I have the rare privilege of spending the holidays with family. It's wonderful and only the first time in at least seven years. Today, I chauffeured my three year old niece and nephew around town on an errand. After singing our way lustily through every song they knew (Away in a Manger, Little Donkey, Old MacDonald, Hush Little Rooster), we moved on to discuss the eating habits of birds. And why not?

They took turns naming all the various items birds enjoy:

1. Plants
2. Leaves
3. Ivy
4. Vines
5. Seeds
6. Worms
7. Caterpillars (At which point, my niece broke in with, "You know the funny thing, Auntie Amy? The funny thing is that birds eat calerpitters. Then the calerpitters turn into butterflies and they don't know where they are.")
8. Not to be outdone, my nephew piped up with another food enjoyed by birds: Sammiches. Um, Sandwiches? Yah, sammiches. Oh. What kind of sandwiches do birds like? This led to a lengthy analysis of whether birds like meat and cheese in their sandwiches, or just meat. Birds apparently share the same tastes as my niece and nephew.

Once we settled the discussion of food for the birds, we moved on to what we know. My niece informed us that she knows everything about anything. My nephew immediately said, "Yeah, I know everything about anything, too!" I replied, "Wow, that's a lot to know...." Pregnant pause. Then the small voice of my niece from the back seat, "...well, sometimes I forget things." My nephew: "...yeah, me too."

And there you have it; three year-old wisdom for you: We all know everything about anything. We just forget things sometimes.

It's been a while. I apologize.

Here's a recent gem...

From an essay on the 18th century: "...when the poor couldn't afford to keep their children, they placed them in fondling hospitals." (I do believe she meant "foundling hospitals.")


In other news, we just completed angel/mortal week. I found myself really, really, ridiculously amused by creating gifts, for some reason. I suppose I needed the distraction. Why are gifts so much fun? The endearing gifts I received from what I am guessing is a Korean girl (we find out Monday):

1. 1 piece of cornbread (gift-wrapped)

2. 1 Cadbury's eclair (gift-wrapped)

3. 2 labels that say, "Ms. Seefeldt," made with a label-making machine. They're red. And they arrived gift-wrapped. In a very small package. I've already put one on my calculator. Useful.

4. 1 packet of seaweed. Also gift-wrapped. With instructions to try to stay warm. It is definitely cold here, and staying warm is a challenge, but I'm not sure how to utilise the seaweed. Ideas? Wearing it doesn't seem a viable option.

5. 1 hand-written copy of the "Footprints" poem. With little heart stickers instead of footprints in the sand. I find this one oddly endearing. It must have taken hours.


Deep Thought for the Day: Yes, it's true that it's the thought that counts. Maybe it's the individuality of gift-giving that makes it so precious for the giver and the receiver. Even when we try to think of the receiver in the choosing of a gift, the gifts inevitably reveal our own priorities, tastes or senses of humor. In the giving and receiving, there's the potential for a moment of rare understanding, a moment when we genuinely pause to consider the Other. How may I serve in my giving? How have I been served in my receiving?

Boarding schools bring some unexpected challenges and opportunities. I seem to be wading into a number of these, lately...

The end of school today found me hunkered down at my desk in the staff work room, frantically trying to reply to emails and prepare the lessons for tomorrow. A soft knock came at the door and two brave Korean boys whispered, "Can we talk to you?" I knew it was serious when I stepped out in the hallway and they asked if we could find a quiet place to talk.

One of their close friends faces charges of bullying, an offense this school takes particularly seriously. Naturally, they worry for him. Our conversation became one of those aching moments when you wish you could fix everything by turning back the clock a few days, before the trouble began.

What I found enlightening, however, was the urgency that filled their pleading. Words stumbled over each other in the attempt to explain to me what had happened. I could do nothing. I didn't even know the incident had taken place. I have no authority, but these boys kept begging me simply to understand. "Cultures are different," they said. "Every culture has different ideas, different ways, and we don't act the same way here that we do in Korea." It shocked me to learn that one of them has been beaten up three times by groups of older boys who were strangers, simply because he did not bow when he passed them in the street. The other student explained that if a group of older boys thinks even that you are staring at them, they will come beat you and take your money.

