Do the Reading

This is what happened in my class today after half of the students failed the reading quiz:

First, I made a little speech: "We need to have a talk. In any class, you have two choices. You can do the reading every day, take notes, try to figure out what's important about it, and come to class--and we can have great discussions that I promise you will be much more interesting. Or you can do what some of you are doing, which is skipping or skimming the reading, coming to class, and saying things that don't make sense, so that the students who have done the reading get confused and wonder, 'oh, wait, was that in there?' Which is detrimental to everyone's learning experience. So, those of you who have failed the quiz, I'm going to dismiss you, and I'd like Students W, X, Y, and Z to stay."

So the rest of them packed up their bags and left, and the five of us had a great class (even if one of the students who had gotten an A did say, "I almost threw up! I'm still shaking!").

If Hollywood produced action movies about teaching, the story would begin with that death-defying moment, and then there would be a flashback to Two Days Earlier. So here's the backstory: their first batch of essays this semester had been almost uniformly miserable, so this time around, for the second essays, we spent two class days going over their drafts and having conferences to help them write better. Alas, here are actual remarks from the conferences about the final drafts two days ago:

"I'm not even going to write on this book; I think I'm just going to start over. Is there a direction you want to point me in?"
"To be honest with you, my paper is really terrible. I didn't spend much time on this at all."

On top of it, in this class of junior and senior English majors, only one student out of 9 has been doing the reading regularly. So on today's announced quiz, when half of them got, oh, two out of ten questions right (what's that about a stopped clock being right twice a day?), instead of banging my head against the wall (again), I decided the best thing for them would be to give them a kick in the pants. I did try to be nice about it--I told them before they left that we would start fresh on Monday. But the book we're reading is a mystery, and I wanted them to puzzle through it together and experience the uncertainty and curiosity, not just get "the answer" from their classmates' comments.

I just can't wait to see my evaluations at the end of this semester!

Church People, Prequel

When I moved to Chapel Hill for grad school, I wanted to find a local church where I could settle in for the duration. One of the first churches I visited had experienced a lot of growth and had recently built a new building, or at least a new wing--soaring ceilings, lots of light, white tile that everybody's dress shoes clicked on . . . a beautiful place to worship. The preaching was consistently outstanding, each sermon an eloquently written exhortation, punctuated by the kinds of observations that make you nod your head in agreement--yes, yes, I think so too. Thank you for that insightful reminder, minister. The congregation was made up of improbably attractive young professionals, pre-professionals, and graduate students from UNC and Duke: serene young moms and dads with a couple of towheaded kids in patent-leather shoes, well-groomed engaged couples holding hands (she from the med school, he from the business school), etc. It was lovely.

And it bored me out of my freaking mind. Well, at first I liked it--I felt a certain sense of relief that God had some normal, well-adjusted people in His family, especially after some rather wacky past church experiences (can anybody relate?). But after a few weeks, I found my mind wandering during those elegant sermons. And after a few more weeks, to my surprise, I realized that I didn't even want to go when I woke up on Sunday, didn't look forward to it. I noticed that I felt the same when I left, as if I hadn't been to church at all; I could only tell because if I looked down, I was wearing a dress and it was precisely one hour later. And I wasn't sure about the dresses either--I wondered, where were the people with poor fashion sense, or women whose children didn't have handsome dads or patent-leather shoes, or people with problems. If you had a problem and came to that church, I wondered, what would happen to you?

So I went back to the Vineyard in Raleigh--25 miles away, a different city; I had visited before but had wanted to find a church nearer to Chapel Hill. The Raleigh Vineyard met in what looked like a converted CVS, with lower ceilings but the same fluorescent lights in aisle patterns on the ceilings. No windows, but velvet drapes up at the front with some fake ficus trees behind the dark jumble of cords and music stands. There was a guy who sat behind me and talked to himself. I think he may have been wearing swimming trunks with his T-shirt, or maybe that was somebody else. The preaching wasn't flashy, and it didn't draw attraction to the pastor. It was simply wise and deep and sweet and honest, like home cooking when you've been eating out all the time. I'm feeling tears well up as I write this; it's like writing about falling in love.

Both churches were spiritual homes for somebody, and I knew which one was mine. The people at RVCF did not have exceptional problems in their lives, but they sought God faithfully and with utter transparency as they lived out their lives together. Their simplicity and earnestness and kindness called me back. If my math is right, I drove about 25,000 miles on Highway 40 back and forth between Chapel Hill and Raleigh in six years of grad school, and every mile was worthwhile.

