Teacher, Stagehand, Coach

When I was in the Marine Corps I was a linguist. It’s a job that takes a lot of training, even at its most basic level, because you have to learn the language first in addition to everything else. Indeed the entire field in which I worked was one that required considerable training and technical knowledge. It took two years from the day I left home for boot camp to the day I finally finished all my training schools and arrived at my first real duty station. And, while all that training was important, I didn’t really learn my job until I was doing it on deployment in Iraq. I was probably in my best working condition around the time my second deployment was winding down and I was getting ready to finish out my time of service.

Which is kind of a pity, if you think about it. I was a well-trained operator and I was getting really good at my job, and then I was gone. (There’s a reason I had to sign up for a five-year enlistment instead of a four-year one).

All this to say, I have a distinct memory of one of the Sergeants or Staff NCOs saying something to me that I have never forgotten, despite having forgotten who it was that said it:

He said, “I would take one excellent teacher over a dozen excellent operators.”

I remembered feeling a little suspicious about this at the time because I felt as though I excelled in my field, and his comment seemed to make that unimportant. To make me unimportant, as a mere ‘do-er’ rather than a ‘teacher.’

But he was so very right, especially in that context. I still struggle with the pride that wants to be a center-stage do-er rather than the guide to help someone else do something, but I’m a mom now, so I am being forced to wrestle with this fact and this role.

The reason he wanted a good teacher over a good worker or specialist (and this applies regardless of profession) is because the teacher makes good workers. If you’re a skilled linguist, you do good work and then you finish your service, retire, or move on. Good teachers are a fountain that brings forth more and more people who are good at their job. Rather than being an excellent product, they are an excellence factory.

The other day my husband was telling me that a certain—very intense—military training course is now going to be stocked with the best-skilled in that field, whereas before they often sent their problem children to get them out of the way. They finally realized that if you send your ‘problem children’ to teach, you get poor results. Instead of amplified positive, you get amplified negative. Seems obvious, but it isn’t because you have to take a hit by sending your best away from the job.

The thing is, going to be a teacher isn’t what most of these guys want to do. It isn’t what I ever wanted to do. We want to be in the action, doing the work we trained to do…we want to be the product not the producer. Ironically, for a lot of these guys, being really good at what they do may bar them from getting to do it, because they need to train others to be like they are. And they probably don’t want to. They’d rather stay ‘in the field.’

Military setting aside, it’s what nearly all of us want to do. We don’t want to be on the sidelines coaching the game, we want to be in the game. It’s kind of a trope, isn’t it? The player gets injured or something bad happens, so he’s forced to teach instead of do, right? And everybody feels bad for him, even though he inspires everyone else towards success. There’s a definite loss there.  A sadness. A pain in giving up the thing you really wanted to do in order to help others do it.

Regarded differently, it’s a pain in giving up the spotlight. It’s the pain of humility.

Since becoming a mom I realized that I had bought into one of the worst and strangest cultural lies that we have: that being a mom is ‘mere.’ “She’s just a mom.” “Oh she was so talented, she could have done so much, but then she just had a bunch of kids instead.” “Wasted potential.” “Stereotypical soccer mom.” “1950’s Stepford wife.”

I just finished watching an episode of Gilmore Girls which shows a crop of look-alike, blonde, be-sweatered mean-moms antagonizing Lorelei for talking to their children about her teen pregnancy. It is repeatedly emphasized that Lorelei (our protagonist) can’t be bothered to remember their names, much less tell them apart. It is strongly implied that they are all narrow and dull, whereas Lorelei is the unique exception to this mom-rule.

Love the show, but Lorelei is a jerk sometimes!

We give lip-service to motherhood, and people appreciate their own moms, but at a deep level, there seems to be a fierce cultural dissatisfaction with this role of bringing children up in the way they should go. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. It’s domestic (ah, how we’ve learned to fear that word. At least, I always have). There’s no glory, and the adventures, while not necessarily lacking, are confined to what you can do with a baby strapped to your back or toddling at your side.

I think our culture has such a strange duality about this: “Mothers are lovely and we are all so grateful for them. I wouldn’t want to be one—I have more important things to do with my life—but aren’t they quite nice to admire from a comfortable distance?”

