Highschool on TV

I've found I really enjoy movies about high schools, not in the John Hughes sense, but movies whose main character relationships are between teachers and students. Okay, maybe not main ones, but secondary ones at least. I'll concede that the movies are usually about student-student relationships.

I might be the only one I know who really loved the new Harry Potter movie. I like the Harry Potter franchise, but true fans complained that it wasn't what it was supposed to be. I don't know whether it was accurate enough to the book, but I do know that when Harry and his classmates moved from middle school to high school, the books and characters were much more endearing. I found their classroom foibles, romantic blunders, and detentions delightful. I thought: I teach those kids. Not wizards, but I teach teenagers and there's something so universal about who they are 15-18. Even if they are wizards, they still get scolded, boy-girl troubles are the end of the world, and there is nothing like the burden of an impossible teacher.There is a collectivism among the Hogwarts faculty about the well-being and potential of its students to which I can deeply relate. I am blessed to teach at a similar school, where (on a good day) the students are cared for and taught by a community of committed, concerned adults.

I also watched the movie FAME! this afternoon with my sister, where rockstar kids with performing arts superpowers are loosely coached by famous former FAME stars like Debbie Allen. The teachers in this movie had a strong presence with a tough-love approach, resulting in adoration from their students. These kids, too: romantic blunders, distant parents, struggling to achieve in impossible classes, arbitrary stratification into "cool" kids and gifted "outsiders". I found myself rooting for the kids who come from behind to shine at the end.

Then we watched the season finale for the show Glee from the DVR. If you haven't seen this show, it's about a teacher in a Midwest, ordinary high school who tried to revive the school's glee club. It has the deadpan, unapologetic, absurd humor of the office without the mockumentary style. The teacher gets in his glee club the most ridiculous, rejected kids on campus who at least know they can sing. To the ordinary viewer of this show, those kids look like mutants. To me, they look like the inhabitants of Room 5 at the end of the day and so I love them. At the end, the students sang a song to their teacher "To Sir with Love," and it made everyone cry. People may doubt that students are that grateful for their teacher, or that the teacher was that moved by his students--but this is my world! This is why I approach graduation with a breaking heart.

Channel 13 News every week, it seems, has some horror story about a teacher abusing his or her students--the kind of story that makes the holy task of relational teaching very difficult. These non-fiction accounts of the modern high school setting get it so wrong according to my experience. Teaching isn't about power and abuse - or worst, sex - that might be the "real world", but it isn't teaching. Real teaching, I've found, is cultivating the mind and spirit of extraordinary people through life-changing relationships.

I instruct my students to disregard Hollywood's approach to most things because of the glamorization and romanticizing inherent to film. But in the case of students and teaching and those relationships, there seems to be much more truth in the fiction than anything I've heard about in the "real world".

B is for Basketball

I am writing this as I watch Game 6 of the NBA Finals--cheering for anyone playing the Celtic, as I was instructed to do.

This spring, to the amazement of everyone around me, I learned to follow a sport. Basketball.

It's no secret that I am a stranger to the sports world, and this certainly didn't change that. It's also no secret that I didn't pay attention to basketball for the love of the game.

I was blessed this year to have nearly the entire MVA varsity team in class. They truly are a group of extraordinary men. In class and out of it, they are smart, challenging, funny, and considerate men who made my classes more interesting and enjoyable. I appreciated them as students so much, that appreciation overflowed into one for them as athletes--sort of.

The Junior class fundraisers more or less mandated me to be at every home game--which is fine because I loved cheering for these guys. I just didn't know what I was doing. I loved them, but I had no idea if these guys were playing well or poorly. I could deduce the basics of basketball, sure, but that's not enough to connect with them in, for many of them, their most important place of performance. It felt so strange to care so much about something I knew so little about!

So I did what all teachers (not really) would do in my situation: I made a class project out of my NCAA March Madness brackets. These basketball guys helped me with my bracket picks, and we did a debrief about the previous night's games in the morning. I watched the games with a notebook and would bring in my commentary and questions. Five weeks of this, and I am a basketball Jedi. ( Ok. Maybe Not. But I can now give a decent play-by-play using the right terminology.)

It's true that I live to learn and Basketball gave me a new subject to explore. It is true that I have an uncommon affection for my students in general, and I would have cheered for these terrific guys if they had chosen to be mimes in boxes. And it is true that it's very easy to cheer for a team that enjoyed the success and exposure that ours did this year.

But more than all this, Basketball for me was my Missio Dei. To develop some basketball expertise was to become indigenous to my student culture. I maintain a Facebook and text-message like my life depends on it for the same reason. I even adapt my playlists and learn to love the music they love in order to love my students better.

Basketball became crucial to my scheme of what's called Missional Living.

According to Floyd McClung, former director for Youth with a Mission,

"Missional living is about investing in the lives of other people. It is not a program. It is certainly more than organized outreach activities. Being a missional person means intentionally building bridges to other people – for the sake of them knowing Jesus and discovering what it means to be a fully alive, free human being. It is an attitude that says, "I will invest my life in others for the sake of Christ and his purposes on earth." It means I will live that way in every sphere of life and every day of the week."

And according to Dr. Ed Stetzer and Phillip Nation in their book Compelled by Love,

"In an alliterated sense, missional living is an incarnational (being the presence of Christ in community), indigenous (of the people and culture) and intentional (planning our lives around God's agenda) focus on the power of the Gospel to bring the reign of God into people's lives."

Nation and Stetzer also directed me toward 2 Corinthians 5:14-15 & 18:

"For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; ¹⁵and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer ^C)">live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf... ¹⁸Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation."

I started attending a bible study (of sorts) with my basketball players, and we had open and important conversations about faith and reason and even race and culture (Did I mention most of them were West African?) --the kind of where Jesus shows up and we see a glimpse of eternity. The kind where true reconciliation of race and gender and culture and age and lost and found really begins. I had the privilege of exploring the truth of the Gospel as it applies to all things--even basketball.

And--as a surprise blessing--I am amazed by the power and art of this sport. I can't believe those jump shots go in from 40 feet away. It's exhilarating to see the ball run up the court so fast, and when they catch those passes from half a court away and drive in to the basket with precision and agility--fireworks!

For me, I saw there is church and basketball because there is Mission.

Missio Dei.

Amen.

A is for Annie Dillard, Continued

In my last post, I mentioned that Annie Dillard wrote my favorite two pages in anything I've ever read. I don't know if they'll be as powerful for you as they were for me, and I'm sure I don't have permission to post them, but there they are:

Thomas Merton wrote, "There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues. " There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple-a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

I live in tranquility and trembling. Sometimes I dream. I am interested in Alice mainly when she eats the cooky that makes her smaller. I would pare myself or be pared that I too might pass through the merest crack, a gap I know is there in the sky. I am looking just now for the cooky. Sometimes I open, pried like a fruit. Or I am porous as old bone, or translucent, a tinted condensation of the air like a watercolor wash, and I gaze around me in bewilderment, fancying I cast no shadow. Some-

Page 2

PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

times I ride a bucking faith while one hand grips and the other flails the air, and like any daredevil I gouge with my heels for blood, for a wilder ride, for more.

There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. "Not as the world giveth, give I unto you." That's the catch. If you can catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you'll come back, for you will come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for-dribbling and crazed. The waters of separation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you're gone. You have finally understood that you're dealing with a maniac.

I think that the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.

* * *

A is for Annie Dillard

If you spend any time at all in conversation with me, guaranteed I reference this author. It's no secret that I really like Dillard - her voice resonates in me like it's coming from my own chest. She starts the conversation between her readers and their everyday worlds, and it continues long after the reader closes the book.

I finally finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this spring, about a year after I started it. Its a series of illuminating personal essays--meandering responses to nature and the rest of Dillard's solitary, literary world. It's image-saturated prose that's carried by a poetic cadence toward transcendence, turning and directing itself like flowing water. Her writing has the honesty and power of something that is both fully human and fully vision. It's the most truthful writing I've ever read.

And I love the truth.

God, I want to write like that.

Dillard says "Poets read poetry; novelists read novels." Dillard wrote my favorite two pages of anything I've ever read. Reading her changes the way I see--even breathe. If a writer often defines herself by what she reads, what does that make me? Nothing, because I haven't been writing. Writers write, but I haven't been because I've been too self-conscious about lack of talent and poor craft. Dillard explains this, " You try, you try every time to reproduce the vision- to let your light so shine before men. But you can only come a long with a bushel and hide it."

