Singing Angels

Sunday 1/6/2013 7:19 AM

It seems that the older I get the more difficult my faith becomes.  I’m not sure if it is because I try to analyze and rationalize everything or what, but things I used to accept without a second thought now trouble me.

An example of this type of analyzing behavior is how it relates to my view of the universe.  Earlier in my life, when I thought about the Big Bang, I imagined God saying, “Let there be light,” and suddenly the entire expanding universe is born in a brilliant, cataclysmic explosion.  He then separates light from darkness, creates planets, separates land from water, and creates living things that slowly evolve to man.  It is as if God were an artist painting on a canvas, having a broad idea of what he wanted to do but adding smaller and smaller details as he goes along.  Lately I’ve been reading about superstring theory, physicists’ and mathematicians’ latest idea in their attempt to find a unifying theory for the four fundamental forces that define and describe our universe.  These attempts seem to take a colorful, creative process and reduce it to a colorless, mechanical process that can be described by mathematical equations, complicated, elegant and beautiful in their own right though they be.

I am a math teacher and I believe teaching is an art, with the teacher as the artist.  At the beginning of a class I have the big picture of what the students need to know and I lay a foundation with big, sweeping strokes.  As the semester goes on there are smaller details that need to be fleshed out and I do so using varied methods, depending upon the class and the individual students within it.  Politicians, and other critics of education, take the colorful, creative art of teaching and try to reduce it to a colorless, mechanical process whose effectiveness can be assessed by applying a rubric to a standardized test.  When this is how my students are evaluated and how I am evaluated as a teacher I am less willing to try new, creative ways of teaching, opting instead for what I know will allow my students to meet the standard.  Meanwhile the beauty and patterns inherent in mathematics are lost and students view it only as a bunch of formulas that need to be memorized for success.

In his book Deep Is the Hunger, Howard Thurman describes the life of faith in this way.  “There must be always remaining in every man’s life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and, by an inherent prerogative, throws all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something that gathers up in itself all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning–then passes.  The commonplace is shot through with new glory; old burdens become lighter; deep and ancient wounds lose much of the old, old hurting.  A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear.  Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.”  I think my faith life has been hijacked by the crassness, hardness and the harsh discords of life I experience and see in the world around me.  I want the world to fit neatly into the little boxes I have constructed using the formulas of my faith.  What I really need is the singing of angels.