Motherhood lacks so many things that we associate with importance and value: public recognition, financial gain, political influence, prestige, awards, titles, and the chance to ‘go down in history.’ And it has so many things we dislike: exhaustion, prosaicness, restrictions, a small sphere, and continual sacrifice. (Ask my mom, mother of 6 adult children: the job does not end when they leave the house. They call you. They ask your advice. They want you to come visit for a weekend and watch the baby so that you and your husband can run a half-marathon. Thanks mom and dad, by the way!)

I do know a number of women (now moms) who wanted to be moms since they were very little, and I deeply respect this and am grateful for them. They saw something in motherhood that I was too busy or self-centered to see. I wanted to be “great” in the eyes of our culture, heroic and adventurous, untethered and a little bit dangerous. I wanted to be, and be seen as, clever and strong and wild.

Like this.

Zoe Washburne, from Firefly. Battle-ready.

Or this.

Mulan

 But wild is not usually the first word that jumps to one’s lips when thinking about being a mom. Shamefully, I have resented not being the image of myself that I cultivated and idolized. But, of course, that is the key word. Idol. And those things have to be smashed to pieces before we can really be anything at all.

Slowly (SO VERY SLOWLY) I am coming to understand what that fellow Marine said to me all that while ago. Someone may be a math genius. Someone else may have some world-changing skill. And that is wonderful and God-given, for certain. But if you’re a good teacher (one of the key facets of motherhood) and are bringing up godly, compassionate, hard-working, loving, strong, wise children, then what you have to offer is, by the grace of God, being amplified and scattered like seed on good ground.

I am indicted by two of my all-time favorite authors, both speaking of motherhood:

"The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only--and that is to support the ultimate career."

-C.S. Lewis

"Why be something to everyone when you can be everything to someone?"

-G.K. Chesterton

I see these quotes and nod with my head, and agree with my intellect, knowing how desperately grateful I am for my parents or for anyone who does the hard, quiet thing. But my pride bucks and kicks. My heart shrinks at the perceived “smallness” of the task, even though it isn’t small. It is hard to confess, but it isn’t what I wanted or imagined. It doesn’t look like all the guts and glory I planned for myself. I spoke about this in a recent post on dying to yourself, and I don’t know how many times or from how many angles I’ll have to preach it to myself before I really learn—really understand—what dying to yourself actually means.

There are so many ways God teaches this to us, but I must say that motherhood is an astoundingly rigorous and unique school for it. Thus I am a student of Christ, and a teacher of his children and--rather than imbibing the culture’s slow, subtle devaluing of it all--I need to open my eyes see that for the beautiful thing that it is.

Like a Child

It seems I am commonly discovering brilliant maxims only to find they have all been discovered before. But I am slow to learn in this way: I do not understand a proverb, be it the most painfully obvious one in the world, until I have lived it.

One of my all-time favorite episodes of television is a particular Community episode entitled “Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples.” It is hilarious and actually quite beautiful. I could rave about it for pages, but I won’t, I’ll just set the scene for you:

Shirley—baker, mother, Christian—decides she wants help making a YouTube video with a Christian message because “there’s no light there for the kids.” So she asks Abed—an aspiring film-maker who is implied to have Asperger’s—to help her make one. At first he declines: “As a Muslim, I’d be happy to. As a filmmaker? No way. I’m a storyteller, not a preacher.”

But later he comes back, looking very excited, and says he’ll do it. Why? He just read the whole New Testament in one night. I should remind you that this is a completely, 100% secular show, so it would be understandable to expect a swift lampooning of Christianity via cheap parody, and nothing more. But this is also a clever show, so it does better than that. Abed states that “Being raised on TV and movies I always thought that Jesus just walked on water and told people not to have abortions, but it’s so much cooler than that. He was like ET, Edward Scissorhands and Marty McFly combined!”

This episode is SO GOOD.

He could just as easily have said Neo or Batman in the Dark Knight or a hundred other characters, but that’s beside the point. What’s fascinating here is that Abed is seeing the story of Jesus for the first time. All he knows is a cultural caricature, but when he reads the original, it is fresh, new, bizarre, and enticing to him. Like when the book is better than the badly interpreted movie, or when you have heard about someone, but you finally meet them face-to-face and you are far more impressed with the truth than the rumor.

Abed, as a storyteller, decides that the story of Jesus is worth his artistic eye. He decides this as someone outside of and indifferent to the Christian faith.

