Zen

On the “broad and generous spirit…”

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In my last post, I ended with Darlene Cohen on the benefits of facing our pain, rather than distracting from it or trying to push it away:

…you begin to feel generous toward your own human tendency to be caught in the cycle of wanting what you can’t have and averting from what terrifies you: bitterness, despair. If you are able to extend your charity to aspects of yourself you know cause you pain, you are developing the broad and generous spirit of letting everything be what it is, including yourself.

This puts me in mind of the work of people in the helping professions. I always think of teachers, but it applies to nurses and doctors, social workers and chaplains, ministers and therapists — really anyone who helps.

It might seem odd, because a helper’s role is precisely to not let everything “be what it is”, but to effect meaningful change in the life of another — often someone in need of support, guidance, or even protection. Correcting errors, administering medication, performing surgery, intervening, cautioning — these are all proactive measures that helpers might take correct a deficiency, to take what is and make it better.

(This tempting misreading of Cohen’s line mirrors a common misconception of Buddhist resignation toward the world. Buddhism might not seem the right religion to support an energetic activism, given its emphasis on non-action as its central practice. Meditation can become navel-gazing; equanimity can becomes a hopeless surrender; the teachings on emptiness and no-self can become a dismissal of the lived experience of human persons; and the Dharma is considered as more philosophy than religion (The Buddha can become Schopenhauer, if we’re not careful!))

But this is not the import of “letting things be as they are,” for both helpers (and Buddhists).

Helping is easy to commit to. Who doesn’t want to help? Even if it’s not their job, most people will acknowledge the value of helping someone in need of help. And if it is your job, how perfectly aligned with the universe you can be! Let’s help, and get paid for it — what could go wrong with such a straightforward charge!

Harder is knowing how much help to offer.

A teacher wants her students to learn math, but its clear that her students need help in this — because math is hard, because some of their home lives are a mess, because young people have a hard time focusing and persevering, and so on. So a teacher will give herself over to helping using the tools of her trade — detailed and rich lesson plans, inspiring mathematical ideas, different ways of structuring the class, getting the kids to practice their skills, experimental pedagogy, going on field trips, singing and dancing, whatever it takes.

But is there a point when too much help is offered? When the help transforms into something entirely other — when it becomes fixing? When it starts to treat the students not as subjects in their own right, able to make choices and grow by their own energy, but as objects to be manipulated somehow?

I think most helpers have a preprogrammed danger of falling into fixing those we’re charged with helping. Its the shadow side of our propensity and capacity to help. We tie our ego strength to the improvement of others. And if we’re not in a good place, if no one seems to be improving, and our ego needs are not getting met — then our helping might become curiously urgent, maybe even compulsive, and it’s not clear if its to serve others or ourselves.

This is where letting things be as they are — bearing witness to what they are, letting go of our assumptions and ideas about them, watching them change with each moment — is precisely the correct lens to apply to the world, and to our work in helping. This is the extraordinary power of Cohen’s method — mindfulness, facing the pain, equanimity. If we are so anxious to brush away our own suffering, as we experience it in our own bodies, how could we possibly tolerate it in others? Especially if our stated purpose is to remediate that pain?

When we rush in to eliminate pain, or ignorance, or neurotic defenses, or self-hating theology, we rob those we wish to help of their ability to see themselves and know themselves. We rob them of the ability to recognize the changes in their own pain, and the freedom they have to improve their own lives.

Helping is closer to midwifery — a midwife is in no way controlling the process of birth, she facilitates it. Fixing is a mode borrowed from mechanical contexts, where human control over human creations is a given (though I’m sure any good electrician or plumber or watchmaker will began to get a sense that he or she is helping the mechanism do what it does of its own accord — mystical plumbing! what a thought).

Nurses and doctors and therapists will tell you that there is a certain subjective element in the process of healing. Medicine can do the trick, but the question of attitude cannot be ignored in how a person moves beyond illness. And speaking as a teacher, it’s clear to me that my students are capable of so much more than I regularly give them credit. They need structure and guidance, but by no means do I need to “put the knowledge into them.” Midwifery is an ample metaphor for teachers, and Socrates got it right a long, long time ago.

