Friday, March 30, 2018

Tradition


Friday 3/30/18 4:51 AM
Next Friday a colleague and I are leading a workshop about using Desmos, an online graphing utility, in the classroom to enhance teaching. When I first began teaching I didn’t even have a calculator, let alone all of the powerful technologies available today. I have always tried to stay up to date with new technologies and I have tried to embrace new things and incorporate them into my teaching. Trying to think of new, creative ways to teach is one of the things I love most about my job. However, as I age, the rate at which technology is changing seems to be faster than the rate at which I can learn it. Sometimes doing things the old way is easier and entails much less work.
My devotional theme for the week is liberty, and a quote by Thomas Merton in his book New Seeds of Contemplation caught my attention this morning. “The mind that is the prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is the captive of its own desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a supernatural desire. For how can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire?”
My first thought was my teaching and how being prisoner to conventional ways of teaching stifles any kind of creativity. I can never learn new, or better ways of teaching a concept if I am unwilling to experiment with the unfamiliar. Of course, experimenting with the unfamiliar also brings with it the possibility of failure and I have to embrace the option of failure if I am to experience the thrill of success.
Merton suggests that my relationship with God can also get stuck if I am a prisoner to my own desires. He writes, “I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me. I must learn to ‘leave myself’ in order to find myself by yielding to the love of God. If I were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of his life that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest.”
Lately I have had an uneasiness, a feeling that God is calling me to something different. I do not know specifically what it is, but I have been troubled by the racial injustice that is experienced by many of my current and former students. I want to do something to address the systemic problem of racial inequality in our society but have no idea where to begin. I need to look for God in every part of my life and remain open to the new, and possibly crazy ideas that pop into my head. Who knows, maybe I can be an agent of change.

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Increase My Faith


Thursday 3/22/18 3:40 AM
Today I read John Powell’s words in his book, A Reason to Live! A Reason to Die!, which address the doubts that have become part of my life. “In the process of faith, doubts and crises must occur. Paul Tillich points out that only through crises can faith mature. Doubt eats away the old relationship with God, but only so that a new one may be born. The same thing is true of our human, interpersonal relationships. They grow from initial fragility into permanence only through the tests of doubts and crisis. So Kahlil Gibran says that we can ‘forget those we have laughed with, but we can never forget those we have cried with.’
“There is something in older people that feels uneasy with, or even resents, crises of faith in the young. We lose sight of the fact that faith can mature only because of these crises. We forget that no one can say a meaningful ‘yes’ or commitment until he has faced the alternate possibility of saying ‘no.’ The most destructive thing we can do to those passing through periods of crisis is to attempt to downplay these legitimate doubts and encourage their repression. Repressed doubts have a high rate of resurrection, and doubts that are plowed under will only grow new roots. One thing is certain, that passage through the darkness of doubts and crises, however painful they may be, is essential to growth in the process of faith.”
As an older person I don’t so much resent or feel uneasy with the crises of faith in those who are young; they are to be expected. What troubles me most is my own crises, which seem to undermine what once was a stable foundation of faith. The picture that comes to mind is a house on a cliff by the sea or on a bluff overlooking a river, once firmly planted on its foundation but now falling into the water with the soil that once held it so secure. Powell suggests such crises are essential to growth in my faith. Somehow seeing things falling around me prohibits me from having the vision of a new house with a stronger, firmer foundation. Intellectually I know this to be true but living out that truth from day to day is a different story. Lord, increase my faith.

Friday, March 16, 2018

Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt


Friday 3/16/18 5:49 AM
Over the course of the last couple of years I have experienced what I call a crisis of faith. I have doubts about things that I once had great confidence. These doubts arose in part because of circumstances that were difficult to explain, and I began to ask that age-old question of God, “Why?” My quiet time of reading scripture and reflection also dwindled, either a consequence of or the cause of my doubt.
In his book That the World May Believe, Hans Küng suggests that questions of faith are not like riddles or crossword puzzles that, once solved, everything becomes clear and simple. He writes, “It is completely different with faith. Here we have, not human truth which men can state and understand, but God’s truth, which goes far beyond any statement or understanding of man’s. The faith never becomes clear. The faith remains obscure. Not until we enter glory will it be otherwise … Until then there will always be more difficulties coming up, more doubts coming up: there are bound to be. Doubt is the shadow cast by faith. One does not always notice it, but it is always there, though concealed. At any moment it may come into action. there is no mystery of the faith which is immune to doubt.”
I understand that doubts will always be there. What troubles me most is the fact that things in which I once had great confidence and assurance now seem to be up for question. Küng suggests that the shadows of doubt have always been there. I just hadn’t taken notice; they were concealed. I liked it better when the doubt was concealed. This living in the shadows of doubt is difficult and troubling to me. I want to live beyond a shadow of a doubt.