High-Tech Household

My vacuum cleaner died Saturday after a long illness. Though no autopsy has been performed, the coroner (my dad) believes the immediate cause of death to have been "a busted ball bearing in the motor" based on the death rattle observed in its last moments by me. (Surely, it did not expire due to overuse.) RIP.

After a very brief mourning period, a flyer arrived in the mail advertising a replacement solution: the Roomba!

For those of you who aren't obsessed with either domestic life or gadgetry, the Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner. It's a little larger than a frisbee, and thicker, and it runs itself: you set it in the middle of the room and it runs around on both carpet and hard surface floors. One of the reviewers on Amazon wrote, "It's not quite as good as a person lugging a heavy upright vacuum cleaner, but a person lugging a heavy upright vacuum cleaner does not come to my house every day." The Roomba can be left on to do its job while you're not even home. The advanced model (which I didn't bother to get) even can be scheduled to come on at a certain time and do its thing, and then it returns to its charger when it starts to run out of juice.

So, I have purchased a Roomba. It was about $40 more than a vacuum cleaner that I would have had to (gasp!) operate myself, so I figured I would give it a try. I set it out for the first time today. I turned it on, and it trundled about the upstairs in zig-zags and circles for a couple of hours on its own, sucking up all manner of dust, pet hair, and assorted other detritus.

Of course, on this first job, it did not save me any time--because I followed it around with my fingers in my mouth, watching in awe.

BTW, I am taking entries in the Roomba-naming contest, beginning . . . now. No purchase necessary; void where prohibited by law. (It's a boy, FYI.)

Reach

My pastor in St. Louis once preached on Jonah 2:8: "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs." He suggested that God does not teach us to let go of things by prying open our fists; instead, God shows us something better, and we open our hands to reach for it.

What I've noticed, however, is that lots of times the better thing doesn't show up, or can't, before we've let go of whatever we held onto. Or maybe something shows up, but it doesn't immediately appear "better"--often, it actually seems harder!

And yet, I think maybe the truly better thing, the thing that is always there for us if we open our hands, is not the improvement in our circumstance or the desperately needed blessing, but rather the promise of knowing Him better. And that does show up. Every time.

Apples of Gold, Pictures of Silver

So Kate asked recently why grammar matters. Rather than clog up her blog with longwinded comments, I'll put all my longwinded comments here to bore my own friends instead of hers.

Recently one of my composition students wrote on one of his assignments about how much he loved this instructor (who has somewhat of a lousy reputation as a teacher) because " __ doesn't grade us on our grammar. He just grades us on our ideas. If you have a good idea, you get a good grade."

The statement has a certain vague logic. But the problem is that lots of times, the ideas in my students' papers are incomprehensible, or at least less comprehensible, because of their awkwardness with the language. Sometimes I can still figure out what they're trying to say, but it takes a lot more work on my part as a reader, and that means that I'm that much less likely to get what they want to say exactly if I don't already know it. Their writing is that much less likely to teach me something new. If language is power, they are only as powerful as they are skilled with its tools.

Of course, they might argue that we read texts in class that require a lot of interpretation, and they might ask how those are different. I think I would say that the work pays off if the process of interpretation itself yields us something. But if we work to discover an idea that could have been communicated more simply, or if we're misled by a sentence because we've gotten the wrong grammatical cues, our time has been wasted.

Or (if they were persistent, and really inquisitive), they might ask why grammar matters when lots of readers don't notice or care about it. And then I'd have to say that the power of language for a society as a whole depends not on the precision of any given communication, but the available range of meanings that any writer can draw on and expect his or her audience to perceive. I think our language is getting dreadfully impoverished, which worries me a little. I've been shocked at the vocabulary that some of my students don't know, and their inability to make important, even obvious distinctions as a result. I read a statistic recently that said the average adolescent today has something like 50% of the vocabulary that his or her counterpart had a generation ago. I think about what a relief it is to find the word that expresses a feeling or an idea, and how convicting and inspiring it can be to hear the right one from someone else, and I want our language to be as rich and powerful and precise as it can be.

Experience

Emerson had an essay titled "Experience," and I don't think I got it until this past year. It's impressionistic, recursive; a writing teacher would have told him he had no argument. But the argument, I think, is for an appreciation of the sensation of experience itself. We had a visiting scholar at W&J for a day, and he said Melville mixes so many genres in Moby-Dick (some chapters are written like a novel, others like a play, others like--theology? poetry? philosophy?) in order to reflect the nature of experience. Maybe that's what Emerson was doing.