We learn so well on our own. That bus drives itself. How did we get the idea it doesn’t?

This is how attending to what we find before us becomes a profound practice of helping. And this is how attending to the world as it is can become a great compassionate action, a vow to save all beings, flowing from a “broad and generous spirit” that was cultivated with time and effort.

In this light, the boundaries between knowing and ignorance, healthy and sick, compulsive clinging and expansive freedom, neurotic defense and wholeness, all seem to get a little less linear, and a little more cyclical. Each is somehow contained in the other, and attending to the dance between them becomes the work of a lifetime, many lifetimes.

The Buddha turns the Dharma wheel! And Schopenhauer takes his dog for a walk.

Zen

On entering the pain

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This year I am participating in a yearlong workshop at the Village Zendo called The Path of Awakening, focusing on Zen responses to the Others we create according to race, gender, sexual orientation, and able-bodiedness. We were assigned a reading by Zen teacher Darlene Cohen called “Mindfulness and Pain” and asked to consider an experience of pain. Mindful that emotional pain is quite a different thing than physical pain, but that this story was most appropriate for me right now, I wrote an adapted version of the following:

Zen practice, pastoral work, and my studies have offered me a helpful tool: recognizing the connection between emotions and physical feelings in the body. I can say that before I began my meditation practice, I existed almost exclusively in the more abstract realm of emotions (I’m happy, I’m sad, I’m confused, etc.) rather than in the physical experience that accompanied those emotions. Emotions, we might say with Darlene Cohen (and the Buddha), are aggregates — ideas and disparate experiences in the body all clumped together under one heading (anxiety, joy, fear, depression, etc.) for convenience of naming. It’s helpful to name them, until the naming obscures the experience and we’re stuck on the idea of the experience. Then there’s no motion, no change, and no hope. Cohen offers a challenge based in meditation, mindfulness, equanimity, and facing exactly what is, right now:

What it takes to challenge your own conceptual heaps and piles and consciously replace them with direct experience is being present in this moment and aware.

My partner left me in the fall. This came to light during my first week teaching at a new school. Within a month she moved out. A month after that I made the decision to give up the dog we had adopted — he was too much for me and couldn’t adjust to her apartment. Within a month of that we gave him over to the adoption agency and said our goodbyes. And then I was alone. That was a few days before Christmas.

In emotion-idea world — well, I was often surprised to find that I was, in fact, still alive. I would often speak to myself and say, “I’m not dead yet,” as if it needed to be said out loud to establish its truth. Emotions of sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, regret, defiance, frustration, shame, embarrassment, longing, brokenness, guilt, and all the rest. Once I settled on an emotion, the stories would begin running in my head, on loop, ad nauseum.

When I went to my Zen teachers during this time I was reminded of facing my actual experience, rather than my idea of it. Cohen says: “The vow to return again and again is the ‘settling,’ the ‘being one’ with your pain.” So often, when I noted that I was telling myself for the twelfth time in a row some story about how broken I was, how I’d never love again, how my trust was forever crushed — I would try to stop and breathe and notice what my body was doing. What was the actual sensation like? What did it literally feel like? This was most effective when the feeling was so overwhelming that I just couldn’t ignore it.

I found that it was usually located right in my chest, a deep, sharp pain in the actual heart, living primarily behind the sternum but with a strong, wafting drift over through the left lung, and extending back to almost grip my spine. I never thought of “heartbroken” as being so completely true as when I actually felt my heart like this. It was so strangely deep, deeper than the physical dimensions of my body, like a suck from behind my back such that the heart retreated away from me. When I decided to give up my dog, the most prominent feeling was the sense that I was cutting out and slowly removing my own heart with blunted tools. At times like these I sometimes had to hold myself with my own arms, to counter this undeniable feeling of my chest falling out of my back or torn out of my front.

(Anger, when it appeared, was also in the chest — coiled tightly around the sternum and pointing right out at the world. But that’s for another reflection.)

Sometimes, I would wake up with this feeling that I had a spear put right into my chest, through my heart, and extending out my back — and here I was having to go teach! I knew from experience on meditation retreats that fully feeling a feeling does not exclude functioning. I could feel like my heart was pierced, but also stand up and speak about math and move about and ask questions and listen.

I would just do so with a pierced heart. That’s all there was to it.

And so I would roll up into the classroom and speak a little softer, smile a little gentler at my students and go about the business, one task by one task, and just do what the moment suggested. And as I moved about the room, I felt some warmth return to my chest (oh, that’s right, I was cold!) and some motion too — there was a lightness, and a sense that the piercing spear was not being withdrawn, but was melting back into my body — just another part of me receding as naturally as it had arisen. I could breathe freely again (because, oh right, I was having trouble breathing).

…you begin to feel generous toward your own human tendency to be caught in the cycle of wanting what you can’t have and averting from what terrifies you: bitterness, despair. If you are able to extend your charity to aspects of yourself you know cause you pain, you are developing the broad and generous spirit of letting everything be what it is, including yourself. — Darlene Cohen

That a “broad and generous spirit” can grow out of entering pain is one of the sweet surprises of life. To feel everything we feel suddenly becomes this great gift that we’re given over and over again, if we can let it in, and if we have a little help. And in some cases, it’s a gift when it changes, too.

Zen

On obedience, attention, and freedom

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It’s snowing, a lot, everywhere, so this morning I was reading Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic (obviously). In the first installment of his Talks of Instruction, titled, “On True Obedience” he says this:

True and perfect obedience is a virtue above all virtues, and there is no work however great it may be, that can take place or be performed without this virtue, and even the very least of works, whether it be saying or listening to Mass, praying, meditating, or whatever you can think of, is more usefully done when it is performed in true obedience. Take any work you wish, however minor it may be, true obedience will make it nobler and better for you. Obedience always brings out the very best in all things. Indeed obedience never undermines or forgets those things which we do out of true obedience, for it never neglects what is good. Obedience need never be anxious, for there is no form of goodness which it does not possess in itself.

He sure says “obedience” a lot. I actually can’t believe I’m beginning this phase of my writing, bringing my Buddhist and Christian heritage to bear on contemporary spiritual matters in a secular setting, with this. Obedience has so many negative overtones, is so resonant with the many abuses of religious power, captures so many of the critiques that we apply to religion, and is so at odds with our sense of individual autonomy — that to take that word and talk about it’s value for secular life seems like a non-starter. Obedience is spiritual poison for many. Obedience offered to what turns out to be an unworthy authority causes real harm, and the transgression lies with those authorities that valorize obedience, not those who seek refuge in obedience.

But this is what I read, so this is where I start.

Let me take a liberty with Eckhart’s words, to open a space so we might approach his meaning. In the passage he doesn’t define obedience. Instead, what he does is talk about the arena where obedience is appropriately applied: in work.

A further liberty: Eckhart is talking about spiritual practice when he talks about ‘work’. His examples are prayer, Mass, meditation. My translator here indicates that the German word werk that Eckhart uses can also apply to activity, as in the verb werken. Not just the kind of work that hopefully everyone is taking a break from today, as the snow blows New York City over, but the work of washing dishes and watering plants, of answering emails and paying the bills. Chopping wood and carrying water, Zen says. Work is the activity of our everyday lives. To somehow let this kind of work live in close relation to spiritual practice is helpful and not contradictory. They’re cut from the same cloth.

Eckhart’s message here is: in work, the fruits of obedience are seen. Every kind of work is made better by this obedience, no valuable work can be truly separate from it, and it seems that every kind of good outcome is already contained within obedience. In obedience, everything is achieved already — so there’s nothing to be anxious about.

Hm! What can it be? This thing that we can bring to our work that fulfills our work as soon as we bring it? If you could put it in a bottle and sell it, you’d make a fortune. WAIT — is it coffee? Coffee makes us work better, right? I like this idea: in every brewed cup of coffee, there is the seed of all-our-work-is-done-already. That’s how we drink coffee: somewhere in this cup is the end of work! The faster I drink the more the endedness of work I’ll have! But, no, Eckhart says that bit about “nothing to be anxious about”. Coffee definitely doesn’t do that.

