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.

Firefly and the Human Condition

When I fall for a TV show, movie, artist or novelist…I fall hard. I become a loud, pushy advocate. Ask any of my loved ones upon whom I have foisted all my favorites (Community! Gregory Alan Isakov! Brick!)…forced all but at gun-point. Minimal complaints so far, if I do say so myself.

Well once upon a time someone did this for me. They told me to watch some random movie called “Serenity” with them at the theater (Sci-fi? I was skeptical. Aliens aren’t my thing). This excellent movie was born of a short-lived TV show called Firefly, which concerns us here today. The show and the film both have a lot to say about the human condition, and so do I, so it naturally follows that we took to one another.

Truthfully I could use an awful lot of space detailing all the things I love about Firefly but I will try to be very conservative in both my summary and advocacy, because the themes are the thing here (Nevertheless you should watch firefly):

Notice the clothing implies psuedo-Western, but there transportation is space-ship, not stage-coach.

Firefly is a great genre masala—western, sci-fi (but no aliens!), action, drama, comedy, caper—and its basic premise is as follows: humanity spread out onto other planets which are made to be like Earth-that-was (as Earth is then called). A war arose between the Independent planets and “The Alliance” the former of which, as the name suggests, wanted to remain independent settlements, and the latter of which wished to unite all the planets in a progressive and regulated society. The Alliance won, and has become the central government of all inhabited planets—both their high-tech cities:

And their countrified back-waters:

Two of the protagonists of the story fought for the Independents during the war and have moved on from their loss to do smuggling and thieving work on the fringes of ‘the system’.

Zoe and Mal

The difference and tension between the outer planets (quite analogous to rural populations)—with the distant control/neglect they experience from the government—and the inner planets (rather like urbanites) and their appreciation for the government’s facilities and efficiency is pervasive throughout the show.

The excellence of the premise is that, although it shows “The Alliance” through the eyes of those that do not love it, it never claims that The Alliance is evil. It is real modern society in fiction: it provides roads, oversight, security (in the central areas at least), education and medicine. It is not precisely dystopian in nature in that it does not oppress groups, it does not ban art or literature. It has a high degree of physical authority, but it is not a police state. In fact, it is made rather clear that the Alliance truly does do many good things for the people. It is as though the UN were actually effective—moreover helpful—and set in space! It is based upon the most idealistic and humanitarian notions that mankind could bring to bear. The Alliance is, in most of the ways we tend to gauge political purpose and efficacy, a good government with good intentions.

But one of the themes of the show is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that human nature is not easy to keep in check; indeed our attempts to constrain or modify the worst elements of human nature may backfire. This is because the constraints are external, and the modifications superficial. And perhaps the most dangerous dystopia is one that believes utopia can be finagled…one that either refuses to acknowledge mankind’s fallen nature, or genuinely believes that by his own hands man can fix himself.

(I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone, so I will be as vague as I can…but be warned, details of show and movie are to be found here):

The Alliance does what many peoples and cultures have tried to do throughout the ages: to “weed out aggression in the population.” They want to make human nature better. They do it very benignly…as best they can, with no intent whatsoever to cause harm. If the image that pops into your head is that of a cop restraining an assailant and carting him off to jail, that is one legitimate way of weeding out aggression. So are anger management classes. Prisons, court systems, reform…these are all in that category.

So, too, is chemical behavioral modification. Likewise eugenics. Also, abortion. And massacre…and genocide.

If it seems like I’ve made a leap too far, I’m sad to say that I haven’t. We—society—like to believe that we can make ourselves better through sheer force of will: adopting this practice, excising that one. One would not say “survival of the fittest” any more, for social Darwinism has become scandalous for good reason…but this nevertheless remains the underlying principle in how societies, governments, laws, medical care and schools are built up. Or cultivated, rather. It seems like such an innocent aim until you realize that the holocaust in WWII—cold, systematized genocide of European Jewry—was derived in large part by a belief that Germany was eliminating that which was dangerous or unhealthy to it. In the minds that conjured the “final solution”, the Germans were “weeding” and “cultivating”, full stop.

Scholar Zygmut Bauman wrote chillingly and convincingly on the subject, showing good evidence that the distance between our desire to reform (which can, remember, be done benignly OR oppressively) and our willingness to do harm is not as far as we like to think. (I reference him here, because it is his eerie garden metaphor that I have just used.)

How does this relate to Firefly/Serenity? In the end of the tale about the Alliance’s attempts to improve human nature, the Alliance—via its great scientists, and its bright young social engineers—ended up causing a certain large percentage of the population to become overly complacent, and another small percent to become overly aggressive, exposing extreme reactions in human nature to these human attempts to modify it.

I must be clear. The complacency was such that, in the end, all those who reacted in that manner died of it. The aggression was such that it became violent madness. Blind suicidal pacifism on one hand and blind homicidal rage on the other. The pendulum swings. In this case a catalyst made it happen, but society does it all the time. We are pendulum swingers. Extremists. Reactionaries. Of our own devices, our reforms are normally just returns from whence we came and back again.

In Pilgrim’s Regress, as C.S. Lewis explores the spiritual and intellectual experiences that either waylaid or led to his conversion to Christianity, he discusses “Northern” and “Southern” ways of behaving—equal and opposite evils. He means by these directional terms metaphors for opposing tendencies of human nature…a thing which will automatically go awry to one of them unless anchored in God.

“Nature, outraged by one extreme, avenges herself by flying to the other”

-C.S. Lewis

We—people, art, literature, pop culture—are always trying to say “something” about the human condition. But in the majority of films and books, even the most poignant illustrations of life and death are merely a sober recitation of either that snide phrase; “life sucks and then you die” or that indulgent one “do what you feel while you can.” The former of these would be Lewis’ “Northern” fall from Grace, and the latter would be dubbed the “Southern” one.

Clearly neither of these are sufficient, but if there were no God, I think there would be no other conclusions to reach. I have several parts the cold-blooded rationalist in me and God is the only thing that renews me and keeps me from turning into what—in any story worth its salt—would be an outright antagonist. My very own nature gives me myriad reasons to be skeptical about human nature broadly speaking, and plenty of the things I’ve seen could make me one of those “life sucks and then you die” types.

This is part of why I like it best when the arts portray human nature as it is: broken and in need of repair; awry and in need of calibration; fallen and in need of salvation. The latter description may seem explicitly religious, but one can portray fallenness without asserting salvation (as is done all the time in popular culture), but at least this—in my opinion—is half the battle and far better than the other alternatives of either white-washing our nature or yielding to its worst vagaries.

That is why the story told in Firefly and Serenity strikes me so. It readily acknowledges that human nature is pretty well awry, but that us trying to doctor ourselves without the real surgeon present, presiding, and acting, is going to get us killed or worse. And human nature tends to toss back and forth, not quite understanding where on earth the solution is.

(Above) Captain Malcom Reynolds: “They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make…people…better, but I don’t hold to that.”

These wounds are much too deep to staunch through our own means. We often end up doing ourselves damage because our efforts are entirely unanchored. But we don’t give up and stop helping, caring, working, fighting, protecting, building…because when anchored in the Lord, it’s a whole different story. That’s the center passage, the plumb-line and it’s anything but some mere compromise or happy medium. It’s the Way, the Truth and the Life. In Lewis’ allegorical metaphor, everything “North” of it is frigid, barren rock, and everything “South” of it is fetid, seething swamp.

Thus it’s the only real, solid ground at all.