A Divine Thrusting On

I’m short profound, inspiration observation from my daily life this week, but since I've promised to try to post every Sunday night, you’ll have to make due with an observation from my exam reading (one that I've pondered before in a few better entries, in fact).  Non-academic readers, receive my sincerest apologies.

One of the exciting things about reading for comprehensive exams is that the inundation with sixteenth-century literature is sharpening my perception to repeated themes.  The past two weeks have been particularly inundated with Shakespeare.  See if you notice these repeated themes, all from different plays:

[My deformed birth] plainly signified

That I should snarl and bite and play the dog.

Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,

Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

Nurture can never stick;

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion...and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on.

Men at sometime are masters of their fates.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

The first is from Henry VI, part 3 right after Richard (later Richard III) has murdered the title role and explains that his malice results from the defects of his birth.  The second is from The Tempest where Prospero describes the islander Caliban, explaining that his savage nature prevents the possibility of reformation.  The third is from King Lear, in which the crafty Edmund explains to the audience that his villainy does not result from his bastard birth but rather from his own will.  The final is from Julius Caesar in which the ambitious Cassius attempts to convince Brutus to murder Caesar, a betrayal that will bring down the republic and secure Brutus’ position in infamy as a traitor.

All characters seem to be asking, in the face of tragic villainy, whether our wickedness comes from within or without, and (more importantly) whether it is destined or avoidable.  

I find that in the face of my own monstrosities, I want to stand beside Cassius and Edmund who insist that we can take hold of our own destiny, that the accidents of our circumstances do not control our future.  And then I find myself, like the crafty bastard Edmund, taking hold of my destiny to bring it deliberately to the places I insisted I wasn’t destined to go. 

As a Christian, of course, I have the easy God-answer that seems like it would save me from the despair of Caliban and the ambition of Cassius: God can snatch me out of my own monstrosities and save me from my natural corruption.  But when he doesn’t, when year after year my weaknesses or deformities or struggles or corruptions remain, I’m not sure I like the answer that would imply to the question.

Maybe it is the wrong question to begin with—how I got this way or whether I can change.   Maybe that is why it is the Shakespearean villains who are asking it, and why they can never come up with a consensus about the answer.  Maybe that is why my attempts to find the Christian answer to the question are equally unsatisfactory.

I’m not sure what a better question might be, and I’m open to suggestions.  In the mean time, I’ll accept the grace to admit that I can’t always take hold of my destiny, and hope that such an admission does not abandon me to despair.

Busting the Myth of Originality

I remember one spring day, as a college sophomore who spent most of her time pondering ideals and trying to understand the way the world worked, when I stumbled haplessly into a history class. My professor lectured about Plato, explaining his analogy of the cave: we were all in a cave which we could not see out of, but into which a light from above was shining and reflecting on one of the walls. From the shadows it made, we could get a glimmer of the true reality, but the reality we saw was only a shadow of the actual world that was outside, shadows that gave us an idea of the true reality which was always mediated.

I remember listening to him, a nineteen-year-old who had never been exposed to Plato before, and being enormously frustrated. It wasn’t his idea itself that frustrated me, but the realization that I hadn’t come up with it. I had been developing a similar notion myself in all my philosophical ponderings, and had felt rather original about it. But alas, it turned out that I wasn’t original after all:

Plato had beat me to it by well over two thousand years. Drat.

As I recall that feeling of disappointment, I realize that it stemmed from two misconceptions, one of which was corrected in that class, and the other of which I would only learn to correct slowly in the next decade:

One, I was under the misconception that my ideas were my own. True indeed, I had not studied Plato before, and thus I couldn’t say I had been influenced directly by his writings. But I had certainly read C. S. Lewis, who had read and absorbed plenty of Plato’s ideas. Even aside from Lewis, I had been influenced by a church that had been influenced by a church that had been influenced by a church that had been influenced been Plato somewhere down the line. Despite what my 20th-century American culture had told me, I was not an original in that sense. My ideas were not my own.

Two, I was under the misconception that originality was an ideal, that it would have been better for me to have come up with a notion myself than to have learned it from the generations that had come before. We shoot ourselves in the foot and bite the hand that feeds us (to mix metaphors) in an effort to come up with new ideas, when we have a copious abundance of wisdom handed to us like a wrapped gift for us to unwrap and use.

Thank God for all the people who have passed their wisdom down to us, whether we have directly acknowledged them or not. And thank God we do not have to invent the faith on our own. It was always too heavy a responsibility for a nineteen-year-old to manage on her own, even if she thought she had to.