Maybe it’s beer — no, probably not beer.

What is this quality that brings everything to fulfillment, because nothing is left out of it? Eckhart says, obedience to God. Let’s unpack that.

Now, forget the word obedience for a second. Replace it with “quality x” or “special sauce” or “a pinch of salt” or some such in your mind — some phrase that means “the thing that brings the whole together”. Now, when this special sauce is present in your work, any of your work, your work is better as a result — indeed it brings out the best of work, truly brings your work to its culmination, even as you’re doing it. It realizes your work, though it doesn’t finish it.

What should we call this?

Is it intelligence, natural or educated? No, we can think of lots of work that don’t require book learnin’. And it seems that intelligence is more of a helper to work than a realizer of work. Is it imagination? We can see the fulfillment of our work, but this doesn’t bring that about — its sort of a precursor to work. Is it creativity, that Prized Quality for entrepreneurship and startups, etc.? Well, you’re not always creating for some kinds of work, are you? Sometimes you just have to do the thing. No innovation, no disruption. I have to vacuum and then send emails. What’s creative about vacuuming and then sending emails?

I’ve heard broader definitions of creativity that have more to do with authenticity. To do work authentically — that’s getting close to something. But what would it mean to do work inauthentically? It’s working without actually doing the work. It’s like, kinda-doing-it. What would make you only-kinda-doing work?

If you weren’t paying attention, that’s how.

Attention is a big part (maybe the whole part) of spiritual practice — meditation, or prayer, or Mass, all of them are bound by a certain orientation of attention to Something Alive that is both within and without. Eckhart suggests this in saying: “When we go out of ourselves through obedience…then God must enter into us; for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself.” This quality of obedience is a going out of ourselves, such that what was outside of us is now also inside of us. With this quality, the inward and the outward become, somehow, undifferentiated, because what’s gone out has made space for what’s coming in. Thus obedience.

But isn’t this also attention? In giving attention, in attending to, we make space for something outside to come well within our little sphere of being. We forgot ourselves in our work. Reading a book, sweeping the floor, listening to a friend about their good or bad day, making a spreadsheet — as soon as we make space for whatever-it-is to come in, as soon as we give our attention over to it, all that’s left is doing the work. And in that spirit the work is fulfilled, even if not yet completed. This is not about deadlines and Getting It Done, it’s about the Doing. There’s a fullness to becoming not-separate-from a spreadsheet. We needn’t be anxious about the spreadsheet being done soon enough. Once we allow that spreadsheet in, it’s wholeness is there already. There’s no form of goodness, not even a beautiful and orderly spreadsheet, that attention does not possess in itself. Thus attention.

Eckhart again: “In true obedience there should be no ‘I want this or that to happen’ or ‘I want this or that thing’ but only a pure going out of what is our own.” Once we’ve purely gone out of what’s our own and given our attention to spreadsheeting, there’s no thought of finishing the spreadsheet. There’s just spreadsheeting.

He calls this obedience. We can call it attention. They share this common quality of emptying oneself and letting the outside in. Let’s think of them as spiritual analogues.

Eckhart talks about obedience to God — I’m talking about obedience to a spreadsheet. Given the way obedience can be abused by those who are obeyed, I think it might be helpful to open up this idea of obedience to obeying spreadsheets, and whatever else we’re doing our work with. Obedience then is not a hateful destruction of the self, a self-degradation, because look at what we’re obeying: a spreadsheet! (We can all agree that people can degrade themselves to making a spreadsheet — and we can all agree its a bad idea.)

We’re giving our attention and opening space to bring what seems outside into our selves.

Once we see this relationship between obedience and attention, we can further explore how we’ve let the spiritual action of obedience slip into our common parlance: through mindfulness. What is mindfulness if not obedience to what’s going on around you right now? This also helps draw out what some see as a more menacing aspect of the mindfulness zeitgeist of the last few years. If mindfulness is being offered as a means of maximizing profits by making workers more focused and aware, or in a further extreme, is offered as training to soldiers to make them most effective in their work — well, I ask, to what are they offering their obedience? Remember that obedience in the religious sense is offered to an entity that at least on paper is committed to love, mercy, compassion, and the healing of broken people in a broken world. What kind of obedience is given when mindfulness is used to break bodies and break the world?

