No Excuse for Groundlings

A favorite story comes from a Danish philosopher named Kierkegaard. He describes a flock of ducks flying over the countryside, swooping and gliding.

One of the ducks suffers a kind of seizure and decides to leave the formation and land in a a farmyard below.  There he joins a flock of chickens, participates in the chickens' routines of feeding and sleeping and strutting about the farmyard. After a few days in that barnyard he decides he has the strength to fly again, so he tries out his wings. But he has lost his flying skills, and cannot fly. Then he sinks back into the chicken yard to resume his comfortable grounded life with the chickens.

That story reminds one of how easy it is to fall into an ordinary routine that loses touch with higher, more demanding ways of life. The apostle Paul pleaded:     

   

"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." That is a good reminder that we live in a world where profits and power are at a premium, where success trumps truth, where revenge and control are valued . . . where Christian virtues of compassion and forgiveness and humility and faith are frequently ignored. We choose many times a day between the conformity and a transformed way of life.

John Oxenham wrote "To Everyman there openeth a high way and a low and every man decideth which way his soul shall go".  And we know that daily  living requires choices. I recall with anguish a choice I made back in fourth grade. In taking a written test, I looked across the aisle to another pupil's sheet to get an answer.  The teacher clapped her hands and said in a loud voice, "Larry, you are cheating."  And I answered, "But other people are doing that too." She called back, "Never excuse yourself for doing what others are doing".

So I got caught in that chicken yard, a groundling who could have been flying.

"Oh yeah?" and "So what"?

Now that the new school year is under way, I am reminded of an experience I had as a classroom teacher.  During one semester a crew-cut boy sat in the front row of desks. Whenever I made an outright statement, he would say in a kind of murmur "oh, yeah?" or else "so what?"

I was startled for the first few times that happened. But as time went by, I learned how important his questioning was. First, could I stand by what I was teaching with authority? Did I know facts to back it up? What references did I have?

The second question asks "Is it important?" and "If so, why?"

I stated at one point that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. And with the "Oh, yeah?" ringing in my ears  I went on to explain Lincoln's determination to set aside compromise solutions to the Civil War despite the awful loss of life being experienced. His Gettysburg address and his second inaugural speech set his presidency in a truly patriotic frame.

Then came the "So what?" query. Despite the antagonism directed toward him, Lincoln's constant insistence that "a house divided cannot stand" and his constant reminder that "all men are created equal" gave a giant start to the civil rights movement. We came to understand that it was not only politically correct but a basic fact that "God made of one blood all nations of men."

So I learned a lot about teaching from that student. When we came to discussing Galileo as the founder of our modern scientific age, I faced the same two queries about the validity and the consequences of that definition. Galileo challenged the ingrained religious belief that the sun revolved around the earth and he was accused of atheism, contradicting so-called "revealed truth." He pursued the method of observation and repeated experimenting that gives us the means of understanding our world today.

In later years I stood in the church pulpit and preached about what Jesus said and did. There I discovered that the same two questions needed to be addressed. It was easy to cite Jesus' call to love our neighbor. He repeated the command and amplified it with parables. But then came the second caution, the "So what?"  Our neighbors surely include the homeless, the disabled, the foreign people in our community. What can we do to love them?  Analyzing their problems is a simple task. But spelling out a solution, answering the "So what?" is a demanding challenge. 

We do not need to be impressed by people who recite verses or even chapters from the Bible, the analysts who quote percentages, the historians who compare today's problems with past situations. They play a part in helping us understand our condition. But the big question remains: how do we give life to these teachings by our actions?  How do we love our neighbors of a different race, a different culture, a different level of society?

 The answer we give to that question is our real religion. 

The Biblical Tree

No matter how the story of the Garden of Eden is told, the focus lands on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But that meaning of that phrase (that Adam and Eve must not eat of that tree) is obscure; and it is not related to some translation judgment. The phrase is correctly translated, and  I think there is a profound message here.

The central idea is that having certainty of one's assessment of good and evil is impossible. When a human being defends his acts on the basis of KNOWLEDGE of good or evil, he is falsely judging his choice. The Garden parable suggests clearly that moral judgments may be based on outlook, prejudice, race, ethics, commands.......anything but knowledge. Every decision we make arises from our character; we are responsible; we cannot know that we are making the right choice. 

I think of the assessment of U.S. presidents: "we won't know whether he was a good president or not for fifty years."  Think of the bitter appraisal of  Lincoln's presidency that  prevailed through the rest of the 19th century, condemning his unwillingness to compromise, citing his opposition to the Dred Scott decision, deriding his bias toward Negro rights. It suggests that we are incapable of calculating the effects of our decisions.

In his book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, Michael Sandel proposes that we "do what is right."   The writers of the Garden parable would not disagree.  But they would emphatically add, "but don't suppose that you can be certainly right." Every decision is more a declaration of faith than a moral certainty

That is why we have the phrase "have the courage of your convictions." The courage to be is the beginning of our journey. The courage to act is a daily challenge.

Original Sin

The idea of original sin was born in a primitive parable designed to explain the origin of human beings.  The moral of the Adam and Eve story was that we folks today suffer evil events because of our immoral behavior, our sins.

The parable was widely accepted, encouraged by the religious establishment which proclaimed its ability to overcome guilt and forgive sins. So the biblical account grounds the origin of human existence in sin and guilt.

Saint Augustine made a fundamental Christian doctrine of this, taking the Garden of Eden story as a historical account. He set up a whole scenario that saw Jesus as the One chosen by God to enable human beings to overcome that original sin. The phrase "Jesus saves from our sins" was born in Augustine's mind.

