Launching a Semester

RANDOM NOTES OF GRATITUDE FOR AUGUST 26 - SEPTEMBER 2

“My first teacher: who taught me to put up with discomfort and not make demands.” — Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations Book 1: Debts and Lessons

A LITURGICAL BLESSING FOR THIS WEEK (Proper 16)
FROM THE 2019 BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER:
”Let your continual mercy, O LORD, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our LORD, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Friends,

Somewhere between medical fatigue, stubborn introversion, and a super stanky attitude, I prefer not to leave my house. My walls are my castle. My pugs glorify my court. Here contains my library, my desk, my chair, my Ramones coffee-mug, and my never-need to blush for that aroma. Is it melancholy? Self-centeredness? Slothfulness? Cynicism? Sure sure, a little bit. All of the above, a little bit. Welcome to life in skin.

Jesus once asked a crew of grumpy butts trolling a party¹, “who needs a doctor except the sick?” Translation: “who needs society’s sandpaper except a crusty old cuss?” And so, despite my rathers, I need the anthropological instrument of Out There to retune the isolated mess that is In Here. God relayed as much at Creation, rehearsed it with Israel, reinterpreted it with the Church, and reminds us still today, repeatedly: “go it alone and you’re hosed.” This notion, despite my many rhetorical efforts to insist otherwise, is not up for debate.

So where does that leave a career college instructor at a semester’s launch—one who, in the words of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, “would prefer not to”? Turns out, an unsavory but necessary task is fertile ground for sowing Better Vibes through gratitude. For reasons such as this, I practice writing Five Good Things each week. Gratitude fights fatigue, turns my inward gaze outward, and refreshes my attitude. Such are worthy results for a seemingly simple practice. After all, classes started today. Students arrived wide eyed, shielding nervousness behind cellular screens and giant energy drinks. These students are not responsible for my weariness, my hunker-down sensibility, my Gen X shoulder chip. They came to do their next big thing, for whatever reason, and my job is to help them towards it.

Dear LORD. The way He works, they’re here to help me, too. So it goes.

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FIVE GOOD THINGS AT A SEMESTER’S LAUNCH:
ONE, thank God for names. This past week, the week prior to classes, I printed class rosters and read through my students’ names. Then I read each name again audibly. Names convey identity. Names extract individuals from the faceless crowd. Notice the proliferation of names in Scripture—both God’s names and people’s names. God even changes people’s names at milestone moments. Abram becomes Abraham. Simon becomes Peter. Saul becomes Paul. On day one of my class, every student advances from the commonality of their first name (or nickname) to a professional suffix before their family name. On day one in our shared space, I am no longer Kevin, but Mr. Still. Same for my students. We enter a professional agreement, conferred upon them by a Mr. or a Miss. A few actually recognize the distinction, shimmying their shoulders up to fill the promotion. Back to reading through my rosters: the act of connecting my voice to each student’s name helps to reshape the blur of our approaching semester, effectively replacing “curriculum” with conversation. Such a shift does not relieve our tasks of their inherent ennui, frustration, or exhaustion, but it does reframe my approach to our moment. Suddenly, I no longer wake simply to “teach class”. Rather, I wake to meet Mr. P____ at 8:30, who is raising a son and working full time while attending school, or Miss H____ at 9:10, who asked to show me her artwork. Smash the alarm for “teaching”. Start the coffee pot for names. My students are characters in stories, and I want to see where these stories are going.

TWO, thank God for pleasant students and co-workers. Honey. Fresh air. Cool drink.

THREE, thank God for obnoxious students and co-workers. Patience. Humility. Sanctification.

FOUR, thank God for Sabbath. In a wedded union of teachers, my wife and I rest on Saturday. Our Sabbath, 24-hours seeking Shalom, is not a heroic affair. Rather, it likely appears pedestrian from the outside—a phone-less conglomeration of unrushed brunch, excessive coffee intake, meandering strolls, reading,² music³, low-audience writing⁴, pug maintenance, professional-grade puttering, quiet cafes, and as few spoken words as possible. On Sabbath, we feast on slowness and silence. By Thursday afternoon, I’m feigning for it—a pug salivating for bacon on the griddle, hankering for the sweet solace of hush. May my countrymen’s weekend productivity mark many headstones with gold stars and the floral homage of international mourners. Meanwhile, I’ll be napping. Amen and Selah.

FIVE, thank God for the quest. As I age, my energies wane while my curiosities mount in equal proportion. Perhaps I could score more sleep if I just paused the questions. But with only 73 to 97 years on the planet—give or take—the number of books, films, musics, and conversations I might relish diminishes with time. And so, I am grateful for access to fellow teachers and young scholars. I’m thankful my office sits directly above the school library. I’m glad for frequent calendar breaks to search out the hidden things. This semester we’re exploring brand new curriculum I wrote over the summer but have never attempted before. Win or lose, the next three months will be one long rehearsal in a fresh conversation. Seriously, I can’t even believe somebody pays me to attempt such a thing. As my friend and pastor Kathryn says, “Let’s go.”

Cheers.

1. Matthew 9:9-13 — my translation

2. On Sabbath all other reading from the week, whether career-based or leisure, pauses. Here on my desk I have a stack of “Sabbath reads”, primarily fuddy-duddy old books that keep me connected to a quieter, analog existence. We’ve got Longfellow’s Evangeline and Other Poems, Irving’s Sketch Book, Melville’s Encantadas, Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, some Coleridge and Tennyson, some Dickinson and C.S. Lewis, The Apocrypha. If the goal of Sabbath is to reconnect to a deeper breath, to the Ruach and Selah of God, I want to give my lungs room to expand. Entering into the past and “breaking bread with the dead”, as Auden said, provides room to exhale the constricting wind of modernity and appreciate the open fragrance of less cluttered horizons. I appreciate that old books can pave the way.

3. This past Saturday’s Sabbath platter: Makaya McCraven’s In These Times.

4. “Low-audience writing”: bad poetry, letters, journaling. Admittedly, I struggle to journal. It strikes me as self-inflated, a navel-gazing ink spill. But I’ve learned to use a planner to log conversations and artistic engagements. “Journaling” has evolved into an exercise in memory enhancement rather than self-expression. It’s proved more fun (useful?) that way.