A strict age hierarchy exists among the Korean students here, I knew that, but this afternoon I learned that younger students must address the older Koreans by bowing, and using a formal title of "Elder Brother." These two boys seemed genuinely offended that the younger boy who had been beaten refuses to bow to his elders, refuses to use the correct forms of address, and even sometimes swears at older students. One of them said, "I don't mind if he calls me Elder Brother or not, I know we're not in Korea, but at least he should bow when he passes me."

They agreed that the correct response to these cultural offenses should not be violent, but they insisted that nobody had listened when they tried to explain that the beating, while wrong, had not been unprovoked.

This is precisely the sort of situation that tests a multicultural community at its core. Will the values of one culture "win" over the values of another? Should they? How do we protect the safety of all, while at the same time protecting the heritage and traditions of each group? The question of respect for each other becomes incredibly complicated.

I sat quietly at the end and said that I wished I could fix things, but that I have no power or authority in this situation. "That's okay, we know that, but we just wanted to explain our culture to someone who will listen." Made me want to cry.

Sometimes, I feel like we work so hard to tell children how to respect and be kind and lecture them on effort and give them spiritual lessons, that we forget simply to listen: they may have already learned the lesson and be able to teach us a thing or two about bowing to each other.

Fragility

Beauty and the Bizarre

One of my jobs as a junior advisor here is to help the class prepare for the annual student talent show, which happens to be this Saturday. We're managing to procrastinate wonderfully and chose the theme last week: Freak Show. Yes, that's right: Freak Show. And all I can do is conjure up images of the Elephant Man. Or the Human Fountain I read about, who used to be a staple feature at Coney Island. He had somehow worked tiny pipes under his skin, and would contort himself into strange positions. Then he would turn the water on. I confess, I'd like to have seen his act. Or the Tattoo Lady.

I tried, in vain, to explain to students why this theme might carry connotations of exploitation, why some might be offended. Didn't work. A "Freak Show" is way cooler than a simple circus.

I think I agree. Why is that?! Why are we drawn to the bizarre, even the hideous? So we feel better about ourselves? That's the psychobabble answer, but I don't entirely buy it. So we can mock the outsiders? Partly, certainly. I learned a few weeks ago that medieval villages used to carry out an annual "perambulation" before planting a new crop. The entire village, led by the priest, would walk a big circle around the land of the village, praying about the next harvest. The perambulation effectively outlined the village insiders and outsiders. We never run out of creative ways of naming us and them.

I remember a psychology/philosophy professor in college talking about an "apologetic of beauty." He showed us pictures of children with progeria, a disease which causes people to age at a rapidly accelerated pace. The photographs caused a visible shrinking back in the class. He went on to say that we don't need to be told that this is not what a child should look like. He took our reaction of horror as evidence that this world is profoundly broken. We have some internal recognition of "rightness" and "wrongness," even about beauty and the bizarre.

Our final response to recognizing brokenness in the world and in ourselves becomes a longing for wholeness that gnaws away at us. We seek the profane, at times, to remind ourselves of how much we long for beauty, purity, and redemption.

Hmmm.

Meanwhile, in the next two days, I have to figure out how to transform the school's auditorium into a circus tent. Equipment? Old drapes, lots of streamers, ribbons, and glitter. Anyone seen MacGyver around?

Confession:

I know I've written about it before, but the subject comes back to haunt me. This afternoon, as I left the staff room, a French colleague said, "You shouldn't carry so much sadness on your shoulders. It weighs you down." We had been talking about the great slaughters of the 20th century and how I always wonder whether I would be one who simply went about her business quietly, as great wrongs went on around her.

As I walked home and then on around the top of the mountain to clear my head and heart, I began numbering the great wrongs going on around me even now. And in me. They range from exploitation of poor day laborers to communal prejudices to the usual school issues of cheating. Then there are the more insidious evils of teachers not truly caring for their students. When I see students struggling under what seems an unfair burden, I get so angry. Even more stomach-churning: what do I do with those who claim to bear the name of Christ and stand in opposition to His love and mercy and self-sacrifice? I begin to taste bile.

