Finding Your Precious Bowl

There is a story about a young Buddhist monk and an old Buddhist monk who were walking along the countryside, carrying their begging bowls. They came to a stream and began to cross it, stirring up the sediment on the bottom as they made their way across. In the middle of the stream, with the water now up to their waist, the young monk suddenly stumbled, losing the grip on his begging bowl, which promptly sank and disappeared into the murky current. He lurched to save it, but all he came back with was dirty water and empty hands. The old monk quickly came over, and together they probed the bottom with their feet, trying find that begging bowl. After a fruitless ten minutes of searching, shuffling along a whole stretch of the stream, the young monk grew frustrated. “What will I do now? That bowl was my most precious possession? What a stupid thing to lose it. I’ll never find it again!”

    The old monk calmly looked at him and said, “Settle down. Don’t get all excited. The bowl is still there. You just can’t see it right now. But I have a suggestion for how you can find it. Do you see that large tree on the other side of the stream?”

    The young monk said, “You mean that really big one by the edge? Yes, I see it.”

    “I want you to go over to that tree,” said the old monk, “sit down on the ground beneath it, close your eyes, and meditate quietly for 30 minutes.”

    “What good will that do?” said the young monk. “My begging bowl is somewhere in this stream, not under that tree.”

    “Just do as I say,” replied the old monk. “I will go ahead of you, and you can catch up with me later on. Just go sit beneath that tree and meditate. You will find that all things will become clear.”

    The young monk did as the old monk had told him. He walked out of the stream, sat down beneath the tree, and meditated for a full 30 minutes. The old man walked off and disappeared over the hill. After 30 minutes, indeed the young monk had calmed down. His spirit had settled, and his mind had begun to clear. The frustration was gone, and now he was just a little sad about losing his bowl.

     But when he opened his eyes, he found out that the stream had cleared up as well. All the sediment that they had stirred up had settled down to the bottom, and now the water was crystal clear, with the sun dancing on the surface of the rippling current. He was able to see to the bottom of the stream in all directions, and straightaway he saw where his begging bowl had landed, gleaming in the reflected sunlight.

     He stood up, walking into the stream, reached down, and picked up the bowl. Then he rushed to catch up with the wise old monk who had known how to find clarity. His most precious possession was all the more precious for having been found.

The end of a school term and the beginning of a vacation is a time of excitement and thoughts of precious things yet to be. Plans and packing lead to unanticipated experiences, probing ventures or adventures, and the occasional stumble. Perhaps there will even be a time when it appears that a precious thing was dropped or lost – through the unkind word, the forgotten gesture, the genuine mistake. In the turbulence of the situation, the effect may easily become greater than the cause, and suddenly a small thing has become a large one, the mouse has transmogrified into a monster. For reasons quite unclear, some precious object (friendship, love, forgiveness, kindness, tolerance, peace, etc.) appears to be irretrievably lost.

This is the time to allow the point of a vacation or break to come forward. Find a quite place. Be still. Let things settle, both inside and outside. At the appropriate time, open your eyes and observe the clarity of genuine reality, unfettered by swirling sediment, as clear as a sparkling stream. Find where that precious thing has landed. Heave a sigh of relief, and then walk over – please do walk over – and pick it up from below the surface. Then be on your way with new appreciation and a firmer grip on the thing that once was lost and now is found.

Fascination & Fear - The Crucifix

“In the crucifix you see, in the most vivid, convincing way, 

God speaking to us about his great love.”
- Cardinal Basil Hume, OSB -

The crucifix, which is a cross with the body of Jesus displayed on it, is such a strange religious image. For those who are not familiar with the mystery that it conveys, the image of a half-naked man nailed to a cross is crass and almost grossly graphic. Why not a nicer image, such as the resurrected Christ in glorified robes and a crown, against a plain cross in the background, with perhaps a sunrise as well? Some cultures even accentuate the negative effect, with the figure of Christ bleeding profusely, displaying sad eyes and a suffering expression. Why would we want to look at that? It both attracts and repels us. Why is that? What attracts us to it, and what are we afraid of?

