Posts
Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans
January 27, 2006
I never got to New Orleans before this service trip. Not even to the Lutheran Youth Gatherings, though they must have been amazing. This was one thought I had among many as we walked and drove around the streets of this devastated city.
During the first week of Christmas Break, Stephanie Friant, Joe Genau, Kathleen Owens (MTS) and I traveled to New Orleans to participate in cleanup and rebuilding, joining efforts coordinated by the St. Charles Area Presbyterian Church program known as RHINO—Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans. Our host congregation was in a less-damaged neighborhood with a former mansion-turned-education wing converted into housing for work groups.
We started by hauling relief and clean-up donations to Berean Presbyterian Church in the central city area, where people were just beginning to return to their homes. The congregation had not worshipped together from the time of the hurricane until the last Sunday in Advent. They were now also ready to resume their Head Start program and distribute donations out of their fellowship hall. In addition to floodwater, a recently-remodeled parsonage had to be partially gutted due to storm damage.
Most of the week, however, was devoted to hauling out damaged furniture and completely gutting two houses in the Gentilly neighborhood. This area experienced damage from the storm as well as 8-10 feet of water from levee breakage. Cars and even semi-trucks were completely damaged, and boats tilted against anything they happened to land on when the water subsided. After a month of being unable to enter the area, the combined effects of a muddy flash flood, high temperatures, and no electricity rapidly accelerated the mold growth and extent of damage to the houses. Food in refrigerators turned to toxic, leaking sludge.
The Brown family owns two houses next to each other in this area; the adult daughter and her children live next door to the parents and high-school aged son. The father recently had back surgery, and the whole family had little help to begin on their own. Of two houses’ worth of possessions, only a cupboard’s worth of glass keepsakes could be salvaged, and one photo album. A six-foot tall, thirty-foot long mountain of former belongings piled up in the street, waiting for the garbage truck. He told us the memories associated with each item as he watched us pulling them from the house. It was a life laid bare to strangers, and he was still a gracious host.
We learned from the Brown family that week what many people have struggled with: why would anyone want to return to these neighborhoods? It is the community, he said, built up over so many years, as much as it is having no other place to go. His house had been through seven floods and two fires and each time he rebuilt, just like his neighbors. They weren’t sure if they would even be allowed to rebuild this time, or if the city would condemn and bulldoze the area. Still, they chose to get started. Once torn out to the studs, the frame would be treated against mold and reconstructed. Just like before.
Later in the week we found ourselves in the now-famous Lower 9th Ward, which took the impact of the breaking levees hardest. The wreckage showed the force of the water: splintered house compressed against splintered house. Who could survive?
Elsewhere in town were relatively affluent patches of ‘normalcy.’ Here, it was a ghost town. In all the war-torn cities where I have worked before, no curfew-induced ghost town was ever like this. In Hebron, you hear children call to you from behind their shuttered windows. You see kites flying from ruins. Not here. Here there were no children.
In among the houses of this district were the churches. The impact of seeing so many destroyed churches on four seminary students is almost beyond words. How is it harder to witness these than even the thousands of houses destroyed? But there were dozens of them. These had been simple buildings, wood and brick; these had been the predominantly black and predominantly poor neighborhoods, the realities of structural racism surrounding us, made plain by the storms. These churches mostly did not say ‘ELCA’ or ‘PCUSA’ on the sides; they were names of Pentecostal, evangelical, or independent churches mostly. I wondered how they would be rebuilt. I wondered if our churches would be sharing our resources to help them rebuild. And I simply wondered where the churches’ people were, how many could have survived.
As we stood in the streets, I thought, the sky was fittingly dark for this. It felt like death.
Still, death is not forever for those of faith, and we were constantly reminded of this in the relationships we developed with people throughout the week. People were filtering in. Children would be coming back during Christmas break, volunteer groups were booked for weeks after our departure from RHINO, even a little night life was returning to the French Quarter. Berean would celebrate Christmas ‘at home,’ and our host church assembled its annual Christmas chorale, complete with orchestra.
None of us wanted to leave, but hope was bigger than us and would continue beyond us. I do not know what New Orleans will look like a few years in the future, just like I did not know it in the past. I have only known it for seven days in between. But I hope that I can know it, and heal it, more.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Sunday Afternoon With a Cat Named Niebuhr
(I wrote this after the adoption of a rather unusual kitten in need of a home, following the end of my January class on Reinhold Niebuhr)
In the end, it was the only name which seemed to fit.
We tried as many other possibilities as we could think of, names human and feline and traditional and unusual, but nothing seemed to match this strange creature that captured our attention and we felt compelled to bring home from the shelter last night. This morning, after close observation and failing to convince myself otherwise, I realized this name would simply have to do. She is neither all black nor white, but a combination somewhere in between; and the lines and patterns are not cleanly defined at all but a bit beyond our comprehension of what the Creator had in mind. She is somewhat gangly and her ears stick out a little too far in her young age, but perhaps she will outgrow that. I’m told she is verbose, and I see her extreme curiosity about the world around her. Clearly, in community with our other cat (named after the prophet Malachi), they are now both less moral than either appeared originally on each one’s own. Clearly, in cleaning up the houseplants they’ve dug into and moderating their squabbles, the progress in our household I had earlier envisioned was far from inevitable.
Meanwhile, as I move around the house I am surprised to find her everywhere I go. How did she get there? She has generated quite a stir and following from the other cat, always trying to get closer, helping himself out of her dish and prying constantly into her privacy, but so far falling just short of understanding all that she is or might be. Though shocked by her castigations of him, he is still encouraged enough by her invitations to keep trying.
All the metaphors with her namesake are not exact; she does still in our house seem a bit more guilty of the sin of hiding than the sin of pride—although our first cat does more than his part to compensate. With such a name as this, she has rather large ‘shoes’ to fill; in reality her feet are bigger than the rest of her, and despite her routine retreats just beneath my bed-skirt, there is a certain scrappiness and determination in her. This should not come as such a surprise, since we learned that she only weighed four pounds until recently, and had still raised two litters of kittens in her two years of existence!
Encountering this strange creature leaves more questions than answers, I am afraid, and I am wondering if I have done the right thing in bringing her into my own messy life. I am not sure if my brother James, knowing less of Reinhold’s legacy in our times, will find her new name as relevant as I do. And more seriously, neither James nor I are quite sure where our lives will take us after this year. So, I ask, just what is a seminary student who spent the past month having her head filled with Christian realism doing, taking on another pet? There are real questions in life, and one can only try to be faithful in response. Still, while we were told yesterday we could always take her back to the shelter, would I really want to? Despite all her troubles, she’s growing on me rapidly. I think in reality she is here for the long run, and life will never quite be the same
In the end, it was the only name which seemed to fit.
We tried as many other possibilities as we could think of, names human and feline and traditional and unusual, but nothing seemed to match this strange creature that captured our attention and we felt compelled to bring home from the shelter last night. This morning, after close observation and failing to convince myself otherwise, I realized this name would simply have to do. She is neither all black nor white, but a combination somewhere in between; and the lines and patterns are not cleanly defined at all but a bit beyond our comprehension of what the Creator had in mind. She is somewhat gangly and her ears stick out a little too far in her young age, but perhaps she will outgrow that. I’m told she is verbose, and I see her extreme curiosity about the world around her. Clearly, in community with our other cat (named after the prophet Malachi), they are now both less moral than either appeared originally on each one’s own. Clearly, in cleaning up the houseplants they’ve dug into and moderating their squabbles, the progress in our household I had earlier envisioned was far from inevitable.
Meanwhile, as I move around the house I am surprised to find her everywhere I go. How did she get there? She has generated quite a stir and following from the other cat, always trying to get closer, helping himself out of her dish and prying constantly into her privacy, but so far falling just short of understanding all that she is or might be. Though shocked by her castigations of him, he is still encouraged enough by her invitations to keep trying.
All the metaphors with her namesake are not exact; she does still in our house seem a bit more guilty of the sin of hiding than the sin of pride—although our first cat does more than his part to compensate. With such a name as this, she has rather large ‘shoes’ to fill; in reality her feet are bigger than the rest of her, and despite her routine retreats just beneath my bed-skirt, there is a certain scrappiness and determination in her. This should not come as such a surprise, since we learned that she only weighed four pounds until recently, and had still raised two litters of kittens in her two years of existence!
Encountering this strange creature leaves more questions than answers, I am afraid, and I am wondering if I have done the right thing in bringing her into my own messy life. I am not sure if my brother James, knowing less of Reinhold’s legacy in our times, will find her new name as relevant as I do. And more seriously, neither James nor I are quite sure where our lives will take us after this year. So, I ask, just what is a seminary student who spent the past month having her head filled with Christian realism doing, taking on another pet? There are real questions in life, and one can only try to be faithful in response. Still, while we were told yesterday we could always take her back to the shelter, would I really want to? Despite all her troubles, she’s growing on me rapidly. I think in reality she is here for the long run, and life will never quite be the same
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Why Can't I Be Reinhold Niebuhr?
(I originally wrote this as a posting to an online discussion group from my January class on Reinhold Niebuhr).
I thought I’d choose a provocative title, barring hubris.
In our discussion of ‘public theologians’ today (public intellectuals? Oy.) I was identifying the following elements of what made the phenomenon of Niebuhr:
+Household name; known outside the seminaries; accessible
+Work encompasses theology, politics, ethics, social problems
+Work combines writing, organizing, teaching, and preaching/speaking
[+Changes and adapts with and respond to times] (needed?)
….and according to Fox, a generous dose of ego?
Let me know if my list is incomplete in terms of being public, theological, and influential.
And a few things which didn’t seem to be needed:
+ a Ph.D (whew!)
+ great grades (um, whew!)
+perfectly referenced footnotes of other theologians
+quotations around stuff you borrowed, actually…
+ money?
+100% of your siblings going into the same field?
Okay, so that list is a work in progress. And I’m still wrestling with whether ‘maleness’ might be a necessity; that is, if a woman wrote in the vein of Niebuhr, would she just come across as ranting? (Or other terms applied to women exercising male behavior)
So…what are those barriers to raising up a voice that meets these criteria, ie, a new Niebuhr? Is it that those who are most like him in thinking are operating in such small circles; or that they only specialize in one area (Rossing vs. La Haye only); or that they only operate in one mode (writing but not organizing)?
So, are there other ‘invisible/unknown’ barriers? In trying to get to this, I started polling people during the break. What prevents Joe Genau or Kathleen Owens or Pat Morton from becoming the next Reinhold Niebuhr? What prevents Bob Cathey or Ken Sawyer from just stepping forward and becoming the next Niebuhr? (Come on, guys, it’d be fun…)
Are we ‘liberal seminarians’ too cognizant of self-care to ‘go there’? Or too modest? Or is it really just impossible, at least in this time? Just throwing out ideas here.
Or are we afraid of claiming that role and the weighty responsibility that comes with it? The Lutheran left in me says, ‘uff-da!’ Are we afraid of how greatly it would change our lives, that we would be confronted so heavily with our own inadequacies? That Niebuhr was somehow born so unique and special that he is to be isolated from us, that we are not to claim our own agency to such a broad horizon?
Sure spooks me. After all, I'm just an average schmuck, right?
So Joe wrote me a note last night using the phrase ‘the Legend of LeAnne,’ which makes me laugh, though I’ve heard it before. And it also embarrasses me (no worries, Joe). What I feel is that I am pretty much the same schmuck I was six years ago. I had some passion around human rights that compelled me to volunteer a year in a ‘relatively safe’ Oslo process zone; circumstance had it that the outbreak of war greeted me on my doorstep, literally, three weeks into that one year I was planning on. The choices after that were always, ‘so what to do now, given the circumstances I’m in?’ It wasn’t really so unique to me.
It strikes me that Niebuhr could not have planned for much if any of this, either. Nor can any of us, right? There are one's life circumstances which may prevent their engagement at the level they would prefer; there's their own passions, which are either frustrated or channeled; there is the chance of being in a 'right place' in a 'right time' (although I think there are many such, including where we are).
And then I ask, is this a worthy goal? Would it be useful to have another ‘Neibuhr’ around? Or would it just spawn a personality cult with more mindless followers? (i.e., La Haye)
One more thought I had, is it more likely that we will see another MLK Jr. before we see another Niebuhr? Now, he was a Rev. Dr., but he otherwise himself seems to have fit the bill. And, on a cynical note, would we be more likely in our supremacist tendency to acknowledge one leader rather than a movement within a repressed minority, might we recognize another MLK before recognizing another Niebuhr? I don’t know. And how much does assassination and isolation/idolization of the one discourage others from claiming their agency? I don’t know.
So, I’d be interested in hearing on this, and was quite attracted by the question in the syllabus for the day: the impossibility, and yet need for.
