Second Cup—the average student? Huh?

So, today, June 7, 2013, I’m sitting in my big rose chair and continuing to re-read Parker Palmer’s To Know As We are Known/a spirituality of education. I first read this book in 1989 and have read it a few times since—often at one of those junctures in my life when I’m wondering if it is time to hang up my spurs. As the one or two readers of my blog know by now, I’ve begun the seventh decade of my life and continue to experience a sense of living on the sidelines. With some consistency, I think, well, really, maybe I should just pack it in. So, I go back to the Palmer well to be reminded, again, of what really matters.

I’m reading Palmer’s conversation about teaching to truth—truth in the sense of “troth”—entering into a relationship of trust and faith in which mutual learning takes place. My soul deeply resonates with this; my whole being over the last decade or more has been shaped in the direction of community, mutuality, journey, relational connectivity as the contexts for learning. I’m pretty sure that Palmer and this book are what began the awakening in my life to something more than and greater than teaching to knowledge as fact. I’m moved by this writing and want to with even greater intentionality move in this direction.

At a break in reading, I check my email. There I find a message from the department chair. There is a Humanities Department meeting coming up. The agenda for this meeting is set by a call from the dean for the department to work on a new DOE requirement: “Time on task.” The task the department (and, consequently, each of us who teach) is to “think about their syllabi…to calculate the average time, the average student would need to complete assignments in a given week” (emphases are mine).

Oh my.

I’m not sure how to express the dismay this calls forth. I said to myself, “Self, really, is this what it all comes to? Is this really want it comes to—teaching as audit?” Maybe I would respond differently if I were reading something other than Palmer’s little book.



What in the hell is an average student? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Average implies that some will take X amount of time; others will take much less than X amount of time; while others will take much more than X amount of time. Maybe if I could find an average student (does that mean we teach to C?), I could give him/her the work, time him/her, and set my standard. Really?

Does this not raise questions about integrity? Is this necessary because teachers lack integrity? Because students lack integrity? Because our assignments lack purpose? Because we’ve been co-opted to a way of thinking and talking about education that sounds more like accounting and hoop-jumping than learning? Because we are really unwilling to make the deep change that Palmer calls for? Because we don’t know how to talk about learning, we talk about doing averages. Does this not raise questions about what we’re really about? (Echoes of Ken Robinson’s mantra about the assembly line nature of education are bouncing about in my mind.) Are we saying to a student that if he/she spends this amount of time on an assignment she/he will get an average grade?

Read these words from Palmer:

To know something or someone in truth is to enter troth with the known, to rejoin with new knowing what our minds have put asunder. To know in truth is to become betrothed, to engage the known with one’s whole self, an engagement one enters with attentiveness, care, and good will. To know in truth is to allow one’s self to be known as well, to be vulnerable to the challenges and changes any true relationship brings. To know in truth is to enter into the life of that which we know and to allow it to enter into ours. Truthful knowing weds the knower and the known; even in separation, the two become part of each other’s life and fate. (Palmer, p. 31)

Take that—averagers!

First Cup—Lectionary Sunday

Recently I was asked by a student to help him think about his 410 paper and how it might be developed into something more. I’m reading it now and it certainly suggests some interesting rabbit trails. Yesterday as I was walking around Sunrise Park near my house, I began ruminating on that provocative (even as it is often trivialized) phrase imago dei.

This phrase is multi-layered and inviting. Most often used to address human spirituality, in the Christian tradition it includes our creation, our soul, our connection with God. Grounded, I think, in the second creation account, it suggests that in our being we carry God’s image. One reading of that account tells us that God, first, created us out of the dust of the earth, molding us into our physical state; then, he breathed his breath into us and we became human.

The Lord God formed a human being from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living creature. (Genesis 2:7 REB)

Some commentaries say this differently: They use words like “person” and "personality" rather than living creature; I like these terms because, perhaps, they are more contemporary, although we abandon creature at some risk, I think. Also, I think they suggest the mystery that while we are all the same in our origin, we are also distinctly our own person. Another commentator, I remember, embraces the word “soul.” I like this old word because it helps to avoid Cartesian dualism, allowing us to think, as I believe we are meant to think, about Hebrew wholeness rather than Greek division.

The scriptures for today engage me in this context, inviting me to think about image of God in connected but different ways. If the Bible is, on some level, the record of God’s self-revelation, when we talk about imago dei we have to ask, well, who is this God whose image we bear?

