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.

Something tells me that the rhetorical skills of our youth may not, ummm, shine the way we would hope.

Yesterday, we held the third Model United Nations meeting of the year. Along with simply gaining familiarity with parliamentary procedure, we want to give students practice speaking in public. Specifically, we give them opportunities to practice debate. The topic? The success of the school's relatively baby Honor Council in educating the student body on issues of integrity (I confess, I am one of the staff advisors and feel absurdly protective of Council members. However, I entered the meeting looking forward to a spirited debate on how best to cultivate integrity. I even expectd to get some good ideas about how to move forward.).

Predictably, the Council's president approached the podium first, in support of the organization. With a quiet, nervous calm, he laid out the number of cases the Council has seen so far, followed by an explanation of the educational events the Council has planned. He ended by soliciting suggestions for how he could do a better job. He may have lacked fire on the surface, but his humility and sincere desire to change the community compensated (In my previously acknowledged-to-be-biased opinion).

Then....the whole debate unraveled. Two students stood to speak against the Council. The entire argument of the first speaker ran thus: "The Council has not succeeded in its goal of educating the public, because it has not educated. Education is a good goal. But if the Council wants to educate, then it should educate, because education is good. Actually, education is very important. Yes, education is important and the Honor Council has failed to educate. It should work to succeed, so that it can educate." You get the picture.

The second speaker then rose, and meandered around for a couple minutes before reaching his point: "Even members of the Honor Council cheat, so what's the point of even having a Council." Now that caught my attention. Cheating? How dare they! When he finished speaking, I asked him where he had obtained his information. He replied that once, he had witnessed a Council member cheating. When challenged on it, the Council member said, "Oh, it's okay, I won't get into trouble, I'm on the Council." Little stars of fury began bursting behind my eyes. I foresaw the entire endeavor and the work of several months spiraling down in inglorious shame flames.

Tempers on both sides rose from there, until about ten minutes later, when the second speaker revealed that he had made up his story "in the spirit of debate" #*^$*@&#?!???

Taking a deep breath to halt the Big Bang going off in my head, I stood and said, "Making up information is not in the spirit of debate." I went on to add that I would not take students to external conferences if they insisted on inventing information.

This brings me, finally, to my point: We have forgotten how to argue. I love a heated, passionate debate. I'm not afraid of intensity in argument. I'm certainly not afraid of disagreement, if the discussion is about the pursuit of truth. I am terrified, however, of a world in which we care so little for our ideas that we would fabricate false support to win a moment of debate. Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" eloquently demonstrates the hollow result of this language with no meaning.

My own endless pedagogical battle is to persuade students that to argue, we must know. By far, the most common comment that I scribble in the margins of essays is, "evidence?" I keep asking myself what will make students want to find support for their assertions? Better still, what will make them wait to form an opinion until they know something about a topic? The answers lie tangled up with awakening students to the questions they may not even know they have burning around in them somewhere. I must make them curious enough to want answers, and critical enough not to accept false answers. Then, if I can teach students how to winsomely share the answers they have honestly uncovered, I will have become an educator.

And that's good, because education is good.

My first unmitigated culinary disaster in several years:



Tomorrow, one of my students has her birthday, so I thought I'd treat her to a cake. What makes this particular disaster even funnier than it looks is that I was using a MIX for angel food cake. All I had to do was add a cup of water and stick it in the oven. How?!? How does this happen?

Much as I love the lush monsoon green of new life, I confess I don't love the mildew that has crept its way into every crevice of my damp house. My asthma makes me feel like I'm perpetually running a marathon. The sound of rattling lungs has become my morning alarm clock. I exaggerate. Slightly.

Then there's the monsoon sights that take away my ability to breathe in a totally different way:

Doon Valley




Tiger Lily after rain



Moon rising over the chukkar