"Why Are You Still Here?"

Should you be here? (I like roads like this one.)

 

Like my previous post, this one begins with a question others ask me fairly often: 

"Why are you still here?"

Thankfully, when I hear this question people generally aren't asking me to leave. Rather, they're asking why I stay. And they're usually asking about one of three things:

• They want to know why I continue to be a member of a church in an age when fewer and fewer people find themselves connected to traditional houses of worship or faith communities. (I have written about this in a few places, but you might like what I have written about prayer.)
  
• They wonder why I am still a professor in a small liberal arts college at a time when students seem disengaged, and when colleges are threatened by political headwinds, rising costs, apparent diminishing returns, and by our own decisions that weaken public opinion against us. (You can see a bit more of what I've written about the liberal arts here and here.)
  
• And they wonder why I continue to work towards environmental sustainability in a place that doesn't seem to value the environment, and where sustainability is viewed as a harmless hobby at best and a threat to business and freedom at worst. (My work focuses on the environmental humanities, and I've done a good deal of work in sustainability with my university, with my city, with our local zoo and aquarium, and internationally with organizations like IBM. You might also like this article I wrote about insects on Medium, but be forewarned that it is paywalled.)
  

I have answers for each of these, and they're all important. My faith matters to me. So does my community, and so does the environment my community inhabits. I want my neighbors to thrive, and that means I want them to live in a place that fosters health for the whole person: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and economic. And my idea of "neighbor" is fairly expansive, and it includes all those whose lives are connected to my own, including the lives of other species. Jesus once pointed out that not even a sparrow can fall to the ground without God noticing it. If the sparrows matter to God, then I'd like them to matter to me.

In other words, for me, these three questions people ask me are all related to one another.  

I think they're all also related to my vocation, and to my sense of calling. In some way I feel called to and by God; I feel like teaching is my vocation; and I feel called to be a good steward of all Creation. 

Those "callings" are different, but they all also feel like "deep calling unto deep." I can't explain them, and I don't mean to say they're others' callings as well. But they're part of who I am, as far as I can tell.

One thing all those callings have in common is that they all seem to be growing:

• When it comes to faith, I often find others' stories more interesting than my own, and I'm glad to meet others who are seeking the way ahead with humble curiosity even if we use different words to talk about what we're seeking and what we're finding. So my calling is not to a building, or to a religion; rather, it feels like a consistent calling to love God and to love my neighbor as myself.
  
• When it comes to teaching, I have taught every age from pre-schoolers to older graduate students. I love it all. For now, I'm a tenured professor at the highest rank available to me. It took a lot of work to get here, and positions like mine are the envy of graduate students everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more schools eliminate tenure and reduce jobs like mine to some version of the gig economy (these things are already happening steadily around the world.) So if I were to leave this job, I'd be leaving something I probably would never find again. But I don't feel the calling to comfortable tenure so strongly as I do feel the calling to meaningful teaching that helps others to flourish. So my calling seems always to tug me beyond my faculty office and my assigned classrooms.
• And when it comes to environmental sustainability, I often find myself scratching my head. Why wouldn't we want to be not just good neighbors but also good ancestors? Why wouldn't we want to pursue solutions that help people and the planet to thrive while also making sure we all flourish economically? I get it: so many of the solutions offered by environmentally-minded people threaten to cost us more in taxes, or they threaten particular practices or certain sectors of the economy. If someone came for my job or my hard-earned savings, I'd bristle as well. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can make good use of the water we have AND we can make sure those who live downstream have clean water too. We can make good use of our soil without depleting it, and we can do it in a way that boosts profits. Etc. Here my callings all seem to come together: I feel called to help my neighbors--all of my neighbors--flourish, and to love them as myself. And to include as neighbors everything that lives, and everyone who might inherit this earth from me. I'd like my great-great-grandchildren whom I will likely never meet to look back on my life with gratitude.
  

So my best answer to this question "Why are you still here?" is this: for now, I feel called to be here. 

Of course, like I said, my callings all seem to grow.

It may be that soon I'll find a better way to answer this triple calling I feel, and if so, I hope I won't hesitate to leave tenure and comfort and my favorite ideas when I find better ones.

Because I believe we are all in this life together, and, as some of my favorite authors have said, "all flourishing is mutual."

“So, how’s the sabbatical going?”

