July, 2010

I was glad to know that Emily Guck was going on for a stimulating Master’s program in Secondary Education at U Penn. She began not too long after graduating from SLU in May. Her current classes include “School and Society” and “Teaching and Learning in Urban Contexts.” I recently asked her what she is learning, and the following is what she shared and, naturally amigas and amigos, I want to share it with you.

It’s hard to articulate the energy I experience here. I am tired in ways I’ve never been. My eyes hang heavy like the like the saturated summer heat, but my breaking, enraged heart is effervescent. Through sleep deprived pallor, I glow everyday. I glow because here I get to spend everyday learning about being a teacher for social change. And everyday I am surrounded and supported by others who are just as committed to inquiry in practice, critical awareness of bias, and the tireless pursuit of providing every child in this country an education that’s worth something.

But what am I learning?

In the way of answers? Not much. But I have turned questions over to find more, deeper, less comfortable questions. I have been digging through history and rhetoric shifts and pedagogical movements to see how our seemingly insurmountable messes have been made. I am learning court cases. I am learning white privilege. I am learning the ghettoization of black America. I am learning the evolution of public schools. I am learning grade and education inflation. I am learning power structures, political corruption, and the curricular reinforcement of it all. I am learning that all children want to learn and be successful, even if they don’t show it to you. I am learning how Taesha sees the world, what Marquis thinks about violence in his neighborhood, why Nasir had a bad weekend. I am learning about Silly Bandz (they glow in the dark!). But mostly…

I am learning that I am in the right place. That I have meaningful things to say and do in this community. In this world. I am learning that I will never be done learning. I am learning that this thing I want to do is hard, it is never finished or perfected, it is always in process. Yes, I am learning that this is, and is going to be, very, very hard. But it’s the hard that makes it worth doing.

“By Final Judgment of the world you should understand
The destruction of injustice on earth
And the reign of the Spirit of Light and Truth, that’s to say Love.”

– Augusto Cesar Sandino
(via Ernesto Cardenal, Cosmic Canticle)

I am delighted to share the following essay by Chelsea Jaeger, who studied with me in the spring 2010 semester in a Spirituality of Service class.

Sometimes there are experiences so wonderful and pure that you swear you’ll never forget a single detail of the perfection. We want to preserve these rare events in our minds to treasure within our hearts and share with the people around us who truly care. But a human mind is wont to forget even the most important things in our lives far faster than we would want. Still it startles and scares me at times when I forget one of the villager’s names or the new Spanish construction words I learned. It’s been a month since I was there, but with everything that’s happened and all the things I’ve done since then, it may as well have been years. Sometimes it feels infinitely far away; the people, places, emotions I so longed to hold close seem merely to be dreams. Other times the floodgates of my memory open and everything is real again. I can hear, see, smell, and taste as if I were still there. The memories are boiled down to their simplest and most pure recollections, unaffected by the pressures of American culture and by my own faulty memory. I smile when I experience this, lost in the recalled perfection of that week abroad. Maybe it wasn’t the typical way for a college freshman to spend her first spring break, but I will surely never regret traveling to Guatemala and giving of myself to the people so desperately in need. And while I gave of myself in my time, my talents, and my treasures, I received far more in return from my Guatemalan Sisters and Brothers in Christ than I ever could have imagined. But maybe I should start at the beginning.

(more…)

1.

The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

–Ernst Bloch, Marxist philosopher

2.

[People] also ask frequently: “Where does your hope come from, how do you keep going?” Which seems to me a serious question, but composed out of insufficient evidence, a question having about it a certain immodest aura, which I’m being invited to stand under. (Should one stand under a light he did not kindle?) I like Phillip’s typically laconic answer: “Your hope is where your ass is.”

As in the case, I judge, of those who sit in. Or in another version: “Your hope is where your feet are” (as in the case of those who march). But hardly ever, in my experience, is one’s hope where his head is. Passing strange, to think of it, that those whose heads are presumably screwed on straight, should ask me, “Where is your hope today?”

Passing strange, and strangely true. Hope dwells in the posterior, or in the hands and feet. But hardly ever in that noblest of human members, whose functions, we are told, are to speculate and ponder and envision and calculate and predict and so all those things named by us, properly human. But in fact, so tragically and often: improperly inhuman.

–Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit priest

3.

Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change in the weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

–Rebecca Solnit, U.S. writer

for Sandra

Yet it was plain to us that by reckoning with Taha’s exceptional personality and poems, many of these American audiences were also reckoning for the first time with a Palestinian—not as a menacing or pitiable abstract concept but as a complex individual human being and a genuine artist who was, of all things, directly speaking to their hearts.

–Adina Hoffman, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness, 387

I know what you are going to say.
“I’m not even a poet!”
And you may be right (on one level)
But I am also right (on another level)
And I think Adina Hoffman would agree with me:
If she had had the pleasure of hearing you speak to the senior citizens
Or had lunch with you amid hundreds of SIUE students
Or witnessed you stand up to that moral fraud Elie Wiesel
Or inspected the photos of you exuberant and steadfast in Cairo
Or sat with us at any of those planning meetings of our fledgling group of concerned citizens for all the peoples of historic Palestine
Or saw you attending to your children
Adina would say—
“Yes, Sandra can do in her own way what Taha has done in his own way!”

I can see the men in suits and overalls, the students who slouch and study, the housewives who care and question—
I can see them meet your simplicity and complexity head- and heart-on.

I can see you telling your stories over and over, with jazz improvisation inspired in another church basement by that one set of fixed eyes in the second row, it’s worthwhile to speak to and for her alone.

I can see middle Americans (of class and region and awareness) witness
A radiant /gentle/determined/down-to-earth
Palestinian/American/mother/Quaker/police-puncher/activist/woman
—Foam-rubber dynamite—
Who bears witness to that which should make us squirm

And by the manner of your telling
You allow the seed of the (on-going) Nakba named
And the seed of the Resistance embodied
To find their home somewhere in our inner moral landscape.

Fifty years ago, one of the students in the civil rights movement said that
To be a revolutionary meant learning how to act out of the deepest silence.
I can see you telling the poem of your life that intersects with a thousand other poems/lives of the Palestinian people.
Maybe it would even be your own unique American-inflected shi’r hurr.
And I can imagine Taha Muhammad Ali listening, wryly smiling, and even wiping away a single tear.

What if the Supreme Roman Pontiff made an unprecedented decision?
What if he made it straight from his gut, his innards?
What if his calculating & rational mind did not hold sway?
What if he listened to the still, small voice within, and blurted out: This I must do?
What if he realized that, heretofore, he had been a bystander?
What if he could reel off all the likely forthcoming criticisms?
What if he listened imperturbably to Vatican officials’ scathing critique of his decision?
What if he privately took humble refuge in the example of Monseñor Romero?
What if he made a simple and strong statement?
What if he eschewed the language of the encyclicals?
What if he said he was going to devote some of the Church’s own resources?
What if he said he was going to sell off some of the Church’s riches, to put toward this effort?
What if he arranged to gather the urgent supplies and material?
What if he invited Jews and Muslims to join him?
What if he made a special appeal to 1,000 Catholics to make preparations to follow in his footsteps?
What if he offered to help subsidize their efforts?
What if he did a week’s worth of nonviolence training beforehand?
What if he exuberantly thanked Kathy Kelly and friends for their savvy, insight and dedication?
What if he refused security accompaniment and all the guarantees normally afforded representatives of a state?
What if he was consequently lambastd by Christians, Jews, atheists, liberals, and conservatives?
What if he gently smiled when told of the latest castigation, this time by a prominent Italian politician?
What if he said mysteriously to a confidante that he had experienced an epiphany?
What if he was told that there were even threats being made on his life if he followed through with such “a disgraceful, outrageous stunt”?
What if he said his life was not more important than their lives?
What if he mentioned that, yes, in his youth, he had been a fisherman?
What if he noted that, because of his decision, many Catholics around the world were no longer making contributions to their parishes?
What if he also noted that, while some Catholics left the Church, others, evidently, were coming back?
What if he held a prayer service before he went?
What if he insisted that it be simultaneously translated into Arabic?
What if he slept well the night before he left?
What if he had to be instructed in how to send Tweets?
What if he was prepared to wear jeans and a work shirt and a hoodie?
What if he spoke of the urgency of the situation to the few reporters who’d been told of his point of embarkation?
What if he and his companions all calmly boarded the boat?
What is he said his M.O. was to be cunning as a serpent, gentle as a dove?
What if this Pope and his companions were committed to break the siege?
What if they didn’t look back?
What if they were headed to Gaza?

–inspired by a proposal made long ago by Andrew Wimmer and Carol Leslie (before the U.S. commencement of “Shock and Awe” in Iraq)