I confess to feeling a faint, weird jealousy at this perspective. Abed, in this context, sees the gospel with the wide, hungry eyes of someone reading a thrilling novel. Never mind chapter and verse references, concordance checks, etc…Abed sees a story about an unlikely hero who speaks in riddles and whom everyone is trying to kill all the time because he threatens to upset the status quo. Meanwhile, he’s secretly a king who dies for his cause.

See, I always thought “become like little children” meant having childlike faith—believing easily and wholeheartedly—which I suppose it does. But now I am thinking there is a whole other facet to that. ‘Like a child’ means “encountering something for the very first time.” Fresh eyes. Curiosity. A willingness to be awed. A quieting of the mind and a heightening of enjoyment.

I experience this in small ways when reading a book of the Bible that I haven’t gotten to in a very long time. I’m surprised by something I didn’t remember or simply wasn’t paying attention to last go ‘round. But imagine not ever having heard the gospel, not ever having read the Bible, or—taking it a step further from Abed—not even having gleaned atmospheric or memetic ‘Christianity’ from the culture. What would that be like?

Also kids don’t just see things with fresh eyes. When they find something they love, they cannot get enough of it. My nieces and nephews would watch the same new movie a dozen times in two days (the rental period, obviously) if their parents let them. When I was a kid I could read the same beloved book over and over and over. Now my mind is jumpity, distractible, and a little skeptical. To my great shame, I find that I would often rather read a clever, critical, or sarcastic debunking of a book than give the book a chance to speak for itself, with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions. I’m especially prone to do this if I already suspect the book is full of things I don’t like/disagree with.

And this is what our society has done towards Christianity and the Bible. Delicious mockery and deft debunking, without really sitting down and viewing the source material with a clear and neutral eye. In Western society in particular, there are no neutral eyes towards the Bible. Everyone is approaching the faith neither as a child, with new wonder, nor as an adult, with mature and distant insight, but (forgive me, O youth) as teenagers, with bucking and rebellion against that which is familiar but not well understood.

In this way, those who approach Christianity and the Bible as wholly foreign objects are far likelier to see them for what they really are than disaffected evangelicals, shrugging agnostics, or those who really like the idea of having a faith, but keep walking a little further and further away from it for the sake of their comfort and preference, too afraid to let it go, too afraid to embrace the faith in all its holy fire. Lukewarm. They want to keep it in the corner of their eye while they inch away from it, because it makes them feel better. They daren’t walk far enough to see it from—shall we say—a non-reactionary distance. Indeed, steeped in Western culture, I don't think you can get that distance. Wherever we run, it will always be reactionary.

G.K. Chesterton puts it best in this (slightly condensed) quote from the intro to The Everlasting Man:

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place…the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts.”

“It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.”

“Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.”

Chesterton

This is what troubles me with the current cultural milieu. So many of us are neither close enough to love, nor far away enough not to hate. So we end up with many people attempting to remodel Christianity, gutting it like a house not built quite to their taste, because they are under both the shadow of the faith (losing the light) and the shadow of secular disdain for the faith. This naturally comes with the territory of a piecemeal, yo-yo-ing journey away from faith. Those who depart try to make the faith into something that looks right in their own eyes from that doubtful middle distance, distorting it in many ways.

Then there are those who completely abandon the faith but are still like teenagers reacting against their parents in the way that they talk about God, the Bible, and Faith. Anger, frustration, and contempt.

And we have a culture that thinks that it knows what Christianity is, but doesn’t. They think they know who Jesus is, but most really don’t. That is something that takes daily effort, and all you have, and a willingness to give up anything that stands in the way of you going home again.

I do not think Chesterton was advising anyone to give up the faith and walk as far away as you can, just to come back around…but it may be better than sidestepping to that intervening valley he spoke of and losing the truth by inches—death by a thousand cuts—so that you don’t even notice it has happened, and you don’t even know where you are anymore, and you don’t even know how to get back because you have distorted the very meaning of home in your own mind.

Best that we stay home in Christ, but that we pray for the eyes of a child. To see him afresh as savior and King, story-teller and revolutionary, hero and martyr, truth and way, bread and wine, flesh and blood, light and fire, resurrection and life. A blazing, thrilling story, and an unconquerable fact.

