Sometimes the Best Teaching is No Teaching at All

I have liked this story, from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 17. It's the story of Jesus and the ten lepers. I repeat it to show how it can be mangled.

11And it came to pass, as [Jesus] went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee.
12And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off:
13And they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.
14And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go shew yourselves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed.
15And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God,
16And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.
17And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?
18There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.
19And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.A kindergarten teacher told this story to her charges, I among them. This was a year or two before the Supreme Court started to take religion out of schools. That started around 1962, and I was in kindergarten in 1961.

So, fine. It’s a good story. It’s dramatic and succinct.

But the teacher apparently feared that we children wouldn’t on our own, with our tiny understandings, suck from this story all of its gospel juice. So she elaborated for our benefit.

And she explained what the story itself failed to say – something that she somehow knew, but didn’t explain how she knew. She told us that the nine lepers who did not return to thank Jesus suffered divine justice on their way to show themselves to the priests. They literally fell apart as they ran. Their disease reasserted itself, worse (apparently) than it was before they saw Jesus.

The teacher's God was a dick, and she wanted our God to be like hers.

Here’s another story she told us. From the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 10, it's the story of Jesus and the children:

13And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them.
14But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
15Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
16And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.Again, this is a fine story. Children have loved it for almost two-thousand years.

But the teacher wasn’t through with the telling of it at the end of the story. She explained it to us, too. She explained what we did not know, and could not know.

She explained (and I am paraphrasing): "Before Jesus, people didn’t love children. They were just [makes gesture of shunting children away, with a facial gesture of faint disgust]."

Did you know that?

Now, here’s a story she did not tell us, from the Book of Judges, chapter 11. Jephthah was a mighty man of valor, and he was on the cusp of battle. He promised that if the Lord would give him victory over the Ammonites, then, when he returned to his home, whatever came out of his doors to meet him, Jephthah would give to the Lord as a burnt offering.

It turned out to be his daughter.

Jephthah was devastated. But he kept his promise to God.

Now, my kindergarten teacher did not tell us this story. There were probably three reasons for this omission.

First, she probably did not know the story. Looking back, I do not have a high opinion of her deep biblical knowledge.

Second, it might have given us children nightmares. (But is it really worse than certain folk tales?)

And, third, Jephthah’s torment would have been hard to explain, since our teacher had already explained to us that children were loved only after a particular moment in Jesus’s life, many hundreds of years after Jephthah’s daughter became smoke.

But if our teacher had told us that story, I would relish the memory of her explanation of it.

Now, I have no way to judge this woman. She might have been a loving wife and mother; a rock of her neighborhood; a baker of cakes; a consoling shoulder. Or she might have been the opposite. I don’t know.

But I think of her when I think of people who rage against the separation of church and state. I think of her when I think of people who want children to learn about religion in schools, not just in the family, and not just in church or synagogue or temple or mosque.

Don’t mistake me. I’m not shoulder-to-shoulder with the Christopher Hitchens’s of the world, who deem religion malignant. ("God is Not Great".) Count me with people like Francis Fukuyama ("The Origins of Political Order"). Fukuyama has spent years studying societies, and he believes that religion provides cohesion. I believe that, and I believe that in religion there is salvation, like a jewel that surpasses value that will be found by the ones that God reveals it to.

But I don’t expect salvation to come from public schools. I don’t expect that any more than I expect that we were going to be made into good drivers in drivers-ed by those silly 1970's driving-simulators.

If a person enters heaven, then it’s because of God. God may choose to use the prayers of that person’s parent, like St. Augustine’s mother’s prayers for his conversion to Christianity. ("Confessions of St. Augustine".) God may choose to use the example of a Godly parent to call that person, like Corrie ten Boom learned Christianity by growing up with her loving, brave father. ("The Hiding Place".)

Or, in church, a child might be inspired by a pastor, who has walked in the ways of God for his whole life.

Parents and pastors have a stake and a responsibility in the salvation of children. That makes them different than the teacher who sandwiches in a little gospel between social studies and math, who might or might not have a clue.

I don't regret the loss of religion in schools. I think that that loss doesn't leave God without resources, and better resources, too.

So let’s never grow nostalgic for that element of the "good old days". Let's never yearn for a return to a time when teachers, like my kindergarten teacher, were free to fill our heads with the cast-off husks of their own silly notions of religion.

