My Deep Gladness

Your life is shaped by your thoughts.
—Proverbs 4:23

To my readers who know me personally, it might seem odd that I start my latest posting about education reflecting on the memory of a Sunday school class I once participated in—especially given that any formal relationship I once had with the institutional church came to an end decades ago.  But I still attend when I’m back visiting my mother in St. Louis out of respect for its role in her own life, and so two or three times a year, I find myself sitting in a room, re-living pieces of my youth, listening to people discuss some passage of scripture or other element of the Christian faith—which on the particular Sunday in question was Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

Now for those not fully familiar with what Christians call the New Testament, the church at Corinth was one of the strongest and most influential Paul helped found during his ministry following his conversion and break with Judaism.  But it was also a church whose members struggled greatly with the realities (and temptations) of the Greco-Roman culture of which they were a part.  Many of its members, claiming to lead godly inspired lives, were still engaging in the common social habits of their day—for example, hopping down to the local pagan temple to “visit” with the priests and priestesses, who would have been prostitutes—and Paul basically uses his first “letter” (in truth, letters) to the Corinthians to chew them out for not living lives in full accordance with their claims to be followers of Christ.

I share this bit of historical context because while I was listening to my mother’s class that Sunday morning, I was reminded of what the noted New Testament scholar, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, said in his critical biography of Paul.  Murphy-O’Connor argues that Paul struggled all his life with the apparent discrepancy between the power of his own encounter with the sacred and the apparent absence of this power in so very many of those who professed belief in Christ.  Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus had utterly and completely transformed (literally “converted”) him into a totally different person, one who had to live life differently than before.  Yet as he tried to bring this experience to others through his preaching and teaching, he kept crashing into the reality that so many who claimed to have encountered the sacred did not live similarly transformed lives.  Paul simply could not grasp how anyone could claim firsthand awareness of Christ and not thru direct cause-effect consequence live a new and different existence. 

What’s more, Murphy-O’Connor points out, what frustrated and angered Paul so much about the Corinthians (and why he chastises them so vehemently in his letters to them) was that here was one of his successful congregations.  Yet, even they were still screwing up–living lives that showed little or no transformation, no “conversion,” of any kind—and the disconnect puzzled and troubled Paul deeply, Murphy-O’Connor argues, to the day he died.

Setting aside any scholarly interest I may have piqued about Paul’s idiosyncratic struggle with normal human hypocrisy and weakness, I can hear most of my readers going:  what the [expletive deleted] does any of this have to do with education? To which I respond by asking everyone’s indulgence.  Unlike much of my writing—which tends to have a fairly linear character to it—this particular posting is more likely to resemble an Amish barn raising, where the separate individual walls are constructed first before being assembled in unison to create a whole.

We have one wall; now it is time to construct the next.

To do that, though, I need to be a biologist for a moment and share a little more about the study of population dynamics than I did in Maybe It’s Pie After All.  For starters, I need to share that this investigative field is one of the more mathematical parts of biology, and the algorithms and equations used to describe what happens to the size of populations of organisms over time are as deterministic as Newton’s laws of motion.  If the model says “if p, then q” and condition “p” exists, then “q” will happen just as certainly as F=ma or E=mc².  Of course, finding the perfectly correct equation for a single species outside of a petri dish in a lab is nearly impossible given the enormity of variables within an ecosystem, and therefore, for an organism in its natural environment, there end up being ranges of models which share common features but that get “tweaked” accordingly as additional data becomes available.

Yet even with a range of them and plenty of tweaking, every single equation modelling the human population is truly frightening.  There is a maximum population size any ecosystem can sustain indefinitely if births equal deaths every moment—known as the carrying capacity—and we exceeded ours on this planet decades ago.  Today, we are only able to sustain the 7.8 billion people alive today (and growing!) at the expense of permanently consuming resources that cannot be replenished, and it has been estimated that it would require at a minimum at least 4! more entire planet Earths to provide every person currently alive the basic standard of living we in this country take for granted.

Of course, the consequence of exceeding our carrying capacity as a species is the same as that of every other living organism: massive amounts of environmental disruption (e.g. pandemics, famine, etc.), the destruction of entire niches (an organism’s “job”), and huge amounts of death—all until the population falls back below the carrying capacity to where the ecosystem can once again provide enough resources to sustain the survivors.  This fall is as deterministic as gravity, and no organism is exempt.

“Wall 2,” then, really is a wall; a finite limitation which humanity has bumped up against and one of those many inconvenient truths I’ve already written about that all the personal denial in the world can make no less real.  Furthermore, if what I’ve just described sounds eerily familiar right now—pandemics, “job” loss, death in the thousands of thousands…—then hopefully, you now have a better understanding of why we are in our current catastrophe.  As our population has exploded exponentially over the past two hundred years, invading more and more pristine ecosystems, the kind of zoonotic viral transmission from another previously unencountered animal—of which COVAD-19 is an example—was as inevitable as gravity.  In fact, the frightening reality is that unless we humans bring our population under control on our own, the current pandemic could merely be the first of many; nature will restrain and contain us.

I am not optimistic, though, that humanity will—or maybe even can—find the wisdom to avoid the looming disaster awaiting us as a species of animal on this planet.  And not just because the rabid individualism of our society which I have written about causes public health measures such as mask wearing to be deliberately discounted.  No, my lack of optimism comes from an experience I had many years ago in Guatemala—a largely collectivist culture. 

I was in Guatemala in the summer of 2004 to participate in an archaeological dig of a Pre-Classic Mayan ruin as an Earthwatch volunteer, and over the course of those three weeks, I learned much both about myself and about human nature.  I learned, for instance, that the Mayans built and rebuilt their society three times (identified as the Pre-Classic, Classic, and Post-Classic eras), only to overconsume, overpopulate, and crash each time, learning nothing from the previous experience.  They were able to do this because each time their civilization collapsed, they simply moved to a new location, going from the Pacific side of the Central American isthmus to its middle and then eventually to the Atlantic side.  Yet, once they reached the boundaries of the Caribbean, the Maya had nowhere to go that someone else was not already there, and consequently, their last collapse remained permanent.

Again, if there is a ring of familiarity to this, it is because the tale of the Maya has regularly been the tale of humanity: we overconsume, we move elsewhere, repeat.  Only today, none of us have anywhere to go that someone else is not already there, and that has been what made living amongst the Maya that summer so jarring:  it wasn’t that which made them uniquely Mayan that had caused them to destroy themselves time and again; it was that which made them human that had destroyed them time and again.  Hence, my lack of optimism about our collective lack of wisdom is another of my “walls” that may also truly be a wall.

I have lived with all this knowledge for many years now, and as a consequence, I have also lived with the knowledge that one of its consequences is that the lives of my nephews and niece and of my students will be less well off than my own has been.  As the popular bumper-sticker likes to say, there is no “Planet B,” and the world my generation is leaving our children and grandchildren is broken and fractured, quite possibly beyond repair.  The present pandemic is simply a symptom of that fact.

But that brings me to my fourth and final “wall” and the chance to raise the “barn.”  One of the paradoxes of our species is that we evolved a brain capable not only of interpreting sensory data but of also having what seem to be experiences that transcend the empirical world, experiences we have traditionally attributed to some notion of the sacred.  Furthermore—and what I find most fascinating—is that whether one chooses to be a classic analytical scientific reductionist and argue from studies of Buddhist monks’ brain waves that the sacred is simply a subjective state of the mind or whether one chooses to be an ardent theologian arguing for the existence of God, the consequence of having such an experience seems to be remarkably consistent as reported by those who have had it: a life utterly transformed in one’s capacity for compassion.

Which brings me back to Paul and what triggered my memory of that Sunday school class.  Following his own transformation, Paul had no choice but to care and to work to seek to help others care; his experience of the sacred made it impossible for him not to do so because compassion was now an essential part of who he was.  It could (and obviously did) frustrate him that he couldn’t seem to get others to care as much as he did, but he could never fail to care himself as deeply as he did even in the face of that frustration; his conversion had made that impossible.

Like Paul, I have learned something similar about myself over the course of this past year.  One of my most fundamental values has always been the old proverb that it is better to light a candle against the darkness than to curse it, and I have spent a career in teaching striving to expose ignorance, challenge obliviousness, and heal woundedness.  But what my time working on this project has taught me is that I seem constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise; I simply cannot NOT “light candles.” Even when I know the “why” of the current pandemic, the ugly realities it has revealed about our society, and the brutal devastation it will cause…even when I know the possible futility of the very words I have written about these things, I cannot halt myself from seeking to authentically engage the world to make it a more worthy place in which to live.  As Martin Luther famously said at his ecclesiastical trial: “Hier bleib Ich; Ich kann nicht anders” (translation: “Here I stand; I can do no other”).

It is also why I am headed back to the classroom this fall.  I have remarked often that I think hope is a verb, and when presently confronted by an entire society so desperately in need of respecting, understanding, and appreciating the value of truth—particularly the scientific and historic kind!—I cannot remain on the educational sideline.  While I hope the thoughts and ideas shared here in this project have added value to the dialogue around what makes for good teaching and learning, I can only fully articulate their truth through my direct participation in the lives of children. I will still post as necessity arises, but now more than ever, I need to be back where my deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger—to hope a better world into existence even when the grim reality would seem to make my efforts futile.  Because as my mentor, the Jewish theologian and philosopher Steven Schwarzschild, once proclaimed: just because the world is coming to an end is no excuse not to get properly dressed for dinner.  Here I stand, then, attired to dine.

References

Coe, M. (1999) The Maya, 6^th ed.  New York:  Thames & Hudson.

Kellner, M.; editor (1990) The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild.  New York: SUNY Press.

Murphy-O’Connor, J. (1996) Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ward, P. (1994) The End of Evolution: On Mass Extinctions and the Preservation of Biodiversity. New York: Bantam Books.

Wilson, E.O. (2002) The Future of Life.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf.