Clarification

In the interview room yesterday, the enthusiasm for teaching, for our students, was palpable. If we get the award, it’ll be because we’re a community, because a significant percentage of us — teachers and administrators — really care. It’ll be because we talk to each other, and try to think of how we can help our students in non-traditional ways, and work together.

I hope I didn’t imply disdain for the Ivy League schools in yesterday’s post. I do think, sometimes, how esteem-boosting it would have been to have applied for and been accepted to Harvard or Colombia or wherever brick and ivy twine together in academe. One of our faculty members got his English MA from Harvard, and the students are awed by it. “He’s really smart; he went to Harvard,” I hear. They know the buzz around the big schools. There’s cachet in being from an Ivy League institution, whether as a student or a faculty member. And I don’t doubt if I taught there I’d probably like it. But I love my place of work. I love my students. I love the sheer, bodacious diversity of them: Mexican, Native American, Asian; displaced workers, returning homemakers, high-school-in-college students; a seeing-disabled girl with her best friend, a guide dog; my deaf octoganarian of a few years back; the athletes and the seasonal workers bending their heads together over a group project. Most of them probably couldn’t get accepted at the state university, let alone the Ivy League system, not for lack of intelligence in many cases, but because of cultural or economic status or language issues or life changes or whatever. But they come to us and find dedicated teachers, small classes, individual attention. We accept them no matter their age, their educational background, their basic ability level. We accept them if they didn’t make it the first time around. Or the third. And I like being a part of the place of second chances.

All teachers, as Loren said, deserve to be proud of what they do. I know I could never teach high school, with the conflicting demands of legislative mandates, like the benchmark tests in my state, and parents who don’t understand or appreciate or support what the teachers are doing. High school teachers juggle unreasonable class sizes and kids from backgrounds that can make it hard for the youngsters to learn. They face apathy and outright hostility to education. They suffer the hormonal mood swings of their adolescent charges, or the pain of watching their young teenage girls show up pregnant, or seeing one of their kids hauled off to jail for drugs or guns. In Zeke’s small choir class, three of the girls are pregnant — and it’s only 10th grade. Several of her male classmates have been dragged off to “juvie.” And she goes to a school in a fairly affluent small town, mostly white middle-class kids. Imagine the challenge in a poorer school district.

Teaching in an Ivy League school would be a different kind of challenge, given that the university level demands ongoing evidence of one’s achievements. “Publish or perish,” they call it, at least until you have tenure. I’ve published. I’ve presented. But I don’t have to. I can dedicate my time to teaching, which is what I love. If I loved research, I’d want to be at an Ivy League school, but I prefer the interaction with students, the deep immersion in issues of the classroom. In the end, teaching is a worthy profession, however and wherever you do it, as Loren said. But for me, being the kind of person I am, teaching at the community college level  suits me in ways teaching at other institutions would not.

Lector, part two

Continued from here

The question is why I would want to be a lector in the first place. There are several reasons. First, I’ve always loved to read aloud. I spent many happy hours reading stories to my daughter when she was younger, putting on different voices for all the different characters. Second, I have terrible stage fright. I can walk into a classroom and teach, but strangers terrify me. I thought it might be good for me to get in front of a cathedral full of strangers now and again. Third, I want to know more about the Bible. Maybe reading it regularly will help me to learn about it. There’s something about religion that gets my students fired up, and I find myself resisting the common academic stance that there’s nothing for students to learn in religion. In fact, I think they need to study religion in college. Having teachers that are open to discussions of religion, and knowledgeable, and willing to accept that intellectual pursuits and spiritual ones are not mutually exclusive, these things might make all the difference to a highly religious student’s experience in college (and I have a lot of them, in my conservative, fundamentalist town). And it might allow us to find some common ground from which to begin conversations about global warming and the Iraq war. Maybe I won’t be seen as the enemy, the intellectual anti-religious Satan worshipper their mothers warned them about (and believe me, my students do get warned about us Satan-loving professors — using those words, too!) If they sense a kinship in inquiry and spirituality, perhaps they’ll be more willing to listen to the questions I ask and the viewpoints I present.

And finally, I just love the language of the Bible. It’s majestic and powerful and cadenced… and oh, wait… that’s the King James Version, which no one uses any more. Sigh. I have to settle for more modern translations, which might be more accessible and perhaps even more accurate, but which lack what I remember from my childhood — that soaring language, a kind of poetry. Still, it’s fun to read.

Eventually I was contacted for training, and after my lessons I was allowed to read at a daily mass in the little chapel. During the summer, I read on Thursday and Saturday mornings, to a scant dozen in the little chapel which I love so much. Then I was brought in for a Sunday service, along with my trainer, who had softened towards me by then, perhaps because I do enjoy it, when I’ve over being terrified, and because I do feel a kind of reverence in reading.

And now, now, I’ve been scheduled for Holy Thursday, one of the biggest masses of the year. Last year I sat up front with my fellow RCIA journeyers while the bishop washed our feet. Nada sat close by, participating too, and all I could remember was a story he told of being in India with his best friend. They’d been walking all day, and their feet were filthy. “And we went into a bathroom and he took off my shoes and washed my feet. I think that was one of the most moving moments of my life,” Nada said when he told me the story, and his face was soft as he remembered.

As the bishop came closer to me, with his jug of water, and the catch basin, and the small white towel, I realized what Nada had meant, how the act of foot-washing symbolized so very much: humility, love, grace, compassion. Nada’s friend’s act was an act of love and reverence towards him. The bishop’s action commemorated Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet, as well as the words Jesus told the disciples at the time: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” (KJV John 13:34). The bishop, an elderly man, sank to his knees before us, and washed our feet, and dried them gently, with words of compassion, and I was moved by it all, by the incense and organ music and choir, and the holy water sprinkled over us, and the prospect of being able to participate in the Eucharist in just two days. And by the bishop’s “peace be with you,” as he finished drying my feet, and stood carefully up to move to the next person, grimacing slightly, his knees paining him, and yet no word of complaint. Just a service to us on this eve of baptism and confirmation. It was grand.

In the end, perhaps reading on Sundays is a way of thanking them all, the RCIA team, the bishop and monseignor, the choir, everyone else, for that moment of understanding.

Writing freely, giving hope

I didn’t blog much for a while, but more recently I’ve been back into it. I like the sense of writing to an audience, and now that I’ve shaken off some people that I just wasn’t comfortable sharing with, I feel more relaxed about it again. Still, I admire Diana and Loren who write under their real names. I actually started a work-blog about being a writing teacher under my real name, and wrote about five entries, but found myself drawn to the more personal writing I could do here without feeling exposed.

The worry about being exposed started about a year ago, when a friend told a friend about my blog. Then the second friend told a whole bunch of friends and colleagues of mine, and suddenly everything I wrote was under scrutiny. And then I couldn’t write any more. I just froze every time I sat down at the keyboard. I was afraid I’d misspell something, or use a period wrong, and be judged, or that my more personal entries would become the stuff of local gossip. I knew my hard-core atheist reader would be scoffing at my more mystical entries, that my writing friend would be disgusted that I was wasting my time blogging, that my nosy colleague from work would probably tell my ex-husband, who’s a friend of hers, about the blog. And I just didn’t want any of it. Every time I sat down to write, I heard their voices in my mind criticizing, scoffing, laughing. Even though I knew what they thought really didn’t matter, I just couldn’t write freely.

I spent much time deliberating whether or not I wanted to continue blogging. Many times I was a mere second away from writing my farewell post. In the end, I decided to start over, here on WordPress, although initially my decision to move was driven because Blog-City was being so slow and glitchy. I had opened a Members-Only site on BC which wouldn’t work, thus stymieing my efforts to write without being scrutinized. I also didn’t like all the orange in the administration area. So I tried out WordPress, liked it, and then realized that I might be able to move without my colleagues following me.

For a while, I checked the stats religiously, making sure that my nemesis readers hadn’t made the jump. Then I stopped checking at all, because I wanted to write without worrying about readers. And then more recently I started checking again, just out of interest, and I was surprised to discover a few days ago that a few people from other parts of the world, Australia, England, different parts of the U.S., had been checking back on BC periodically. There they were, a string of people who dropped in over and over again to see if I was posting. I don’t think any of them ever commented while I was writing on BC, but clearly they must have been reading–and still are. So I took a chance. I put a little notice on my BC site telling those persistent visitors that I’m here on WordPress. In three weeks, my BC membership expires (BC charges a fee, unlike WordPress), and before that date comes I will delete the blog altogether.

It’s been interesting, though, looking at stats. Apparently a lot of dogs get Rymadil poisoning. The most-read pages on my WordPress site are those describing Sadie’s illness and recovery. I hope those readers searching for information will realize their beloved pets can survive even huge doses of Rymadil with the right care.

On Blog-City, many readers came to my site by way of searches like “How to kill yourself,” which made me quite uncomfortable! On WordPress, they seek information on Johnny Got his Gun and the Grapes of Wrath, on the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville, and on Kuan Yin, on breast cancer and breast pain, on akathisia and tardive dyskinesia and twitches in dogs. I find it fun to see what brings people to the site, and to wonder if they’ll return after their initial encounter.

Whether they do or not, I hope they find what they see to be helpful.

Lector, part one

Why do I find myself wanting to make my Catholic posts private? I think it’s because I lack what some Catholics might consider the necessary reverence towards religion in general and Catholicism in general. And yet that’s not really true, either. I am both reverent and irreverent. I revere the mystery that is life, that is Obadiah in flight, that is Bridgey envisioned before she came into my life, that is the light in my mother’s head. I revere the beauty in rituals, the grace of the Eucharist, or the power of the chanting at dawn in Chinese Buddhist temples. But I don’t revere dogma or judgment. I almost walked out of RCIA forever when a pompous young man gave us a fifth grade sex education lesson and told us adults that reverencing life means being anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-woman’s rights, anti-birth control. It was the only talk during the 18 months of my RCIA experience in which someone tried to tell us what to think, rather than presenting the church’s position and then inviting a discussion in which dissent was welcomed. He was new, I was told later. He’d never spoken before, and had volunteered when the usual facilitator couldn’t make it. He wouldn’t be invited back, my sponsor told me. I wasn’t the only one who’d been upset.

In a sense, I am anti-abortion. I couldn’t imagine having an abortion, and it pains me when Zeke tells me that her friend has already, at the age of 15, had four. But I would never deny Sarah or any woman the right to choose. If I were a doctor, I probably wouldn’t perform an abortion, but I’d never judge doctors who choose to do so. And I believe in the right to be taken off life-support, to death with dignity, to choice. None of these things are incompatible with a reverence for life. Still, I might not seem the natural choice for a lector. Certainly the head lector didn’t think so last year, during the mystagogy portion of the RCIA experience, when we were asked in what way we might serve the church, and were given many options, one of which was lector, or reader, or … here it comes … Minister of the Word.

“I like reading,” I said. “Maybe I could do that.”

The woman in charge of lectors lifted her head. “You?” she asked, and I could swear she wrinkled her nose a bit. It’s true I’m the one who always found every way possible to compare Catholicism to Buddhism, and who eventually chose Catholicism because the Dalai Lama suggested it was best to stick to one’s heritage (I’m simplifying, you understand!). I’m the one who walked out on the man who insisted that “Go forth and be fruitful” meant that anyone who would ever think about not having 14 kids was a sinner. I’m the one with the atheist father and the Buddhist mother, the one who kept saying, the whole time, “Well, I’m probably not going to come back.”

So when I said, rather flippantly, “I can read. How hard can it be?” the Woman in Charge of Lectors bridled.

“You do understand,” she said, “that you are not just reading when you Proclaim the Word?”

Right. I forgot. I’m Proclaiming.

“But reading’s part of it, right?” I said.

“It’s far more than reading. Not just anyone can be a lector. You need to be Trained. And you need to Proclaim. It’s a Serious Duty, an Honor, and must be treated with the Reverence it deserves.”

There’s that reverence thing again. I’ve never been particularly reverent when it comes to rules, to behaving right.

“I can try,” I said. The WiCoL frowned.

“We’ll see,” she said, ominously.

To be continued…

Chess Moron

Chess is a strange, elegant, beautiful game, intricate, frustrating, exciting at times. Nada loves it. He taught his nephew, who became state high school champion a few years ago. These days he plays at least one game a day with a friend of his who was some kind of high-fallutin’ chemist and was able to retire in his 30’s with enough money to keep him through the rest of his life. This friend, Casey, lives an austere life in a small, sparsely furnished house in a college town. I have never seen it, but I imagine it, for some reason, to be filled with light. It will be older, with wooden floors and bare white walls. He has a car he rarely drives, preferring to walk almost everywhere. He’s a vegetarian, perhaps even vegan, and long and lean in build, with startling blue eyes and an intense gaze. And he loves to play chess. He’s rated about 1900, which, according to Nada, is quite good. A match between Nada and Casey is intense, driven. They don’t speak. The board consumes them. Nada can’t beat Casey, though he’s come close on a couple of occasions. Casey plays with scrupulous attention to every piece, his moves methodical, irresistibly precise. “He never makes mistakes,” Nada says. I wouldn’t know. I have a mixed relationship to chess. My mother taught us children the moves, and occasionally played with us when we were younger. I don’t remember learning anything technical beyond castling. I didn’t even know about en passant till Nada taught me.

After childhood, I didn’t play again for years, till Nada pulled me back in. These days I’m an uneven, unpredictable player, easily frustrated. I give away my queen and then give up. And it’s almost impossible to improve at chess, at least as far as I can tell, in any way that’s meaningful. It’s an incremental process, impossibly slow (or maybe that’s just me). I can’t possibly improve fast enough playing one or two games a week with Nada when he plays daily with Casey, sometimes annotating the game and getting tips. “Sure you want to do that?” Casey will say kindly, rarely, when Nada makes a mistake, and Nada will take it back, and forge on, till he’s annihilated in the end game.

When Nada and I play, we’ll talk through moves, play different configurations. He’ll warn me of impending blunders. But on Friday night, the day after Bobby Fischer died, coincidentally, something strange happened. We were playing, and talking, and not really being too serious, and suddenly I was ahead. And then Nada crept up on my king with a vicious attack, and he started to suggest how I might get out of it and I shushed him. I stared at the board. There had to be a way. And I saw it. A crazy sacrifice on my part, a kind of distraction, and a queen exchange, and then, suddenly we were even, and then I checkmated him. It was the first real, honest-to-goodness, unhelped game I’d won against him. And then I did it again, and almost a third time. The second and third games were silent, board-absorbing, reminding me of games between Nada and Casey. For the first time, ever, I was actually a real opponent to Nada, making him work, making him squirm at times.

And of course, the next day I was back to losing again, and today too. But something has changed. I think there are moments where I see the board differently, where I’m willing to take risks in ways I wasn’t before, where a move that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago becomes a calculated risk. Maybe, after all these years of feeling like a chess moron, something has clicked. Maybe I’ve been learning all along, and it’s just been imperceptible till now. Maybe Bobby Fischer left behind a little chess fairy dust, and I breathed it in. Even if I don’t win, just being able to play with purpose is a step forward, and I’m glad.

Looking for Light

Winter has always been hard for me. I love light, waking at dawn to quiet illumination. I love long golden evenings, the sun setting on the tawny landscape of the valley where I live. The 5:30 a.m. blare of an alarm intruding on sleep-in-darkness irks me. My body resists the call to arise into the chill air of a tired black morning. Driving home in the dark, avoiding ice and snow, is wearing. I want to be up with the sun, whenever the sun arises.