     Both fascination and fear are bound up with the crucifix. The image fascinates because it is strangely compelling and it elicits fear because there is pain involved. Frank Sheed used to say that after all his studies and reflection and prayer, the only real thing that he could say about the mystery of redemption is that only God could do it, and it hurt. The fact that God is the main character is fascinating, but the fact that it hurt and may hurt us if we take it all seriously is cause for fear. Even when love is part of the picture, perhaps especially so, fascination and fear kick in big time.

     This combination of fascination and fear is not a new one. There was the classic description by Rudolf Otto of the “numinous” reality of divine presence and power as  “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” in the 1923 publication The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press). Subsequently, this description struck a chord with people, and authors as diverse as Carl Jung, CS Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Carl Sagan, and Richard Dawkins have built on Rudolf Otto’s work.  A quotation from Huxley gives a good notion of what is meant: “The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.”

     Our own human experience provides plenty of examples of the same sort of encounter. There is the range of vicarious, fascinating/fearful enjoyments, such as the tragedies of Shakespeare, the popularity of UFO’s and horror movies, or the attraction of Halloween. There are the Xtreme games (online or not) and TV shows, car-racing and encounters with bears. There is the more personal sort of version, which includes learning a new language, dating and friendship, keeping a pet or a garden, and figuring out what to do with your life. All of life’s pieces have both a fascinating and fearful aspect to them, according to one’s history, approach, perspective, and follow through.

     When a crucifix is seen as a focused, fascinating, yet fearful symbol of how life is and/or may be, then the key dimension of love jumps to the fore. Parker Palmer once wrote that we must "...allow love to inform the relations that our knowledge creates." We have to work to allow love to happen. God’s love, however, is a constant reality, available to us through the mystery of Jesus Christ, and available to others through us. In Anthony Bloom’s words, “At times one can give one's own life more easily than offer unto death the person whom one loves beyond all; and this is what God, our Father has done. But it does not make less the sacrifice of Him who is sent unto death for the salvation of one person or of the whole world. … We will never be able to experience what it meant for Him to die upon the Cross, even our own death cannot disclose to us what His death was: how can Immortality die? But what we can learn, what we can discover by communing ever more deeply, ever more perfectly through a daring, wholehearted endeavour with the life, and the teaching, and the ways of Christ - what we can learn is to love in a way that approximates more and more to that love divine, and discover in this love the quality which unites death as forgetfulness of self, ultimate and perfect, with the victory of love, Resurrection and eternal life.”

The Seminar of Life

Earlier this week I attended a small evening seminar at SMU (Singapore Management University), hosted by one of the professors there whom I had met some months ago at a dinner. He turned out to have been friends with two Brothers in California who were also good friends of mine (both have now passed on). We had some fine conversations that evening at dinner, and we have since met several times. This was the first time, however, that I was on “his turf” participating in an event such as this. The topic of the informal seminar was university education in Singapore. The people in the room were from various backgrounds and were currently involved in a variety of professions. But most of them had been Fulbright scholars at one point in their lives, and most were native to Singapore. They were bright people with bright backgrounds who had a very wide range of present circumstances, ages, priorities, and daily lives; in other words, a great group with which to have a conversation about a serious topic.

I won’t try to represent or capsulize the conversation here, let alone tease out some sort of answer or conclusion about the present context and possible future of university education in Singapore, based on that seminar. But I will try to relate the foundational thrust represented by the simple fact that it even took place.

We all have an abiding interest in engagement and knowledge, whether through words, or pictures, or symbols, or relationships, or tinkering, or play, or any of a hundred other activities. Our drive is to know and to be engaged in that knowing. Some may do so better than others, but I will bet that most of us remember when we have done so well, and we appreciate it all the more in the remembering.