On the other hand, whatever Eckhart’s obedience is, it is intimately related to freedom — in his second talk, “On the most powerful prayer of all and the finest work,” he says:

The most powerful form of prayer, and the one which can virtually gain all things and which is the worthiest work of all, is that which flows from a free mind. The freer the mind is, the more powerful and worthy, the more useful praiseworthy and perfect the prayer and the work become. A free mind can achieve all things. But what is a free mind?

A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or devotion and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God’s most precious will, having gone out of what is its own.

There’s that “going out of self” again — in this case applied to religious devotion, but not separate from the spreadsheets that apparently I care for so much.

Freedom by going out of the self. Where have I heard that before? Ah!

To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

That’s Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen school of Buddhism, in his text Genjo Koan. In forgetting the self we are actualized by All of the Things. When actualized like this, even the idea enlightenment slips away! And there you are. There’s just that, right there, nothing missing, and the mind is “untroubled and unfettered by anything,” like Eckhart says.

Likewise, there’s no trace of “doing a spreadsheet” when paying attention to it, when you’re really doing the spreadsheet — there’s just the rhythm of keyboard keys and mouse clicks around a gently glowing grid. And I suspect for Eckhart there’s no thought of prayer or God when obedience to God is full. There’s just the sound of prayer and the scent of incense.

Now, while there’s still light — go and (safely) obey the snow!

Theology

Applying the compassionate infrastructure (New Year’s reboot)

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And we’re back.

When I first started this blog in September I had pretty grand designs for what and how I was going to write here. Looking back, I think more often than not I was responding to some idea of what I should write.

Because my work is teaching math in a progressive setting, I always feel bound to return to that theme. There’s good work to be done there, and it’s helpful to reflect on it because it is a lived experience that grounds all of my ideas — but I’m interested in more than that.

I’m inspired today to reflect further on what a theological engineer might do. I admit I chose the title because it had a nice (albeit polysyllabic) ring and captured an aspect of my life story that I don’t think many share: I’ve trained as an engineer and as a theologian. I feel the influence of both. while my undergraduate engineering work was a while ago, because it came first in my adult life it has undue influence over how I approach everything else.

  1. I’ve already spoken about systems, the unity that connects diverse parts into a coherent whole.
  2. I also consider an application of heuristics — not procedures but reliable, discreet methods used strategically to approach complicated problems — a legacy of my engineering training and something I’ve applied often in thinking of theology and psychology.
  3. Engineering thinking is dedicated to efficiency, economy, and design, and I see in this a relationship to poetry (at least analogously) and thus to a major mode of suggestive teaching that pervades both Buddhism and Christianity.
  4. The description and application of dynamics (fluid, thermo-, elctroc-, etc.) in engineering has its mirror in studies of theological dynamics (especially in pastoral work) and psychodynamics (in clinical work) — and these especially describe the relationship between material and energy transfers, in engineering, or the relationship between body and spirit in theology and psyche and body in depth psychology.
  5. Engineering is a reflective human endeavor, focusing on those dynamics between matter and energy to develop products and processes to improve human life — theology is also uniquely human (animals may experience gratitude and intuit the inter-relatedness of all things, but theology needs words), and brings together the revealed and reasoned sources of truth to foster aliveness in a community, even a secular community.
  6. Engineering is a little uncomfortable in an academic setting, or so its seems, given its relationship to praxis, to experiential rather than theoretical learning. Theology, we might say, finds its classical expression in academic settings — but then again, when it is most useful and dare I say authentic, it is never far from faith-as-practiced, from ritual and prayer and meditation, and from the way the transcendent approaches and is present to us in our daily lives.

Theology is reflection on our encounter with each other and the spiritual nature that lives at the center of our lives. The engineering of theology applies this compassionate infrastructure for the good of all beings (and is ready to point out when theology or religion work against this purpose).