My conscience pricks me. Before I close, I acknowledge teachers who are wise and, so far as I know, Godly.

Why an Act of Kindness is an Act of Patriotism

Chaos was the rule in China. I lived there for two years. Getting on a bus wasn’t simple. When the bus’s door opened, a near-riot followed. Everybody tried to board at once, pushing and shoving and struggling to get in ahead of each other.

Church was the same. Sometimes I went to the Chinese Protestant church. When the service ended, everybody left the church like they were getting on a bus. I saw a frail woman roughly treated in the rush to leave.

America is different, and there are probably many reasons for that. But one reason is a simple regard for strangers.

We are a nation of people who (mostly) show courtesy to one another. We let another car merge in front of us in traffic. We tell somebody if they have dropped something. We stop to render aid when someone is in trouble. At least, we dial 9-1-1.

My experience in the world tells me it isn’t so everywhere. In some countries, the rule is that you watch out for yourself and your clan; to blazes with everybody else.

Even though people like Christopher Hitchens argue that religion is a malignant force in the world, I see America as a place where people look out for each other exactly in the degree that Judeo-Christianity has a solid influence. Maybe it sometimes gets downed out in the competing narratives of contemporary fiction and current cinema, but the Bible still informs our conduct. The tale of the good Samaritan is one we admire, even if we don’t always follow it. Almost every child knows the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". And somewhere in our consciousness we find the amazing and sometimes-impossible-seeming demand to "Love your enemies".

We must never forget to cherish those sentiments.

This is true because we live in a complex society. 300 million people more-or-less thrive together. When I try to comprehend this number and reflect on all of these strangers taking care of their daily business and somehow successfully contributing to a country that works, I am amazed. And I know it wouldn’t be possible without a fundamental decency, a core cooperation.

In a country like China, control exists by brute force. Executions are common. One Chinese university I taught at was near a prison and a medical school. The prison fed the medical school a steady stream of cadavers. The medical students learned on these cadavers, but the value to the medical students of each cadaver was reduced by the severe brain trauma from a bullet that had entered the rear of the skull.

I think of China and I think of America, and I fret when I see evidence of everyday indifference to the well-being of others. I worry when I see a loss of courtesy and respect. I dread divisions among us. At stake, ultimately, is a society that works together.

These words are on the United States Seal: "E pluribus unum." It means, "Out of many, one." These words must not become, "E pluribus pluribus." If they do, America is diminished.

Even the Chinese know the desirability of Christian values. I was alone in a sleeper car on a train in China. A beautiful young Chinese woman walked in. She had a ticket to share the sleeper car with me. When she saw me, a young foreigner, her face showed disgust, and she jetted up to her upper bunk across from my lower bunk and proceeded to ignore me. This reaction wasn’t universal, but it wasn’t uncommon. I chose not to be bothered by it, and I calmly opened my Bible and read, sitting on the edge of my bunk.

At some point she must have peered over the edge of her bunk and recognized that I was reading a Bible by the distinctive two-column printing of the pages. I infer this because suddenly she was eager to know me. She broadly hinted that she would welcome a later meet-up. (It never happened; I soon left China.) The point is that she, a non-Christian, added value to me because I was a Christian.

The world wants what we have. The world knows that it’s good. We must not let it slip away.

So if we love our country, we must love our neighbor. We must love not just the ones that are easy to love, but the ones that are different from us – different in race, different in religion, and different in ideology. We must sacrifice our readiness to condemn for the sake of cohesion.

Each of us can influence our neighbor by example. That’s why an act of kindness is an act of patriotism.

Glitter and Shine

My first name is Kill and my last name is Joy. Here’s why.

I fret about popular entertainment. I worry that comic-book-style heroes are replacing real-life heroes. I wonder if Hollywood’s imagination drowns out the Abraham Lincolns of the world, and the Martin Luther King, jr’s. As that happens, we as a society, and we as individuals, gorge on mental Twinkies, and we have feeble moral muscles to show for it.

It’s not that I’m particularly bigoted about Hollywood writers. But I’m realistic. The blockbusters that millions flock to see are profit-vehicles. The writers entertain with spectacle, because that’s how you fill seats in the cinema.

