Richard Cory and Roland: Support and One to Grow On

For my previous post about the myth of money, I was reminded of the poem "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson in this morning's sermon.  As I said here, the knowledge of the failure of money to satisfy is not new (it seems to have always been a favorite reflection topic from the wise and poets). But this poem, published in 1897, is a stark example of the foolishness of longing for and envying wealth and what accompanies it.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked,
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--
And admirably school in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Also, looking forward to the next posts about growing our students in their likeness to Jesus:  I have been reading a good bit of medieval literature about knights and such to prepare for this year's history section at Veritas.  In the last weeks I've read Beowulf, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Song of Roland so far.  (Also, thanks to my newly received present of bagpipes, Braveheart is on in the background as I work.)

Besides feeling like I am a complete wimp (I have yet to unhorse even a single squire, nevertheless a great knight), I was struck while reading The Song of Roland how masculine and yet emotionally passionate the knights are.  I have been reminded of David and Jonathan's character and friendship a great deal. There is a rawness, an unbridled passion that exists in these Men. A few examples of how this passion comes out in what we might even consider "feminine" or "un-manly" ways, weeping and swooning.

The count Roland, when dead he saw his peers,
And Oliver, he held so very dear,
Grew tender, and began to shed a tear;
Out of his face the color disappeared;
No longer could he stand, for so much grief,
Will he or nill, he swooned upon the field. (Stanza 164)

Clear was the night, the moon shone radiant.
Charles laid him down, but sorrow for Roland
And Oliver, most heavy on him he had,
For's dozen peers, for all the for all the Frankish band
He had left dead in bloody Rencesvals;
He could not help, but wept and waxed mad,
And prayed to God to be their souls' Warrant. (Stanza 184)

It is essential to keep in mind that just prior to and following these quotations, Roland, Oliver, the Archbishop, and Charlemagne are killing men by the thousands, in especially brutal ways; we are not talking about Scarlett O'hara's fainting spells due to heat.  In the Song's vision of Men there is no problem for these valiant, virtuous men to confess their sins (or receive confession in the case of the Archbishop), ride into battle, kill the enemy, refuse to concede or retreat even when vastly outnumbered, weep and faint for lost friends, and then ride back into battle.  These men were Men.

How will we make such men and women of virtue and passion as of old? How might we disciple and train up men and women "with chests", as C. S. Lewis calls them in The Abolition of Man? We could be cynical and say that such "Great Men" never really existed, that they are a fabrication of the poet and pseudo-historian, but something deep within us testifies to the reality of the men of old. The world and God need such People badly, but institutes of education all around us are training children up in a way that will squash anything that might lead in the direction of true Humanity.  Lewis remarks:

"And all the time--such is the tragicomedy of our situation--we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

More soon.

Reflection Weekend Thoughts (part 2)

"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you." 

-David Foster Wallace

 "Ecce, homo!" ("Behold, the Man!")  John 19:5

We are all lovers. We are all purpose driven. The question is what do we love? At what purpose are we aimed? David Foster Wallace hit it right on the mark only a few months before his tragic death. Whatever we worship, whatever we hold in awe, it will completely consume us. It will consume our passions, our time, our money, our all.  No matter who you are, or what you pretend to believe (or not believe), there is some goal you are aimed at, there is some idea of "the good life" you are pursuing.  If you don't believe me, just watch 3 commercials.  They will all paint for you a picture of the good life, the "blessed man".  Michelob Ultra will tell you that, "Blessed is the man who drinks a light beer, for he shall keep off the calories he has burned during his workout."  Lexus confesses, "Blessed is he whose sports car is perfect, for so shall he be perfect." And finally, Taco Bell preaches, "Cursed is the one who eats the food of the old, for he shall not inherit the hip-ness of the waffle taco."