This is the third time in my life that I have taken a sabbatical. On average, I’ve taken one about every eleven years. My first sabbatical was from a position as a campus minister, and I used it to begin graduate school. There was no obligation for me to return to that position afterwards, and I wound up not returning. Instead, I continued with grad school and eventually became a professor. My second sabbatical, which I've written about here, was after I first earned promotion and tenure. This current one might be my last.

Sabbaticals are a great idea. I wish everyone could have sabbaticals. Some countries have long service leave, allowing those who stick with a job for a given number of years to take some time of rest and renewal. Etymologically, “sabbatical” is supposed to be a time of rest. In most cases today, I’m not sure it still means that. Some companies offer leave for study and upskilling, which is great, but it’s usually about coming back to work as a more efficient worker. Sabbaticals seem to be more and more about efficiency. The committee that reviewed my sabbatical request sent me a letter letting me know that my sabbatical was approved, and that they expected me to write and publish the things I said I’d like to work on. If memory serves, there was nothing in there like “remember, this is mostly about rest and restoration, so don’t neglect that.”

And I find that my first impulse on sabbatical has been to use time away from the office and the classroom to catch up on all the things that get neglected when I’m working hard at being a teacher. Inbox zero is a tempting goal, even if the only way to achieve it is to mass delete emails. In other words, I am tempted to use time away from the office to catch up on things that I should have done at the office if I weren’t so damn busy.

We impose work on ourselves. Productivity is the watchword. Our discipline has monastic roots. We still wear the robes and still have our cells (offices), but the daily office of readings, the hours of resting and praying are a thing of the past. We dress like monks but we still punch the clock like everyone else. It feels like we’ve lost something big, and we’ve told ourselves the loss was freedom from outdated antiquity. I’m not sure that’s true.

A few years ago I took my students to visit a monastery in Greece. The sisters there told my students about their lives, and about their daily work and prayer. They wake up in the middle of the night and gather in their little chapel to pray, then return to bed for more sleep. When they wake up, they pray together again, and then throughout the day they return to the chapel to pray and read and sing. In between that, they do the things that make their life together possible: they grow food, harvest it, store it, prepare meals, and eat them together. Clothes get washed, floors get swept, and the work of caring for the needy in their community goes on at a steady pace. Not with breakneck urgency, but at a pace that can be maintained—that has been maintained—for centuries.

When my students heard all this, one of them asked with a look of exhaustion, “When do you take a break?” The sister looked at her with some confusion, and replied “Take a break from what? Our lives are lives of leisure.”

For most of us, including teachers at most of our nation’s small colleges, our lives are not so much lives of leisure but of busy-ness and constant work. One of the appeals of teaching used to be the possibility of leisurely conversations with students and colleagues. We spoke in lofty terms of “the life of the mind,” and of a “great conversation” that included both the living and the dead who left their words for us to contemplate. The trade-off was we teachers would accept low pay in exchange for a long tenure that included time to reflect so that we could both model good practices and teach “sound learning, new discovery, and the pursuit of wisdom.” (That line is from theBook of Common Prayer.)

The last decade feels like it has been a decade of increasing urgency at the expense of contemplation, greater push for efficiency at the expense of conversation, the replacement of teaching with instruction, the rise of software to “manage” courses for teachers (and to do homework for students), the gathering of data that will satisfy the professional accreditors.

I have more to say about this, but I’m going to stop here for now because I’m going to go do something else. Or rather, I’m going to take a little while to do very little, intentionally. One of my practices during my sabbatical has been to pay close attention to what is right before me. I do this by sketching and by writing, not with the intention of publishing my essays or of becoming a great artist, but rather in order to be more attentive. I think that’s a good model for my students, and hopefully it helps me to rest and to return as a more attentive and more caring teacher. Because teaching is not (for me, at least) about handing over information but about fostering lives of contemplation, conversation, and commentary.

Time for a newsletter?

I've had this blog for a long time, and for all the years I've run it, it has been a good place to get some ideas down and publish them quickly.

When I began, I had a rule: no more than fifteen minutes.

If I couldn't write it in that time, it was a big idea that needed to be turned into an essay or a book. Or it could just be that my thoughts were not clear. 

Either way, I stopped writing at fifteen minutes, and often I'd hit the "Publish" button.

Some of those pieces wound up generating helpful conversations, and a few of them became longer essays or parts of books. And they wound up making me some new friends and a bit of money as well.

These days it seems everyone has a Substack or a Buttondown newsletter. A few friends have Wordpress blogs. I'm thinking of becoming a late adopter of one of those.

I like the simplicity of this platform, but it's also grown very dated, and it's still got the clunkiness it had fifteen years ago. Blogspot used to be a place to find other blogs, and their writers. Now it feels like an archive for short pieces I wrote way back when.

What do you think? 

If you're a writer, what do you find to be a helpful way to be in touch with others who might respond to your writing and give you helpful replies?

And if you're a reader, (nothing wrong with that!) what do you find helpful as a way of staying in touch with writers you appreciate?

Now I'll hit that "Publish" button and see how well this platform still works. Whoever you are, and wherever you are, I hope your day brings you great joy to share with others who need it.

Why All Saints' Day Matters To Me

Here's a bit from a recent post I wrote and shared on Medium:

Who knows? The student in my classroom, the driver in that other car, the man sleeping on a park bench, the Uber driver, the cashier at the grocery — any one of them might be an angel in disguise.

And similarly, any one of them might some day be considered a saint.

So this All Saints’ Day, I want to remember that.

You can read the whole post for free here.
 

Poem: Visiting Rowan on Easter Sunday

Rowan laughs and smiles, but he is plainly sad.
Emma has been gone for a long time now.

Beside him, an electric photo frame shuffles images of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren,

All of whom keep him anchored here.

But he cannot eat, he says, as he holds a white plastic bag

With a blue plastic ring to hold it open for vomit.

We brought him a red egg, hard-boiled, in the Orthodox tradition.

He is glad to receive it with a sad smile,

But we both know he will not eat it.

Mother asks him if he would like communion, and he thinks;

Thinking is hard right now, and his eyes won’t focus

Though he tells us he can see through the doorway beyond 

And make out the picture frame in the next room.

We turn to look but we don’t see it, 

Unless he means the mirror, or the window, in the room across the hall

Or perhaps he sees something beyond our vision that we cannot yet see. 

Richard is coming soon for lunch with his father, 

Of course Rowan won’t eat, he tells us,

But he will be glad to see his son.

The phone rings. One of his daughters, calling to check in.

They all check in with me every day, he says, 

With a laugh that makes him cough a little.

“They’re so good to me.”

He tells her he has guests, and that everything is fine.

The egg starts to roll off his lap, and he quickly catches it

With his knees, and it does not break. 

Which reminds me that he learned to ski in his fifties

And only gave it up in his eighties when his balance started to go.

He hangs up the phone and Mother offers him communion once again.

He cannot focus his eyes, so we read the liturgy for him, 

And then he takes the bread with fingers that have grown dark and thin and knurled like wild oak branches.

I am surprised by his speed and agility as he takes the bread.

And he chews it, and drinks the wine, 

While his right hand clutches the white bag with the blue ring.

But he does not need to lift it to his lips.

The bread and the wine stay with him, and he laughs,

And stretches out a thin hand to each of us

And thanks us for coming to visit.

Would you like us to shut the door, Mother asks.

He is quick to reply:

No, please leave it open.

And he wishes us a happy Easter,

And we walk out through the lobby, where twenty gray heads in wheelchairs stare at the television screen, and wait. 

Of Kings and Wars and Gardens

Long ago there was a season for war. An ancient text about one of the kings of Israel tells us this:

"It happened in the spring of the year, at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the people of Ammon and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem."

Two points stand out to me:

1) When ancient kings went to war, they did so in the spring; and 

2) King David didn't go this time.

The first point probably has to do with agriculture. An agrarian society like David's probably did not have much of a standing army. Men were free to fight in between the time for sowing seeds and harvest. Wars could be launched when the seeds were in the ground, and should end before harvest if the nation is not to starve. 

The second point is the reason for the story. And it is a reminder that sometimes kings have big enough armies that they can send men to fight for them. In this case, because David stayed behind, he wound up taking the wife of one of his soldiers. When she got pregnant, David had the man killed.

It's foolish to think we can somehow go back to how things were even before David's time, when kings themselves would have to work for food.

But we can at least dream of kings who work their own gardens with enough care that they respect rather than covet the gardens and spouses of others.