So, the readings for today reveal to us some of God’s character:

In Kings, Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal and God is revealed as faithful, trustworthy, can be counted on, attentive, awake, saving. And Solomon prays to the unique God who is available to the “other,” that is, the foreigner.

In Psalms, God is great, deserving of glory and worship and reverence; God is king and judge.

In Galatians, if we understand that Jesus is God’s face, that is, the most complete revelation of God, in fact, God himself, then, God is the good news God.

In Luke, God is capable of being astonished (amazed, perhaps surprised) in a good way by human beings.

Then, somewhere, in this question is also the theo-ethical question, how is that image expressed in and through my life? I have to ask, if I am indeed an “image bearer,” in another metaphor, an icon, how does my life reveal God—how does my life distort God?

Am I faithful, trustworthy, attentive, awake, redemptive?
Am I open to and available to the other?
Do I reverence God?
Am I a good news (Gospel) person?
Am I amazed by the beauty of those around me and their capacity for good?

I am brought again and again back to this question, “How then shall I live?”

First Cup—Poetry Friday

Among School Children



Another poet of far greater art sang
of sacred fame and dying young—how
good, he said, to die so young while
laurel wreaths were crisp and green and
winning still so fresh. Yet there
is another death of children—the one that
no matter how you count never is outweighed
by the probability of pain and sorrow that
surely arrives in later lives,
as another poet dirged of prison house
shades closing round. We sometimes
call these surprising, accidental deaths
"acts of God" because somehow
sense is made of acts otherwise senseless. If,
we think, these are acts of God, then, we think
there may be some larger plan; at least, there
is one to blame. Yet,a tornado appears as tornadoes do,
apparently randomly but by nature determined,
and wipes whole neighborhoods, even cities, and persons
old and young and places we think of as
safe—homes and churchesmosquessynagogues—
and schools. Schools where possibility reigns
and hope takes wing and children learn to sing.

Cut off, yes, unbudded. Cut off, yes,
but not, I think, by act of God.
Rather by that strange condition of our world—
unpredictable predictability.
This is the human condition.
This is the world we live in.
This is the world where things happen. And yet,
still we choose to live where we do, and
where and how make a difference.
We know these patterns,after all,
yet still we build in the path of winds, the
direction of tides, and the shakiness of earth.
And among our fellow humans so bright of
mind and dark of soul.

God, I think, would have it
otherwise. It was, I think, the original
gardener's plan to keep all safe but, then,
what difference would anything make?
(What difference would it make had there
been no forbidden tree?) What
difference would it make to know that all
are safe—a good difference, we think. We
desire such safety for our children.
And yet—

A friend said, “Arthur, I anticipate an elegy from
your pen mourning another loss of children in a school.”
And, Arthur says, I wish I could write of love and loss
in ways that make sense. (I wish I could make sense
of most of what goes on in life.) I wish I could make
sense of death at any level, age, or circumstance. I
cannot. I cannot make sense of Moore or Sandy Hook or
Columbine or Boston—except to understand that somehow
this is the world we live in and to look deep into
the human soul and its potential horror.

Then, teacher,
give myself to something more than the horror—the
unbearable lightness of that soul and its beauty—
and hope that somehow in the
greater scheme of life’s despair,
good is called forth and we will be better—
but hope is fragile, as another poet said, “a thing with feathers.”
Another said that “poetry makes nothing happen”
even as he conjures the poet to “In the deserts of the heart/
Let the healing fountain start" to teach us “how to praise.”

Poets seem to find the words—it is what
they do—to free us from “the prison of our days.”

I think I am not a poet.

—amk • 5/24/13

Second Cup: continuing reflections on achieving 70....

A particular friendship:



I have a friend named Merle Strege, a doctor of the church and a teacher of my soul. Our relationship began in the first years of the 70s at the School of Theology, Anderson University, of the Church of God, Anderson, IN. It is a place of convergence—a point in space that resonates so deeply in my story.

I was responding to God’s call on my life. As I understood it, at the time, God (crazy God!) wanted me to become a pastor. Really—and, oddly enough, everyone else was as crazy as God because everyone I trusted said, Yea! Go for it! So, I did. I pulled up roots, packed my family, left Red Bluff, and headed east, hoping, like the Magi of old, that I was following a star. My traveling east story is an entirely different story than the old one; not everything went well. Life became hard for us, especially for Judy; I was in school and loving it; I was working for the Board of Christian Education and, eventually, loving it. But Judy had to work in the real world, our kids struggled, babysitters were challenging—it was hard. We didn’t stay. (That’s another long, formational story, that I've told parts of elsewhere in this blog.) We made it one year and moved back to the West Coast, Portland, and WPC, where I stayed for another very long time (before returning to the scene of the crime).

