Firefly.