Leading out

I stumbled accidentally into academia a few years ago (much to no one’s surprise but my own, as it turned out). After a year of living in an intercity commune, I listened to the wise counsel of some of my housemates who suggested, after living beside me for a year, that I may find the logistics of a public school teacher (the vocation I had been pursuing actively for seven years) to be stifling to my flexible lifestyle. They suggested I consider teaching community college instead, and, after a teary conversation, they encouraged me to leave the commune to pursue my master’s in a nearby city, assuring me that the doors were open to me should I decide to move back after my quick M.A.

It was a confusing time for me (incidentally, the time I started this blog), a time when I was slowly realizing that I had no place for Grace in my worldview, that I related to God like a slave to her tyrant, that I didn't know how to think of myself when I wasn't trying to single-handedly save the world, that I was motivated more from a hero complex than from love, that I didn’t know how to distinguish my voice from his or the million other voices clamoring around me. In that time, oddly enough, academia became a place of refuge for me, a place where I felt the closest thing to healthy I had felt in quite a while. Part of that reason may be because it was the right fit, certainly, but I had an inkling that the primary reason was quite simpler:

Academia gave me something to analyze other than my own mind.

This comment must not be interpreted as a criticism of self-examination or psychology or other forms of understanding oneself. On the contrary, I assume I still have a life full of inner probing in front of me. What I needed for a time, however, was time; I needed to learn to leave my unanswered questions unanswered for a while, to gain perspective that was outside myself, to listen to voices other than my own.

At any rate, I remembered all that as I read the closing chapter of At War With the Word, a book about liberal education by a scholar who has meant quite a bit to me over the past three years, R. V. Young. For any of my readers interested in scholarship or education (from either the producing or receiving end), I am including it.

The Latin educare means to “rear or bring up (children or young animals),” and it in turn derives from educere, “to lead forth” or “to lead out of.” Implicit in the term is the idea that education consists in leading the young out of something, and the something out of which everyone must be led is the peculiar, self-interested ego; for to be self-centered is the common predicament—that narrow, stifling subjectivism that is the universal prison of all human beings. A great work of literature is, then, a book that extends our horizons, that alters our perspective, that makes us take notice of something beyond our immediate needs and desires.
-R. V. Young

May I never leave the journey of knowing myself, and may I never lack for people to lead me out of myself!

Veni, redemptor gentium

Today in celebration of the feast of St. Ambrose, my Latin professor had us translate a fourth-century Ambrosian hymn. My Latin is far from expert, but I thought in the spirit of Advent (and because I'm doing a poor job posting anything for you this semester) I'd give you my best shot at a translation. Better Latinists out there are welcome to correct me for the benefit of all.

* * *

Intende, qui regis Israel,
Hark, King of Israel,
super Cherubim qui sedes,
who sits above the Cheribum,
appare Ephraem coram, excita
who appeared to Ephraim, stir up
potentiam tuam et ueni.
your power and come!

Veni, redemptor gentium,
Come, redeemer of nations,
ostende partum uirginis;
show forth your virgin birth;
miretur omne saeculum:
let all the ages rejoice:
talis decet partus Deo.
for such befits the birth of God.

Non ex virili semine,
Not out of the seed of man,
sed mystico spiramine
but out of the Holy Spirit
uerbum Dei factum est caro
the word of God is made flesh
fructusque uentris floruit.
and the fruit of the womb blossoms.

Alvus tumescit uirginis,
The womb of the virgin swells,
claustrum pudoris permanet,
the seal of chastity remains,
uexilla uirtutum micant:
the standards of virtue shine:
uersatur in templo Deus.
God is turned within his temple.

Procedat e thalamo suo,
Let him advance from his chamber,
pudoris aula regia,
from the royal courtyard of chastity,
geminae gigas substantiae
the giant with twin substances
alacris ut currant uiam.
keen to hasten on his course.

Egressus eius a Patre,
Going out from the Father,
regressus eius ad Patrem;
returning to the Father;
excursus usque ad inferos,
going out even to Hell,
recursus ad sedem Dei.
returning to the seat of God.

Aequalis aeterno Patri,
You who are equal to the eternal Father,
carnis tropheo cingere,
gird yourself with a trophy of flesh,
infirma nostri corporis
strengthening the weaknesses of our body
uirtute firmans perpeti.
with your eternal virtue.

Praesepe iam fulget tuum,
Now your stable gleams,
lumenque nox spirat nouum,
and a new light shines forth,
quod nulla nox interpolet
where no night corrupts
fidesque iugi luceat.
may perpetual faith shine forth.

