Bringing the Outside In

Yesterday was a frustrating one for me, for various reasons. Within about an hour of chapel beginning, I was probably at my most cranky point. But I headed over to chapel (later than I've done all semester), in order to prepare the space for our worship service.

After setting out the hymnals and preparing the communion table with the green cloth I use each week (never the same way twice, though), I felt overwhelmingly that I wanted to bring something in from the outside.

I walked out the door of the chapel and looked about me. I thought of maybe some branches off a tree, or some flowers I might find... then I saw a charlie-brown ginkgo tree just off to the side of the chapel. It had shed a number of its bright, gold leaves and they had blanketed the ground around it. I collected a good handful and put them by the bulletins (which I always set on a table at the entryway). I also put some more on the communion table on top of the green cloth and under the candle, already burning. But then I turned around and saw this long stretch of bright red carpet along the the aisle...

I went back out with a student. I took off my jacket and we started to fill my jacket with gold leaves. As we reentered the chapel, the president of the seminary looked at me curiously: "I saw you out there loading leaves in your jacket..."

I laughed. "Wait til you see what we do with them!"

Then we proceeded to strew them all along the aisle - from back to front. The bright gold against that deep red was something!

It was fun, then, to watch people come in and blink! The prayer of invocation we prayed together ended up asking God to help us see God in unexpected ways: in the strange and familiar. Then the sermon was on the feeling of "in-betweeness."

I thought about how the leaves made our space an in-between space: not outside, not inside. And Autumn being an in-between season: not Summer, not Winter but carrying us between the two. For me, the leaves began to generate meaning.

My favorite part was directly after the service, first the two of us who had brought in the leaves (and made the mess in the first place!) started collecting them into baskets. Then, little by little, more and more people--from the students to the dean--were down on our hands and knees collecting leaves! There was so much laughter and marveling going on down there on the floor of the chapel that it was certainly a continuation of the worship service from my perspective.

Part of my role as the director of chapel is to use the chapel experience to teach students. I've been trying to do this subtly, by showing the kinds of things that are possible in worship. At our community dinner afterwards, one of our students asked me about the leaves. She is Korean and still struggles to express herself in English, which made our conversation all the more beautiful to me. She asked me about the meaning of the leaves. I talked about the meaning I had found in them, but suggested that others might have made different meanings. She smiled, and said: "I liked it. They were beautiful!"

Another student admitted that she hadn't noticed the leaves at all until partway through the service. And she said she couldn't figure out then if they'd been there when she had walked in, or if someone had walked through as part of the service and scattered them, or if they'd been there every week and she simply had never noticed before! She was one of the ones who got down on the floor to pick up the leaves, laughing delightedly. It occurred to me that the leaves had called her into presence in worship in a way she had not expected. They were familiar things in an unfamiliar place--and they had caused her to notice. There is gift in that.

By the time the service was over, the frustrations of my day had melted away. My spirit had been able to come to a resting point. And I'd been reminded of the joy that can be found in community, especially a community that dares to worship together.

Finding Perspective

On Saturday I went to watch Monk's hockey practice. Each week at practice they do a horrendous drill where they skate the length of the rink (back and forth) while the coach shouts, "Down!" then "Up!" With each command they drop to the ice then clamber back up again as quickly as possible. I guess it's supposed to help them learn how to get on their feet again if they take a spill during a game.

Granted, all exercise strikes me as dreadful, but this one in particular looks like utter punishment. I couldn't help but smile as I sat on the bleachers this Saturday. It occurred to me, no matter how bad a day I may have on occasion, I never have to do that. It was such beautiful little moment of perspective. I feel like now I always have something to be thankful for. :)

Yesterday wasn't a bad day, but it was a long one. Mondays always are: I get in to work by 9:30 a.m. and stay 'til 10 p.m. (Though last night it was closer to 10:30 before I headed out.) I spend the day preparing both for the Seminary chapel service at 6:00 as well as preparing to teach immediately after chapel from 7:00 to 9:30. The amount of energy that goes into each experience is tremendous--both draw on wells of spiritual intuition and empathy, not to mention intellectual challenge.

For the most part, I find that worship and teaching gift back energy more than they take, but on occasion they really zap me out of it. And last night was one of those. Even so, it is such a privilege to get to do this. The tired that hits me is a well-earned tired. And the thing is, I never have to do that drill.

Filling Whose Shoes?

I read a little while ago an inspired bit of reflection from Katherine over at Any Day a Beautiful Change in which she considered how far she is from fitting the typical pastoral profile. As she often does, Katherine struck a chord in me. When I realized that any comment I would write in response to her latest post would end up being rather lengthy, I thought I'd take the space here instead. My reflections are not in any way an "answer" to Katherine's reflections. They are merely my own thoughts sparked by her words. Before reading this post, I highly recommend you read hers.

The notion of fitting a professional profile or filling a role has interested me for some time. Maybe any woman who has at least gotten as far as considering a position as a pastor of a church has to face these issues head on at some point. Yesterday, after preaching at my church (something I do maybe three times a year as a lay person with a church staff position), I got into a conversation with a woman who is about 65 years old or so. She told me that a granddaughter had been born in their family lately, the first girl in seven years or so. I smiled and mentioned that I was the first girl born on my father's side of the family in 96 years! Her immediate response: "And now you're doing a job that men usually do!" She's right in a way.

One of the reasons it's been so scandalous for women to become preachers is that it's essentially perceived to be a gender-bending activity. In the nineteenth century, this was very much the perception. A woman who wanted to preach was often perceived to be mentally ill--the equivalent to many folks' unfortunate reaction to cross-dressers today. This view, tragically, is not locked into the nineteenth century. I remember encountering a website this past year where someone argued directly from this perspective, equating women preachers to transvestites.

I think my dear friend SRF would suggest that women preachers queer the pastoral role in a way that breaks the role open to God's kin-dom here and now. It disrupts the usual expectations in a way that lets grace seep through the cracks.

But 'taking on a role' is not only about being a pastor. bell hooks reflects on this subject briefly in her book Teaching to Transgress. She remarks:

I feel the way I teach has been fundamentally structured by the fact that I never wanted to be an academic, so that I never had a fantasy of myself as a professor already worked out in my imagination before I entered the classroom. I think that's been meaningful, because it's freed me up to feel that the professor is something I become as opposed to a kind of identity that's already structured and that I carry with me into the classroom.

Like being a pastor, being a professor certainly has a sense of filling a preconceived role rather than something we become, gradually, in our own way, over time. The feeling is akin to the sense that one has 'big shoes to fill.' The roles come complete with costumes--whether it's a stole, a robe, or an alb. Or a Volvo stationwagon, flowing linen dresses, and cropped hair. The roles come complete with certain languages one is supposed to be fluent in (not just Hebrew but pastor-speak or professor-speak), or a demeanor one is supposed to assume.

While we bring our own assumptions to these roles, we are also shaped by the way others expect us to be, too. So my students have a certain idea of what it means for me to be a professor--and I am shaped by those expectations. Even if I am not those things, even if I don't meet their expectations they still shape me.

In seminary one of my colleagues refused to do the usual Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) units during the summer months between her first and second year in school. Instead she took her whole middler year to do CPE, with the hours spread over the course of two semesters rather than over three months. She told me why she chose to do it that way: "The CPE model is still really heavily influenced by the young, single male seminarian--someone who doesn't have a family to care for, or a home to help shape in any significant way. I refuse to work myself to the bone over the summer--and not have any time or energy for my partner. I need the summer to be more restful so my relationships can be sustained in a healthy way."

My friend was perceptive enough to see what had long-shaped the role that she would be assuming. And she knew that it would not be healthful for her to step into such a pre-formed, rigid model. She needed to do something new, something that made sense for her life.

But others' expectations of how you fill a role are not necessarily a bad thing. While I was in seminary, I read Hillary Rodham Clinton's book Living History. She reflects honestly about her struggles with being First Lady--never seeming to meet people's expectations of her. Her role was so public, that any "mistake" she made brought wave after wave of criticism and negative press. At some point, though, she met with someone who helped her to understand what she was experiencing in a new way. (I'll be darned if I can find the quote in the book, so I'm just re-creating this from memory.) Her friend explained to her that the position of First Lady is a symbolic one. (Now is a good time to remember that it's never useful to say, "It's just a symbol" as if a symbol doesn't carry huge import and life-changing consequences.) Clinton realized that the symbolic role of First Lady carried a vast amount of possibility with it--that one couldn't re-create the role without experiencing huge repercussions. When she realized she could live into the role with the full knowledge that it is a symbol, then she learned how to navigate her world effectively and powerfully.

The role of a pastor and a professor are similarly symbolic roles. They carry a weight and an import that have nothing to do with us. This is not to say we cannot be ourselves when we're in these roles. But it is to say we will never be only ourselves.

It is a delicate and a difficult balance. There are expectations assigned to these roles which are not life-giving, to the one living them out as well as to those who are in relationship with that role. There are expectations which simply have to change--and the sooner the better. We have to make ourselves aware of how these roles are shaped by patriarchy, hierarchy and even consumerism. But there are expectations which will also empower, need to be lived into (not like too-large shoes, but like a sunflower grows toward the light). Who we are will bend to these things and change us in ways we don't expect. And we'll stay the same, too, in ways we don't expect.

Now I have to get back to studying for my exam. So I can become a professor someday...

Love, Teaching, & Vulnerability

This past week I had to write my final paper for my Course Design class. I designed a course that I hope to teach someday at a seminary near me. I've called the course "Holy Times: Worshipping Through the Seasons of Life." It addresses the liturgical year and the Revised Common Lectionary. But also expands into talking about the seasons of our lives that are not addressed in the standard liturgical year: birth, menarche, menopause, new school years, embarking on missionary trips, going to seminary, moving, loss, unemployment. We'll look together about how to mark these events ritually for individuals, families, churches. We also look at ordinary time and extraordinary time. We'll read Kathleen Norris' Quotidian Mysteries and we'll consider the days after September 11. We'll ask questions about how time is constructed: what are the cultural, anthropological, economic, scientific constructions of time? How does worship shape time itself--on a yearly, weekly, daily, hourly basis? And so on.

A major part of the project was not just creating the syllabus for the course, but spending a significant amount of time reflecting on that process. Part of that involved reflecting on my philosophy of teaching: what do I see happening in a classroom? what dynamics are present? how does learning happen? what makes a seminary classroom unique?

It was a very difficult assignment. Partly because we had an excellent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education which talked about how pompous and detached philosophies of teaching can be. The article advised the writers of these philosophies to be as concrete as possible. Don't just say, "I believe learning is a collaborative process" and leave it at that. But explain the way in which you attempt to live out that belief in the classroom. "Therefore I begin each class session with small group discussions centered on the readings for that week."

The article also encouraged teachers to be honest about what doesn't work for them sometimes. What has gotten in the way for them in the past. Not to make themselves sound like Teacher Extraordinaire.

And finally, to be careful not to root all of your reflections in what the teacher can and should do, but to remember to write about students.

I ended up phrasing my philosophy of teaching in terms of expectations and hopes. So I said things like:

• I expect my students to have a rich and varied history with the subject we will be engaging together.
• I expect my students to have very busy, committed, and over-committed lives, of which their academic work is one aspect.
• I expect my students will be bringing their fears into the classroom with them.

And

• I hope my students will see one another as colleagues and as resources to be mined.
• I hope my students will take our subject to places I never imagined.
• I hope my students will fall in love with the subject matter.

It is this last one that I thought I'd share with you today. Partly because I've written about the role of love (or eros) in teaching and learning before. And partly because I'm desperately trying to distract myself from the fact that I'm still waiting to hear about our apartment application.

I hope my students will fall in love with the subject matter. This is the stuff of revolution! If my students fall in love with worship, then the way we worship will change for the better. If my students fall in love with worship, then the world will never be the same. I hold very dear a quote from the Jesuit, Pedro Arrupe:

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are inlove with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings, what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

The only way I know to help people fall in love with something is to love it myself, to show them that the subject is worthy of love, indeed calls for a response of love. bell hooks writes: "When eros is present in the classroom setting, then love is bound to flourish."

Indeed, we ought to enjoy what we are talking about and the questions we are asking. Enjoyment is one of the key intangible ingredients to fostering love in the classroom. There is a sense of playfulness in enjoyment. And there is also a sense of splendid possibility. Enjoyment and eros go hand in hand. They both have to do with knowing, and searching, and being known. Somehow all of these play together in a way that opens us up to the ecstatic experience of learning and breaking new ground. I experience this ecstasy in the classroom when I am brought to a place where my thinking goes to the edge of language, to the very edge where I can see the vast nothingness that has not yet been thought. Even while there, I am confronted by the realization that I have no ability yet to think even that--that is the ecstatic experience of learning.

It is also undeniable an experience of vulnerability. Just as opening ourselves to loving a person puts us in a position of vulnerability, so it is with coming to love a subject. May Sarton writes about the vulnerability in love:

Love at any age has its preposterous side--that is why it comes as a kind of miracle at any age. It is never commonplace, never to be experienced without a tremor. But to stop arbitrarily the flow of life because of a preconceived idea, any preconceived idea, is to damage the truth of the inner person . . . that is dangerous. Are we not on earth to love each other? And to grow? And how does one grow except through love, except through opening ourselves to other human beings to be fertilized and made new? (May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal. New York: Norton & Company, 1980, p. 250.)

Sarton is speaking of falling in love with a person in this journal that she kept in her seventies. But we can apply her insights to the classroom as well. There is at the very least a certain preposterousness about falling in love with a subject in the classroom. But more than that, it can only happen if we keep ourselves from letting our preconceived ideas shut us off from new ideas.

To open ourselves to new ideas is a vulnerable thing to do. It is also, frankly, not very commonplace. In a classroom environment which cultivates the need to prove one's point, to make oneself an expert on a subject before addressing it--it becomes very difficult to open ourselves to new ideas. It can also be a challenge especially for seminary students who may be under scrutiny from their ordination committees who are looking for "right thinking"--or worse, looking to root out "wrong thinking."

A climate of fear will shut down the possibility of falling in love. But an overemphasis on safety is not the solution. A comparison might be fruitfully made between the age of terrorism and its accompanying race for "security"--even at the cost of civil liberties. It is much too facile to make security the solution to terror and safety the solution to fear. According to bell hooks an overemphasis on safety often stems from "the fear that classrooms will be uncontrollable, that emotions and passions will not be contained." In an effort to contain emotions and passions, all too often we resort to a model in which "the professor lectures to a group of quiet students who respond only when they are called on." The appearance of a calm setting, however, is often misleading about what's really going on below the surface. "Many students, especially students of color, may not feel at all 'safe' in what appears to be a neutral setting." (bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge Press, 1994, p. 39).

Like bell hooks I believe that cultivating a sense of openness in the classroom (which may exacerbate feelings of vulnerability rather than smooth them over with a false sense of neutrality) is the way to draw people into profound, life-altering learning experiences.

I enter the classroom with the assumption that we must built 'community' in order to creat a climate of openness and intellectual rigor. Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sesne that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn--to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. It has been my experience that one way to build community in the classroom is to recognize the value of each individual voice. (hooks, 40)

I seek to cultivate a classroom community in which people can "try on" new ideas and insights before attempting to speak authoritatively about them. (Thus one of the final project ideas is to "try on a new spiritual discipline" over the course of the semester and write about the experience.) I also allow space for students to present their work-in-progress, rather than only presenting their completed work. Works-in-progress presentations demand different responses from among student colleagues who must see themselves now as essential contributors to a project which can only get better with their valuable insight. Presenting completed work too often results in either silent reception (students don't understand what response is required of them) or de-constructive comments in which students point out what wasn't present, or what they would have done differently.

I also seek to model openness to growth. I have been known to ask a question of my students during the question-and-answer phase of my lecture: "Do you know what has been confusing to me as I prepared this lecture?" I have said. Then I have followed up by asking for their insights on a certain matter. Such a question in no way abdicates my role as teacher. I take very seriously the responsibility to be fully prepared for each class session. However, it does model for the student the reality that I also continue to be a learner. It is my love of the subject that makes me that way. Not to ask my own questions would be to pretend I were not in love.

(If you made it all the way to the end of this behemoth posting, God bless you.)

Getting Out of the Way

"What we teachers can finally give to our students is to show them that we are not what they are seeking, nor what they need. As we resist their desires, we can best enable them to reach for something different from what we have, or something else that might even be something more."
Stephen H. Webb, "The Voice of Theology: Rethinking the Personal and the Objective in Christian Pedagogy" in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65.4 (Fall 1997): 779.

I read this just a little while ago as I prepare for my class this afternoon on pedagogy. I am fascinated by the quote, by its almost shimmering quality, and by its implied critique of many pedagogical practices.

I read Webb's article in the midst of several in the same issue of that journal, all reflecting in various ways on pedagogy in religious studies, especially interacting with various commitments of feminist pedagogy (or pedagogies, why should we ever refer to multiple things in the singular?). It's evident to me that the authors were struggling with redefining concepts of personal versus public space: Is the classroom, and perhaps the religious studies (or humanities) classroom a personal or a public space?

The conclusion, for the most part, seemed to be that it is a unique merger of the two. And the pedagogical task, from feminist perspectives, seems to be to draw on that merger rather than seek to suppress it in favor of some "objective" ideal. Students will and must bring the fullness of their personal experiences to the subject in order for them to engage with it. At the same time, teachers must cultivate the space to allow for these personal experiences to be given voice. More, the teacher must be willing to share her own personal experience as one way of cultivating space.

She must be fully present, in other words. And yet, somehow, not there at all. This is how Webb's quote shimmers for me.

Now I suddenly see teaching and liturgical leadership related in ways I never noticed before. Two things come to mind immediately.

The summer prior to entering seminary, I attended a conference as a ministry fellow of The Fund for Theological Education. The acclaimed preacher Barbara Brown Taylor spoke at the opening convocation, developing the idea of the preacher as icon--the window through which others are opened into the Divine. The icon is never the thing itself. And yet it matters, inasmuch as it reveals the thing itself. In order to live into becoming an icon, the preacher must be fully present. Fully there. And yet, somehow, not there at all.

While in seminary, I had the utmost privilege of being trained as a liturgical leader by Gordon Lathrop. I have no single quote that sums up what I learned from him in connection to this idea, but I know it has something to do with wearing the alb as a liturgical leader. Gordon describes the alb as being the baptismal garb that one wears on behalf of the baptized assembly. It is not a distinguishing mark, not one announcing status (as the academic robe worn by ministers in my own free-church tradition tends now to be). Rather, it is the ultimate equalizer. It is the clothing of "neither slave nor free, male nor female." It is the alb that assists the liturgical leader in being fully present. And yet, somehow, not there at all.

Because there is someone wearing the alb, after all.

Gordon had us read Robert W. Hovda's book Strong, Loving and Wise: Presiding in Liturgy. Here, Hovda reflects on the notion of presence and how it requires the spiritual art of being oneself. He writes: "At one time--a time this author remembers well--it was popularly considered desirable for the one presiding to be as anonymous as possible. The less oneself that showed through, the better. The ideal was pretty much an obliteration of self in liturgical celebration, if that isn't putting it too crudely."

Hovda acknowledges the impossibility (and futility and even costliness) of anonymity. "We can't escape ourselves at any time, especially when we are exercising a function of leadership. Only the one who recognizes the futility of the effort to be anonymous and is without illusions will be effective in minimizing individual idiosyncracies and peculiarities for the sake of the social event."

Finally, I'll quote generously from Hovda's conclusion regarding liturgical leadership and presence:

Part of one's service to the assembly as presider is to be willing to present oneself to the whole group, consenting to be a focal point in the action being in constant communication with the other ministers and the entire assembly through eye contact, gesture, body posture and movement, as well as word. The self-centered person, the ecclesiastical prince, the person who is out for privileges and status is opaque in this role. If, however, the presider is close to and part of the lives of all in the faith comunity, one of the people, clearly the servant of all, there there is the possibility of being transparent to the presence and action of [the Divine]. But it is a transparency that is accomplished, not with an anonymous persona, but with oneself.

So, when one functions as a presider or other minister, it is the whole person, the real person, the true person, the full and complete person who functions. It is you God calls through the church. God wants no sacred alias, no pulpit tone, nor does the church.

It is rather a pardox, isn't it? Being fully present in order to be tansparent to the presence and action of the Divine.

I am delighted with this connection that I see now between teaching and liturgical leadership. And even as I write this, I begin to suspect that the connections might be made all over the place. My spiritual director often told me it was his purpose to "get out of the way" when we met, in order for me to see my relationship with the Divine more clearly. And what of parenting? And being in love?

Which is to say, I suppose, Happy Valentine's Day.