Feet get so dirty here, it takes constant scrubbing to try to keep them clean. Even then, I despair when I look at the cracks of dirt in my heels that I never seem able to scrub away. And you should see my heart: I'm returning to some of my old high school questions about hypocrisy when I look around me. Dark cracks of anger and frustration are starting to creep up. But what will I do to stand up to the evils around me? In me? What will I do to insist that all of us faculty treat students kindly, fairly, lovingly? What will I do to make myself more patient with the student who calls for study help at 10pm? In the end, these failures of ours become great evils.

Sometimes I want to weep at the hunger I see in students for meaning and for true peace. The classroom offers so much more than the chance to get ahead in life. Students learn to wrestle with the deepest, darkest areas of our hearts--and I'm privileged to share in their wrestling. I had a student today write that he has a theory about history: everything we do really comes down to seeking comfort. That's all humans ever really care about. They'll sacrifice everyone around them for the sake of their own comfort. But he obviously wasn't satisfied with his answer. Who thinks that seeking your own comfort is noble? admirable? achievable, even? I want to tell him, "Yes. You are correct. We only seek our own comfort. I know One, though, who gave up His comfort for the sake of ours. His life in me makes me able to daily lay down my comfort for the sake of yours."

...then I hear a little accusing voice say, "Oh really? How much of your comfort have you actually been willing to give up?"

Forgive me, Father.

I teach History. But...if I could teach just one selection of literature in my whole life, I would choose this sonnet, Shakespeare’s 116th:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to ev’ry wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I first heard it read aloud on an old cassette of the soundtrack to the ‘80s series, Beauty and the Beast. This sonnet, in combination with Matthew Arnold’s, “She walks in beauty like the night...” filled my adolescent ears with an almost palpable nostalgia I couldn’t escape or understand. I don’t know that I comprehended much more of the poem than that Shakespeare believed two minds could marry. Even now, the thought makes me sigh. He said two minds, not two hearts. The prospect of uniting my mind with someone else’s feels as dreamily impossible at 34 as it did at 15. Incomprehensible nostalgia isn’t why I want to teach this sonnet, though.

I want to share Shakespeare’s almost incomparable definition of love with pop-culture-drugged students. He captures love’s essence even down to the sound of the words he chooses: “...within his bending sickle’s compass come...” Read that line aloud a few times. The rhythmic sounds of those hard c’s mimic the sickle of Time cutting into rosy lips and cheeks, and he goes on to say that Love persists despite the harsh blade of Time. It’s perfection, I tell you.

If I taught this sonnet, I would have to pair it with I Corinthians 13. Each selection equally praises constancy and steadfastness as the mark of love. Paul, in I Corinthians, goes beyond Shakespeare to claim that if “I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am nothing.” In his straightforward prose, Paul agrees with Shakespeare: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful...love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

I woke up this morning with both descriptions of love churning around in me. About ten years ago, I joined with people I didn’t know at all to build a church in Atlanta. As a member, I vowed to “practice the purity and peace” of this community. I came to love and depend on so many brothers and sisters profoundly, as we worked together to figure out what it means to follow Christ. Now, I find myself on the other side of the world and hear of fractures appearing, of relationships being tested. Time’s bending sickle is cutting into the community. The rosy lips and cheeks of new friendships and a new building and a new excitement about worship are perhaps fading. My heart and mind desperately need the reminder that love alters not when it alteration finds.

I also need the reminder that Love finds its only constant origin in God. My love on its own will alter when it finds alterations in the people or communities I love. I am full of envy and arrogance. I can only be patient when I’ve slept well, and I have a hard time believing that my own way is not the best. So, ultimately, what binds me with these brothers and sisters in Atlanta is not our own ability to look on tempests and remain unshaken. Rather, we jointly seek God’s unchanging hand of Love to redeem our broken human loves. Here’s William Rees’s beautiful description of Divine Love. It’s one of my favorite hymns:

Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Lovingkindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten,
Throughout Heaven’s eternal days.

On the mount of crucifixion,
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God’s mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And Heaven’s peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.