These are silly examples, but one of the most important things to realize as members of Western society, is that the world all around us is built to shape the way we view "the good life".  The happy man is the man whose wife (or girlfriend) is attractive, wears the right clothes, with the right high heels, and isn't too much of a nag, especially when the guys are over.  The happy woman is she who is able to go out with her girlfriends, who is the thinnest out of those girlfriends, and for whom men buy drinks.  Underneath all of these miniature myths of "happiness" is the myth of money.

The myth of money (and its related "myth of the job") is what enables us to buy the cars, beer, clothes, workout machines/gym memberships, bikes, houses, (need I go on?) that we need to be happy. The myth of money is what holds up all of the other sub myths. Money is Zeus, and everything else springs from its head. It is to the myth of money that every presidential candidate and mayor must pay homage, "I will boost jobs and reduce unemployment"; it is to the myth of money that even universities now must submit, "96% of our graduates find job placement within a year."

However, as people and as society, we are learning that money (and the stuff and "prestige" that come with it) does not satisfy. Chuck Palahniuk put it this way,
"We are an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy (stuff) we don't need... Our Great War's a spiritual war... We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact."
He is right.  The myth of money is old and dead. It perhaps hasn't been realized all the way through, but our level of decadence and depression with the myth of money is coming to its end. With what will we replace it?  Or, perhaps more to the point of this blog, what will our schools aim at, if not "good college placement so that our students can get good jobs"?

What I suggested in my last post is that we need a different aim as a school. As St. Augustine rightly observed in his Confessions, "We are all restless until we find our rest in Christ."   As a school, our aim is to make our students more Human by aiming them at Christ.  We want them to fall in love with Jesus. Our aim is to have kids walk out of our doors more Christlike than they walked in. Our aim then, in a word, is "discipleship" (from the Latin word disco-"I learn").  It is "training" or "discipline" that they need (also from disco) in the ways of true Love, as their loves and desires are horribly disordered.  They need to be trained up in the ways of true Humanity, and here is where Christ figures so centrally.

From ancient times education focused the eyes of the student on ideals.  Think of Pythagoras's pondering of triangles or the Golden Mean's hold on architecture.  The reason that art and mathematics (particularly geometry) developed to such an extent in the Greco-Roman world, and then again in the Renaissance, is that those who were studying and thinking were absolutely transfixed by the world of the ideal, by the image of perfection (remember the famous, "Is there such a thing as a 'perfect circle'?" debate).

The scholars especially would talk about what the blessed or happy or just man looks like in deed. What kind of life should you crave? What kind of person should you want your child to be? (See Juvenal's Satire X)  When we see Michelangelo's David, Michaelangelo is answering this question of the ideal as it pertains to beauty.  "What does the ideal man look like?"  This same question is answered by the Greeks with statues of Apollo and Hercules.  We might answer with a David of our own, Mr. David Beckham.  The question of beauty for women is answered in statues of Venus and in paintings of Bathsheba and Judith, Biblical characters described as especially beautiful to the eyes.  We answer with models on runways and cheerleaders on the sidelines of sporting events.

The concept of the ideal man/woman was called by the ancients the "tyrannical image".  It was literally an image/statue you couldn't hope to live up to.  It was an image that was terrible to look upon because it called you up to something higher and better than yourself, even while telling you that you could never reach that level of beauty or moral excellence. It was both infinitely encouraging and infinitely discouraging.

I want to suggest (following David Hicks) that Christ is that image for us and for our students.  He is the "tyrannical image" of MAN.  He is the second Adam. He is what we were and are supposed to be.  In Christ we see all that man's blessedness and happiness look like.  Humanity looks like living out the teachings of the Beatitudes (from beatus, which means "happy").

Before I have to sign off for this post, I want to add two rays of light to what Christ might look like as the tyrannical image.
"We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." (Ephesians 2:10)
"Both the one who makes people holy (Christ) and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters." (Hebrews 2:11)

These passages contain 2 basic elements that will shed light upon our future reflections on training our students up for following Christ: 1. God is the one who has made and is making us holy. It is through the sacrificial death of Jesus that we are made perfect. It is not our doing.  2. God very closely identifies with us ("brothers and sisters") and takes part in our working, not only with our salvation, but with what follows afterwards. This working, as the author of Hebrews makes clear later in his letter, includes both great times of success and discouraging times of failure.