It’s laughable to think that most Hollywood writers write movie scripts with pastoral concern about making America better, making its people nobler. Maybe I’m cynical, but it seems that these writers are judged by how much money they make for the studio. And how many studio heads take a long view of America’s future? (My guess: it’s the same number as the number of varieties of fruit can that you buy at a cinema.)

So? Here’s a metaphor. I knew a young prosecutor. He was married to a medical intern, and he had a young son whom he loved. His downfall was consorting with a prostitute. She hooked him by hooking him on crack. One day, he got high with her, and they got into his car, and he drove onto a freeway using the off-ramp. A cop spotted him. Goodbye marriage, goodbye career, goodbye dignity.

Some people compare Hollywood writers to prostitutes. That’s a very loose metaphor, and it over-generalizes. I apologize to the sincere craftsmen among them.

But candidly, their motive is often the same as that category of professional, and so is their pastoral concern for their customers, even if they differ in legality and in method. (By the way, I think the same way about lawyers who talk clients into funding merit-less lawsuits or merit-less defenses to lawsuits. Or about pastors who incubate their own greed with the tithes of their congregation. Perhaps the point is not that Hollywood writers are worse than others; it's just that they're not better.)

To be fair to Hollywood, I know or know of Hollywood craftmen who don’t fit the predatory mold. The writer/director of the indie film Radio Free Albemuth, John Simon, truly believes in the value of the legacy of Phillip K Dick, who wrote the story that the movie is based on. And whatever his merits or demerits, I have heard that Mel Gibson had no idea that The Passion of the Christ would be the blockbuster that it was. He made the movie with his own money, because he believed in its importance.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence, but both of the examples I just gave are movies that have a basis in reality. The Passion of the Christ – of course. But also Radio Free Albemuth. Because the book and movie are a fictionalized account of elements of Phillip K Dick’s life.

But back to the crap. The waste of resources on spectacle is tragic, because a movie can be much more than that. A fine work of fiction can lift up the character. But just like I prefer an analysis of the Bible by a great man, rather than by a great scholar, so great fiction requires a deep writer. That’s why people like Harold Bloom urge the study of the classics over more contemporary fare that will soon fade from memory.

Classic cinema, from when movies were more vitamin and less sugar, often has greater merit than today’s blockbuster: like Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. The history might be doubtful, but the message is great. It’s a cerebral movie.

It has great lines about the rule of law. At one point, Thomas Moore’s son-in-law said, "I’d cut down every law in England to [get at the Devil]." Thomas Moore replied,


Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!Powerful stuff.

Probably it’s unrealistic to keep our children out of the cinema. But maybe we can make a bargain with them: they can earn a ticket to X-Men. Like this: choose something worthwhile, and make it the price of going to the cinema. Have them read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or his Second Inaugural Address and talk about it with you before going to a movie. Or the Sermon on the Mount. Or Martin Luther King, jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail. Anything that gives the child a grounding in what is good and real, to counter the tsunami of glitter and shine of the Hollywood blockbuster that he or she craves.

Maybe I’m a crank. Maybe this is an eat-your-moral-vegetables-before-dessert essay. So be it. I dread a generation of children that gets their shallow heroes from today’s Hollywood.

Here is a link to the fine article that inspired this essay: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/opinion/09coates.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=x-men&st=cse

Bullfight

I like bullfights.

I saw my first bullfight in Madrid. Before that trip, I read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, his book about that art. So when I sat in the stands of the bullring, and as I watched the ritual of the corrida unfold beneath me, I had a sense of what was going on.

Without that sense, a bullfight would seem to be only an appalling cruelty. One would naturally think, "Why doesn’t the matador just go into the ring with a pistol, and shoot the poor bull in the brain? Same outcome, less suffering!" Point taken.

Except that there is a ritual significance to the bullfight. From it’s emergence hundreds of years ago, it has symbolized the triumph of the urbane (the matador) over the wild (the bull).

Today, urbane up to our noses, we might miss the importance of the urbane. But to the sometimes rustic watchers of bullfights, this urbanity means no less than the goodness of the modern world, with its suave pleasures and its sophisticated cooperation among people so that they can live in the comfort of a smoothly-functioning society. A bullfight draws the rustic up the ladder of social cohesion. To the already-urbane, it’s reassurance of the rightness of what is.

I don’t know that Hispanic culture has a strong notion of yin and yang. But it’s present in the ritual of the corrida. Because, even as it is symbolic of the triumph of the urbane, it culminates in killing and death.

Killing and death are realities that we share with our most-fanged ancestors. So a bullfight exalts the modern world, but it’s rooted in what is primitive and in what is fixed in our reality from the origin of our kind.

People say that bullfights are cruel. They are. But here’s the thing: the cruelty is part of the point. In the art of the bullfight, the watcher remembers that what is good and urbane is costly and bought by blood.

I don’t want to oversimplify. Many things bring modern societies to modernity. There is the rule of law; there is the press; there is education; there are the slowly, painfully evolving political institutions; and there is trust in those institutions – among other things. But even in our own history, there is also brother spilling the blood of brother. There are families trusting their sons and daughters to God and the U.S. military, not knowing that a reunion will happen in the land of the living.

Just like the rustic must become more urbane, the rustic and the urbane must remember what they come from and what perilous reality they might return to. Times of peril come. They come to nations, they come to families, they come to persons. The corrida is remembrance of that.

Perilous times call for courage. In a corrida, the matador is courageous for the crowd. He takes the risks. His literally takes his life in his hands. I have not seen a matador die, but matadors die. I have seen matadors injured, sometimes seriously. It’s not uncommon.

Matadors are courageous to a greater or a lesser degree. Hemingway wrote of a matador beloved of the crowd who was, to Hemingway, a fraud. He had a paunch that he sucked in when the bull passed by. Then, just after the bull passed, he would slack his gut so it looked like he had let the bull’s horns pass closer than he really had. Hemingway must have had a keen eye.

If you see a corrida, in addition to looking for how near the matador lets the horns pass, you should gage the matador's bravery by his feet. A brave matador’s feet are planted and do not move as the bull passes by. A weak matador can’t control his feet; he stutter-steps back away from the bull as the bull passes under his cape. It takes courage just to get in the ring with a huge, horned, wild, killing creature; but a matador must have more than just the courage that it takes to get in the ring. When a matador gives a good performance, its key component is his bravery.

One matador found that he could not control his feet. In frustration, he fought the bull from his knees, so that he literally could not jump back – even when he needed to. That proved to be fatal.

Matadors must have courage. Courage is also the key virtue of a good bull. People think that a bull that paws the dirt with its hoof is brave. It’s not. That’s a bull that’s bluffing. A brave bull doesn’t need coaxing; it charges the cape; or, later, it charges the cape and the sword. It’s easier to fight a brave bull than a cowardly bull. Part of the skill that a matador must have is to know how to make a bull charge, even if it wants only to stand and paw the dirt.

Another skill that a bullfighter must have is the ability to kill well. A bullfighter might himself – not his assistant – plant the barbed bandarillas in the bull, and he might do it skillfully. His cape work with the bull might be beautiful and flawless. But these will matter little if he lacks that special skill that it takes to lunge his body over the horns of the bull, and to plant his sword to the hilt between the bull’s shoulder blades, missing the bull’s spine. If it’s done well, the crowd is jubilant. If it’s done sloppy, the crowd whistles – a grave insult. If it’s done poorly, or if the matador has bad luck, the bull’s horn might penetrate the matador’s body.

You never know how you’ll react to a bullfight. At my first bullfight, I sat next to a middle-aged woman who had been coerced to go there by her friend. She expressed sympathy for the bulls. During the corrida, I explained as best I could what was unfolding before us. At the end, I asked her what she thought about what she had seen. She thoughtfully answered that it was "interesting".

And yet. A friend of mine grew up absorbing books about the great matadors of history. He went to his first bullfight with high expectations. His first bullfight was his last. He found it to be appalling and cruel and nothing more.

Perhaps one difference between people who thrive at bullfights and those who don’t is in their toleration for the cruel -- not cruelty for the sake of cruelty, but cruelty in the service of social cohesion and courage.

Or people might differ in their toleration for the sad. Because Hemingway said something that might be surprising. That lover of bullfights said that after a bullfight, the fan should feel a little sad.

I’ve taken my twin brother and a few friends to bullfights in Tijuana. None hated it. Only one loved it and went back. Before you go, you can’t know how you’ll react. And as a cultural event alone, it’s worthwhile going, if only once.