So — I’m the theological engineer.

Writing this, it occurs to me that my cross-disciplinary move integrating theology and engineering is accompanied by another, somewhat more common one: I’m trained in Christian theology but practice as a Zen Buddhist. So I will often dance across the boundaries and speak in analogous terms, for instance:

  1. practice/faith
  2. Dharma/Gospel
  3. koans/parables
  4. emptiness/grace
  5. karma and illusion/sin and death
  6. compassionate response/righteousness
  7. not knowing and bearing witness/kenosis and kerygma
  8. awakening and saving/repentance and salvation

So, yes, I’m a Buddhist — but still, that I can even hold up these two systems for comparison, as a result of my Christian training, makes it hard to say that the distinction between the two is the only thing that matters. Their interrelation (and apparent conflict) in my life story and in the realm of practice and faith, are more interesting.

I came to Buddhism with an unconscious set of theological assumptions inherited from Greek and Hebrew thought, the philosophical grab-bag that is Western Christianity. Whether I liked it or not, I read Zen as a (forlorn, angsty, wonkish) member of Christendom: raised somewhat in the Catholic Church, in a post-Enlightenment/secular milieu that is not as separate from Medieval Christian thought as we’d like to think.

My understanding of Buddhism must have been Christian-tinged — but then! as my Zen practice grew as I began my formal study of Christian theology, I accessed Christian ideas through Zen practice! How could the loving immanence of God, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the giftedness of grace, and the dramatic pivot of repentance be separate from liberation, emptiness, Buddha-nature, and the turning from illusion to the truth right in front of one’s eyes, when the bottom of the bucket falls out?

All of these, not just ideas but experiences — they’re not the same, but they’re not separate, either. The tension between these two still drives me as it did when I first began on my religious journey — just without the stress of thinking I have to figure it out all on my own, that I labor alone for my own justification and salvation. Paul says: I don’t even judge myself. And the Buddha said, I and all sentient beings enter the way together. And my favorite honkadori:

before they realized
they didn’t need to cross —
were helping others across —
did they think you crossed it alone,
the ocean of suffering.

I’m a Buddhist now, but I wasn’t converted, I was called to a deeper personal practice of something more intimate to me than I am to myself, as Augustine says; an intimacy with not-knowing which is closer to the truth, as the Zen story says. My Christian study speaks to me in a language I understand, while my Zen practice speaks to me — just that. My Zen practice speaks to me, and I listen.

So, theological engineering and dual-belonging, Christian-influenced Buddhism: these are two axes I live along, and write about.

There’s a third here and it’s in my work as teacher. I think I can start to describe this as the tension between knowing and not-knowing, of what teachers have to offer students and what students know already, of the kind of space that facilitates learning, and of the relationship of transcendent realities to the every day of the classroom. This informs most of my writing on teaching math, but also my interest in any one who works as a helper — what are the motivations and the dangers? What are we getting out of it, and what should we put into it? How do we best serve others, how do we take care of ourselves? This is my third line of approach.

And just because no system is perfect: I love New York and it is my home. So sometimes I’m going to write about that.

Elaborating on my About Me seems appropriate for the start of the year.

But now — right straight ahead, not-knowing.

Zen

On Columbus and a New World

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So I woke up thinking about the New World, because it’s Columbus Day. The big irony is that his New World was nothing new, that he didn’t discover anything because there were people there already. But because he saw it as New, and therefore open for the taking, the consequence he wrought for those people there (i mean, THESE people HERE) were at least disastrous — and we do a disservice to them when we frame it was anything but that.

But this New World that’s not really New — that’s new only for us, and therefore becomes a mirror for our own assumptions — in it we find a pressing question for today and every day. I wonder: how do I relate to the new, the fresh, the until-recently unknown? Do I accept it patiently, on its own terms? Or do I anxiously fill it with my expectations, taking from it what I want and paving over everything else that doesn’t fit what I want?

When I face this I think what I really confront is myself, that jittery, controlling self that won’t tolerate the unknown to me, that won’t accept the other.

