Here and There and Everywhere

I was really rattled by the deaths of the three students in Chapel Hill last week.  So many details of the story made it breach the distance that stands between me and most of what I read in the news. These young students were members of a community that I loved, and the story had me thinking about why and how I did and do. I'm not from North Carolina, not a Southerner.  I'm not a member of the alumni association, and I don't have a sticker on my car.  I'm not even a basketball fan (!).  None of these are points of pride; they're just observations that my feelings of identification with the University run below the surface, but over the past few days, I've been trying to divine their course.

Carolina was the unlikely (for me, a Yankee) site of my initiation into full adulthood.  It was the place where my youthful interests and impulsive inclinations became acted-upon certainties with some force of their own in my life.  It helped me see academia as a place where I could live, because counter to all stereotypes (perhaps due to its sheer size, but also due to a host of other, more elusive reasons), it was a lot more diverse in pretty much every respect than ultra-liberal Northeastern Swarthmore, especially intellectually.  Even while I endured the sloggier aspects of grad school, I felt . . . hosted . . . by a place of tremendous grace.

Maybe that's why this seems so shocking and sad.  Because for me, what defined Carolina as an institution and what characterized Chapel Hill as a place was not the performance of a basketball team, not the number of Rhodes Scholars nor the vastness of the library's holdings, but the sense that the University existed to welcome everyone into a community of learning.  The camaraderie and generosity that blessed me among the grad students in my program seemed to extend to everyone associated with the institution.  I had this unarticulated sense of having been granted entrance to someplace, of being in possession of full membership, with all rights and privileges, to a place that everyone was proud of.  I didn't feel that all over the South, but I felt it all over campus and everywhere in town.

Maybe because I was in so many ways formed there as a teacher, that vision of education has been completely intertwined with what I feel (not just know or think or believe) as the purpose of higher education.  To confer membership, to create communities of which we can be proud, to welcome.  What happened to those three innocents, whose faces were so full of light, does not make me doubt the work itself; if anything, it means it's even more needed.  But it reminds me that everything we do is situated in what Elizabeth Barrett Browning called "a place to stand and love in for a day . . . with darkness and the death hour rounding it."

Whom he loveth . . .

Sam and I have been attending a Sunday School class at our new church.  I haven't attended anything called "Sunday School" since I was a kid because the churches I've mostly attended as an adult tend to favor terms like "home group" and "small group," which are typically informal meetings where everyone sits in a circle and does things like answer ice-breaker questions and talk about the past week and share prayer requests in addition to Bible study.

This Sunday School class is much more traditional, with chairs in rows and a teacher at a blackboard.  We raise our hands, and not in the charismatic way.  The teacher asks questions, and we answer.  People comment on one another's remarks, though comments tend to be directed at the teacher because we are all facing him.  Still, there is genuine interest in thinking through things, and I've been impressed with the seriousness and depth of the conversation and the degree to which everyone takes these things personally rather than simply intellectually.  The teacher is the most-widely-read-in-18th-century-American-theology layman I think I've encountered (I realize how elitist that sounds, but there it is.  I've met lots of people who've studied Jonathan Edwards seriously in graduate programs or in seminary, but not a lot who read him for fun).  So, even on weeks like today where neither Sam nor I really feel like going, the class has been a blessing because it causes us to pause meditate in a serious way on theology, and the meditations are guided in a way that is worthwhile.

Today we were talking about the purposes of God's admonishment, and how we should welcome it even when it comes from our enemies. I was thinking about how hard it is to welcome criticism, but how criticism from an "enemy" should be viewed as a gift if it is the voice of God in correction.  Part of my mind was distracted by how wrong it is to have enemies at all, but another part was following the discussion.  Someone asked if God is more pleased with us when we do good things, or if he is infinitely pleased with us because he imputes the righteousness of Christ to us even though we are sinners (my take: atonement means we have the standing of Christ before God in terms of judgment, but it seems obvious to me that he still sees our continuing sinfulness and wishes for better).  We talked on, and I thought about how I want to say that I love my children unconditionally, whether they behave well or poorly, but I do feel surges of affection for them when I see them act kindly or generously or selflessly in some way, and that caprice is my limitation as a human person.  God, on the other hand, has infinite love for us when are behaving well or poorly, but that love takes different forms--pleasure or sympathy or grief.  And all of those are forms of love: not only his acceptance but also his grief over our sin.

This led me to think that as a parent, it's part of my job to help my children learn that love is both unconditional acceptance AND the kind of admonishment that says, "I want better for and from you than this." Unconditional acceptance is kind of the theme of contemporary parenting, so it's not hard to build in. Admonishment is a little trickier--there's old-school parenting that emphasizes submission and authority for its own sake, and that's often equated with discipline.  But it's not just that I need to discipline--it's that I need to teach my children to understand that my discipline is a product of my love--it's that link that I am responsible for illuminating.  It's not even enough just to discipline in love--it's important to teach that discipline is love.  This is hard because discipline is often most called for at the moment when my child is acting most (dare I say?) irritating or infuriating, but if I don't learn to help her equate my admonishment with love, then I risk the possibility that she will not learn to hear God's voice in that way also.  And that is a very rich and important way in which he speaks to us.

But maybe Allison Clare kind of gets it instinctively anyway.  Later we were on our way to a birthday party, and since it was just the two of us, I asked her, "Do you know why Mommy and Daddy correct you?"  And she said, "Why?" And I said, "Because we love you." And she kind of scoffed affectionately and said, "I knew you were going to say that."  Then I said, "What do you think is our job as parents?" (I was truly curious to hear what she'd say.)  And she said, "To take care of us and help us grow up to be smart and kind."

Please, God, let me not let her down.