I've been thinking about experience because of something else I read in the Bonhoeffer book:

At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess:

'I now do see that we can nothing know.'

That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the inital data it cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired.

I loved this! It articulates something I've been wondering about: how to convey things that can't be taught by telling. If I tell my students the theme or interpretation of a text, they will dutifully write it down and memorize it. But they won't have had the experience of the text working on them and bringing them to that conclusion themselves . . . and perhaps by hearing about it first, being inoculated with it, they never will. Even asking questions I think sometimes gets in the way . . .

"Follow Me"

I've been reading a book called The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A couple of years ago, I saw a documentary about his life (simply titled Bonhoeffer) that left a deep impression on me. Just watching it, I felt my attention being clarified in some way--it made me want to be holy. Not to be annoyingly, simperingly holy, but to be powerfully holy. Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor during Nazi era in Germany, and he objected to the Third Reich early on. Some American friends brough him to safety in England, and he worked as a pastor there for a few years. But as the crisis in Germany grew more intense, he returned to his homeland.

That in itself is a choice I find breathtaking--it's like those firemen who rushed into the World Trade Center inferno as tens of thousands of people rushed out. He re-entered the conflagration that was Germany at the time because, as he wrote, Christians in Germany would face the choice between praying for civilization to be preserved and their nation destroyed, or praying for their nation to be destroyed and civilization to be preserved. He wrote that he could not legitimately participate in the rebuilding of Germany after the war if he did not share in making the inevitable, heartbreaking choice with his people.

So he came back to Germany, and he continued to preach what he considered to be the pure message of Christ, refusing to dilute it. He was arrested for conspiring against Hitler (which he had done), and he was executed very shortly before the end of World War II .

Anyway, in this book on discipleship, he writes that Jesus' first and last words to Peter were "Follow me." Jesus calls Peter, the impulsive, big-hearted fisherman, to himself with those words, and Peter follows as he preaches, heals, suffers, and dies. Then Jesus comes to Peter again, and when it's time to ascend to Heaven, he says, "Follow me." Yes, it's a command that presages Peter's own death, through which he will follow Jesus to heaven . . .

But it also seems to me like a tender moment between two men who love each other. I think Jesus looks at Peter, his friend to whom he has to say good-bye, and says, "Remember how I said, 'Follow me'--and you came? Remember all the great times we had, how we camped out and went fishing together? This is going to be just like that, even though we won't see each other for a while . . . you can follow me in this, even as you followed me for these three years. Don't be sad, Peter: remember how I called you, and you came?"

Church People

Ever since I first learned that there was a Vineyard church plant in my town (immediately after I accepted the job here, while I was still living 450 miles away), I've felt like I should be committed to it. Ed and Jodi, the pastors, went way beyond the call of duty to welcome me even before I arrived. They sent me long emails. They told me that the men's Bible study would be standing by to help with the house when I moved in, and that people in the church were already praying for me by name. They treated me like one of their own--before we'd ever met.

Their commitment to the area and to this church has become even more impressive to me as I've gotten to know the community a little better. When you walk around downtown, it's clear that the town's heyday was a couple of decades ago. Empty storefronts and dilapidated, gutted buildings provide only bare reminders of some past civic center. There is some new construction, and there are signs of growth--they're just so small, subtle, and slow that you need to be extra careful to note them. It's as if God is doing things very, very quietly, announcing his plans at just a whisper, and you have to listen very hard to hear Him rustling about.

Case in point: one Sunday, I found myself irritable in worship. There was a couple in front of me, the male part of whom kept letting his hand drift over his girlfriend's rear end during worship. Another woman just in front of me kept looking all around, sighing in frustration, drumming her fingers--not just normal fidgeting but "I can barely stand to be here" hyperactivity. She even bolted out once or twice, returning after having apparently had a cigarette. All of this my oh-so-holy Baptist-raised self found distracting. Why couldn't these people keep their minds on God for one lousy hour and let the rest of us do so as well?

I tried my level best to focus more intently on worship, but I'm ashamed to say that it took quite a while for the real lesson to sink in. At home later, I felt God say to me, "Tara, at least they're there." And I realized what a miracle it was for a woman who could barely sit still to want to come to church every week, as uncomfortable as it made her. (If church made me that uncomfortable, I don't know that I would have the obedience to go. But she did.) And as for the couple, they're apparently recently recovered from some kind of addiction, so maybe the fact that the man was happily offering his worship to God was more important than the fact that his hand dropped too low for my personal good-girl taste.

Ed and Jodi think much more like God and much less like me. They've made a commitment to be in this town, even when the great big sign of God's movement for a given week might be that someone in the congregation manages to sit through whole sermon, while a lot of the others still can't. Their commitment to nurturing a church planted on this parched, rock-hard earth leaves me awe-struck. It's as if they've promised themselves in marriage to an unfaithful spouse, or adopted a child that they know is plotting to run away. And yet they stay, planning to continue pouring out unreserved love as they wait for the prodigals to return. They wait week after week, year after year, for God's people, for us--the jittery addicts and the sanctimonious Baptists.

Pursuits of Happiness

In a class I taught at Duke a couple of semesters ago, I asked my students the big "What is the meaning of life?" question. I can't remember what we were reading at the time, but what I can remember is their unanimous confidence that the purpose of life was the achievement of personal happiness.

What is happiness? I asked.
It can only be defined by the individual, they said.
Does that mean that there are no external standards for happiness?
Yes.
What about if people say they're happy, but they don't seem happy?
Blank stares.
Well, you know, say someone with an eating disorder, or a drug addict claims to be happy, but you have your suspicions otherwise?

Here there was a divergence of opinion. Some resolutely stated that happiness was entirely subjective. Others said that if a person was being self-destructive, s/he could not be happy. But either way, these extremely privileged students believed they owed nothing to anyone or anything except their own pleasure. I didn't expect them to give me the Westminister Catechism's "To glorify God and exalt Him forever," but I'd have settled for, oh, I don't know-- good works or social justice or even being nice to other people?

The first thing that struck me was the obvious selfishness, but that actually troubles me a little less when I think about it at greater length, because I don't think they actually live their lives as selfishly as their verbalized moral code might permit. (I do think it is a problem that we haven't found a language for civic obligation and generosity that is as ready and persuasive as the language of hedonism. But that's a separate issue.)

The less-obvious problem, it seems to me, is that happiness is not something that one can pursue in the absence of other objectives. My mother has a vision problem in one eye where the center of her field of vision is blurred, and the periphery is clear. If she looks at something directly with just that one eye, she can't see it--she can see it best when she's looking at something else. I think happiness is like that--it can only be seen in one's peripheral vision.

So while they (young, upper-middle-class Americans, healthy, with top-flight educations) have been raised to be more consciously focused on their own happiness than perhaps any other group of people in the history of the world, they have also been raised without any hope of actually finding it. This seems both scary and sad to me.

(Of course, I've also had phenomenal students, at Duke and everywhere else I've been, whose concern for social justice and all those old-fashionied virtues like righteousness, humility, and courage were intact and even inspiring. I hope that they will lead their peers--and I pray that they will not be lonely.)

Surprised by Joy*

--For J and the two Cs.

After some recent events, I’ve been taking sober stock of my life and my character, thinking about who I want to be on the other side of it all—about who I want to be becoming, through all of this and through everything else. Part of me has wondered if certain things in my life would have gone a lot differently if I had been less complicated, if I had had the kind of carefree happiness that’s endlessly delightful to be around. I’ve seen that wholesome innocence in others, and I understand its summery appeal. When I think about it, it sometimes breaks my heart a little that I couldn’t have been that girl.

But in the midst of wishing that I were different, I’ve realized that I was given a different gift, even if it was not one included on my original Christmas list. Others have received it in far greater quantity and with far more grace than I have—so much so that I’m almost ashamed to class my own experience with theirs. But I think that however infinitesimal its measure, and however awkwardly I've received it, I’ve been given the gift of suffering.

I don’t mean this sarcastically or self-pityingly, and I certainly don’t mean that I’m asking for more of it, or that I’m resigned to some sad life. On the contrary, in some contradictory way, recognizing what I’ve gone through as a gift imparts to me a sense of peace, and kindles a small, steady hope for my life, for my eternal life. What I’ve received is not the simple vivacity of an untroubled heart. It’s not the kind of courage that comes from never having known fear, but the kind that comes from having faced the worst of my fears, and knowing that I will never be overcome by them again. It is a depth of compassion, and it is an irrefutable knowledge of the character of God.