During my mid-life years (38-41) at Boston College, one of the most enlivening and deeply satisfying aspects of my studies was the doctoral seminar, a time when the 6 – 8 candidates in the program (all sorts of backgrounds, interests, ages, futures, etc.) got together for 2.5 – 3 hours of conversation around a fairly difficult text or topic, with the guidance of one of the top professors in the department. I must say that those conversations are still with me, not so much in the detail as in the effect. When you sit with clever and articulate colleagues to talk about things that are important, there is an engagement of depth that is as hard to describe as it is difficult to shake off. It is a sort of falling in love with thinking and talking, of being slapped by fascinating ideas and twirling novel connections in the mind, of following fascinating trails behind another’s mental steps, picking up on their enthusiasm even as you stop every once in a while to gaze around at the new – to you – environment. Even if others believe that there’s an ivory tower aspect to the whole thing, at least you can’t argue with the fact that conversations like this invite us to look at the used-to-be-normal landscape from a new height. Like experiencing a wonderful piece of music, something sticks.

The same may be encountered, albeit to a lesser degree, in the things we choose to read or see or think about. Everything around us has the potential of being a catalyst for engaged knowledge. One of the most fascinating things about education, especially perhaps about a program such as the IB, is that that this sort of this becomes the rule, habit, and goal, the expectation rather than the exception. Within the Christian context, the notion is best conveyed for me by Nicholas Lash: "To think as a Christian is to try to understand the stellar spaces, the arrangements of micro-organisms and DNA molecules, the history of Tibet, the operation of economic markets, toothache, King Lear, the CIA, and grandma's cooking--or, as Aquinas put it, 'all things'--in relation to that uttering, utterance and enactment of God which they express and represent. To act as a Christian is to work with, to alter or, if need be, to endure all things in conformity with that understanding."

I really enjoyed that short, one-hour seminar at SMU earlier this week, even if I said very little and listened quite a lot. Sort of like prayer, I suppose. It was the kind of thing that provided food for a hunger that may be rarely acknowledged but is always part of our makeup. The appropriate response is thankfulness, and I thank my friend for having made it possible. May we all be able to do the same for others in our own small ways.

The Risen Christ in Our Lives

This week it’s something different. Geoff Wood is someone whose writings are little known to the general population. He writes for his parish in Sonoma, CA, and I’ve spent a wonderful morning speaking with him. He writes a weekly reflection on the Sunday Gospel. This reflection is for the Gospel for this Sunday (John 15: 12-15), when Thomas learns more than his pessimism might allow for. Geoff’s other reflections are online: http://angelacentergeoffwood.blogspot.sg/ I decided to substitute this one for mine this week because 1) I can’t think of anything better to say, 2) his words describe something that echoes my own experience, and 3) it’s good to share interesting reflections by other people. On the weekend when we celebrate Buddha’s birthday, the openness of the human spirit to realities thought to be beyond our reach is a good thing to think about.

“I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.”

With startling rapidity the faith of our civilization seems to be slipping away.  As recently as my childhood Catholics and Protestants for the most part didn’t question their creed.  They were born into it and, as they grew up, it was reinforced by a prosperous Church, plenty of priests and ministers, family solidarity.  We had no doubts where we came from cosmically.  The catechisms were full of answers that were easily memorized.  The sacraments were accompanied by gestures that had become habitual, collectively uniform.  Now, I am speaking as an old man; I’m not sure someone born even 30 years ago has had the same experience.  But that’s my point!  Times have rapidly changed.  The ethnic, creedal solidarity we once assumed had been around forever has broken up.  People of different cultural and even global background have become our neighbors.  And then, 300 years of secular philosophies, of the “supremacy” of science over religion have reduced Christ, for example, to another Socrates, at best – and all options seem open as far as what truth might be.