We made good friends there—lifetime friends. (A list would be very long and those still alive are still our friends.) One of these was Merle. I’m not sure why he and I are friends. (I mean by this: I understand why I would want to be his friend.) He’s smarter than I am. He’s more disciplined than I am. He’s more serious than I am. He’s a better story teller than I. We share a love of reading and talking about what we read, although he is more my teacher than I his. We both enjoy fishing, although he’s more committed to that than I.



(He says that the two hindrances to our relationship are that I don’t play golf and I do not have an appropriate appreciation of baseball—both of which are practices to which he is particularly devoted. I first wrote “both of which are ‘sports,’” but, honestly, they are for him spiritual practices.) We both love teaching and share many of the frustrations and deep, deep joys that come with teaching students subjects that many consider irrelevant. I don’t think one of us is better at this than the other; we are quite similar in why we teach but quite different in how. He challenges me and, I think, we both feel more often than not like fish out of water when it comes to the church that formed us. We are comfortable with each other. In some ways, we might be characterized as Lucky Jack and Stephen Matarin (characters in a wonderful series of books that we both love), but not so much in the details as in the relationship—it doesn’t make sense on so many levels but matters to me so much in so many important ways. He is a loyal friend. He can be counted on. Trustworthy. Demanding. Merle is a teacher—born to the craft.

Merle has taught me much about the centrality of story and the power of remembering. As a lover of story, I knew the power of narrative to shape and change and call and disorder and order. I experienced this power in so many ways; but I didn’t really understand the trans-formational power of narrative until Merle, as church historian, began to reflect on the central responsibility of the people of God to remember, which is clearly at the heart of God’s call to God’s people. He powerfully mined this theme from scripture as well as from other readings in, I generalize, the morality of a being a story formed people. Merle is currently working on a history of Anderson University; it is being developed with the 2017 centennial in mind. He works not only to capture the people, the events, influences, the times—the facts. He works to lay bare the moral narrative that inhabits the soul of that place.

(Even as I write this blog the latest issue of Communion today appeared in our mailbox; in this issue is an article, written by Merle, on the interpretative center opening this year during the Global Gathering. Here he writes, “The center’s fundamental premise is summed up in this observation by the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: ‘I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do? If I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what stories am I a part?’” Relentlessly, Merle calls us to this central task of remembering because “We do not make up our own identity; we inherit it…[even as we] are also free to interpret and extend that identity for our own time” (Strege, Merle. (May/June 2013.) "Interpretative Center to Open." Communion Together. p. 14.)

He has worked to be a teacher of the church through his classroom and through his on-going, decades long, writing for the church’s Sunday schools. His articles for the unfortunately defunct Vital Christianity; his efforts for the aborted OneVoice; his own histories and revisions of histories—everything he has done (and the list is formidable) focuses on that one word—remember—and the centrality of all that is contained in that word.

I remember a meeting of the Commission on Higher Education of the Church of God (another unfortunately no longer available “tents” of the church). This annual meeting of presidents, deans, board chairs, agency leaders and others met for fellowship, mutual support and understanding, and conversation about the shared educational mission of the church—including not only the broader world of Christian education but also the church’s higher education institutions). At one of these meetings, Merle and I spoke out of our conviction and theology about how much more important the relationship of the church’s colleges to their church is than their relationship to such bodies as the, then, Christian College Coalition—which embodied a narrative very different than our own. Merle’s words were, I think, prophetic and, like most prophecy, unheeded, certainly misunderstood—perhaps considered irrelevant in a demanding recruitment world that thinks it needs more generic and less specific definitions. We needed to be more like others (regardless of the fundamentally different narrative, i.e., holiness theology v. reformed theology) than like ourselves.

How can we be who we are called to be if we cannot remember who we were?

Merle is a historian who has never simply called us to return to the past or raised a banner that says our best days are behind us. His is, rather, a message about roots and formation that contains a call to address the future in ways that continue to provide us stability in the midst of change so that we can discern well God’s call on God’s church today.