My dear angry Lord

Posts are going to stay rather sparse this semester, I am afraid, while my class load is higher than it ever will be again (I hope!). But as I begin a project that compares John Milton's Paradise Lost to the book of Job, I am pondering the theme of wrestling with God that seems rather central in the story of the nation of Israel (so named because Jacob had "wrestled with God and won," whatever that means), and then by extension of the Church. I don't know what to do with the strange ending of the book of Job (and I feel pretty certain that Milton did not either), but it does seem clear to me that Job's faithfulness and his wrestling went hand-in-hand, even if his questions were not answered with words but with God's power. And in the light of these questions, a poem of good ol' George Herbert has been coming to mind:

Bitter-Sweet

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

Dwarven Hermeneutics

In the past two months, I joined the Catholic Church, moved out of my cottage, submitted my first potential article for publication, spent a month in Ireland, bought a house in the Midwest, and enjoyed a week at the beach with my family. My brain has not been able to function more than one or two steps ahead.

Suddenly, as the dust of the past two months settles, the next step is my move across the country to start my PhD at a school I never expected to get into, and I am realizing something for the first time: I am afraid. Though my transition into academia surprised neither my friends nor my family, it still does surprise me, and I have a keen awareness that I have no idea what I am getting myself into or where it will take me.

I am quite a little girl with a finite brain stepping out into a world of intellectual giants. I feel like Bilbo Baggins, stumbling out the door with no hat, no stick, no pipe, not even a pocket handkerchief. But here's to the unplanned adventure, and here's to hoping for some Longbottom pipe weed along the way!

There were days when giants roamed the earth
With minds of iron, hearts of witty fire,
And we have tread their steps, for what that's worth,
Like bumbling dwarves aspiring to admire.
But in the caverns of these footprints, we
Have chiseled half with hubris, half with awe,
And nestled in sophomoric flattery,
Pontifications on the dirt we claw.
And I have trembled half with terror, half
With love, and stumbled on my hobbit toes,
Afraid to find a troll along the path,
Discovering as he nears he also grows.
Be gentle, giant, if ambition's charming
From a midget seeking her disarming.

The path to sainthood

Today is the feast day of (among other people) St. Thomas More, the patron saint of my master’s thesis. I’m not thinking much about martyrdom today, nor, despite the fact that Ireland always reminds me of the tragedy of Church division, about unity. Instead, remembering his prayer scroll that he read from the Tower of London as he awaited execution, I am thinking about the ultimate vocation of the Christian: Love.

Those who are the most holy, from what I can tell, do not get there by trying to be holy. They most certainly do not get there by hammering out whatever imperfections linger with them, nor by striving to be better people. The holiest people I’ve met, at any rate, radiate not perfection but love. Love for God and for ones brother does, after all, sum up the law and the prophets, and we are able to love only because he has first loved us, as John reminds us in his first epistle. The path to sainthood, as it turns out, is a path of receiving the love of God.

I don’t have a clear idea of why that seems to come easier to some folks than to others, how I (for example) could have tried to follow Christ for decades without a sense that he loved me. I don’t know how much love (and then sainthood by extension) is a gift we receive passively or actively (the middle voice, as a friend once speculated). But I do know that a call to holiness, a call to sainthood, is a call to receive God’s lavish Grace.

On that note, on the feast of the good St. Thomas More, I will end with the poem the saint read 475 years ago today as he watched John Fisher marched to the scaffold where he would follow two weeks later. We are called like More not as much to martyrdom as to love; in the light of love, martyrdom almost becomes incidental.

Rede distinctely
pray deuoutly
syghe depely
suffer pacyently
meke youe lowly
giue no sentenc hastely
speke but rathe and that truly
preuent youre spech discretely
do all your dedes in charytye
temtacyon resyst strongly
breke his heade shortly
wepe bytterly
haue compassion tenderly
do good workes busyly
loue perseuerently
loue hertely
loue faythfully
loue god all only
and all other for hym charitably
loue in aduersytye
loue in prosperyty
thinke alway of loue for loue ys non other but god hymselfe. Thus to loue bringeth the louer to loue without ende.

As a hen gathers her brood

Grading high school English papers gives me a new appreciation for the passage in Isaiah where the prophet exclaims, “Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you...” Come on kid, I find myself groaning, just put down anything! I’d give you a decent grade for a wrong answer; I can’t give you anything for a blank!

It makes me understand how my thrown-together papers in high school did so well. I never dreamed that half of the kids might not write papers at all. I feel like Desdemona talking with her servant Emilia after the former has been falsely accused of infidelity in Shakespeare's Othello:

DESDEMONA I have heard it said so. O, these men, these men!
Dost thou in conscience think,--tell me, Emilia,--
That there be women do abuse their husbands
In such gross kind?
EMILIA There be some such, no question.
DESDEMONA Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA Why, would not you?
DESDEMONA No, by this heavenly light!
EMILIA Nor I neither by this heavenly light;
I might do't as well i' the dark.
DESDEMONA Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA The world's a huge thing: it is a great price.
For a small vice.

Dost thou in conscience think that there be kids do abuse their teachers in such gross kind? Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

Indeed, many a highschooler would do (or not do) such a deed, and not for all the world but for nothing. O student, student, the highschoolers that kill the teachers and stone the graders who are sent to them! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

But I shall be gone

I spent last week on a campus visit to the first university I heard from last month, and, with four rejections, two wait-lists, and three unheard-from inferior schools in my wake, I went saw no reason left to keep my favorite school waiting. I officially accepted the astoundingly generous offer that I had never expected to receive, and will be moving (back) to the Midwest this summer.

I will miss my green cottage, my immediate proximity to my family, and all the endearing qualities of the South where I have lived for the past twenty two years. But of course, the liminal life of a student is one of the qualities I knew I was buying into when I reluctantly made the decision to move out of my intercity commune to start graduate school. Here's to hoping some fixity lies before me five or six years down the road when I am done with my PhD!

But the visit confirmed that the way is already being prepared for me: the personality of the school that makes even the faculty of unrelated fields interested in my research, the supportive nerdy students who get as giddy about research as I do among whom competition seems virtually nonexistent, the various anecdotes about the campus and town well-suited for my own quirky personality. It is no green cottage, but it is a comfort to know that as our faith prepares places for God, God continues to prepare places for us. And on these tiny legs of middle-voice faith that have been given to me, I (perhaps reluctantly) rejoice to follow.

I WONDER about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.
-----Robert Frost, "The Sound of the Trees"

The work has been done

Once upon a time, I decided to write a master’s thesis. This was, in fact, entirely optional for my MA program which had recently decided to eliminate the thesis option in favor of a smaller “capstone project,” but never one to take the easy way out I wanted to go for the throat.

I chose for my director one of the most intimidatingly smart and well-read professors in the department. I played around with a couple different ideas for a topic, not wanting to research anyone too overdone to be approachable nor too obscure to be interesting, and finally decided on Thomas More. My director advised that I avoid More’s larger, more famous works like Utopia or his Response to Luther, and pointed me in the direction of his poetry. He recommended that I explore what influence his poetry might have had in the development of the English epigram. Armed with a topic I knew almost nothing about, I set out to begin my research.

Well, actually, first of all I set out to learn Latin for two months in an intensive Latin boot camp in Ireland. Then I returned home to begin my research.

Now, I didn’t exactly know what an epigram was, nor was I aware that Thomas More wrote any. Nor was my university library aware of this fact, for though it housed the definitive Yale edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More, it had neglected to purchase the volume of his Latin poetry. But after procuring a copy, I read the text along with some letters in the appendices, and was ready to begin exploring their influence.

I read the first-century poet Martial to get a feel for the Classical background of the epigram tradition (and discovered among his thousands of epigrams one that More had used as a model!). I read Ben Jonson's epigrams to see what the quintessential English epigram had become (and discovered one that seemed to be based off of one of More’s epigrams!). I read books about the English epigram tradition (because other than Jonson and now More, I had no idea who else might have even written them), and discovered a couple references to translations of More’s epigrams. I read volumes of Renaissance epigrams by obscure epigrammatists. I discovered an entire journal devoted to Thomas More, and read every article it had published about the epigrams in the past thirty or so years. I searched the collections of various rare books libraries for obscure collections of epigrams in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to see what they might have included of Thomas More.

Months later when I had done enough research to get a feel for how gargantuan a topic I had chosen for the thesis and how impossible the task of doing it well really was, my director told me to go ahead and start writing it. “This is not your magnum opus,” he reminded me. “It is not your first book. It is not even your dissertation. Just think of it as a scholarly exercise and begin writing.”

Feeling like an impostor for pretending I could say anything about the topic before I had read every epigram ever written and every scholarly book and article on the topic, I nevertheless wrote the thesis with the mere scraps I had managed to discover. Then I defended it, and despite the hazing I’m told I did well enough. They gave me my degree at any rate.

And now, months later as I prepare to write a talk for a frighteningly prestigious Renaissance conference, I picked up that volume of epigrams I succeeded in getting my university to purchase and read through them again. While flipping through the volume, I happened to notice something for the first time:

The endnotes and appendices.

The former included information like the Classical sources behind each epigram (like Martial). The latter had a chart I had instinctively ignored that listed every time in the sixteenth or seventeenth century More’s epigrams had been reprinted, quoted, translated, or discussed. There were certainly all the sources I had "discovered" in my months of research, and many many many many more. Oops.

My research had already been done for me. Some people can receive the grace to realize that the work has already been done before trying to take on the giant alone with their bare hands. There is a lot of grace in that, I imagine, but I don't seem to be one of those people. At least not this time around.

But even for me, there is another grace to receive as I realize that I had just spent months gathering information that had already been gathered by better, more able scholars. I reflect on my director’s reminder to me that no one had ever expected me to write the definitive work on More’s epigrams. No one had expected me to discover anything, per se. The telos (the end, the goal) of the project had never been the actual thesis: it had been me. Through my intensive research on a topic that had already been done in order to write a thesis that no one would ever need to read, I was becoming a scholar.

I don’t think there is generally a lot of grace among us arrogant academics, so I’ll take it when I can!

Joy-makers

I once promised that esoteric Greek posts would cease as soon as Greek boot camp ended in August, but I’ve already broken that promise several times. Now I break it again.

I stumbled on the word χαρα today in Philippians a verse or two after I had correctly identified the word χαρις as being “Grace” (non-readers of Greek, all you need to notice is that the words are identical at the beginning; Greek words change their endings depending on how they are used in sentences). I assumed it was a different form of the same word, and tried unsuccessfully to connect the words on any declension charts I could remember. Of course I was wrong, but only slightly: I was wrong because they are indeed different words, but only slightly wrong because they are etymologically related.

χαρα is the Greek word for “joy” or “delight,” and is related to χαρις, the Greek word for “grace.” Literally then, you could say that Grace, one of the most fundamental words to the Christian vocabulary, simply means joy-maker or delightfulness; in other pre-Christian contexts, it is often translated “sweetness.” This strikes me as quite different from the understanding of Grace I tend to have as being an abstract ideal involved in the cosmic matters of salvation. Somehow, the understanding of “sweetness” or “joy-makers” feels a bit more tangible and much warmer, and I wonder what it would do to my theology.

“Joy-makers to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”?
“It is by sweetness you are saved through faith”?

That amazing sunrise I saw on Saturday morning that brought me so much delight was a grace. That surprise meeting of an old friend, that bowl of Mom’s fantastic barley soup, that Sunday evening thunderstorm, that afternoon of throwing rocks on an icy pond with my nephews... these were all graces. The cosmic matters of salvation and the morning cup of hot tea are connected, and God’s grandiose dealings with humanity and his provision of a Sunday afternoon nap are part of the same motion.

It is by graces that we are saved.

Intercity-high-school-senior blues

Tonight I have a case of the intercity-high-school-senior blues, which may (oddly enough) be appropriate for the Advent season. The students were assigned to write a letter-to-the-editor that addresses any controversial topic. Of course, after (barely) surviving these essays, I’m wondering if perhaps this assignment should have come after many many many many other lessons that they missed.

• If students could choice the class that they took, I think that the drop out rate would go down quickly. I doubt many of them would choice to took grammar.
• I believe that other teens should not be exposed to teen pregnancy. This to solve the problem of teen pregnancy: If teens didn’t see other teens pregnant, then they wouldn’t get pregnant themselves.
• Gang’s in our community was created to improve the community with love and respect so you feel safe in some community’s. I don’t want to touch this one.
• Catholic people are against abortion, because they believe that pregnancies are woman’s punish. That’s right; Catholics are always quoting that one verse that says “Children are a punishment from the Lord…”

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

Now to find an activity a little better for my soul…

If I only had a Plutonian...

“Whatcha doing, Auntie Em?” my five-year-old nephew asked me as he joined me on the couch and began reading the computer screen on my lap. The kid is already an avid reader.

“Oh, I’m working on some applications,” I answered, pausing my painful, dehumanizing, Thanksgiving-break project to explain. “I’m writing letters to convince ten different schools that they want to pay me money to go there.”

“Well,” he changed the subject, “I need to send a message to NASA. It’s quite urgent. Give me the computer.”

Slightly amused at his lack of decorum, I nevertheless turned down his pressing request. “No, I have to work on this letter for now. Look, I’ve already written this much, and I still need to write more.” I pointed to the screen in an attempt to impress the munchkin.

“Wow, that is a lot of words,” he allowed. “But Plutonians can write ten times that much in five minutes.”

Now, I’m by nature a bit competitive anyway, so if there’s anything worse that being one-upped by fictitious residents of the dwarf planet Pluto (not even a real planet, no less!), it is having a five-year-old point it out to me.

“Well, good for them,” I grumbled. “Maybe they would actually get into some of these schools."

But he was not done. “And they can read books this big,” he demonstrated with the entirety of his (albeit small) arm-span. “They read that much every day.”

“Alright,” I said, looking back at my computer to demonstrate disengagement, “then they can read my applications when I’m done.”

“And Plutonians can speak every language ever,” he continued, “including Chinese, which is much harder than Latin and Greek.”

Come on, kid... academia is already making me feel like enough of an idiot!

Finally, his mother came to my rescue by commanding the munchkin to leave Auntie Em alone, and I returned to the cumbersome task of keeping the requirements of the ten admissions committees to which I was prostituting myself straight. “We place great weight on your personal statement,” I read on one school’s website. “This statement is your opportunity to get the committee interested in you, in your potential as a professional and as a human being...”

This is a what-I-have-been-trying-not-to-listen-to post. God, may this be over soon!

Out of the Mouths of Undergrads

The Roman poet Horace once said, “It is when I try to be brief that I become obscure.” I have developed a similar maxim as I struggle through life as a professional paper-grader: “It is when I try to be nice that I become snarky.” Sometimes the students make it quite difficult not to be.

But since this is supposed to be my listening-blog, I thought I would try to extract life lessons from my most recent round of undergraduate pontifications.

* * *

Beware of the ol’ bait-and-switch: "Freedom is there for the taking, but it has to be worked for."

Equality is relative: “They were still limited and not treated as equal as white Americans.”

Any statement can be contradicted by saying the same thing with more words: “This difference that he references is not a social difference, rather it is a difference in perspective and conflict between social identities.”

For postmoderns, stories can be characters: “Being the main character but not the narrator, the entire story is focused on the man.”

What do authors know about the work? “Granted, Hemingway may feel that I am evading his point of the hero…Yet the fact of the matter is that…”

The best metaphors make meanings more obscure: “A slow death has the chance to act as a kind of time-travel reflecting pond.”

And, most importantly by far...

Bloggers are the world’s best humanitarians: “What better way to assist the rest of the human population in deciding how to live than by publishing your opinion on the subject?”



Surely these lessons were worth staying up until 5am to learn!

Hazing

There is an ancient form of hazing practiced among a peculiar tribe of creatures from the land of Academia (if the name sounds like a nut, all the better) that we have come to call a “thesis defense.” The ritual involves the victim being forced to endure sundry humiliations for approximately one hour. Some examples are as follows:

Questions about a central point of ones thesis: The victim will assume the interrogator has found a hole in the main argument, some key issue that was not explained well enough in the carefully crafted thesis, and will fumble to formulate a new answer on the spot as if it were possible to say in one minute what he had not said in one year of meticulous research and writing. The interrogators will watch him sweat through his fumbling answer for a while, no doubt inwardly grinning, and then end the torture by saying, “I think you actually answered this question quite nicely on page 12. Let me read your words.”

Questions about complex issues in the broader scope of the cosmos that the thesis innocently provoked: The victim will stare blankly at the interrogator for a few panicked moments, hoping there was some mistake and the interrogator will realize he had meant to say “Thomas More” (who was the subject of the thesis) rather than “Ben Jonson” (who wrote a century later). When it is clear that no such relief will come, if the victim has the presence of mind to refrain from asking “Do you want me to answer that?” (which he may not always have), he will fumble through an elementary sort of answer before finishing with the only definitively true thing he can say: “…but I haven’t yet done the research necessary to speak confidently on the subject.” The interrogator will nod and interject pointedly, “Well, you’re going to need to look into that,” a message that seems to have been the purpose of the question in the first place.

Questions of the softball variety: These questions often come from the kind, outside-the-area interrogator, and are essentially to the effect of “Can you define that word you keep using?” The victim will feel the sudden ecstasy of being given an easy question, ecstasy which is quickly subsumed in panic when he realizes that the other two scholarly giants in the room had defined that very word countless times in his sophomoric youth, nuancing it ad nauseam in rich ways they would no doubt want to hear replicated by their academic progeny. The victim may indeed catch the softball, but do such a sloppy job of it that he may as well have dropped it. No doubt the interrogators feel that their years of teaching the victim have been wasted.

And the purpose of the ritual? That though the victim may walk away initiated into the tribe of Academia with the new title of “Master of Arts,” he will know that he ain’t mastered nothin’ yet.

But ya know, I’ll take the title anyway. You may all call me Master Em now.

Grace to the Gracious

I have a general policy about kindness and friendliness to strangers on the street that goes a good bit beyond most urban American standards. I may be wrong about this, I freely admit, but at some point I decided it would be better to err on the side of too extreme an adherence to Christ’s warning “Whatever you did to the least of these my brothers you did to me” than on the side of over-caution. Somehow, I think the damage that over-caution could do to my soul is worse than the danger to my body everyone imagines is waiting behind the stranger on the street.

As you can imagine for a young woman, this has gotten me into quite a few sticky situations over the years. I admit that the caution that my friends in the conservative-right and the liberal-intelligentsia alike have tried to instill in me over the years would have saved me from many an awkward situation. But what I have also found is that most awkward situations are, in their strange, awkward ways, windows for grace.

Take today for example.

As I walked down a small, empty side-street around the corner from my regular coffee shop at 7am, I was hailed by a man in his 20s or 30s.

He says (politely enough): Excuse me, can I ask you a question?

I say (pleasantly, pausing my walk): Sure.

He says: I’m not from around here; is there a tattoo parlor on that street?

I think: You’re looking for a tattoo parlor at 7:00 in the morning?
I say: I feel like there’s one down that way, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.

He says: You’re not a tattoo person, I guess?

I think: Already changing the subject?
I say (maintaining my pleasantness): Nope, not so much.

He says: It’s for my girlfriend. She wants to get her belly-button pierced. [Face becoming contorted as if pondering a vexing issue] Do you know anyone with a belly-button ring?

I think: I should probably be wrapping this conversation up soon...
I say: Yeah, lots of people.

He says: How does that work? She’s an inny... can they pierce an inny?

I think: I don’t think he’s thinking a lot about his girlfriend right now...
I say: Yeah, they just pierce the skin on top, and the ring hangs down over the belly-button. It works. [Beginning to step away as if the conversation is ending.]

He says (quickly): Wait, it doesn’t make sense to me. Are you an inny? Can you just show me on your belly-button?

I think: Abandon ship! Abandon ship!
I say: Nah, it’s pretty simple... they just stick a needle right above it. [Making feeble hand motions to illustrate the phenomenon]

Right then, as if on cue from out of nowhere, my thesis director (a well-established Renaissance scholar and Catholic intellectual who always wears a suit with a hankie in the pocket and a hat over his gray beard like a proper gentleman) walks up to the post office that is right behind us.

My thesis director says (jovially): I just can’t get away from you!

I say (relieved): Nope, apparently not!
I think: [Grasping for an academic question that will involve walking away from the stranger] How thankful I am that I was not showing this fellow my belly-button right now!

To all of you out there who don’t find the balance between wisdom and grace toward the stranger on the street as easy as it seems to be to others, I empathize with the tension. But I am learning that there is an abundance of grace out there waiting to be poured back out on the gracious.

I mean, what if I had been showing that guy my belly-button right as my thesis director walked up? That’s one catastrophe I could do without two days before my defense!

Poets of the Word

Some of my readers indicated an appreciation for my esoteric Greek posts, which I promised were about to stop now that language school is over. Rejoice then, O Greek fans; my promises were empty, and Greek posts will evidently continue. My thesis director gave a delightful anecdote in class the other day, and I cannot help but post it.

In his Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney makes much of the fact that English gets its word for poet from the Greek (ποιητης), which is derived from the verb that means “make, do” (ποιεω). In a literal sense, poets are makers and doers.

For a literary scholar who also dabbles in theology, this is absolutely delightful.

Literally, then, when St. James tells us to be doers of the word rather than hearers only, he is commanding that we be poets of the word (ποιηται λογου). Don’t just be a hearer, he says; be a poet!

After all, we must remember, God himself is a poet. The Apostle’s Creed which Christians have been reciting for centuries declares in Greek, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, poet of heaven and earth” (ποιητην ουρανου και γης). Who could stand on a mountain or stroll through the forest without suspecting that the authors intended the double-meaning?

That alone validates spending a summer in an intensive course to study a dead language!

Except for the Exceptions

“I have a question,” I interjected once during week two of Greek boot camp.

“Yes?” the instructor asked, looking up from the textbook.

“So we just learned the ‘regular’ way to construct the future tense. But then you added an exception when the stem ends in α, ε, or ο, which strikes me as most of the vowels.”

“Yes...” he began, and I jumped back in lest he should think my question were finished.

“And then you added another exception for verbs that end in β, π, πτ, or φ. And then there’s the exception for verbs that end in γ, κ, σκ, or χ. Not to mention the exception for verbs that end in δ, ζ, θ, or τ. That was all... until you added another exception for verbs that end in λ, μ, ν, or ρ. Of course, as it turns out, the exception also applies to those that end in ιζ. This strikes me as most of the consonants.”

The class started chuckling, and the young teacher shuffled his feet nervously as the unspoken vibes of mutiny flowed through the room.

“So my question is...” I paused, looking helplessly at my notes that had become quite unintelligible and I began longing for the good old days when Latin seemed complicated, “how regular is a regular verb, really? It feels like this rule for the ‘regular’ formation of the future tense applies to any verb as long as it does not end in a vowel or a consonant.”

The above anecdote doesn’t have anything to do with this post really. But as I continue to pray the Divine Office, it continues to remind me of Greek. The complex system I labored to learn with the Dominican and seminarian friends over the summer applies to regular days in Ordinary Time, as long as they are not feast days.

Ahem.

I guess I could think of worse vices of which the Catholic Church has been charged than too high a frequency of feasting, but I sometimes wish I could have a normal morning prayer time, since I worked so hard to learn how to do it. Are any days not feast days, I want to ask?

Not today, at least. Today is the feast of St. Augustine, and the antiphons in morning and evening prayers were excepts of his writings. In honor of his feast day, I thought I’d post them for those out there who are not gluttons for punishment enough to learn to Divine Office, but who enjoy a good feast anyway. Enjoy, and I’ll let you know if I ever stumble upon a regular Greek verb or a regular day on the liturgical calendar.

You inspire us, O Lord, to delight in praising you, because you made us for yourself; our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you. You called, you shouted and you shattered my deafness.

The other end

Though I am somewhat afraid that I will spend purgatory grading high school English papers to atone for this, I thought I’d post a few more grading highlights for this week. I could repeat my dubious moral from last month as an excuse for it. More accurately, I’m feeling somewhat penitent for being angry about my sudden grading bombardment that coincided with a weekend I already knew would be filled with an out-of-town visitor.

Like always, these intercity-high-school papers were terrible, and I was given them less than 48 hours before they needed to be completed. It didn’t help that I spent the first seven years of my adult life wanting to teach intercity kids and I’m still sad that I’m not there right now, so I use my paper comments as my sole opportunity to contribute to the education of kids I imagine have never had their writing taken seriously in their lives. Thus I stayed up past midnight and was up around 4 all weekend trying to redirect sparkling prose like this:

• “It seemed to me like [Shakespeare] wrote his plays based on what he wanted them to be like.” I read the sentence bewilderedly for a while, trying to find a way to make his statement actually say something.
• “Shakespeare wrote his many famous plays throughout history.” Wow. I suppose we Renaissance scholars are greedy to keep him to ourselves!
  
• “Throughout history, when people read books or watch movies, in the back of their minds they expect a happy ending.” I haven’t checked the ancient Sumerian movie reviews, but my impression is that tragedy was not completely alien to them. Nevertheless, another student went so far as to imply that Shakespeare invented the sad ending.

After spending the weekend angry with the state curriculum that allows these high school seniors to make these kinds of mistakes and with the teacher for giving these to me at the last minute, I met with her yesterday to deliver 14 hours of grading. She used the chance to vent her own frustrations with the infamously corrupt government of the city where she teaches. In this case, due to some absolutely foreseen and unprevented computer issues, the entire county, elementary through high school, lost every bit of data in their entire computer system.

• Medical records.
• Transcripts.
• Honors and awards.
• Grades.
• Storage space where the kids would have been storing the drafts they worked on in the computer labs.

Graduation is in two days, and there are kids whose papers I begrudgingly graded this weekend who do not know if they will graduate. Teachers, already infamously underpaid and overworked, have been scrambling for weeks to pull together some semblance of academic records in time for the end of the semester. Students who have spent their lives shafted are finishing this year out a few steps further back.

And I was frustrated because of a few impromptu sleepless nights.

Perhaps there are some valid reasons for me to have been angry at the frantic teacher and the bad papers that kept me from enjoying my weekend with my friend. But anger feels a lot different with a more comprehensive picture of the person on the other end. Perhaps I should try to look for him a little more often.

Undergraduate pontifications

My brain is fried from the end-of-semester grading, and I don't know how long it will take to get it back. But in the mean time, for the benefit of those in blogger-land who are not my facebook friends and thereby did not have the chance to read my frequent venting during my recent 34-hour grading marathon, I thought I'd post some highlights. They even fit into the theme of my listening blog!

[Throughout history,] High school English teachers have instructed their students to begin papers with broad, sweeping statements about humanity. These unsupportable claims torture college professors and TAs who try to make the students realize that they have not done enough research on any topic "from the dawn of time" to begin a paper with those words (I have indeed begun many a paper that way in my foolish youth). Maybe we academics hate those statements so much because we know some of our own little pontifications (even mine!) are equally precocious, even if they are more subtle.

So, without further ado, here are my favorite undergraduate pontifications from this semester:

• "Learning is what life is all about." Dear student, if you have indeed managed to learn what life is all about at such a young age, you should probably write about it. But not in your analysis of Sherman Alexie's novel.

• "Vonnegut poses a quote, and it is taken from the bible. 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference.'" Oh dear. Well, it does have the word "God" in it, and I'm sure the word "God" is in the Bible...

• "War will always exist on Earth because there will always be a struggle for power and for land, and because of that it will always be debated and scrutinized." At least Vonnegut and Alexie may both agree with the student's opening prophesies for the future potential for war on earth. But his analysis of their novels certainly cannot prove such a declaration.
  

And my favorite opening line:

• "It is not often that human sexuality is a major theme in fiction writings." Hm.

God forgive all our little precocious pontifications. God forgive mine.