If that's the case, why bother?

She answers, "Because acting is better than being here in mere opacity."

Really, the only people who read my writing are family and friends--and there's a paradox there. They're the hardest to write for - they're people to whom I feel compelled to prove something. There's a fear that I can't write well enough to earn their approval and respect. But this kind of concern misses the point entirely.

To whom did Jesus do most of His teaching? His closest friends and family--the disciples. More of Christ's conversation and lessons were directed toward the people who knew Him best. He didn't aim for fame or notoriety, or even polished delivery. He aimed to save his own people--to serve His fathers Vision.

Do I actually think the clumsiness (at best) of my writing is worse than not serving the Father's vision with the capabilities He bestowed on me?

Among many, many things, Dillard reminded me that serving the vision is more about trusting Power is made perfect in weakness than any other measurement of success.

God did not give us "a spirit of timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline."

A is for Annie Dillard, but there is a great chance she'll show up in other letters, too. Just watch.

Coming Back

I'm embarrassed by my posting performance for the six months - maybe this whole year. I'm not embarrassed because I think I'm letting anyone down - heavens no, there's only a handful of people who read this - I'm embarrassed because I should have made a better public record of all I've learned and read and taught.

I should have deemed the lessons important enough to write out, organize, and post properly. I shouldn't have been so self-conscious about how I write and let that deter me from sharing new insights. Sometimes learning from reading keeps God from having to teach me with "the hard way". If I am sometimes spared the "hard way" by reading, maybe I should write more and other people can be spared my same lessons by reading.

Or maybe that's not how it works.

I am inspired by Jadepark's alphabet list--though her focus is more of a memoir. I think I need something to get me started--something that lets me move forward and backward in the chronology of things. I think I'll do an alphabet list of lessons.

I'm a teacher, after all--alphabets, plans, lists, and lessons are the nasty side effects of our trade.

New Notebook

A friend of mine just had a birthday, and I sent this to him as a present. It is one of my favorite pieces I've ever created. The iconography is based in eastern mysticism and the process of enlightenment, which reflects my recent reading about Christianity from a non-western, pre-Enlightenment context.

The front is about the enlightenment process in its eternal context. I chose to depict that as a growing tree spanning a horizon line, illuminated by the rising suns and moons. I painted the tree with a technique that combines deliberate human effort with randomness and chaos. I didn’t premeditate those lines. Instead, I threw ink and then used air to force it up the page. This means that the shape of the tree is determined by repetition and focused energy, where the ink follows its own path along the paper. It took a great deal of meditative practice for me to be able to control the paint by not controlling it.


In addition, trees represent continuity as well as seasonal change. They represent transformation in that they convert earth (dirt) into living, breathing matter with energy from the sun. The tree crosses the horizon line that divides earth and sky, material and spirit. The tree carries light from one opposite to the other, as learning and study does. As people growing into enlightenment, we cross that horizon line, too, moving from material to spirit by constantly reaching in prayer and study.


The sun is the source of energy for all living things, and the moon reflects that energy. I once saw a time-lapse photograph of the rising moon, and I recreated that here. I saw the rise as a marked process. I also put sun and moon in the sky at the same time—both rising, both present—for timelessness and completeness.

The back is a little more abstract, but so are the ideas of energy, connection, process, prayer that I sought to represent. I drew each of these gold circles slowly, because that gold ink is difficult to apply. This kind of repeated motion and concentration has meditative connotations. Circles are powerful spiritual symbols and concentric ones even more so. The rings are stacked inside each other to represent different stages of prayer and the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit, as well as the interconnectedness of people to each other. The centers of the circles represent the different focal points of prayer, and if you feel the back of the book, you can still feel the grooves I made with my own energy in the painting of it--like the physical representations of repeated prayers.

Leaving 2009

It’s an oak, I think, outside my door

It, too, has had enough of this year

In two days, two months late,

Set itself aflame

A phoenix.

Impetuous

Prone to extremes

Withering transitions intolerable

It’s the only one left on the lane

With any green

With any leaves.

There’s no stopping it now

Two more days

Crimson, golden scales

Will launch

Drift

Land like fireworks.

In two more days

For two more months

Standing naked

Shameless

Greater in Spirit and Truth.