----
True confession and learned wisdom: Mmm…coffee-cake. Thank you for gifting our class with such a treat! However: If one might wish to jot down a poignant observation in the middle of another’s presentation, pertinent to the presentation at hand, mind you, and one chooses to ‘share’ that poignant observation with a friend, one might wish to not write it on a folded-over napkin containing the streusel topping crumbs. Particularly if that friend is working at a laptop and might need to lift up the note to read it, thereby showering keyboard with said streusel topping. So sorry Joe, I do hope the computer will be okay despite its angry whirring noises, and my apologies to the class for the distraction of efforts to extricate said crumbs.
----
And another question from our presentation on community, government, tyranny and anarchy—what about communities of anarchists?
(‘Come on everybody, let’s get together and smash a Starbucks?’)
Niebuhr is curiously silent, or had not had the privilege of meeting G8 protestors…
definitions of tyranny and absolutism are up for grabs…
peace,
Le Anne
I thought I’d choose a provocative title, barring hubris.
In our discussion of ‘public theologians’ today (public intellectuals? Oy.) I was identifying the following elements of what made the phenomenon of Niebuhr:
+Household name; known outside the seminaries; accessible
+Work encompasses theology, politics, ethics, social problems
+Work combines writing, organizing, teaching, and preaching/speaking
[+Changes and adapts with and respond to times] (needed?)
….and according to Fox, a generous dose of ego?
Let me know if my list is incomplete in terms of being public, theological, and influential.
And a few things which didn’t seem to be needed:
+ a Ph.D (whew!)
+ great grades (um, whew!)
+perfectly referenced footnotes of other theologians
+quotations around stuff you borrowed, actually…
+ money?
+100% of your siblings going into the same field?
Okay, so that list is a work in progress. And I’m still wrestling with whether ‘maleness’ might be a necessity; that is, if a woman wrote in the vein of Niebuhr, would she just come across as ranting? (Or other terms applied to women exercising male behavior)
So…what are those barriers to raising up a voice that meets these criteria, ie, a new Niebuhr? Is it that those who are most like him in thinking are operating in such small circles; or that they only specialize in one area (Rossing vs. La Haye only); or that they only operate in one mode (writing but not organizing)?
So, are there other ‘invisible/unknown’ barriers? In trying to get to this, I started polling people during the break. What prevents Joe Genau or Kathleen Owens or Pat Morton from becoming the next Reinhold Niebuhr? What prevents Bob Cathey or Ken Sawyer from just stepping forward and becoming the next Niebuhr? (Come on, guys, it’d be fun…)
Are we ‘liberal seminarians’ too cognizant of self-care to ‘go there’? Or too modest? Or is it really just impossible, at least in this time? Just throwing out ideas here.
Or are we afraid of claiming that role and the weighty responsibility that comes with it? The Lutheran left in me says, ‘uff-da!’ Are we afraid of how greatly it would change our lives, that we would be confronted so heavily with our own inadequacies? That Niebuhr was somehow born so unique and special that he is to be isolated from us, that we are not to claim our own agency to such a broad horizon?
Sure spooks me. After all, I'm just an average schmuck, right?
So Joe wrote me a note last night using the phrase ‘the Legend of LeAnne,’ which makes me laugh, though I’ve heard it before. And it also embarrasses me (no worries, Joe). What I feel is that I am pretty much the same schmuck I was six years ago. I had some passion around human rights that compelled me to volunteer a year in a ‘relatively safe’ Oslo process zone; circumstance had it that the outbreak of war greeted me on my doorstep, literally, three weeks into that one year I was planning on. The choices after that were always, ‘so what to do now, given the circumstances I’m in?’ It wasn’t really so unique to me.
It strikes me that Niebuhr could not have planned for much if any of this, either. Nor can any of us, right? There are one's life circumstances which may prevent their engagement at the level they would prefer; there's their own passions, which are either frustrated or channeled; there is the chance of being in a 'right place' in a 'right time' (although I think there are many such, including where we are).
And then I ask, is this a worthy goal? Would it be useful to have another ‘Neibuhr’ around? Or would it just spawn a personality cult with more mindless followers? (i.e., La Haye)
One more thought I had, is it more likely that we will see another MLK Jr. before we see another Niebuhr? Now, he was a Rev. Dr., but he otherwise himself seems to have fit the bill. And, on a cynical note, would we be more likely in our supremacist tendency to acknowledge one leader rather than a movement within a repressed minority, might we recognize another MLK before recognizing another Niebuhr? I don’t know. And how much does assassination and isolation/idolization of the one discourage others from claiming their agency? I don’t know.
So, I’d be interested in hearing on this, and was quite attracted by the question in the syllabus for the day: the impossibility, and yet need for.
----
True confession and learned wisdom: Mmm…coffee-cake. Thank you for gifting our class with such a treat! However: If one might wish to jot down a poignant observation in the middle of another’s presentation, pertinent to the presentation at hand, mind you, and one chooses to ‘share’ that poignant observation with a friend, one might wish to not write it on a folded-over napkin containing the streusel topping crumbs. Particularly if that friend is working at a laptop and might need to lift up the note to read it, thereby showering keyboard with said streusel topping. So sorry Joe, I do hope the computer will be okay despite its angry whirring noises, and my apologies to the class for the distraction of efforts to extricate said crumbs.
----
And another question from our presentation on community, government, tyranny and anarchy—what about communities of anarchists?
(‘Come on everybody, let’s get together and smash a Starbucks?’)
Niebuhr is curiously silent, or had not had the privilege of meeting G8 protestors…
definitions of tyranny and absolutism are up for grabs…
peace,
Le Anne
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Penance for Pakistan
Penance for Pakistan
January 16, 2006
Now, at this time, when large crowds of Pakistanis are marching in the streets of their cities shouting “Death to America,”[1] it may be a good time to reflect on the past three months of our relationship with our global neighbor.
This evening’s news reports that the ruling party of Pakistan is demanding an apology for our actions, killing 17 citizens, as we allege intelligence that a top al-Qaida official would be visiting there. Guess who didn’t show up for dinner. It has a too-familiar ring with our ‘mistakes’ of recent years.
I disagree with the assertion I heard in class today that were the suspected terrorist present and killed, “The news headlines would read very differently.” In this I recall the Israeli airstrike that killed not only Hamas leader Sheikh Salah Shehada, but 11 other civilians as well as it flattened a crowded apartment block, including seven children. 120 neighbors were wounded. Although the man was an accused terrorist, the headlines were not jubilant. Too many innocents had suffered for jubilation. Eleven, seventeen, what is our mathematical equation for acceptable collateral damage?