As I look at the people I really, really love, I know that much of what I love most about them, what they reflect of the Spirit of Christ to me, has been born through their pain. My friend who lost her mother to death and virtually lost the rest of her family, even her in-laws, in the weeks and months afterward. Other friends, deeply beloved to me, who suffered infertility, and for whom the angel has not yet shown up to announce some miraculous birth. My grandmother, who lived through the Depression and survived her husband by twelve years. My friend who watched the loving husband she had waited her whole life for as he suffered for months before dying. My friend who is afraid of the world every day, yet meets it with shining eyes. In their careworn faces, I see a gentleness, an unshakable forbearance, and a tempered and powerful joy. Theirs is the spirit that takes my hands, looks me in the eyes, and says, “This too shall pass” with the serene authority of absolute faith.

And I want that; I want the grace to meet everything life throws at me with that kind of faith—because even the most carefree among us, I think, eventually meet some kind of bewildering pain, from which we cannot protect them. Because then I can recognize the incandescence of another person’s choice to bless the name of the Lord while wearing sackcloth and ashes. Because this is what the world needs, what this generation is crying out for—for a faith that can answer the suffering of our age.

Left to my own devices, I might have taken my chances with innocence anyway, but it would have meant choosing to be less than I am, less than what these friends are are, less than what He apparently wants me to be. My friends grow more luminous with every passing day; they embrace joy; they hold all things lightly except His hand. They are becoming what they will be in the resurrection—they are donning their glorified selves already. They are the fellowship that has shared in His suffering; they are the ministers of the kingdom of God. Make me like them, O Lord.

*apologies to C.S. Lewis

Spring!

The extended weather forecast shows temperatures rising to 70 in the next week. I know this because after moving 1) from North Carolina to western PA and 2) from a small, modern condo to a big old house that I bought for its charm, not its insulation, I've been monitoring the 10-day forecast like a horoscope this winter. I'm thankful the weather was relatively mild; I feel a tiny bit like the pilgrims, humbled by their gratitude that it was provided for them to survive.

It sounds silly to make so much of living through a winter that I spent in a 3-bedroom house in the 21st century United States with a thermostat and a stocked pantry. But it's not improbability that often limits my hopes, I think; it's my fear of disobedience and all the disappointment it creates. I've almost felt as if it were too risky to hope for things that I really wanted because the fierceness of those desires might lead me away from God's path. There may be some truth in that caution, but I also think of something C.S. Lewis wrote about how detachment is far closer to hate than love, and how passionate desire is much more akin to the heart of God that we see in the Bible. I think He wants our love for Him to exceed our love for all else by our seeking always to love Him more immensely, not by our reducing our love for all else to the mean and shallow.

I've always loved the wild joyfulness of spring: the smell of the damp earth that's been frozen for so long, the sound of rainwater and snowmelt gushing through the drains, the reckless daffodils that show up even before the final snowfalls sometimes. It's a time of surprise abundance--little plots you've hardly tended suddenly offer up a tuft of crocuses, and the dirt by your door becomes a mass of green shoots prophesying summer daylilies. If someone promised you all of this, and if you worried that hope could lead you astray, wouldn't it be difficult to set your heart on it?

It's really not hoping for spring in the midst of winter that I need to do; it's looking toward a resurrection that gives little sign of its presence, and trying to draw on a unity with God that I can't even personally remember and only barely can imagine--as if I and everybody I know was born stuck in the first winter ever, with only promises of what's to come. But here's the thing: it happens whether we hope for it or not, whether we believe in it or not. In spite of our inability to bring the spring or even to believe fully in it, it is coming soon.

Yes, 70 degrees! Forget that groundhog; you heard it here first.

From the Voice Mailbox

Voice mail messages I have received in the past week:

"Yes, hello. I was wondering if skinny-dipping could cure hot flashes. If you have the answer to this question and could call me back, please call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX."

"Hi, this is Larry Summers. I understand that you have an opening at your college, and since I am currently unemployed, I am interested in applying for that. I am very smart, have a PhD, and have done a little government work. I have been told I am a little abrasive, but my friends like me. I'll be waiting by the phone. Please call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX."

"Hi there. I’m calling from the Margaret Mitchell estate, and we understand that you are using the name 'Tara,' and I put that in quotes, as your moniker. I should let you know that 'Tara' was the name used by Miss Mitchell in her well known and brilliant novel Gone with the Wind. We are very concerned about this infringement of our copyright, and we would like you to pay damages. According to our calculations, you’ve been using it for approximately thirty years, and we believe that you owe us upwards of $500 million, though we may be able to adjust that slightly if you are cooperative. I should let you know that the clock is ticking and that the bill is increasing by the minute. If you could, please call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX."