Sunlight for My Students

As I prepare for next semester, in which I will teach four classes in lecture halls filled with about fifty students, I am encouraged by the advice of the first century rhetorician and educator, Quintilian. He offers an apology for public education to those who would prefer to hire private tutors for their children, claiming that in some subjects there is no limit to the number of students who can each receive the full value of their teacher's instruction. He explains with the somewhat self-aggrandizing metaphor:

The voice of the lecturer is not like a dinner which will only suffice for a limited number; it is like the sun which distributes the same quantity of light and heat to all of us. So too with the teacher of literature. Whether he speak of style of expound difficult passages, explain stories or paraphrase poems, everyone who hears him will profit by his teaching. (Inst. 1.2.14)

Is he right? Modern theories of pedagogy would tend to dispute his contention; but I will cling to it for now, drawing encouragement when I wonder if my expositions of difficult passages and explanations of beautiful narratives benefit my students and do justice to the writings of the New Testament.

We're All Prospectors

I recently read Farley Mowat's memoir Never Cry Wolf after watching the movie in one of my classes. The book recounts his year spent in the Canadian wilderness observing wolves. As a government scientist, he had been sent into the arctic wilds to prove the widely held assumption: the blood thirsty wolves, who often kill simply for the joy of the hunt, were exterminating the caribou population. They assumed his report would confirm the common wisdom and provide warrant for the extermination of wolves in the area. His first-hand research, however, led him to quite different conclusions.

The book is delightful, and I highly recommend it. Mowat's dry wit pervades the book, regularly leading to bursts of audible laughter for the present reader. His paradigm-shifting observations about the lives of wolves still fascinate several decades after his research.

Come to find out, the book is standard reading in California public schools, which explains my wife's otherwise inexplicable distaste for the movie. The film captured my imagination as a young boy. Images of a man eating mice and running naked with the caribou leave an indelible mark on a preteen. The movie faithfully adapts the book, though it addresses questions that Mowat does not raise in the book. I hesitate to say that the movie is better than the book, but its more complicated portrayal of the protagonist makes for rich analysis. I'll note two important questions/themes in this post.

First, the movie grapples with the paradox of human interaction with wilderness. Simply stated: humans long for and need wild places, but their very presence threatens to destroy the wildness they seek. Near the end of Never Cry Wolf, Tyler (for some reason the film-makers balked at naming their protagonist Farley) takes indirect responsibility for the killing of two wolves. Hunters killed them for their furs, but Tyler realizes that by establishing his observation camp near the wolf den, he pointed the hunters to their prey. Simply by seeing the wolves, he threatened them. When other wolves arrive to adopt the orphaned pups, Tyler turns his back and refuses to watch them leave. He doesn't want to see where they are going. If they are to remain wild, as they should, he cannot even look at them.

Second, the movie explores Tyler's ambiguous motives for going into the wild. We might be tempted to romanticize Tyler as a purist who loves the wild country and its inhabitants for their own sake. He is the virtuous, selfless foil for the selfish, greedy hunters, we might think. He cares about the wolves; they care only about money. An encounter at the beginning of the movie complicates such assumptions.

During his hair-raising flight into the Canadian wilderness, Tyler converses with the pilot, Rosie. Tyler has been reticent to talk about why he is traveling into the back country, and Rosie assumes he is hiding his plans to mine a valuable ore. Not a bad policy, Rosie notes; it's best to keep your plans close to the vest. Tyler assures him that he has no plans to mine, and Rosie responds, "We're all of us prospectors up here, Tyler."

In other words, Rosie affirms that people might find the wilderness valuable for different reasons, but they all exploit that value for selfish aims. For his part, Rosie sees unconventional value in the wild country. The real gold isn't in the ground, he tells Tyler. It's in the south, sitting on couches in living rooms, bored to death and needing adventure. The wilderness provides limitless resources of adventure, and when we encounter Rosie later in the movie, he is bringing rich adventure-seekers into the arctic to hunt wild game.

The movie does not explicitly reveal the nature of Tyler's prospecting, but I think Rosie's comment calls the viewer to explore that question. Is Tyler any less exploitative than Rosie? Or are they simply seeking different selfish ends? If Tyler isn't seeking money in the wilderness, what is he seeking? Is it simply the well-being of the wolves, or are there less pure, more selfish motives at play?

I plan to post more on this second question later, using insights from the writings of Aldo Leopold. In the meantime, what do you think?

Into the Wild to Kill the False Self

After watching the beautifully made film, Into the Wild, one haunting question continues to echo: Why does Chris McCandless venture into the wilds of Denali National Park in Alaska?

The words he scratches into a piece of scrap wood in the "magic" bus reveal he tramped into the wilderness to find freedom, to escape the poisons of civilization, to flee his family, and to embrace adventure. Most telling of all, however, McCandless refers to his great Alaskan adventure as a climactic battle "to kill the false being within."

Killing the false self is his primary motivation, I would contend, and he succeeds, though not in the way he expected.

McCandless wanders into the wilderness assuming that the "false self" in need of killing is the self defined by money and career and "success" of a certain type. It is the self created for him by his father, a self he despises. He shreds his credit cards, adopts the moniker Alexander Supertramp, and embarks on a journey of hitchhiking, camping, and canoeing. His time of penniless living on the road peels away those layers of false identity, leaving him with a purer, rawer sense of self. It is not enough, however. The false self still breathes, if only weakly, and so McCandless goes into the Alaskan back country to deal the final death blow.

Near the end of his time in Alaska, however, he discovers another false self--one created by himself, but one as equally as false as his father's materialism. He enters the wilderness believing himself to be the strong, independent wanderer who loves life, who experiences it first hand apart from the buffer of civilization, and, most importantly, who needs no one. Throughout the film he shuns relationships. He's not anti-social--he makes friends easily and engages in meaningful conversations--but he doesn't need people, or so he thinks.

One conversation with his friend and surrogate grandfather Ron Franz reveals much. He tells Ron, as they sit together on a promontory overlooking the desert, "You are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience." Meaning comes from experiencing the world around us, he claims, not from relationships with others. In his own family life, relationships have been marked by lies and deception and posing. He wants truth. He wants real experience. He tells Ron, "The core of man's spirit comes from new experiences," and he encourages him to leave his lonely house and see something new.

Ron promises the twenty-three year old McCandless that he will "take stock of that," and then he offers some reflections of his own. He tells Chris, "when you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines through you." On cue, the sun breaks from behind the clouds and shines on their perch.

McCandless doesn't initially understand (or at least appreciate) Ron's wisdom. Ron reminds McCandless of the divine beauty of human relationships, without denying his praise of new experiences. Sure, one might find enlightenment in the wilderness, but God reveals himself much closer to home. The divine light is seen even more clearly in the love of forgiveness. McCandless' false self of rugged independence shrugs off such sentimentality, however, and McCandless eventually leaves Ron to follow his quest to Alaska.

McCandless initially exults in his Alaskan solitude. But as the weeks progress, he finally feels loneliness. He highlights a passage in Leo Tolstoy's Family Happiness, indicating the beginning erosion of the false self:

"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others. . . . I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people for whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor--such is my idea of happiness."

Later, he even writes in the margins of a book, "Happiness only real when shared." He came to Alaska to "kill the false being within," and now he has succeeded. The strong, independent wanderer who needs no one, Alexander Supertramp, has died.

The final scene of redemption confirms his transformation. Suffering from the final stages of starvation, he writes a farewell note and signs his name, Christopher Johnson McCandless, claiming the family and the father he despised and abandoned. Then, as he lies down and prepares to take his last breath, he has a vision of the homecoming he'll never experience. He meets his parents in front of his childhood Atlanta home and embraces them, the smile spreading across his face. The prodigal has finally come home. He's finally forgiven his parents. On cue, the sun breaks from behind the clouds and shines on his tear-stained face as he gasps his final breath.

Nature Reveals by Concealing

In preparation for a class I will teach this summer, The Motif of the Wilderness in Christian Thought and American Life, I am reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She finds time in nature to be a spiritual experience, as I do, but she experiences God differently than I do.

When I think of "wilderness," I'm inclined to imagine wild, harsh landscapes--like the high Colorado peaks I explored while growing up--places where God reveals himself in humbling, undeniable grandeur. Dillard, on the other hand, focuses her attention on small intricacies: the reflected light in a creek, the flash of a fish in a stream, the sudden appearance of a bird in a tree. These experiences certainly communicate the power of God to her. She comments that when she walks into the wilderness, "I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something that sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell" (14). Indeed, she states that in our interactions with the created order, "Something pummels us, something barely sheathed" (15).

God's power is not the only thing experienced in nature, however. The brief flashes of light in a creek or the surprise flight of a bird is revelatory in another way: it is easily missed. "Unfortunately," Dillard laments, "nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. . . . For nature does reveal as well as conceal" (18). In this way, nature confronts us with the hiddenness of the divine. Unlike the majestic peaks, which can be witnessed by all who take enough steps to approach them and can be revisited as often as one makes the effort, the flash of a fish in a stream, seen only in the periphery of our vision, catches us by surprise and then disappears before we can focus on eyes on it. God is more like that, Dillard wants to say. The pearl of great price, she notes, can be found but not sought. "The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and total surprise" (35).

Thus for Dillard, nature communicates something important about God through its propensity to conceal itself in the transitory, surprising, flashes of revelation. They are powerful flashes, pummeling us or striking us like a bell, but they are equally mystifying. They generate longing more than satisfaction. This is Dillard's God--a mysterious, oft-hidden, consuming fire.

I plan to ask my students this summer, "Is this the God revealed in the Christian scriptures? How does Dillard's experience with nature correct how we imagine God? Where might she lead us astray?"