Pakistan, within the region, is considered a place of relative stability. Perhaps millions of refugees from neighboring conflicts are filling its communities. I can only imagine the fear of people in a country that believes itself not to be at war, only to have an unmanned aircraft fly above its sovereign airspace and fire a powerful weapon into the midst of unsuspecting villagers. Perhaps it is something that we felt not so many years ago when fire and debris rained from our skies and our perceptions of personal security were shattered.
Looking back further, do you remember the terrible earthquake which this country suffered only a few short months ago? Perhaps we missed it in the wake of tsunami, Katrina, and Rita. Even NPR coverage was not nearly so thorough as that of the Gulf Coast hurricanes. And yet, as of this writing at least 73,000 people are dead, and three million without shelter from the bitterly cold winter. More will die. Many tents supplied cannot keep out the weather, stand under the heavy snowfalls, or accommodate heating fires. Do you remember the pleading of the aid agencies for anyone, everyone to donate, to stave off certain additional mass deaths? Do you remember our response? Only half of the $546 million needed has materialized. Much is in loans. How can they repay?
Another quake of 5.2 struck the same region on Christmas Day. There is no news on how the fragile tents and their occupants withstood the trauma.
There are many reasons to ignore a country until it publicly denounces us in its streets. We do ourselves no favors with Sen. McCain asserting our right to bomb wherever we please in our global war. Or with apologies absent from the White House. Perhaps we are overburdened, experiencing ‘compassion fatigue?’ Or perhaps it seems that for people in those countries, large scale tragic death tolls are too regular an occurrence for us to be made too uncomfortable. Or perhaps it is because they don’t look like us and do not practice our religion, and we feel unable to ‘relate.’
I thought sarcastically several weeks ago that perhaps we could start a fundraising drive called ‘Pennies for Pakistan,’ a name which would voice our negligence over letting such a disaster fall through the cracks of our collective conscience.
So how do we make things right between ourselves and Pakistan? An apology somehow doesn’t seem enough—not for our bombing, and not for our paltry response in their time of great need. I think a renewed effort toward helping the country rebuild is most certainly in order. We might wish to call such fundraising efforts our ‘Penance for Pakistan.’
To do nothing seems so frightening. Surely with our State Department beating the drums of war against Iran, and possibly Syria, we do not need to enmesh ourselves in yet another battle. Especially not one with a country that, if even only for its sheer catastrophes faced, likely stands on higher moral ground.
How you can help: Learn more and donate!
www.mercycorps.org
www.oxfam.org
www.lwr.org (Lutheran World Relief)
Volunteer to rebuild? (Dress warm, though): http://www.bitsonline.net/earthquake/
Read a story from a Wartburg College student:
http://public.wartburg.edu/trumpet/2006/jan16/pakistan.html
[1] “Morning Edition,” NPR, January 16, 2006
January 16, 2006
Now, at this time, when large crowds of Pakistanis are marching in the streets of their cities shouting “Death to America,”[1] it may be a good time to reflect on the past three months of our relationship with our global neighbor.
This evening’s news reports that the ruling party of Pakistan is demanding an apology for our actions, killing 17 citizens, as we allege intelligence that a top al-Qaida official would be visiting there. Guess who didn’t show up for dinner. It has a too-familiar ring with our ‘mistakes’ of recent years.
I disagree with the assertion I heard in class today that were the suspected terrorist present and killed, “The news headlines would read very differently.” In this I recall the Israeli airstrike that killed not only Hamas leader Sheikh Salah Shehada, but 11 other civilians as well as it flattened a crowded apartment block, including seven children. 120 neighbors were wounded. Although the man was an accused terrorist, the headlines were not jubilant. Too many innocents had suffered for jubilation. Eleven, seventeen, what is our mathematical equation for acceptable collateral damage?
Pakistan, within the region, is considered a place of relative stability. Perhaps millions of refugees from neighboring conflicts are filling its communities. I can only imagine the fear of people in a country that believes itself not to be at war, only to have an unmanned aircraft fly above its sovereign airspace and fire a powerful weapon into the midst of unsuspecting villagers. Perhaps it is something that we felt not so many years ago when fire and debris rained from our skies and our perceptions of personal security were shattered.
Looking back further, do you remember the terrible earthquake which this country suffered only a few short months ago? Perhaps we missed it in the wake of tsunami, Katrina, and Rita. Even NPR coverage was not nearly so thorough as that of the Gulf Coast hurricanes. And yet, as of this writing at least 73,000 people are dead, and three million without shelter from the bitterly cold winter. More will die. Many tents supplied cannot keep out the weather, stand under the heavy snowfalls, or accommodate heating fires. Do you remember the pleading of the aid agencies for anyone, everyone to donate, to stave off certain additional mass deaths? Do you remember our response? Only half of the $546 million needed has materialized. Much is in loans. How can they repay?
Another quake of 5.2 struck the same region on Christmas Day. There is no news on how the fragile tents and their occupants withstood the trauma.
There are many reasons to ignore a country until it publicly denounces us in its streets. We do ourselves no favors with Sen. McCain asserting our right to bomb wherever we please in our global war. Or with apologies absent from the White House. Perhaps we are overburdened, experiencing ‘compassion fatigue?’ Or perhaps it seems that for people in those countries, large scale tragic death tolls are too regular an occurrence for us to be made too uncomfortable. Or perhaps it is because they don’t look like us and do not practice our religion, and we feel unable to ‘relate.’
I thought sarcastically several weeks ago that perhaps we could start a fundraising drive called ‘Pennies for Pakistan,’ a name which would voice our negligence over letting such a disaster fall through the cracks of our collective conscience.
So how do we make things right between ourselves and Pakistan? An apology somehow doesn’t seem enough—not for our bombing, and not for our paltry response in their time of great need. I think a renewed effort toward helping the country rebuild is most certainly in order. We might wish to call such fundraising efforts our ‘Penance for Pakistan.’
To do nothing seems so frightening. Surely with our State Department beating the drums of war against Iran, and possibly Syria, we do not need to enmesh ourselves in yet another battle. Especially not one with a country that, if even only for its sheer catastrophes faced, likely stands on higher moral ground.
