welcoming the Word

A talk I gave recently for the women of Hillsdale College's Catholic Society on hospitality, households, communion, incarnation, and Scripture:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11-UTVNjl4zlPf9NafOC3TRvozt6ZZAV-/view?usp=sharing

The sources we looked at:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fVPDA7BnfjKURDAMv37WWcBnPPcMVHXK4CzJcvU9EHg/edit?usp=sharing 

medieval philosophy + big band

what do Boethius, Dante, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando and Robin Williams have in common?

I'm glad you asked.

OLA 2019

for God did not give us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power and love and self-control.

(2 Tim. 1:7)

My second week in Belize I spent camping in the Mt. Pine Ridge Forest with some of the other JP2 faculty and the first-year students. Called the Outdoor Leadership Adventure (OLA for short), the trip is a required part of the coursework at JP2. Students leave their phones at home to live for a week without electricity, running water, or a real bed on some property in the nature reserve owned by SOLT. Each day, students get up at 5:30 am to venture out on different excursions—hiking in the mountains, walking blindfolded down to a river, exploring a cave and natural water formation, and climbing a huge waterfall. In the evenings, after Mass and dinner together, we played chess (the students here are completely obsessed with chess) and talked around the campfire.

The terrain around Mt. Pine Ridge is very different from where I’m living in Benque and stunningly beautiful, so it was a real treat to get to spend almost a week there exploring it. I had been praying this summer that the Lord would fill me with love for my students, and as soon as I actually met them, He answered with an outpouring of desire for their good and so much consolation each time I observed one of them drawing close to Him in prayer or helping another student.

JP2 faculty

Probably the coolest part of the week was seeing how living in common for even such a short period of time concretely built up community and leadership among the students. By the last day, students had come to know each other, and were offering and receiving help in ways that made it clear they had not only a desire to help but a new awareness of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Young men who had hung back at the start of the week helped the young women with carrying bags and navigating difficult parts of the trail. Young women who had been reluctant to climb or get in the water at the beginning of the week pushed themselves through burdens of fear and insecurity. Students who had barely been able to speak a word when the OLA started were smiling and playing cards with their new friends.

At the end of the first day, as students were setting up their tents, Fr. Beau sat down to draw me a map detailing how to get to the cave the next day. And the question that I would be working through the rest of the week hit me: what in the world does it mean to lead when you don’t know where you’re going?

Many of the students hadn’t been camping before. Many hadn’t been this far away from home for this long before. I was supposed to lead them, to support them, to guide them in the leadership the OLA was supposed to be developing.

Rio Frio Pools, another stop on our map!

I’d never been camping for a week before. I’d never been to Pine Ridge and I’d never been to the cave I was supposed to be leading them through the next day. I had literally moved one week before to take up semi-permanent residence in a foreign country.

How was I in any shape to lead these students?

Leadership, I told myself, is not primarily about knowing exactly where you’re going and what you’re supposed to be doing, otherwise I sure as heck cannot lead these students. Trying to figure out what it does mean, I remembered two things that had come up in conversation earlier that summer with two of the most incredible women leaders I know.

The first is a Boston College PhD who works at a DC think tank. “When you’re a teacher,” she told me, “Always make sure you’re working harder than your students. They'll see your hard work and know that there's something there that makes it worth it, and they'll try to find out what that is.” I know she means it, because that’s exactly what she does.

You can’t lead if you just to use your position of leadership to make people serve you and make life easier on you. Leadership means thinking something so important that you are willing to pour yourself into it in whatever way necessary to achieve your end.

The second runs a highly successful business in Nebraska. “Leadership,” she told me, “means you’re the one mopping the floors.” I know she means it, because that's exactly what she does.

Leadership means not pursuing the vision at the expense of people. Leadership is service: He came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. Leadership is constantly looking for ways to meet the needs of the people around you. It's a willingness not just to run towards the vision, but to be the first to volunteer to do the dirty, mundane, difficult jobs it takes to get there.

The verse from Second Timothy kept coming up all week, as I realized that when you're enslaved to fear, you seek control, and leadership looks a lot like knowing exactly where you're going and what you're supposed to be doing. The only way to lead through hard work and service is divine liberation from that fear. Blessed be God, this week allowed me to see how much He has done so for me over the past two or three years.

seeds of the Word (or, my working defense of the humanities)

I'll be teaching two humanities courses this upcoming semester, one on the Greeks and Romans and one on the medievals. Preparing for these classes has been an exciting and maybe too-consuming adventure, but it's been forcing me to look squarely at a question I usually shrugged off at Hillsdale: why prioritize studying the humanities?

I loved the classes I took for my history major, and I went that direction in the first place because I'd been enchanted by courses taught by the most wise and loving Great Books teacher a high-schooler could ask for. At Hillsdale, I took classes in philosophy of education and the liberal arts tradition, and I read A.G. Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life for devotional reading (ha! the Dominican spirit strikes again!) because it set my heart on fire. I thought then, and do now, that reading history, literature, political theory, philosophy, and theology impelled me to examine my life more intentionally and opened me to dimensions of human experience with which I had been unacquainted.

As I began to put together syllabi for my courses, though, I began to realize that my own experience did not constitute a sufficient apology for others to pursue a similar course of study. When one of the other missionary teachers asked me to describe in one word what I was hoping to find in Belize, I said, "integration." Integration of all this abstract thinking I've been doing for years with the practical realities of human life. Taking what I have discovered to be true and letting its implications permeate what I do and how I do it.

Well, here we are. The intellectual rubber meets the road to Benque Viejo.

The act of standing in front of a classroom and asking students to read Homer, Aristotle, Boethius, Aquinas, and Shakespeare stakes my integrity as a teacher and a human being on the assertion that these authors are worth reading and thinking about, not just for economically-privileged American students but also for economically-challenged Central American students. I will be cheating my students if I offer them anything less than a completely worthy use of their limited time and money.

The value of the liberal arts education that John Paul Junior College offers holds true only if liberal arts education is what it purports to be--an education based not on the particular race, nationality, sex, religious background, or economic situation of the person receiving it, but on the fact that he is a human being. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to understand and responsibly exercise freedom. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to wonder about and reflect on the conflicts and questions raised by his own experience. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to discuss these questions with other human beings and alongside them to seek the truth about the human condition. An education which helps him to do these things is an education in realizing the potential inherent in his humanity.

One could reasonably object that exercising freedom, reflecting on one's experience and seeking truth can be done without reading ancient texts. True enough. It seems to me, however, that one can think about reading these tests in (at least) two ways:

(a) "I will read Homer and try to figure out what he thought about x (hospitality, fame, immortality, family) so then I will know what an influential ancient bard thought about these things, and if I ever write a textbook on ancient Greece, then I can write about what Homer thought," or,
(b) "I will read Homer and try to figure out what he thought about x (hospitality, fame, immortality, family) and what the implications would be of thinking that way. I will think about why he thinks those things, and about whether or not I agree with him, and I will allow his perspective to bring nuance and depth to the way I think about these things."

No contest, folks.

The perspective of any given person is pretty limited, such that we learn best in the company of others. Reading ancient authors enables part of that company to be formed of those who have lived in times and places quite different from our own, who may think in categories utterly foreign to us, and who have foreseen difficulties (or solutions) in various paths of thinking not immediately evident to us.

SO. Super cool example I ran into the other day:

While putting together the ancient humanities course, I'd been pulling some sections from Justin Martyr's 1st Apology where he discusses pagan philosophy. He says, for example, pretty shockingly: "we have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them." Justin attributes the possibility of the rational pagan to the fact that "there seem to be seeds of truth among all men."

Ok, yes, he did just say that those who lived reasonably before Christ are Christians which is W I L D. Stick that on your back burner to consider, though, because it's not my point at present. 

Know where that same phrase popped up the other day, only a few weeks after I'd read it in Justin? The Instrumentum Laboris for the 2019 Synod on the Amazonian Region, the very same document which has created a tizzy in much of the English-speaking Catholic world, despite the general difficulty of source-checking any of the claims made by various Catholic news agencies as it is not yet available in English. One of the questions addressed in the document is the complicated question of what it means for Catholicism to engage with a non-Catholic culture. Where does the Church learn, and where does it teach?

Section 108 of the document reads "inculturation and interculturality complement rather than oppose each other. Just as Jesus was incarnate in a particular, determined culture (inculturation), his missionary disciples followed his paths. For their part, the Christians of a culture leave so as to encounter persons of other cultures (interculturality). This occurred from the beginnings of the Church when the Jewish apostles brought the Good News to different cultures, such as that of the Greeks, discovering there “seeds of the Word.” From that encounter and dialogue between cultures emerge new paths of the Spirit. Today, in this encounter and dialogue with the Amazonian cultures, the Church examines these new paths."

Yep, the Instrumentum Laboris explicitly invokes Justin's phrase. This suggests that the Synodal bishops think that understanding how Catholicism engaged with pagan Greek philosophy in the first centuries A.D. can help us understand how the Church today can engage with the cultures of the Amazon region. Not understanding the first will hinder our efforts to sort out the second--we'd have to re-do a lot of legwork that was already done, so to speak. (At least, the authors think that they think this; I'll have to read more of the document to get a better idea of how far the historical parallel can be drawn and how far the authors would want it to be.) This is a huge question being worked out by the Church right now, but it can be at least partially elucidated by our understanding of the past.

It's easy to treat great texts as desiccated museum specimens, but how much richer for us to know they contain dormant seeds of the Word to be watered by our encounter with them.