What do you think?

Life Everlastin'

Earlier this week I discovered and read a short play by one of my favorite authors, The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy. I'm still ruminating on the work, and have yet to make any definitive judgments. At times it was heavy-handed; at times it was illuminating. It certainly deserves and rewards further thought.

The setting of the play is simple: two unnamed men, one white and one black, are sitting in the black man's apartment having a conversation. They know very little about each other and were only brought together earlier that morning when the black man "saved" the white man from jumping in front of a train, the Sunset Limited, to commit suicide. The black man, an ex-con who had a vision of Jesus in prison, tries to detain the white man, a professor whose education has slowly led him to a stubborn nihilism, because he fears the man will make a second attempt to take his own life.

The conversation ranges widely, revealing tid bits about each man's past along the way. The black man persistently prods the white man in an attempt to uncover the reason he wishes to kill himself until the white man finally erupts in a nihilistic tirade in the last pages of the play. At the end, the nihilist appears unchanged, and the play closes on the black man questioning God.

For the record, I don't believe McCarthy to be a nihilist. How could a nihilist go to the work of creating great art? What would be the point? He certainly gives full voice to that position, however, in this and other works. His purpose, I believe, is to explore what he believes to the malaise of our age, a steady loss of a moral foundation in a post-Christian culture. He explores the problem by incarnating nihilism in various forms in his novels, and the white man in The Sunset Limited is the baldest expression belief in nothing.

I write this post to share a thought-provoking statement the black man makes as he tries to diagnose the white man's problem. The white man repeatedly asserts there's nothing wrong with him. He simply sees the meaninglessness of it all, he claims, and chooses to do the only sane thing: kill himself. The black man never accepts this answer, however, and he continually digs for another reason for the white man's despair. Maybe it's a total lack of community or the loss of his father or a string of bad luck. About mid-way through the play, the black man shows his cards and reveals what he thinks is the source of the white man's pain.

BLACK: Suppose I was to tell you that if you could bring yourself to unlatch your hands from around your brother’s throat you could have life everlastin?
WHITE: There’s no such thing. Everybody dies.
BLACK: That aint what he said. He said you could have life everlastin. Life. Have it today. Hold it in your hand. That you could see it. It gives off a light. It’s got a little weight to it. Not much. Warm to the touch. Just a little. And it’s forever. And you can have it. Now. Today. But you dont want it. You dont want it cause to get it you got to let your brother off the hook. You got to actually take him and hold him in your arms and it dont make no difference what color he is or what he smells like or even if he dont want to be held. And the reason you wont do it is because he dont deserve it. And about that there aint no argument. He dont deserve it. (He leans forward, slow and deliberate.) You wont do it because it aint just. Aint that so? (Silence.) Aint it?

The black man comes back to this premise briefly near the end of the play:

I got to say that if it was grief that brought folks to suicide it’d be a full time job just to get em all in the ground come sundown. So I keep comin back to the same question. If it aint what you lost that is more than you can bear than maybe it’s what you wont lose. What you’d rather die than give up.

The theological validity of the black man's position is open question to me at this point. He's clearly the voice of Christianity in the play, but I'm not sure how closely McCarthy's depiction of Christianity adheres to the real thing. Nor am I sure how closely McCarthy intends it to adhere. It's too early for me to decide. What do you think? Does the black man, in his attempt to diagnose the white man, express something true about human nature? Does he give voice to a Christian understanding of the human situation? More importantly, does that voice powerfully address the challenge of nihilism?

Travel Agent or Tour Guide?

I recently finished Simple Church by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger (and, yes, I realize I am probably late to this particular party). The book was skim-worthy and overly colloquial for my tastes, but I found myself repeatedly nodding my head. I might not embrace the answers they propose in their case studies, but they push church leaders to ask the right questions: What do I expect "disciples" to look like in my congregation, and what process will help people become disciples?

Rather than offer a full review of the book (I'm sure many thorough reviews have already appeared since the book was published in 2006), I'd just like to relate one convicting metaphor:

"There is a major difference between a travel agent and a tour guide. . . . A travel agent spouts out intellectual information, hands you some brochures, and smiles. A travel agent tells you to enjoy the journey. 'Nice to meet you. Enjoy the trip.' A tour guide is different. . . . Unlike the travel agent who hands you a brochure, he goes with you on the journey. 'Nice to meet you. Get in. Let's go.'

"People need spiritual tour guides. They have had plenty of spiritual travel agents. Be a tour guide through the process of spiritual transformation in your church. Take people on a journey with you."

As church leaders, we must constantly ask ourselves if we are telling people to enjoy the journey or joining them on it. Does my ministry consist of brochure making or actual trekking?

On the Occasion of a New Birth

Like lightning in the humid night sky
Blessing flashes brightly in a moment
And gratitude swells and rolls
Like thunder rumbling below the stars.

Thank you thank you thank you
For sending your rain on the righteous
And the wicked.