About a year and half ago, I bought myself one of those alarm clocks that simulates dawn. It was a little one, with a clock radio paired with it, a little pricey compared to a plain radio alarm clock, but worth it, I thought, if it made waking easier. It was worthless. The light was too dim to wake me, and the radio quality was so poor it was unusable. After a few weeks of sleeping through the light and waking to static, I gave up and tossed it. In the meantime I’d done a little web research and discovered that others had the same problem as I did with that particular model, but that those others had gone on to purchase a bigger product from a different company, and they were happy with it. So I did the same, ordered my BioBrite dawn simulator and waited for it to arrive. When it did, I set it up, set the alarm, and waited for the next morning. The light came on gradually, and woke me eventually to a room filled with light. A few moments later, after I had showered and was getting dressed, the back-up beep went off, a horrendous sound that would have woken me if the light hadn’t — but in a foul mood. After a few mornings in which I woke unfailingly to the glow of what to my body appeared to be sunrise, I switched off the beep, and for more than a year have enjoyed waking the way my body wants me too. Even when I’m exhausted, the light coaxes me out of sleep, and I find myself wide-eyed at some time between 5:40 and 5:45.

Then, a week or so ago, the light didn’t come on. I didn’t wake till almost time to be in class, and I thought I’d slept through it. I was horrified, especially since Zeke’s friend was staying with us and I had to apologize for almost getting her late to class. The next morning I set the backup radio, and it woke me. The light hadn’t come on on my BioBrite. Assuming the bulb was out, I emailed the company and discovered that I could replace it with a common candalabra bulb. I did, and nothing worked. Now I’m waiting to hear back from the company. I ordered a floor lamp from them just a few days ago, and I’m ready to cancel the order if they don’t help me out. If they tell me the $130 light is out of warranty and unfixable, I’m going to be furious. (See The Story of Stuff for why, apart from the sheer cost in dollars to me.) But the email the guy sent about replacing the light bulb was friendly and funny — even if it did take him two days to respond, and I hope the company is a good one, one that I can endorse. The product is great, but only if it lasts longer than just over a year!

In the meantime, I’m back to waking to an angry alarm clock, hauling my grumpy self out of bed, and cursing the winter. Gads, life can be so frustrating sometimes. (I’ll update you re the company response, if you’re interested.)

Protected: On being Catholic

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Listening

Like something dropped on me, so sudden does it hit, stopping me there in the center of the path, in the mute light, shards of ice catching sparks from the hiding sun, black branches, a horizon where the snow and the sky meet and weave together and become one another. And I am filled with it, the suddenness of it — transubstantiation.

It doesn’t matter that I am here, on the path, and not at Mass. It doesn’t matter that the dogs sniff the undergrowth and I worry about my father. It doesn’t matter, any of it. It will be fine.

They hit me, these small epiphanies, in surprising ways. They always have. I had no words for them before, and few enough words now. I simply stand and wait, absorbing it — the knowing, the calm. I could die like this. There is another side — but that is the wrong word, side. As though there really is one place, and another, or one time, and another. Opposites. Bifercation. They are constructs. Words cannot say.

My mother’s head spilled light when she was dying. I dreamed of beautiful nothingness and came back through flaming embers. Those moments, those memories that are more than memories, stop me dead. They return and return. If I had been born and raised Catholic, I would be a nun.

Old Girl’s reference to Martin Luther King’s experience on the bench when he was tired of fighting, a time when God spoke to him, followed me all day yesterday. I have carried with me the moment on the path last weekend, that sudden, knee-buckling realization that is pain and ecstasy at once. There is no difference between the two, in the end. Martin Luther King heard God speaking to him. I hear no words. There is no grand light, no operatic music. Just that moment, repeated and repeated. Mum’s head spilling light, the rich earth spilling through my fingers in Ireland, the rising up and up and then falling into emptiness of my strange moments as a 10-year-old in Ireland. Kuan Yin and Teresa of Avila spin in the clouds, touch fingers and dissolve. Nada is my beautiful emptiness. I tell Mum of my dream. “I know,” she says. “I’m not afraid.”

The light in her head flickers, and fades. I am the only one who sees it — Mum and I alone in the house that afternoon — but the heron is for all of us. I do not fear dying.

Morning inspiration

Old Girl of the North Country commemorates Martin Luther King Jr. with an inspiring story. It warmed up my morning — which considering it’s 16 degrees where I live (not in my house, though, just walking the dogs), was quite a feat!

Protected: On Depression and Coping

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