telling the truth

Thanksgiving break was GLORIOUS. It was so nice to be home in sunny California and see my family for the first time since the end of May. Coming back was very difficult, though. It’s amazing how in one week you can forget all of the good things about your life and only remember the bad.

All of the conversations I had with family, friends, and semi-strangers last week went something like this.

“So, you’re a teacher now?”

“Yes.” [I fought the urge to say "ma'am" about half the time]

“And you live in southern Arkansas?”

…we go on to talk about latent racism, the achievement gap, etc…

“Wow, it’s really like that?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, what you’re doing is really admirable.”

Thanks, I guess? That doesn’t make it easier to go back and face reality, though. I’ve been reading Lies My Teacher Told Me. Highly recommended, but very depressing. It basically explains how everything we learned in history class was complete propaganda. The author writes a whole chapter about the misconceptions Americans choose to have about the explorers, especially Columbus. I thought it was relevant to read on Thanksgiving week, and I started to think the denial our society lives in all the time.

People just pretend that since the Civil Rights Movement, racism is over and everything’s all hunky dory now. And people pretend that the Thanksgiving feast is a representation of the pilgrims and the Native Americans and the actual relationship they had. I know I’m guilty of this too, but it seems that people would rather pretend that something doesn’t exist — that way they don’t have to do anything about it. And if they pretend for long enough, then they start to really believe that segregation, for example, is a thing of the past.

It’s sad that I had to convince so many people of a reality that slaps me across the face every day. Talking about it, though, reminded me of why I’m here. I realized that it is November, and according to the month-by-month mood swing calendar in See Me After Class, this is Disillusionment Month. I have become pretty disillusioned. A lot of my idealism has worn off with months of hard work yielding seemingly spare results.

I remembered that I am here for a reason, and I do think that I can empower my students and (hopefully) help them treat each other with more respect. I don’t think I’ll be changing national statistics any time soon, but I’ll do what I can.

This semester hasn’t been that bad, truly. But the next 3 weeks might be rough. Other teachers have told me that the weeks before Christmas break are rough because the kids are just done and you are too. So I’m trying to let go of control and just ride it out.

With the coming of Christmas and the advent season comes the reminder of the Incarnation, and how it changed human history forever. I don’t want to get too preachy, but I’m reminded every year around this time that Jesus saves, and we are to manifest His reign here on earth. And as I try to treat my students as He would treat them, I’m reminded that He’s the only one I’m trying to please after all, so I don’t have to worry about pleasing everyone.

Truly He taught us to love one another,

His law is love and His gospel is peace

Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother,

And in His name all oppression shall cease.

Such beautiful words. I’m resisting the urge to get a Sharpie and scrawl them all over my bedroom wall.

I have “And in His name” written on my forearm, reminding me that I’m taking part in ending the oppression that so many Americans choose to ignore.

I’m also very excited to see my kids tomorrow .

I just love Isaiah.

"I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do, and I do not forsake them." -Isaiah 42:16

more Brennan Manning

"Anoint us with the spirit of compassion that we may be with you in the passion of our times;
That we may be poor with those who are poor, mourn with those who mourn, enter into the struggle of our generation for social justice, treat others as we would like to be treated.
We pray for the courage to risk everything on you, to be with you in your faithfulness to your mission, our mission."

"Life is hard. It is hard to be a Christian, but it is too dull to be anything else."

Brennan Manning

I love him. I just started reading the Signature of Jesus, and it's just what I need to hear right now.

"Littered along the Calvary road will lie the skeletons of our egos, the corpses of our fantasies of control, and the shards of self-righteousness, self-indulgent spirituality, and unfreedom."

"I long for passion, intelligence, and compassion in a church without ostentation, gently beckoning to the world to come and enjoy the peace and unity we possess because of the Spirit in our midst."

"But the victorious minority, unintimidated by the cultural patterns of the lockstepping majority, live and celebrate as though Jesus were near -- near in time, near in place -- the witness of our motives, our speech, and our behavior. As indeed he is."

"All that we have and are is one of the unique and never-to-be-repeated ways God has chosen to express himself in space and time. Each of us, made in his image and likeness, is yet another promise he has made to the universe that he will continue to love it and care for it."

"God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought in him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in him." -Thomas Merton

"I pray that you will be daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, courageous enough to get burnt in the fire, and real enough to help others see that prose is not poetry, speech is not song, and tangibles, visibles, and perishables are not adequate for beings signed with the blood of the Lamb." -Brennan Manning

"As Abram leaves Haran he embarks on a journey he has never made to a land he never has seen. He sets out, not because he can predict the role he is to play in the history of salvation, but simply because of his personal experience, the spiritual experience of God speaking to him. There is no program he can detail; no insight into history with which he can support his decision; no model through which he can obtain a psychological identity. Spiritual experience has become a summons: It is God who directs. And the future is God's. God will, in time, show him the land."

"His is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, and not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future."

"If the Christian beliefs inherited from our family and passed on to us by our church tradition are not grounded in a shattering, life-changing experience of Jesus as the Christ, then the chasm between our creedal statements and our faith-experience widens and our witness is worthless. The gospel will persuade no one unless it has so convicted us that we are transformed by it."

"God calls us to break camp, abandon the comfort and security of the status quo, and embark in perilous freedom on the journey to a new Canaan."

"We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must now deduce everything about God from what we do know about Jesus."

favorite.

Frederick Buechner

is dear to my heart. These are from Secrets in the Dark, a collection of his sermons. You know the author has to be good when a collection of sermons is a page-turner.

What we saw on the face of the newborn child was his death. A fool could have seen it as well. It sat on his head like a crown or a bat, this death that he would die. And we saw, as sure as the earth beneath our feet, that to stay with him would be to share that death, and that is why we left -- giving only our gifts, withholding the rest. And now, brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him is the only life?

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle that we are really after. And that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.

Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery.

...poetry that points beyond itself to the very heart of reality, which is beyond the power of time and change to touch.

Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart, because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.

For those who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby's skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that. God comes to us in the hungry people we do not have to feed, comes to us in the lonely people we do not have to comfort, comes to us in all the desperate human need of people everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon. It means that God puts himself at our mercy not only in the sense of the suffering that we can cause him by our blindness and coldness and cruelty, but the suffering that we can cause him simply by suffering ourselves. Because that is the way love works, and when someone we love suffers, we suffer with him, and we would not have it otherwise because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God's love for us.

hymns are just the best.

I remember listening to this hymn on my forbidden ipod at camp while hiking Scar, just working through my issues with God and hiking. It speaks to me now as I'm in a completely different place, and nothing is familiar.

written by Joseph Hart

Come, ye sinners, poor and needy,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
Full of pity, love and power.

I will arise and go to Jesus,
He will embrace me in His arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
O there are ten thousand charms.

Come, ye thirsty, come, and welcome,
God’s free bounty glorify;
True belief and true repentance,
Every grace that brings you nigh.

Come, ye weary, heavy laden,
Lost and ruined by the fall;
If you tarry till you’re better,
You will never come at all.

View Him prostrate in the garden;
On the ground your Maker lies.
On the bloody tree behold Him;
Sinner, will this not suffice?

Lo! th’incarnate God ascended,
Pleads the merit of His blood:
Venture on Him, venture wholly,
Let no other trust intrude.

Let not conscience make you linger,
Not of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him.