I want to become like a little child, for my heart to be circumcised, and to be made new, so that I can rest in Christ, but still have the of giddy wonder of seeing every fiery truth for the very first time.

When Music doesn't 'Resolve'

I don’t know much about musical theory and have never had much musical talent. So, a while back, when I read a description of a band (called Thrice) which was described as having “mathy time signatures,” I had no idea what that meant. So I asked my husband, who is a bit more musically educated than me, and he explained the time signatures as having to do with how many beats there are in a measure, and also has to do with how many beats it takes for the main melody to resolve, and a “mathy” one would be particularly complex. He waited until a song played that had such a time signature, and I was at least able to recognize that the difference he was talking about. (That song, by the way, was by Amit Erez, and is called “Cinnamon Scattered Along Your Shoulders.”)

It was still a little confusing for me at the time, but I liked the idea of how music has to resolve, which was something I never really understood before. Indeed, it’s part of the reason why Jazz is so hit or miss for many people—it’s not hugely into resolution, it’s into exploration. That can be really enjoyable, or really frustrating.

Most of the time, however, in order for the melody to be powerful and effective—however complexly it goes about it—it eventually has to resolve.

The idea has, shall we say, some striking metaphysical resonance. People who are especially musically talented can hear where a tune “ought to have gone” or where a melody “missed an opportunity” or where an important nuance was missing, or something was overdone. I do not have this skill, but my brother does and it fascinates me, because the implication is that music is not just a chaotic free-for-all, where anything goes, even though it may seem like it: it’s going somewhere. It’s saying something. The notes have purpose.

So what’s the point of all this mild-mannered musical theory from someone who knows far too little about the subject?

Well, a while back a friend recommended a song to me. I listened to it and liked it and sought out more of the artist’s work, because I detected some spiritual themes that intrigued me. Very quickly into my research, my shoulders fell because—as it turned out—themes were all there was to be found. Or, more accurately, spiritual imagery and cultural references with too little blood pumping through the veins to keep it alive.

I almost felt tricked. Don’t get me wrong, the music was still very good and the lyrics had real substance. But what I had thought was something truer and deeper was only an aesthetic—like incense, stained glass, or a gilded menorah when I had come through the door hoping for prayer, worship, and light.

And I realized what bothered me. It wasn’t that the music didn’t line up with my spiritual values—though that was a factor—because I listen to all kinds of music that doesn’t do that. It was that the song didn’t resolve. Oh, musically, it did. But thematically? Not at all.

I found myself feeling frustrated and weary. I don’t expect every artist who uses religious imagery to actually put forth something of spiritual depth and merit. Religion will be used by culture just like every other product. But when I get that hint of real truth-seeking and find that it was just a artistic flirtation with fact and faith? It’s getting old. Real old.

The imagery of faith is beautiful. I get it. It even resonates in an era and a culture that has little respect or understanding for the foundation beneath that imagery. But weirdly, it almost resonates like a fairytale—something dangerous and adventurous that pulls at their soul, but which they won’t really dare to believe. Something you like to muse about with quick-beating heart that is hiding just beyond the corner of your eye, but which ultimately has no effect on your daily choices and beliefs.

Artists use this spiritual imagery because it is evocative. They use it in a similar way that we have used the imagery of ancient myth: of Greek gods and fairies and elves and imps and sprites. Symbolically. Half-believed, but never lived.

But this is different. If I were to say something poignant about Athena because I was going into war, this wouldn’t come off as grand. At best it might be considered poetic, at worst extremely silly. It has little cultural resonance because we do not believe in Athena, nor does anyone we know, most likely. Athena is not a name tossed about at the center of most philosophy, religion, and even current political debates.

So this habit (particularly among musicians that I tend to love) is more than just evoking religious grandeur. This is tip-toeing on the edge of belief, recognizing with an artist’s eye that this is the greatest, most poetic battle on earth: it is life or death. Forget the trope of “Unresolved Sexual Tension” in every YA novel, cop procedural, and sit-com. The real stuff is to be had in the “Unresolved Spiritual Tension.” That’s where the true thrill is. The battle over souls, not sex.

So just as we desperately want to see the main couple in the cop show get together, but then we’re often bored once they do, it’s as though we—as a culture—are conditioned to demand that everyone wrestle with God, with Truth, with Faith, with Purpose, with Meaning, but then we cannot stand it when someone has reached a conclusion. It’s everything but the marriage, the smell of food without eating it, all of the preparation but none of the action, all the intellectual posturing but no final choice.

So here’s what I think regarding both types of unresolved tension: We fail to see that the reason we’re ‘bored’ when the couple in the TV show gets together is not because satisfied and growing love is boring, but because it’s beyond us and can no longer include us in the way that the lead-in can. We can join in the build-up, like we can attend a wedding. But then the married couple has to live it. And that is greater, and more complex. It’s not mere story arch anymore. It’s a road. The tension may be reduced, but the richness is increased and it is too subtle for easy caricature. Deep wholeness is harder to depict than mysterious fragment.

So too with faith. It isn’t always Jacob wrestling by the river (though I’m wont to feel that it is in my life). Sometimes it’s Abraham waiting years upon years for a promised to be fulfilled. Steadily—sometimes failing and falling—but doing so for years on end often without the flash and snap of doubt and tension.

The theme of Unresolved Spiritual Tension is powerful because we all must wrestle. Even when we believe, we still must wrestle—working out our faith with fear and trembling.

But it’s also heartbreaking because everyone seems to think that mere wrestling is enough. Even I am wont to think that more often than not, and I’m sitting here saying I know better. It would be like in a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu match, if I were to wrestle and wrestle but never attempt a triangle choke or an armbar because I thought the heart of it was just in the act of rolling around on the floor and exerting well-trained effort.

And that’s just not true. At some point you have to make a decision, find your opening, and go for the choke. Then you find out if you were right or wrong. If you don’t act, you will get choked in the end. To refrain from making a choice regarding belief is to make a choice against it. Eventually, even if it’s just because the time runs out, there will be a resolution.

We, both in and out of the church, are often trying to have all the trappings of spiritual depth without having to actually engage in the occupation…the leaves and fruit without the trunk and the roots. We like the resonance, but not always what that sound calls us to. So many wish to employ the beauty and power of things they are not quite willing to believe in.

Oh and they are beautiful and powerful. But if everything becomes divorced—the image from the meaning, the question from the answer, the wrestling from the conclusion—then the power either dies horribly, or becomes perverted in a way that something less meaningful never could have.

Why do artists do this? Why do we do this? Why do I want to be satisfied with the mere fight, never mind the victory (God’s, not mine)?

Because people think that imagery and a feeling of comfy antiquity is all Christianity has to offer? Or because we want to be able to yell at God without answering to him?

I think it’s both, but today I am discussing the latter. Our spiritual selves are drawn to throw our anger, our pain, our struggle, or hate, our longing towards him. Our baser selves cannot stand the thought of having to face a real, live response that requires something of us. Or, rather, everything. We’re afraid of resolution the way some people are afraid of marriage. It’s so permanent. What if I get bored? What if I change my mind? What if I’m wrong?

We want to rant, not to debate. We want to be heard, not to listen. We want to angst, not to resolve. I say this because this is my strong tendency.

Or, suppose, some of us do want a resolution, but we just can’t swallow the idea of one that requires us to give up all we have and are—our hate, our anger, our revenge, our bitterness, our preferences, our desires, our meandering…ourselves. Resolution means shearing off certain paths. Utterly and forever.

This is not to belittle the search and the struggle.  I enjoy these artists because their work resonates deeply with me—with my own spiritual struggles—and because there are powerful questions being asked. But no answers being struck.

And that last bit infuriates me.

I’ll tell you what, though: In the Bible the same person who said “My God, my God, has thou forsaken me” said “I will yet praise you.”

The same person who said “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb? and “I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil” and “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face” at the final hour said “my ear had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.”

But for some reason, not all are willing to both ask the question, and then with a cry of “I believe, Help my unbelief” point to the answer because of its imposing permanence. We’re really not supposed to worry the same bone forever. We’re not supposed to wrestle over that one piece of ground endlessly.

What good is it to “have a form of godliness” but deny its power, or to be “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth” (2 Timothy 3: 5 and 7)?

Strange as it may seem, answers are simultaneously wild and complex as they are concrete and simple. In any case, they are real.

“We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and started looking for answers”

-GK Chesterton

So, further up and further in. There is power in the music when it has the courage to resolve.