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

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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.