                And so I read today on the Internet a blurb by an ex-Catholic who boasts of his newfound freedom – from the whole “myth” he was taught in his youth.  He doesn’t take the Gospels seriously either literally or metaphorically.  He now embraces an existence (for his kids too?) that stops dead at death!  And yet he’s laughing.  Obviously he has not reached 40 let alone 50.  And he is raising his children as dogmatically in his skepticism even as he was raised dogmatically in Catholicism.  Except again – there’s that Berlin Wall called death that he’ll have to deal with some way or other – or steel himself to it with a display of theatrical defiance?  But is it his fault?  One must admit our Christian tradition shares the fault.  The essence of biblical and liturgical theology poorly taught, poorly understood even by teachers can contribute to disenchantment.  Young people in this day and age and under the influence of bright atheists or agnostics are going to be better impressed.

                But is it, after all, a matter of a better Christian education?   Teaching, be it “literally” or “abstractly” done, won’t be enough.  What has to happen is “conversion”.  This being the Pentecost season, we should be aware that conversion happens when one wakes up one morning a different person, suddenly alive, aware of a spark having been struck in one’s mind, one’s imagination, one’s soul.  The mission of teaching is to arrange the dry grass and wood chips, to strike the flint, to create the spark – in other words educate in a way that allows a tongue of fire to enkindle a blaze of genuine, living faith, hope and love within even possibly a 60 year old Catholic who may have recited his creed his whole life long - but never with a “tongue of fire”.

                “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.”  Jesus said this at the Last Supper and scholars think he’s foretelling his coming resurrection when he will deepen his disciples’ understanding of what he is all about.  Yet those words are addressed to you too – that if in fact what you have learned about Christ and his mission and origin is still a lot of “information” or piety – then he is telling you there is more to come.  It will not just be a good course in theology.  It will be that waking up one morning aware of a depth and expanse to this universe far beyond the range of any telescope, a sense of a grace permeating creation that becomes a turning point you will never be able to reverse or explain to others.  It means suddenly seeing the risen Christ and dropping to your knees not in a servile way but with astonishment and blurting out: “My Lord and my God.”   - Geoff Wood

Founder's Day 2013

St. John Baptist de La Salle wasn’t always a saint. He was given that title 180 years after he had died. He was made a saint because what he did made such a big difference to so many people, especially people who were involved in teaching and in schools.  And in 1950, on May 15^th, he was also made the Patron Saint of All Teachers. He is the one that teachers can pray to for help when they need some help. That is why May 15^th is celebrated as Founder’s Day in many Lasallian schools.

     The saintly things that John Baptist de La Salle did were not amazing building projects, impressive miracles, or rousing speeches. He wouldn’t have been on the front page of the newspaper, or be mentioned in a blog, or be a singing sensation, or be part of a famous sports star. Those things may have their value, but most of the people who become famous that way usually aren’t saints, and most saints usually aren’t people who become famous that way.

     Instead, John Baptist de La Salle became famous because he did something that each one of us can do. He decided how he wanted to live his life, what kind of person he wanted to be, and then he followed those decisions. Saints make choices that they follow with stubborn consistency.

At some point in life we all figure something like this out. We have to figure out what direction we want to take. It’s a very basic decision because it’s not so much a decision about a career than it is a decision about our basic direction in life. Some people make it and follow it like a laser beam. Others take a longer time and do it gradually. The deliberate kind of decision is like that of a large whale swimming in the ocean, majestic and focused, slow and deliberate, concentrating on one direction and one direction only. The whale decides to go one way and the rest of the body follows. The alternative is more like a large school of smaller fish, where the final direction comes about because of a thousand little decisions, all of whom seem to be independent and without much direction individually. But because they get multiplied and effect all kinds things around them, it's soon apparent to others that a general choice has been made. Therefore, one small but deliberate decision about our life can lead us in a particular direction. But even if we don't make such a choice, all the little decisions that we make every day, in effect, do the same thing.

