Uncertainty & Faith

One of the most telling memories of myself as a child is standing on a chest in a friend's bedroom, pointing down with one finger, vehemently arguing my side of a particular issue.

As a child, I was a debater. I was sure I was right.

Perhaps the sign of growing older is that I am no longer sure that I am right, and that I think such uncertainty is a step towards personal and even spiritual maturity.

In American Christianity, there is a push to eliminate uncertainty from the faith. As a teen, I remember attending Christian apologetic conferences. The speakers laid down arguments as if, following one conference in a large Midwestern church, there could nevermore be legitimate discussion on these topics. The timing of Christ's return, courtship as an alternative to dating, and the need for more stringent Christian laws in our country were all obviously decided. Faith was no longer a choice but rather an intellectual certainty, explicated by knowing speakers from the platform.

Indeed, believers assume that, provided sufficient attention is given to a problem in the Bible or in personal life, there need be no uncertainty. We can, they suggest, know without doubt what every single Scripture passage means. We can know every step and action that must be taken for us to live as Christians. No doubt about it.

A writer on the blog "Project TGM: Theology, Gospel, Mission" sums up this belief: He suggests that "uncertainty . . . leads to destruction" and that our faith should be marked by "peering into the mind of God" - presumably, understanding what we see there.

I agree, of course, that we have great certainty in our God. Proofs for His existence and for His goodness abound. If it were not so, C.S. Lewis would not be a household name, and we would not have such pleasure in Nature, seemingly outfitted (especially in the springtime) expressly for our pleasure.

Yet the fact that we can know some things about God does not change the fact that we cannot possibly know everything about God, that "peering into His mind" may well leave us with more questions than answers. Indeed, uncertainty is a crucial part of our faith.

The Apostle's Creed begins, "I believe in God the Father, Almighty".

Stop.

"Almighty."

Who are we to think that we can fully comprehend God the Almighty? That we can offer reason and proof for his existence? That we can conclusively and without doubt describe His character?

Yes, He has offered us the Bible, but the Bible is His Word to humanity - the Word of Infinite Being to finite Creatures. Can such words be wholly understood? Do any of us really stand ready to accurately interpret the flaming wheel of Ezekiel? Are any of us ready, unlike Moses His servant, to look upon the face of God?  No? Then God, even in the Bible, transcends intellectual apprehension.

Mystical Christianity flourished a thousand years ago, as writers such as St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Lady Julian of Norwich reminded us that God cannot be wholly known. Like the horizon that is perceived but never reached, such writers, in contrast to contemporary apologists, suggested that God may be perceived but never apprehended. Indeed, they suggested that only by admitting the failure of intellectual machinations can individuals perceive God clearly.

The mystics' legacy lives on in T.S. Eliot, and it is to Eliot that I turn in order to explain why uncertainty is such a crucial part of our faith. Eliot, known for The Waste Land, is often not known for his mid-life conversion to Christianity. After his conversion, he wrote Four Quartets, poems that clearly express both his faith and his uncertainty regarding how he ought to approach God. In the second of four poems, Eliot writes,

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. (East Coker)

Most believers lean hard on "the wisdom of old men" to guide our faith, wisdom we find in books published by Francis Chan or John Piper.

Yet is is in the "folly" of old men that Eliot finds wisdom - in other words, what such men don't know about God. Moses, who wrote portions of the Scripture, saw only the back of God, and certainly Chan and Piper and others like them know no more. This is why Eliot begs to know the "folly" of wise men: That which is unseen is perhaps the truest part of the divine; it was the face of God, the most identifying characteristics, that Moses did not see. Let no one imagine that what we understand about God describes His character at all completely. Who God is baffles our intellect, so that the closest we come is, compared to the divine reality, but folly.

Such uncertainty ought not to alarm the orthodox Christian. Yes, God is eminently logical, but He also calmed the storms while He was on earth. Perhaps the story is too familiar now to raise the shock that such an illogical event ought to raise. Storms, we know, are not the outpouring of Zeus' wrath but the meteorological consequence of a high-pressure front meeting a low-pressure one. That Jesus averted such a natural event conflicts with the wisdom of modern science. Yet the storm was calmed, and so we see that God is sometimes seen best in that which is unexplained and considered folly.

Perhaps this is why Eliot follows up his demand for the "folly" of old men with this passage:

As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

In the first stanza, Eliot suggests that the observable world is but a "bold imposing facade" - in other words, no more significant than the cardboard tree that appears in an elementary-school production. Such crafts do not accurately represent the world as it exists, so why, Eliot implies, do we expect our senses to accurately represent God as He exists? As the facade must eventually be rolled away, so eventually our senses must be rolled back so that the soul may perceive God without the errors introduced by human cognition.

Ultimately, Eliot recommends that we believers lay aside cognition to "wait without hope" and "wait without love" and "wait without thought" for God to reveal who He is. Perhaps Eliot's advice sounds anti-Christian, but it is not. Have we, for instance, never hoped that God would cure someone of cancer, yet that person died? Have we never thought that God will provide a job or a spouse for us, only to find ourselves out of work and single? So often, what we think and hope and love about God is not at all aligned with who God is. The Pharisees thought they loved God, until He showed up on their doorstep forgiving tax collectors and hanging out with prostitutes.

Consider the demon-possessed man that God healed, the man named "Legion". When Legion was healed, the entire town came out to beg that Christ leave their city. This too is another portion of Scripture we gloss over too easily: Glad as we are that Legion is healed, a herd of pigs and thus an entire city's economy is destroyed on behalf of that one person. Will you pretend you understand this miracle? Will you say, "Well, the soul is worth more than anything?" To save Legion, Jesus Christ doomed an entire city to hunger and continued poverty (they weren't raising the pigs for fun!).