Another memory: For a few (too few) years, Merle was at Warner Pacific. He worked there as recruiter and, finally, as teacher. I’ve never forgotten a sermon he preached in chapel: “The Christ of God.” He reminded us that we cannot make Jesus the Christ into whatever Jesus we want him to be. This Jesus is grounded in a specific history—a peculiar story of a peculiar people who follow, usually not well, a peculiar God. This Jesus is rooted deeply in a cosmic narrative of relationship and revelation; this Jesus is formed by and can be understood only fully within that story.

He is not our Christ
to be what we want him to be;
he is God’s Christ.
We forget that to our peril.

I do not want to put words in his mouth, but I think he would say we have forgotten that and continue to act as if Jesus is, first, the Jesus we want him to be, and that the church, which belongs to Jesus and not to us, can be whatever we want it to be—and we stand in need of correction. A correction, I believe, he would say comes finally through acts of thoughtful discernment, that is, through acts of remembering, which is a practice he relentlessly calls the church to—a church that still tends to ignore him, unless he is telling one of those humorous old timey stories we all love to hear.

He is a particular friend because of all of these things. It is always good to be in his company. I cherish those times—in commission meetings, writer’s conferences, at CUS meetings, at Nipissing, in Florida, his family room, and at Eva’s with other good, long time friends. Few pleasures in life have been more continuously a pleasure than this friendship that began over forty years ago.



Thanks be to God!

First Cup—Poetry Friday

Warner Pacific College sponsors a good little magazine. It is interesting to me that there is a tradition of literary magazines at this place. I was once an editor and usually have been a contributor. Upon returning here a few years ago and discovering Rocinante, I offered a few and was accepted. This year, something was off in me and I didn't; it would have been good to among such good stuff this year in this very fine publication.

As I wondered why I didn't have anything to submit this year, this emerged. Since it is my "Poetry Friday" and it has been a while since the last blog:


Upon why I am not in [2013] Rocinante: XII

No room for poetry right now.
No space. No deep breathing—only shallow.

When I was young (I’ve written about
this somewhere else, in a foreign hand,
now tucked away in a
filing cabinet drawer, in a manila folder
marked “Poetry”), I answered the
whatareyougoingtobewhenyougrowup
question, saying, “Bum.” I
meant “poet.” I want that.

And ever since I’ve known that is
who I aspire and sometimes am,
and ever since when the poetry
doesn’t, I know the soul space grows
arid—sere—dusty—full of
mirage…

and I know I must find water.

amk
4.30.13

First Cup: Continuing reflections on turning 70....

I've been away from this stream for a while--too many interruptions of all kinds. But it has not been far from my mind. So, picking up the process again, I turn to one of the most fruitful associations of my entire life—my journey with the National Council of Churches of Christ, USA:



At first glance this may seem an odd entry—an organization rather than a person? Chronologically, it connects with Sherrill’s role in my life and so, I think, now is a good time to write about it. My first connection with NCCC was with the venerable Committee on the Uniform Series (CUS). When we moved to Anderson, IN, in 1996, I was employed by Warner Press as the adult curriculum editor for BRIDGES, following in the able editorial footsteps of John Little. BRIDGES is the Sunday school curriculum for the Church of God, Anderson, and it takes its basic lectionary from the International Sunday School Outlines of CUS/NCCUSA. (Enough acronyms?) CUS, and its umbrella commission, is where an ongoing truly interdenominational (and lovely/loving) dialogue about scripture, learning, and discipleship takes place—“Probably the oldest ecumenical committee in existence, the Committee on the Uniform Series celebrated its 140th anniversary in 2012.” An annual gathering of writers, editors, Christian educators, and church publishers produces a lectionary that is used by over 35 denominations and communions and is the basis for the Christian education of around 45 million people in more than 100,000 congregations. It is a significant ministry of the Council. Well, really, it is simply a significant ministry. Period.

Sometime after leaving Warner Press and joining the National Board of Christian Education (scuttled by the reorganization of the national offices into Church of God Ministries—a mistake, I might add, that I wonder if we will ever survive), Sherrill took me to an annual meeting of the Administrative Board of the [then] Ministries in Christian Education, a commission of the National Council; this board and CUS became liminal spaces on my journey, holy places for me—places of great growth in as many ways as I might imagine. It became home.