     For St. John Baptist de La Salle, he made such decision when he was about eleven years old and decided that he wanted to become a priest.  He stuck to that decision and eventually did become a priest, even though it wasn’t easy. But just when he thought that his life was now set, the whole thing changed. The big and deliberate choices were no longer as important as the small, daily ones. (Researchers  say that an average adult makes up to 35,000 decisions every day.) One set of these small decisions led him to do something that he had never even thought about doing, starting schools, training teachers, and beginning the Brothers Order. He said that God “made it happen in a small, hidden way and over a long period of time so that one decision that I made led to another in a way that I did not foresee in the beginning, until I ended up doing something that I really never thought I would do.”

     That’s a great lesson from De La Salle’s life for this year’s Founder’s Day. What we do with the thousands of decisions that we make every day is actually more influential than the one decision we made when we were much younger. They’re both important, but the ultimate effect of those small daily choices is what brings about our real future, shapes our true character, and defines our lived life. Therefore, things like the virtues and character and a compassionate heart end up being the actual guide for all those small choices. Paying attention to the inside parts of who we are will lead us to much more interesting places and people than paying attention to the outside parts of who we are. That was the experience of St. John Baptist de La Salle, and it can be our experience too.

Happy swimming.

Death and Life - Blessing and Curse

“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.

Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” 

(Deut 30:19)

This quotation came to mind as I was thinking about the issues surrounding a recent video that was posted by one of our students to express his frustration with those who choose to stereotype others and who use anonymous (or not so anonymous) means to be hurtful and mean, especially via current social media. Another word that might be used to describe the gratuitous, intentional act of demeaning another person is the word “evil” and all that it implies.

While this word may bring to mind images of fierce-looking beings from Gustave Dore’s drawings for Dante’s Inferno, in actual fact some of the more evil people in the world are and have been, to all appearances, the most common of men and women (characters from The Hobbit notwithstanding). It’s only in police photos that suddenly those who commit crimes look glum, expressionless, unappealing and ruffled; sort of like we look when we look at ourselves in the mirror each morning, which in itself is a good reminder that there is this same capacity for evil within each of us, and we neglect paying attention to it at our own peril. “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” (GK Chesterton)

Traditionally, committing a sin is doing something evil, whether to a smaller degree (venial sin) or to a great degree (mortal sin). The three conditions that are given for deciding whether something is a mortal sin are also good gauges to see whether something is just a really bad thing to do. First, it must be something that is a grave matter, something that has serious consequences and truly breaks relationships with others and with God. Secondly, it must be something that is done with full knowledge, with a clear notion that this is something that will hurt others seriously. Thirdly, it must be something that is done with deliberate consent, with the conscious decision to do something that you know to be bad. The Catholic Catechism gives a straightforward definition: “Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbour caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity.” (CC1849) Bad is bad even for the bad, because it is the good that defines our core.

Hiding behind an anonymous identity makes evil easy and even appealing. If others cannot hold us responsible, and if we don’t have the capacity to hold ourselves responsible, then all those hidden parts of our nature, the dark corners where the bad bits dwell, have an opportunity to come out.

Gollum wasn’t a bad guy when he started his life, but things went from bad to worse when what he thought was precious wasn’t, and what he thought was evil wasn’t. That’s the glamour of evil. When rain-water discovers a hole in the roof, it begin to drip into the house and ends up making things quite messy, uncomfortable and finally unliveable for everyone. But some people just get used to it.

The fact is that we have a choice, that we can make a choice. That is what the quotation on top is all about. The fact of being able to choose makes it possible for us to drift towards the evil side of things or to the good side of things. The habits of choice that we develop, drip by drip, shape the character we become. Things like anonymous identities, letters or postings, spoken words (gossip), and the like don’t have to be used for bad things, but they are unfortunately more likely to be used that way. It’s a problem that is related to what the church calls the “Original Sin” that is part of our nature, whereby we are “subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.” (CC396) The tendency to doing bad things draws us with a thousand shiny baubles, while that of doing good things seems to require more work. The moral life is not reached for free.

We move our souls each day by the choices we make, online or not, and so change our world and the world of others for good or ill and in ways unknown and unimagined. It pays to pay attention.

The Mystery of Understanding

This is a small trek into the jungle of understanding, largely because I am in the process of reading a book called “Discerning the Mystery” by Andrew Louth. The topic is that of theology as an essentially non-rational human encounter with the divine (my words, not his). The subtext seems to be that reason is over-rated, at least when it comes to serious things having to do with God. The trouble started because of the effects of the Enlightenment, which have led to a sort of fatalism, whereby “conscious that other men were men of their time, we are conscious of the way we belong to our time and feel constrained to think in certain ways.” Science determines all.

Into the mix comes Hans-Georg Gadamer – a great name if ever I saw one – who defends “an experience of truth that transcends the sphere of the control of the scientific method.” Science is one way of finding truth, but not the sole way. The author stipulates that “in reality science as a human pursuit of truth is much less privileged than the claims of the Enlightenment might lead us to suppose.” Elements such as tradition and the tacit dimensions of life, the non-propositional personal knowing based on unwritten rules and father-to-son sorts of skills and crafts (Cf.  Michael Polyani), reveal a pattern underlying any of the human apprehensions of truth , a pattern that is curiously similar to  that found in the writings of  the Fathers of the Church (early theologians from the first few centuries after JC). The point seems to be that one must essentially live the mystery of faith in order to gain any real understanding of it. Discerning or learning the truth of faith happens through the thoughtful and reflective living of all that “faith” refers to and is part of. There are no shortcuts. Thinking is not enough.

When Einstein was asked to provide the ultimate explanation of the world, he is reported as having said, “I cannot tell you in words, but I can play it on the violin.” You will perhaps smile at that answer as if it were a fleeting glimpse of an essential truth, but very hard to put into words.

Near the end of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas, probably one of the most prolific and revered theologians in the church, whose writings still form the backbone of much formal theology, had some sort of vision of things which made him exclaim, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.” Whatever it was that he saw, the understanding gained profoundly transformed his knowledge about knowledge, even though it was based on that first knowledge.

A friend of mine, presently a retired U.S. federal attorney, earned his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago in three years (a really smart guy). He told me that the “key” or “solution” in his 27-page dissertation came to him while walking to dinner one day. However, he said, he would never have found that insight or solution without all of the work that he had done prior to it. In other words, one must enter into something wholeheartedly in order to bring oneself to the place where understanding might emerge. To repeat a favorite notion that I have used before, from Herbert McCabe: As we enter into a mystery, we increase our capacity for understanding it.

Another way of making the point is via a poem about poetry by Billy Collins (apologies for not properly laying out the lines):  Introduction to Poetry “I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into the poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.”

What the Dog Knew

Some 30 years ago, when I taught 8^th grade at a Lasallian boarding school in California, the Brother in charge of the school somehow ended up with three German Shepherd puppies. In his eagerness to find someone to take them, he asked me to take care of one. And so it was that a piece of my education began. Over the subsequent months, “Bart” ate and you-know-what with great frequency, tugged at the leash as if it were all part of the game, grew excited at the least provocation, and generally made me more patient and tolerant of faults. Lesson One.

As he became older and better behaved, Bart grew to eagerly watch me during training periods in order to carry out the commands, generally tagged along whenever he could, liked to awaken me at 3 AM by fervently staring at me in the dark, 4 inches away, became part of the 8^th grade classroom routine where he spent most of the day, and generally contributed to the well-settled atmosphere of our learning environment. At the end of the year, the class insisted that he sit for his yearbook photo, which he did and which was included. Late one evening on my rounds, I discovered him in a school hallway, where a 5^th grade student was seated on the floor in a dark alcove, having temporarily escaped from the dormitory, petting him and saying things like, “Nobody understands me. Only you understand me, don’t you?” Bart just looked at him and licked his hand. Lesson Two.

When it was time to play and exercise, Bart knew it through my body language and the thousand little signals known only to those with limited vocal skills. Once out in the field, it was a time of great fun and running around, chasing here and there through the tall mustard grass, until exhausted he lay down content with even being tired, tongue lolling and bright eyes shining, happy to be alive. Lesson Three.

Several years later, when not so patient anymore with kids pulling his tail or sitting on his back, the new Brother in charge suggested that I find another home for him. After some searching around, I stopped by Guide Dogs for Independent Living, walked him into the vet center, and convinced the founder, who happened to be there, to take him as a breeder (great pedigree, well trained, impervious to loud noise, etc.). She sat on the floor, grabbed his nose with her hand, put her nose up to his, and silently stared into Bart’s eyes for a full sixty seconds. Then she said: “Okay.” I took the leash off and he obediently walked to the back, ready for his next adventure. Lesson Four.

A good number of years later still, when curiosity led to wonder led to inquiry, I found out the address of the rural family where he was boarded, now long retired. I drove out there, but the family wasn’t home. From around the side of the house came an old, partially blind German Shepherd who didn’t react much, until he did the smelling thing and heard my quiet voice say his name. Then his old tail began to wag and the head-shoving began. I sat on the ground and spent a good 20 minutes reliving old times, mostly in silence and some mumbling on both our parts. Finally I returned to the car, Bart walking to the familiar rear door as if to come along. One of the toughest things I’ve ever done. Imagine that. The last image is of an old dog in the rear-view mirror, standing in the middle of an empty country road, both of us going back to where life has brought us. Lesson Five.

Do I regret any of it? Not a bit. Would I change any of it? Very little. Are there parallels with the life of a teacher, or any life for that matter, and the nature of learning? You bet. 

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was right: “Knowledge makes a bloody entrance.”

The Gentle Power of Easter

The life, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are both an historical reality and a profound mystery. Much about the details of his life are simply lost to history. They were not recorded and not remembered. Specific incidents and statements were recalled by his followers, certainly topped by the mere fact of his resurrection (which they clearly never expected to really occur). But the vast majority of his life experiences are not available to be covered by a biopic on the History Channel, and he is not available for a sit-down interview with the latest TV personality. Try as we might, details are lacking.

Some may wish to know, for example, how he spent his early youth and what he was doing during his twenties. Others might be interested in finding out what it was like to be part of the crowd that listened to him speak, whether in a synagogue, on a noisy hillside covered with people, or next to a lakeshore as he preached from a boat anchored a little way off. Did he shout, sing, laugh, or tease? What was it like to walk with him on the road. (He did a lot of walking.) Was he happy, morose, serious, relaxed, or driven? Could he “connect” to people easily or was he relatively distant, despite his really good stories?

It’s good to acknowledge these sorts of curiosities, because they are the ones that shape our contemporary mode of preferred knowledge about individuals. We would like to know personal details because personal details bring someone closer to us, apparently, than if they were “merely” an historical figure who is vaguely known and vaguely remembered. And this would probably be true almost all historical personalities outside of our immediate experience.

The difference in the case of Jesus, it seems to me, is the impossibly consistent unity of perspective and content regarding who he was and what he did. Except for easily debunked outliers who give a quaint but strange picture of what Jesus “must have been like” or “probably did and said”, the vast bulk of written works about his life (e.g., Scripture scholars), his thought (e.g., theologians of all stripes), and his impact (e.g., all serious Christians) are remarkable consistent and uniquely impressive. Here was someone who in three years, or perhaps longer, was able to launch a movement that changed the world, and it was a movement whose substance centered around himself. For anyone else, such a thing would be ultimately empty, practically unsustainable, and more than a bit suspect. Yet in the case of Jesus, his followers, his message, his remembered and recorded words and actions, his very real and living spirit evident in those who unite their words and actions with him, and his daily transformative effect on real people who look to him for guidance and sustenance; these are all things that remain as miraculous and transformative as the apostles standing on the rooftops at Pentecost proclaiming the Gospel to the multi-lingual multitudes below them. Each Christian’s story is unique. Each Christian’s story is a very real and alive thing. Each Christian’s story is profoundly personal (potentially), for whom a whole new world stands open to be encountered. Each Christian is to be another Christ.