That Augustinian mind-set has prevailed through the succeeding centuries, still resounding in even liberal-minded theologies. But the onset of the scientific age has made it necessary to put aside that original guilt imputed in Genesis. Galileo, Newton and Darwin have made that parable of origins untenable. No longer can we accept an imaginative  account of original sin as the basis of human existence. We must learn to think in evolutionary terms.  The human experience is the product of a millennia of uninterrupted centuries of upward growth and development.   

 There is no reasonable basis for an account of original sin. The parable served its purpose in fostering a religious frame for human existence, but it has lost its relevance. No longer are sin and guilt the foundation of human life. Human beings have been on an  upward trajectory since their awakening, increasing in skill, intelligence, and ability with the centuries. Our mission is to plan and think forward, not to look back in anguish. 

The phrase " Jesus saves us from our sins" is not biblical.  Jesus did not speak of himself as a savior. Rather, he advocated and demonstrated a new dimension of life, a forward step in the evolution of the Spirit. This is the healing, accepting, loving way that human beings are capable of. Jesus showed that in his life. So he could rightly say " I am the way". 

In the beginning...

T.S.Eliot put it right: "Nobody likes to live with  mystery."   We humans beings have been pondering our origins for centuries, discontented with the elusive mystery of where we came from and why.

Our Old Testament faces up to the question at the very outset: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"  This is a statement of faith, not knowledge.  It says to the reader that an unknown and unknowable force is responsible for the creation.  It does not attempt to suggest what went on before that act of creation; it does not conjecture any motive; it does not describe the substance of that creation.  It is a grand lyrical poem that attempts to account for existence.

The poem consists of eight acts of creation, based on the Babylonian calendar. These eight acts were telescoped to six in the Hebrew poem to fit the creation-in-six-days liturgical week during the Babylonian captivity of Israel. When that "captivity" came to an end, the Hebrews returned to their homeland with a new worship plan (home-based Seders), confirmation of the Shabat (seventh day worship) and a poetic answer to the age-old mystery of the Creation.

In our scientific age, we earnestly search out an answer to that fundamental  question about our origins.  The Hadron Collider is our current enterprise, attempting to discover the elements of our existence and how they came into being.  But the purpose of our existence remains unknowable except in the imaginative weaving of poetry and theology.

These are speculative efforts at best, the "stuff that dreams are made of."

And this is not a bad situation.  We must be thankful that the mystery of our existence is a never-ending challenge to our imagination.  It is not a matter of knowledge.  It is not open to scientific investigation.  This mystery cannot be solved.  It can only stimulate our spirit to commit our selves to channeling our lives in ways that are meaningful to us.  And "meaningful ways" are what lift our lives above the level of mere survival.

Updating Socrates

On July 19th, The New York Times published an op-ed essay “The Trouble With Online Education” by Marc Edmundson.  You can read it here: http://nyti.ms/NBUfBW

Here is my response to his ideas:

Mark Edmundsen makes good points, especially in holding that good education is a dialog, a community enterprise.  However, he stands in the traditional line of transmission of learning through personal teachers.  Good for him!

However, several factors still need to be considered.  Here are a few:

•    The prohibitive cost of traditional educational procedures. 

•    The vehicle of computers which have a grip on the learning process from a very early age. 

•    The interaction provided by Skype that enables discussion and debate. 

•    The lethargy of many professors who are not nearly as sensitive to student concerns as he is.  Edmundson’s overestimation of the amount of student- to-student discussion that may or may not take place. 

•    The suggestion that the Socratic method is the most effective learning technique, intimating that Socrates would not have used the computer if he had one. 

•    The fact that professors would have to search out innovative ways to engage their students in dialog, and that is a demanding task. 

•    That regardless of the method, teachers have to be creative in their approach, finding new ways of presenting material - like daily quizzes, newspaper headlines, exploratory research, self-conducted surveys, etc. 

I would guess that in the upcoming generation we will see skills and talents that this generation barely touches.  I admire Edmundsen for his staunch hold on traditional methods, but the onslaught of distant learning will render him a minority voice before long.

Unto. The. Hills.

When Israel entered Canaan, a pagan land, they listened to the most popular hymn of the locals: "I lift up my eyes unto the hills.........". Their song reminded them that God's home was in the mountaintops. 

The Hebrew faith had something better to offer: "My help comes from Him who made heaven and earth!." It is the Creator, not the creation, which is the center of faith.

But the pagan hymn was appealing  in an agricultural community where so much depends on the sun and rain, factors that are presumably controlled by a deity who lives on the mountain top. So it was that many of the new Hebrew residents joined in the chorus.

Elijah was the first outspoken champion of the Hebrew position as he killed many prophets of  that mountaintop God (Baal).  Later on, King Josiah  led a reform movement - that meant destroying the mountaintop altars of the pagan gods.

A nameless writer put these events into a kind of taunting poem, starting with a line echoing the popular refrain, "I lift up my eyes unto the hills!"  Then the second line, countering the first: but "MY help comes from far beyond the mountain; my help comes from the Lord who created the heavens and the earth."

That abrupt shift between the first and second line of the poem was unfortunately overlooked as  many printed versions of the Bible combined the lines into a single sentence. 'That made it sound as though the writer's help came from the mountaintop.  Make no mistake here! It is the Creator God whom we seek, whom we honor, whom we worship.  Let the marvels of mountain  vistas remain forever attractive; they are not the residence of God.