In part, this is why robbing Christianity of its inherent uncertainty is dangerous. If we claim to know who God is, then we must likewise claim to know why He permits particular instances of human suffering, which is (as Job learned) a question far beyond us. If we, however, know that we do not wholly know God, we also know that we cannot explain His actions.

The only answer is trust. 

I am watching Battlestar Galactia right now. At the beginning of the third season, Admiral Adama sends out on a crucial mission one of his officers: a Sharon Valerii, who belongs to a race traditionally at war with Adama's.

Sharon, though proud of her appointment, nevertheless asks Adama, "How do you know you can trust me?"

"I don't," Adama replies. "That's what trust is."

That's what trust is. 

If there were no uncertainty, faith could not exist. Towards the end of his poems, Eliot writes this:

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

"Verifying" faith with proofs is, in the end, not faith at all. "Instructing yourself" in the supporting evidence misses the point of faith. Ratiocination has its uses but also its limits. We who believe in God ought most of all to "kneel / Where prayer has been valid". Faith is ultimately about laying aside questions upon questions about the complexities of religion and worshiping what we know, and what we do not know, of Christ.

Uncertainty is not a bad word. It is not a faithless word. It is part and parcel of a faith that asks us believers, in the end, to lay down our weaponry of intellectual debate and experiential proofs. All we can do, in the end, is trust that the God who is never fully seen is the God of Peace.

Teaching Boys, Post #3

You who read my blog (all 40 of you) know from previous posts that the first two years or so of teaching were rocky ones for me. You may also know that what pulled me out of that period and set me on the path to becoming at least a decent teacher was Bruce Wilkinson's excellent book The Seven Laws of the Learner. 

Reading this book, I learned to accept responsibility for students' learning. I told more stories to keep class attention. I used pictures and graphs to illustrate how papers should be set up. I pushed back paper deadlines when I discovered that I had confused students. It was a big step forward. 

Now, the next step forward is to give responsibility back to the students. 

In The Trouble With Boys, Peg Tyre writes (unexpectedly enough for me) that one way to reach difficult boys is strict accountability for academic and personal performance. In other words, boys, and presumably girls, do better not when class is made easier but when class is made harder. 

I am guilty of the opposite. I have at times made class easier (too easy!) for students, personally and academically.

Two particular student encounters from the last five years of teaching illustrate what I mean when I say that my teaching has become "too easy": 

Some time ago, a student arrived 20 minutes late to my class, well over the time that I would count her absent. When I called her up after class, she apologized for missing and said, "Yes, go ahead and count me absent. I deserve it." I, grateful for the student's admission of error, gave her a tardy instead. Thinking back on it, I wish I'd given the absent. One absence would not have failed the student, and it would have sent a clearer signal: I the teacher expect you to manage your time appropriately in order to arrive on time at my class. Instead, I sent this signal: I the teacher will allow you to get away with anything if you apologize. 

Oops.

Another time, I was holding paper conferences with my student. The students were required to bring a certain amount of homework in to class. Halfway through my three days of conferences, a student arrived with all his homework completed. I, unthinking, praised his work. He responded, "Uh, yes. That's what we were supposed to do." My heart sank to the floor. During the conferences, student after student with their homework half-finished had managed to convince me that I expected nothing more. I expected that my students would not complete their work.

May God forbid that is what I expect of my students. 

To expect students to fail is to guarantee failure. To take responsibility for a finished paper or project into my own hands is to deny college students, all on the cusp of adulthood, a shot at personal maturity. 

Never again will I excuse students who arrive without homework completed.

Never again will I delay the deadline for a paper because students were not prepared.

Never again will I grant general amnesty on homework because half the class didn't complete it.

Never again will I turn a blind eye when students walk into class ten minutes late on the day a paper was due because they were still printing it. 

I will not allow students to be disruptive in class. I will not allow them to ridicule fellow students. I will not allow them to disrespect me as the teacher. 

Yes, I say this very confidently on my blog. Yes, I will continue to make mistakes in granting excessive leniency. Among other things, five years of teaching have taught me that I am a softie. Yet I cannot allow myself to grow soft with my students.

Of course, "never" statements only guarantee a kind of negative accountability. I have positive expectations for my students, too:

I expect them to work on papers in advance, not in the last three days of the semester. To hold students to this, I will enforce rigid deadlines: all sources submitted by one date; a rough draft, by another.  

I expect students to teach themselves. Some material is too basic to cover in class, such as selecting quotations from research to use in papers. Other material is too boring: All MLA citation information is easily available at OWL at Purdue. Class time is better spent reviewing the finer points of rhetoric than reviewing what is in italics and what in quotation marks on a Works Cited page. To hold students accountable for independent learning, I will provide them the resources (the OWL link, the information about the writing center) and require correct submission. 

I expect students to use strong grammar. If the appropriate use of the colon is beyond them, avoiding comma splices and fragments is not. I will grade students on grammar, and I will teach those that still confuse you're / your and there / their / they're to distinguish between these words. We will practice fragments and run-on sentences.

Regarding my responsibilities as a teacher, nothing has changed. It is still up to me to teach in such a way that students master the content. Yes, this responsibility may extend to delaying a paper assignment if my teaching has confused the students. Yes, it includes making allowances for students challenges: legitimate sudden illness, for instance, or learning disabilities. 

Regarding my students' responsibilities, everything has changed. They are wholly responsible to produce the best that they personally are able to produce. That standard is at different places for different students, of course, but the fact remains. They are accountable. 

And when they are made accountable, they are more likely to learn.

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.