As the one reader of my blog knows, I grew up in the Church of God, Anderson, IN. This church taught me a great deal that it seldom practiced. So, I could never hope to count the number of time I heard “we reach our hands in fellowship to every blood washed one.” The congregation I grew up in had “Where salvation makes you a member” posted on its marquee. I grew up learning about the unity of God’s church. I know this may sound ironic (except to anyone who has experienced it), but my work with CUS and NCCC is where I actually experienced what we taught. CUS was my first experience of a truly ecumenical effort in the church and my first experience with healthy and significant diversity. In paradigm shifting ways, it was my first experience with what the New Testament describes as the church. The irony, of course, is that I grew up in a movement one of the central faith declarations of which is, “I saw the church,” and in a movement that essentially forbade involvement with such organizations because they were worldly and denominational.

How can I help anyone else understand this?

The difference, I suppose, has something to do with what I think we really meant when we described ourselves as “come outers.” We actually meant “come to ‘ers.” We really believed we were the “evening light church” and that through us God would save the church in the latter days. Were we really interested in conversations with any one else? I don’t think so; at best, only a handful. We knew they were so wrong in all the important ways (we called everyone else “Babylon,” for goodness sake) and about all the really important issues that, rather than opening us outward, we were really focused inward—“come in ’ers.” Our collective back turned toward the larger church. For the most part, no one, except maybe Billy Graham, really had anything to say to us that we thought worth hearing.

One exception to that was the Committee on the Uniform Series, a connection that was still largely a fairly well kept secret when I joined the curriculum work of the church at Warner Press in 1995. (Perhaps it still is.) So, the irony was pretty heavy for me. Eventually I came to understand the ideal behind the call to separate--even prior to my involvement with the CUS and, then, the Council; but as a result of my work and friendships in CUS/NCCUSA, my sense of church was enlivened, emboldened, and enlarged—oh amazingly enlarged!

I’m not really sure I can do justice to this. I’ve had three adventurous journeys in my life that have radically changed how I think about organizations. One journey comprises my years at WPC, especially the latter years of my journey there when I experienced true collaboration. One day, I’ll try to write about this place, but it is so integrated into my being that I struggle to know how to begin. A second journey encompasses my years at Church of God Ministries in the Congregational Ministries Team, specifically in the development and implementation of SHAPE; the third journey is my work with CUS/NCCUSA. Each of these taught me more than I can put into words. Like most OJT experiences, what I learned is so caught up in working and friendships with distinctive and wonderful and gifted persons. Such good friendships emerged in this common effort; friendships that transcend time and space and denomination. To list only a few names: Dot Savage, Patrice Rosner, Thom Chu, Mike Fink, Barbara Tulley, Marvin Cropsey, Kaye Edwards, Garland Pierce, Ken Ostermiller—actually, too many to name.

What did I learn from my work with the Council?

•Diversity is powerful and enriching and essential.
•Differences are contributive when there is shared vision.
•Discernment is central to any enterprise. (My discovery of discernment is directly connected to the work of the administrative board in our annual meetings. This is another irony, since I grew up in a holiness church where we always invoked the Spirit but never practiced discernment.)
•Dialogue around tables may be the single greatest method available to the church (clearly connected to the practice of discernment).
•[inter]Dependence, that is, trust, grows out of spending time together in common cause and in the warm, intimacy of conversation and laughter.
•Hospitality. (I’ve tried to find a good “D” synonym to fit here—no luck.) At CUS/NCCUSA is where I learned and experienced the wide welcoming of Christ’s Table.

Poetry Friday: INCARNATION

The commonness of this. Old
friends, fishing, breakfasting—
eating their catch. Like all
fishermen everywhere.
A campfire, an old friend.
Breakfast is ready. Bring
some more fish with you. Fresh fish.
It’s morning on the lake.

I have known a few such mornings.
Lassen. Nippissing. Alpine meadow.
Deschutes. Shasta. Ocean. Mist rising.

Silent.

Sound of early bird song, splashing trout,
ripples. Coffee perking. Baconpotatoesfish.
The world slowly forming around me. Old
friends quiet around the fire. Smiling.

“Come and eat breakfast.” This one, on
the beach, on all the beaches of the world,
always inviting us to the table, a table,
The table, a fire, a feast. A meal. Such simple
Pleasure. Elemental. Companionable.
The one on the beach enjoys
another last meal. He cooks. He serves.
He asks, “Do you love me?” These men,
fresh from the lake, fishermen; he loves them.
Chooses in the expanding cosmicness of
who he was, is, is to be
to breakfast with friends
on the beach in the morning of his last days.

—amk, 2013
(John 21:1-19)