Jesus as the tyrannical image of perfect Man dares to call us to to join him in his blessedness; he does not simply speak of our failure to measure up to his greatness. He calls us to join him in true Humanity as family.  The "tyranny" of the image is diminished significantly when we realize that we are his heirs and family. He died so that we too could be revealed as the glorious sons and heirs of his Kingdom.

Reflection Weekend Thoughts, part 1

Holy Face by Georges Rouault

"We must have some concept of the kind of person we wish to produce, before we can have any definite opinion as to the education which we consider best."

-Bertrand Russell

"Those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires...The mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace." "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed."
-The Apostle Paul, Romans 8

My posts this week will be a reflections stemming from our two days of teacher retreat last week.

Bertrand Russell, that philosopher who among other works penned Why I am not a Christian, could not be more right.  All education is goal oriented; it is teleologically ordered.  An apprenticeship program aimed at making HVAC repairmen will differ quite a bit from a soccer training program for FC Barcelona, and rightly so.  The aim of the one is to create a worker who knows electrical systems and common failings of machinery, the other aims at soccer tactics, fitness, and teamwork.  The one makes mechanics, the other athletes.  It is worth noting here that a football training school will be quite different from a football training school.  Preparation for American football will add in more weight training, upper body development, and quick reactions off the line, the other football will focus more on running and lower body finesse over the course of a long game. In fact, even different positions in the same sport will look at training differently. How does the goalie's education look different from the striker's? (By the way, what a performance from Tim Howard versus Belgium!)

Then the question we must ask as educators is, "What do we want to produce?" In the Christian tradition, we can ask, "What does God want us to produce?" or "For what end did the Creator create us and our students?"

These were the first ideas we talked about this past weekend, and the faculty came up with great definitions of humanity from Scripture, like:
"We are image bearers who exercise stewardship over the world as men and women." (Gen 1)
"We are glorious and bestowed with honor." (Psalm 8)
"We are the workmanship of God responsible for doing the work of God." (Eph 2:10)
"We are longing, unsatisfied, and hoping for justice. We are imperfect beings longing for perfection and beauty." (Eccl 3:11)
"We are forgetful. We are redeemed and yet often do not live that way." (Romans 12)
"Our children are gifts from the Lord and have infinite value." (Psalm 127)
"We are fragile, dependent on the Lord for life and salvation." (Job 14; Isaiah 44)

If this is who we are, then what is our purpose? Some of the purposes are already present in the "what is man?" answers. For example, if we are created to be present with the Lord but suffer from sin, we need to be perfected. We are longing for the new creation of ourselves. Here then were some of the purposes that flowed from the definitions of humanity:
"We are created to do the works Christ has laid out for us." (Eph 2:10 and Rom 4:11)
"We are created to have relationship with God. We are to know and fear him and delight in him and his creation." (Proverbs 2)
"We are to be still, be in awe, and worship." (Psalm 46)
"We are to be satisfied sitting with Christ." (Ps 65)
"We are to point others to Jesus by all means, with everything we do and are." (Matt 5:14ff)
"We are to love the Lord and those around us. We are to keep his commandments out of our love for him." (Matt 22 and Eccl 12:13)
"We are to cultivate and keep the creation as his image-bearing representatives."(Gen 2:15)

Simply put, what we are talking about is that we are to be images of God. We are to be Christlike, as Jesus the Messiah was the perfect representative and image of God. (Col 1:15)  So then, what does education look like that will cultivate and shape Humans, the sons and daughters of the second Adam? What kind of curriculum (literally, "course to be run") should be pursued if the finish line of the race course is Christlikeness?