How you can help: Learn more and donate!
www.mercycorps.org
www.oxfam.org
www.lwr.org (Lutheran World Relief)
Volunteer to rebuild? (Dress warm, though): http://www.bitsonline.net/earthquake/
Read a story from a Wartburg College student:
http://public.wartburg.edu/trumpet/2006/jan16/pakistan.html
[1] “Morning Edition,” NPR, January 16, 2006
Monday, January 16, 2006
On Ouliving One's Students
On outliving one’s students
January 16, 2006
[I wrote this for an online discussion in our January class, 'Reinhold Niebuhr' at McCormick Seminary, team-taught by Drs. Robert Cathey and Ken Sawyer, and include an impressive response from one of my classmates. She is better than she knows, I think. ]
I guess I had a few more thoughts prompted by our discussion today and previously; I was thinking especially of ‘students’ who feel lost when their leader is taken, the example in today’s class being Reagan (uff-da), but of course very true for Martin Luther King, Jr., and perhaps even for those around Niebuhr at the time of his stroke. Sometimes the loss of voice goes the other direction: I want to say that at some point this term Dr. Sawyer made a reference to the tragedy of outliving one’s children. Maybe someone else remembers better, though it got me thinking…Somewhere close to the magnitude of dread of outliving your children, must be the possibility of outliving your students. So far, I have outlived two of my best ‘students,’ Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall. Those who I taught to carry on my teaching have been jailed and tortured, Osama and Ghassan, among others. Dozens more have been deported by the Israeli military, although this is a different kind of suffering.In Palestine, I designed the training curriculum for foreign volunteers joining an organization called the ‘International Solidarity Movement,’ which included basic human rights documentation, accompaniment, responsible conduct in the culture and the conflict zone, and methods of nonviolent resistance. Altogether under my watch, I believe we trained nearly a thousand volunteers, and however many more in the two years since I left. I wasn’t alone in this effort by any means, I had partners and so much help in doing all this, but I still take responsibility for what I set in motion.As you might imagine, the survivor guilt has been quite incredible. I remember how grateful Tom was for being in my sessions. “I didn’t want to go to Gaza before, I was afraid, but now with your training I feel ready to go and I am excited to get there. Thank you so much,” he said. Those words have haunted me, especially when an Israeli sniper shot him in the back of his skull a week later [April 11, 2003], while he was trying to rescue two little girls. Since then, I don’t think I’ve taught. I had become a broken person and I had also recently been assaulted, and I needed a profound rest. Later that year, I transferred to Baghdad full-time. Now, in seminary, I only tutor in the LRWC, if you can call it that, since my students are all far brighter than me, usually working on Ph.D’s. As I mentioned in class, some have been on death lists in their home countries for combining church leadership and activism. So instead, I consider my role usually to be just ‘in awe.’ One is herself a seminary professor, who constantly calls me (half her age) her ‘good teacher’ (who teaches who?) and showers me with small gifts and food. “I could do nothing without you,” she says. She looks up to me, and it almost tears me apart.I fear being called the “good teacher” and I have feared having students, ‘disciples’ of any kind, for fear of losing another. I don’t doubt anymore the reliability of the teaching, it was the best we knew under the circumstances. And then the circumstances changed; that is, the Israeli military began targeting foreigners, and they attacked four in I believe nearly as many weeks. [It’s something like the ‘unintended consequences’ of humanitarian work that one has to be prepared for, such as when militaries begin targeting the people who give testimonies and cooperate with your organization, so that the people themselves will urge you to leave for their own ‘safety.’ Or when militaries attack peace workers, knowing that the usual response is for societies to label the newfound victims as ‘dupes’ for engaging the ‘enemy’ unarmed. Oddly enough, it’s the armed foreigners that get the sympathy for being captured or killed.]So I think about the weight and responsibility of teaching, especially in times of risk and unknowing. A teacher of conscience wants the best for her students, wants them to excel, but also to be safe. I only learned this week that my gruff OT professor in undergrad would read all my letters home to each of his classes, would lead them in group prayer if it had been too long since I last wrote, and told his students their grades would be lowered if they did not attend my sermons when I guest preached in the Chapel. This was a man devoted, and I think also terrified of what he helped inspire me to do with life. Now, other students have followed my path from there. I worry about them too.I still wonder, would they have died if I had not taught them? Would they have suffered if I hadn’t interfered in their lives? Dare I encourage anyone else to go to the Middle East? Do I even dare encourage anyone to become a campus activist? The stakes, in all, are quite high.I know that Niebuhr’s students were coming from the first world war, and surely some must have gone back for the second. King surely lost disciples who followed him into the civil rights movement. I do not know enough about how this impacted them. I think I need to. In fact, I don’t even know enough on their thoughts about their teaching and their hopes for their students. And what do seminary professors today hope and fear for their students? I don’t know.So, to survive, I read Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. He was still very much alive though in prison when he learned that his students were being killed for their resistance to the Nazi government. He remembers their aptitude and their personalities from their short time together. And I think it is a better text on the ‘costs of discipleship’ than perhaps his book by that name.There is a level of brokenness that maybe one cannot ever recover from, but the experience informs pedagogy and even the broken might still teach. I’m getting ready to start training again, if our new human rights organization takes off. Still, on the radio they’re talking about my colleagues in Iraq and the emotional toll on Jim’s family, and recalling the grief of Tom’s and Rachel’s families, I ponder the wisdom of expanding this line of work. Yet in four years of living with war, and ten days of Niebuhr demolishing pacifism, I still think it is necessary. And so tonight I sit in my apartment reading Niebuhr and King, thinking about war and nonviolence, teachers, students, dupes, and faithfulness, and wonder what comes next.Tonight’s quite moving radio interview with CPT and family of hostage Jim Loney: http://www.cbc.ca/insite/AS_IT_HAPPENS_TORONTO/2006/1/16.htmlInternational Solidarity Movement: www.palsolidarity.org. I want to conclude this by saying that I do feel a little self-conscious speaking up and writing, knowing that not everyone may appreciate my making the connections between what we are reading and my experiences in war, and people have a variety of reasons for taking this class. I thought though, perhaps, while half the postings are chiding one another for poor grammar, I might be forgiven. I doubt though I’ll even have the luxury of writing again before the end of our class. For those that are interested, I am building a blog out of my letters from the Middle East, and you may find it at www.young-activist.blogspot.com. It also is a work in progress.
Peace, Le Anne Clausen
+++++
Elizabeth Downs replies:
LeAnne: I don't know if you will be able to really hear this, but I admire your courage, your willingness to risk, your openness, your profound reflections and honest writing. Perhaps admiration isn't what you want; perhaps being called teacher isn't what you want; perhaps feeling isn't what you want. But in the web of connection, the fiber you stand on tugs at others, me included. Yet I can only fight the battles within my own possibities. That's all any of us can do. And we don't know what those possiblities are until they whisper into our lives or explode in our faces or are tugged at by another's thread.Dr. Cathey's question provoked me today: How does the realist live with knowing she has fallen short of the ideal? I also ask, how does the idealist live with encountering the brutalities of reality? I wrestle with repentence and grace in all of this, but I don't know how it really fits. Activism demands participants in the drama of living, whether it is the drama of a questionable "war" in Iraq ... or the drama on the face of a Muslim girl in a class of secularist, "all American" tenth graders watching the twin towers fall on the classroom TV on 9-11 ... or the still-prevalent racism that shows up in small ways in a checkout line at the grocery. Where do we take our stands? Do we have to "get on the bus" so publicly before we realize that in the details of daily living we are also drawn to live out justice? Is the way I take steps in my justice walk unacceptable to those who do not see it? I strongly believe, and have tried to live (though only with intermittent honesty) that real faith is only faith if it acts. I think Niebuhr deeply held that belief as well. But what does that mean, really? Just how do we walk our faith? An orthodox Jewish rabbi, who was a supervisor-in-training for my CPE, said that praying with a Jewish patient was ridiculous, if not insulting, because prayer was what their lives were all about: they lived their faith, every moment. Another log entry, I believe yesterday, stated that making dreams into reality required strategy and operational planning. Yes ... and it often requires compromise. My vision and your vision may sound the same, but how we realize it, how we bring it about, the details of the implementation, may make us look very different, even turn us against one another. Yours and your friends' actions are not at all a pacifism, LeAnne. Yours is a very courageous activism. I don't know, but perhaps Niebuhr would also say that; but he may also ask whether the cost was worth it, whether there is enough power in the position you -- or anyone -- takes in order to effect a change. You -- we -- will never know the answer to that until we can look back on it from distance in time and place. In the meantime, I can either turn my attention toward my gated community and my home-schooled kids and my safe pastorate ... or I can take small and large steps toward working for justice wherever I am. And I can try to be open to my own blindness and prejudice and political "rightness." I don't want my own sins to be sins of omission, or of hiding, or of pride, but I won't be able to avoid those entirely, either. Yes, having a job and a mortgage, and being a mother brings more caution to one's words and acts; the consequences no longer affect just the one. But that does not mean one stops speaking up, stops taking stands. I am still part of all humanity. Yet the fact of my race, place, and time make me one of the oppressors, whether or not I feel it is just or right or fair or whatever. My feelings, in the long run, don't matter. My acts, in this moment, do. So do yours. They are meaningful.
January 16, 2006
[I wrote this for an online discussion in our January class, 'Reinhold Niebuhr' at McCormick Seminary, team-taught by Drs. Robert Cathey and Ken Sawyer, and include an impressive response from one of my classmates. She is better than she knows, I think. ]
I guess I had a few more thoughts prompted by our discussion today and previously; I was thinking especially of ‘students’ who feel lost when their leader is taken, the example in today’s class being Reagan (uff-da), but of course very true for Martin Luther King, Jr., and perhaps even for those around Niebuhr at the time of his stroke. Sometimes the loss of voice goes the other direction: I want to say that at some point this term Dr. Sawyer made a reference to the tragedy of outliving one’s children. Maybe someone else remembers better, though it got me thinking…Somewhere close to the magnitude of dread of outliving your children, must be the possibility of outliving your students. So far, I have outlived two of my best ‘students,’ Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall. Those who I taught to carry on my teaching have been jailed and tortured, Osama and Ghassan, among others. Dozens more have been deported by the Israeli military, although this is a different kind of suffering.In Palestine, I designed the training curriculum for foreign volunteers joining an organization called the ‘International Solidarity Movement,’ which included basic human rights documentation, accompaniment, responsible conduct in the culture and the conflict zone, and methods of nonviolent resistance. Altogether under my watch, I believe we trained nearly a thousand volunteers, and however many more in the two years since I left. I wasn’t alone in this effort by any means, I had partners and so much help in doing all this, but I still take responsibility for what I set in motion.As you might imagine, the survivor guilt has been quite incredible. I remember how grateful Tom was for being in my sessions. “I didn’t want to go to Gaza before, I was afraid, but now with your training I feel ready to go and I am excited to get there. Thank you so much,” he said. Those words have haunted me, especially when an Israeli sniper shot him in the back of his skull a week later [April 11, 2003], while he was trying to rescue two little girls. Since then, I don’t think I’ve taught. I had become a broken person and I had also recently been assaulted, and I needed a profound rest. Later that year, I transferred to Baghdad full-time. Now, in seminary, I only tutor in the LRWC, if you can call it that, since my students are all far brighter than me, usually working on Ph.D’s. As I mentioned in class, some have been on death lists in their home countries for combining church leadership and activism. So instead, I consider my role usually to be just ‘in awe.’ One is herself a seminary professor, who constantly calls me (half her age) her ‘good teacher’ (who teaches who?) and showers me with small gifts and food. “I could do nothing without you,” she says. She looks up to me, and it almost tears me apart.I fear being called the “good teacher” and I have feared having students, ‘disciples’ of any kind, for fear of losing another. I don’t doubt anymore the reliability of the teaching, it was the best we knew under the circumstances. And then the circumstances changed; that is, the Israeli military began targeting foreigners, and they attacked four in I believe nearly as many weeks. [It’s something like the ‘unintended consequences’ of humanitarian work that one has to be prepared for, such as when militaries begin targeting the people who give testimonies and cooperate with your organization, so that the people themselves will urge you to leave for their own ‘safety.’ Or when militaries attack peace workers, knowing that the usual response is for societies to label the newfound victims as ‘dupes’ for engaging the ‘enemy’ unarmed. Oddly enough, it’s the armed foreigners that get the sympathy for being captured or killed.]So I think about the weight and responsibility of teaching, especially in times of risk and unknowing. A teacher of conscience wants the best for her students, wants them to excel, but also to be safe. I only learned this week that my gruff OT professor in undergrad would read all my letters home to each of his classes, would lead them in group prayer if it had been too long since I last wrote, and told his students their grades would be lowered if they did not attend my sermons when I guest preached in the Chapel. This was a man devoted, and I think also terrified of what he helped inspire me to do with life. Now, other students have followed my path from there. I worry about them too.I still wonder, would they have died if I had not taught them? Would they have suffered if I hadn’t interfered in their lives? Dare I encourage anyone else to go to the Middle East? Do I even dare encourage anyone to become a campus activist? The stakes, in all, are quite high.I know that Niebuhr’s students were coming from the first world war, and surely some must have gone back for the second. King surely lost disciples who followed him into the civil rights movement. I do not know enough about how this impacted them. I think I need to. In fact, I don’t even know enough on their thoughts about their teaching and their hopes for their students. And what do seminary professors today hope and fear for their students? I don’t know.So, to survive, I read Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. He was still very much alive though in prison when he learned that his students were being killed for their resistance to the Nazi government. He remembers their aptitude and their personalities from their short time together. And I think it is a better text on the ‘costs of discipleship’ than perhaps his book by that name.There is a level of brokenness that maybe one cannot ever recover from, but the experience informs pedagogy and even the broken might still teach. I’m getting ready to start training again, if our new human rights organization takes off. Still, on the radio they’re talking about my colleagues in Iraq and the emotional toll on Jim’s family, and recalling the grief of Tom’s and Rachel’s families, I ponder the wisdom of expanding this line of work. Yet in four years of living with war, and ten days of Niebuhr demolishing pacifism, I still think it is necessary. And so tonight I sit in my apartment reading Niebuhr and King, thinking about war and nonviolence, teachers, students, dupes, and faithfulness, and wonder what comes next.Tonight’s quite moving radio interview with CPT and family of hostage Jim Loney: http://www.cbc.ca/insite/AS_IT_HAPPENS_TORONTO/2006/1/16.htmlInternational Solidarity Movement: www.palsolidarity.org. I want to conclude this by saying that I do feel a little self-conscious speaking up and writing, knowing that not everyone may appreciate my making the connections between what we are reading and my experiences in war, and people have a variety of reasons for taking this class. I thought though, perhaps, while half the postings are chiding one another for poor grammar, I might be forgiven. I doubt though I’ll even have the luxury of writing again before the end of our class. For those that are interested, I am building a blog out of my letters from the Middle East, and you may find it at www.young-activist.blogspot.com. It also is a work in progress.
Peace, Le Anne Clausen
+++++
Elizabeth Downs replies:
LeAnne: I don't know if you will be able to really hear this, but I admire your courage, your willingness to risk, your openness, your profound reflections and honest writing. Perhaps admiration isn't what you want; perhaps being called teacher isn't what you want; perhaps feeling isn't what you want. But in the web of connection, the fiber you stand on tugs at others, me included. Yet I can only fight the battles within my own possibities. That's all any of us can do. And we don't know what those possiblities are until they whisper into our lives or explode in our faces or are tugged at by another's thread.Dr. Cathey's question provoked me today: How does the realist live with knowing she has fallen short of the ideal? I also ask, how does the idealist live with encountering the brutalities of reality? I wrestle with repentence and grace in all of this, but I don't know how it really fits. Activism demands participants in the drama of living, whether it is the drama of a questionable "war" in Iraq ... or the drama on the face of a Muslim girl in a class of secularist, "all American" tenth graders watching the twin towers fall on the classroom TV on 9-11 ... or the still-prevalent racism that shows up in small ways in a checkout line at the grocery. Where do we take our stands? Do we have to "get on the bus" so publicly before we realize that in the details of daily living we are also drawn to live out justice? Is the way I take steps in my justice walk unacceptable to those who do not see it? I strongly believe, and have tried to live (though only with intermittent honesty) that real faith is only faith if it acts. I think Niebuhr deeply held that belief as well. But what does that mean, really? Just how do we walk our faith? An orthodox Jewish rabbi, who was a supervisor-in-training for my CPE, said that praying with a Jewish patient was ridiculous, if not insulting, because prayer was what their lives were all about: they lived their faith, every moment. Another log entry, I believe yesterday, stated that making dreams into reality required strategy and operational planning. Yes ... and it often requires compromise. My vision and your vision may sound the same, but how we realize it, how we bring it about, the details of the implementation, may make us look very different, even turn us against one another. Yours and your friends' actions are not at all a pacifism, LeAnne. Yours is a very courageous activism. I don't know, but perhaps Niebuhr would also say that; but he may also ask whether the cost was worth it, whether there is enough power in the position you -- or anyone -- takes in order to effect a change. You -- we -- will never know the answer to that until we can look back on it from distance in time and place. In the meantime, I can either turn my attention toward my gated community and my home-schooled kids and my safe pastorate ... or I can take small and large steps toward working for justice wherever I am. And I can try to be open to my own blindness and prejudice and political "rightness." I don't want my own sins to be sins of omission, or of hiding, or of pride, but I won't be able to avoid those entirely, either. Yes, having a job and a mortgage, and being a mother brings more caution to one's words and acts; the consequences no longer affect just the one. But that does not mean one stops speaking up, stops taking stands. I am still part of all humanity. Yet the fact of my race, place, and time make me one of the oppressors, whether or not I feel it is just or right or fair or whatever. My feelings, in the long run, don't matter. My acts, in this moment, do. So do yours. They are meaningful.
On Taming Cynicism and Resentment
(This I wrote initially as an online discussion in my Reinhold Niebuhr J-term class at McCormick seminary. We had been reading his work on the same name as this title).
I’m thinking more about the “taming cynicism and resentment” discussed today, which is so necessary when one has been wounded and discouraged in the struggle, and what doing this takes. In class I mentioned human relationships, and the ability of the student to pick up and continue the voice of the teacher even when that teacher’s voice itself has been lost. And I also liked Amy’s response about the knowing of the other, that which re-humanizes the de-humanized (interpretation mine).
I think it goes even beyond the hypocrisy of teachers, and the disillusionment of students, a theme I’ve been wrestling with and have mentioned in different ways: I knew a professor who talked some good talk, every day, in class. The talk was so good, so inspiring, that I held on to it and said, ‘here at last I am finding a mentor who is not afraid to speak some truth!’ But, when push came to shove in a real situation, I was crushed to learn that the professor didn’t really believe it, didn’t walk the walk that went with the talk; in fact, when a real situation developed where his professed ethics were so needed; his talk changed. For a while, I wanted to yell at him in class every time he went back to talking his talk to just stop, it meant nothing, and he had proven he really didn’t care at all.
Yes, I suppose a student could do that. But I didn’t yell at him, and not because I have been able to forgive just yet, either. It was because I knew I still needed the words, and despite his personal enacted ethics, I didn’t want to give up the standard of his professed ethics. It was a vision that I could not afford to lose, despite the lived disappointments.It frightens me how often I hear and see students idolizing their professors, that is, making them into idols, on campus. I know I have bought into it on and off in my education, and I’d like to think that I have finally been cured of it, but time will tell.
To idolize is different than to acknowledge the hard work and commitment that goes into becoming and being a professor. It is instead to accept words pronounced from their mouths without question, as well as their actions, a practice I’ve seen more these days in my seminary classes than in undergrad, and which continues to disturb me. “If Dr. X says it, then it must be true, if Dr. X does it, it must be right.” Does speaking of God equate one with God in the minds of those early in spiritual formation? Maybe there are parallels in the larger society, and it is one of Piaget's intermediary stages of moral development. It is interesting how much more this seems to affect the Masters’ students than the Ph.D students; and perhaps the LSTC students more than the McCormick students. I think it is also not unrelated to ‘cultures’ on campus of complacency and comfort, an unwillingness to engage the uncomfortable questions.
Meanwhile, in a larger context, I guess students today still find value in what Tillich has written, despite his great hypocrisy (what I might call the disparity between a beautiful theological system in theory and a very ugly personal conduct in reality). I imagine this happens whether or not students know his story. I also think of the debate, at least in Lutheranism, on whether the incompetence or unworthiness of the minister nullifies the worthiness of the sacrament itself. (Conclusion: it doesn’t).
So I guess I’m pondering faith that transcends the sin, a faith to hope for beyond present disappointments. And that is some hope that prevents despair, which I might otherwise be led to, knowing I will inevitably fail to live up to my own ‘good talk,’ and in multiple ways. Probably two or three times today, and hundreds of times in the next decade. Ouch. But yes, there is grace. Not grace that lulls into detached complacency, but grace that encourages one to try again and engage despite the risks and inevitable failures in the process. A grace that is speakable in polite society? And a grace that’s as good in the seminary as it is in the war zone. And this brings me back to the human relationships and carrying echoes of prophecy.
I know I am increasingly ‘hard’ on my professors. They have to earn my respect now, where I used to give it away easily until hurt deeply. In my transition from a college religion major to a seminary student, I had become quite cynical here in a few short months. I had learned to accept professors who didn’t care about my life or my vocation, but only talked at me in advising sessions or class. Who didn’t want to spend time with students outside of class. Who failed to engage and who failed the ethics that were called for when it mattered most. Still, in times of deep pain, I have recently discovered a faithful few. A few who do care about my self and my future, and who do encourage, and who do put their ethics into actions, maybe even with some risk. And it tames my cynicism and eases my resentment, and gives me some hope to continue. Perhaps these few cannot combat the larger forces at work, but they have created some shelter for a student to breathe, to perhaps find her feet and her voice again.
The teacher’s voice may be lost, through death, or hypocrisy, or complacency, or any number of human limitations…and the student may yet be able to take that which was of most value and bring it a step further, to bring some future good from it. It is not inevitable, but it is hopeful. This is enough for now. It is, very much, a work in progress.
Peace, Le Anne Clausen
I’m thinking more about the “taming cynicism and resentment” discussed today, which is so necessary when one has been wounded and discouraged in the struggle, and what doing this takes. In class I mentioned human relationships, and the ability of the student to pick up and continue the voice of the teacher even when that teacher’s voice itself has been lost. And I also liked Amy’s response about the knowing of the other, that which re-humanizes the de-humanized (interpretation mine).
I think it goes even beyond the hypocrisy of teachers, and the disillusionment of students, a theme I’ve been wrestling with and have mentioned in different ways: I knew a professor who talked some good talk, every day, in class. The talk was so good, so inspiring, that I held on to it and said, ‘here at last I am finding a mentor who is not afraid to speak some truth!’ But, when push came to shove in a real situation, I was crushed to learn that the professor didn’t really believe it, didn’t walk the walk that went with the talk; in fact, when a real situation developed where his professed ethics were so needed; his talk changed. For a while, I wanted to yell at him in class every time he went back to talking his talk to just stop, it meant nothing, and he had proven he really didn’t care at all.
Yes, I suppose a student could do that. But I didn’t yell at him, and not because I have been able to forgive just yet, either. It was because I knew I still needed the words, and despite his personal enacted ethics, I didn’t want to give up the standard of his professed ethics. It was a vision that I could not afford to lose, despite the lived disappointments.It frightens me how often I hear and see students idolizing their professors, that is, making them into idols, on campus. I know I have bought into it on and off in my education, and I’d like to think that I have finally been cured of it, but time will tell.
To idolize is different than to acknowledge the hard work and commitment that goes into becoming and being a professor. It is instead to accept words pronounced from their mouths without question, as well as their actions, a practice I’ve seen more these days in my seminary classes than in undergrad, and which continues to disturb me. “If Dr. X says it, then it must be true, if Dr. X does it, it must be right.” Does speaking of God equate one with God in the minds of those early in spiritual formation? Maybe there are parallels in the larger society, and it is one of Piaget's intermediary stages of moral development. It is interesting how much more this seems to affect the Masters’ students than the Ph.D students; and perhaps the LSTC students more than the McCormick students. I think it is also not unrelated to ‘cultures’ on campus of complacency and comfort, an unwillingness to engage the uncomfortable questions.
Meanwhile, in a larger context, I guess students today still find value in what Tillich has written, despite his great hypocrisy (what I might call the disparity between a beautiful theological system in theory and a very ugly personal conduct in reality). I imagine this happens whether or not students know his story. I also think of the debate, at least in Lutheranism, on whether the incompetence or unworthiness of the minister nullifies the worthiness of the sacrament itself. (Conclusion: it doesn’t).
So I guess I’m pondering faith that transcends the sin, a faith to hope for beyond present disappointments. And that is some hope that prevents despair, which I might otherwise be led to, knowing I will inevitably fail to live up to my own ‘good talk,’ and in multiple ways. Probably two or three times today, and hundreds of times in the next decade. Ouch. But yes, there is grace. Not grace that lulls into detached complacency, but grace that encourages one to try again and engage despite the risks and inevitable failures in the process. A grace that is speakable in polite society? And a grace that’s as good in the seminary as it is in the war zone. And this brings me back to the human relationships and carrying echoes of prophecy.
I know I am increasingly ‘hard’ on my professors. They have to earn my respect now, where I used to give it away easily until hurt deeply. In my transition from a college religion major to a seminary student, I had become quite cynical here in a few short months. I had learned to accept professors who didn’t care about my life or my vocation, but only talked at me in advising sessions or class. Who didn’t want to spend time with students outside of class. Who failed to engage and who failed the ethics that were called for when it mattered most. Still, in times of deep pain, I have recently discovered a faithful few. A few who do care about my self and my future, and who do encourage, and who do put their ethics into actions, maybe even with some risk. And it tames my cynicism and eases my resentment, and gives me some hope to continue. Perhaps these few cannot combat the larger forces at work, but they have created some shelter for a student to breathe, to perhaps find her feet and her voice again.
The teacher’s voice may be lost, through death, or hypocrisy, or complacency, or any number of human limitations…and the student may yet be able to take that which was of most value and bring it a step further, to bring some future good from it. It is not inevitable, but it is hopeful. This is enough for now. It is, very much, a work in progress.
Peace, Le Anne Clausen
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