Therefore, during this Holy Week it is good to “see the point” of what we celebrate, recall, and make present. It is good to enter into the depths of what we find ourselves called to do as followers of Jesus Christ. And it is good to make our own the resurrection that gives life itself its transformative potential.

Saint Joseph - Patron of the Institute

The church celebrates the Feast of Saint Joseph on March 19th. Among Lasallians, he is held in special esteem because of his position at Patron and Protector of the Institute. De La Salle writes about him: "The Gospel makes us admire in Saint Joseph the care he had for the holy Child Jesus…You must have a similar great attention and affection for preserving or procuring the innocence of the children entrusted to your guidance…For you have been made responsible for these children just as Saint Joseph was made responsible by God for the Savior of the world." The very first seal of the Institute bore witness to this statement, bearing an image of Saint Joseph holding hands with a young Jesus.

For many Christians, St. Joseph remains a minor character in the lineup of saints, largely because we know so little about him. It’s as if he is a fictional or mythical character, communicating a strong but relatively hazy impression. “Oh yes, Odysseus. Wasn’t he the guy who fought that one-eyed monster?” “Oh yes, St. Joseph. Wasn’t he the father – well, sort of – of Jesus?”

Schools and institutions bear his name, but I doubt that most people ever really think about him and his role in the life of Jesus. Indeed there are precious few references to St. Joseph in the bible. But those that we have are quite impressive.

Here is someone who cares for Mary enough to marry her, despite the fact that she was “with child.” In his place, most of us would have doubted Mary’s story. Yet Joseph knew Mary, respected her, loved her, and trusted that she spoke the truth. That takes real, grounded faith.

Here is someone who pays attention to all of the ways that God communicates to us, including through dreams. Because of his trust in God, he marries Mary and later takes his family into Egypt in order to safeguard the child and mother, eventually returning to Nazareth and carrying on as if nothing special had happened. That takes real, grounded faith, humility and hope.

Here is someone who raises Jesus as any father at that time might, taking him to synagogue, teaching him about life and relationships and carpentry, having both casual and formal conversations on a host of topics, and generally shaping the boy’s personality and moral character. That takes real, grounded faith, humility, hope and the special charity of parents.

We associate Saint Joseph with goodness, watchful care, faithful service to God, a loving presence, and quietly working in the background of the greater drama about to unfold. When I think of him, I think of someone who is significantly older than Mary (not uncommon in those days) and cares for her out of a growing love and respect. For some years, he walked a lot beside a donkey (to Bethlehem and then to Egypt and back to Nazareth) and made all of the practical arrangements of life (places to stay, means of income, etc.). During the formative years of Jesus, he was the model of what “father” came to mean for him. Joseph played a significant role in providing the foundational experiences that developed how Jesus came to understand who God was and how God meant for all of us to know and love him. “Father” became “Abba”.

Many years ago I asked a holy priest how Jesus came to know that he was God’s Son. The priest thought about it for a minute and then said: “I suppose that he came to know that he was God in the same way that you and I come to know that we are a person.” In other words, it is a growing awareness, fed by reflection, experience, and prayer, which brings someone to a deeper understanding of who they are, or who they are meant to be. This was the experience of Mary, of Joseph, of Jesus, and of each one of us.

This deepening process of awareness doesn’t stop but is fed daily by what we do, say, think, and pray; something worth keeping in mind as we enter Holy Week. If this was true of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it can certainly be true of us. (Emphasis on can be.)