I hope I can watch and listen patiently in the face of the unknown.

I mean, can we just face it? Just turn to look at it, without trying to change it, what we don’t recognize and know already? What if Columbus just stood on that ship and said “Jesus, look at all these PEOPLE,” and let that sink in for a moment. Might he have resisted the temptation to take what was not his and kill what he did not want?

Probably not. Maybe. Anyway, it’s too late for him. His karma is his, and now it’s ours, because we live in his bloody wake, as Americans, and as humans, sharing in the same fear and desire that I suppose drove him. But it’s not too late to make our own choices. It never is.

Can we just face the unknown? Can we just face ourselves? Can we open to the unknown and open to a new way of being ourselves, not separate from that unknown?

In that way of being, we might find that, far from there being no New World, there is actually limitless newness in the world, offered to us in every moment. Everything fresh and unknown.

Passing into that new world, not separate from it and not trying to change it, maybe we can even find our home there.

Teaching

On the power to create mathematics

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This post continues where “the power to create” left off. I’m going to expand on what it means to rely on the phrase “the power to create mathematics”.

Creating mathematics has a funny ring to it, mostly because we assume that math is not something that you create. It’s there already, and you find it — or more likely, someone points it out to you, and you (hopefully) come to recognize it as sound.

We recognize that some math groundwork exists in our students already, otherwise how could they understand? We’d simply be telling them to follow arbitrary rules that had no significance or coherence — oh wait! This is what much math instruction becomes, when we assume our students have no inherent capacity for math. In that model, while we (math teachers) might know for ourselves that there’s a deeper meaning, but rarely does a teacher feel inclined or free to explore that with students.

The deeper meaning that teachers know and students intuit (if given the space) is the starting point for creating mathematics. Math is expression of the deep structure of how we see and experience the world. Mathematical objects — patterns, shapes, systems — have the uncanny capacity to seem so objectively true that it’s most convenient to describe them as outside of us (and so we might speak of mathematical discoveries), but at the same time they are subjective, coming into existence only when a human subject creates them.

Math is objective because it is shared between us in a most subjective way. Following Kant, it’s not something we see out in the world, it is precisely the lens through which we view the world. To borrow a line from Tom Stoppard, math is a mystical experience shared by everyone.

This is a philosophical distinction that has a huge impact on how math students approach math. Math is a creation — an unique expression of deep structure and meaning. When math is created by a student, she or he will likely use their own symbols and structures, but the ideas are so a part of us that I have no doubt that my students can construct them if given the proper resources and environment.

In this setting, my role as a teacher is not to give them, or even to guide them through how beautiful it us — both of those hand over all attention and authority to the teacher. Students have authority of their own in the creation of math. My role is to help the math they create cohere, internally and externally. The former is begun in their interactions with one another (see my next post). The latter is mostly introducing them to common language for ideas they’ve been developing.

Math viewed in this way is precisely a liberal art. Why we don’t teach it this way is anyone’s guess (well, I have a few guesses).

And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that math also has a way of addressing us, of surprising us, and of confronting us. Viewed this way, math bears a striking resemblance to psyche and spirit, some aspects of which I’ve discussed previously. I don’t know, I have to think more about that.

Next time, creating math together.

Teaching

A meditation on the first day of school

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This is a honkadori that I love, based on a story in the Lotus Sutra in which a character doesn’t realize that he’s a bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint dedicated to saving all beings.

It goes like this:

before they realized
they didn’t need to cross —
were helping others across —
did they think you crossed it alone,
the ocean of suffering.

I like this for the first day of school, which is such a busy and emotional time for both teachers and students. For my part, I’m excited just to have the youthful energy in the space — teachers hanging out with teachers can be a pretty grumpy bunch. I want to meet my students and get to know them, laugh with them and understand their strengths and where they can grow. I want to try out my ideas for my classroom, and get into the steady and comforting rhythm of work.

In the midst of all that, I feel no small amount of anxiety, that can basically be boiled down to, “will my ideas work,” and “will everyone like me.” I fret, my students are depending on me, and I could let them down. I worry, I’ve worked so hard, and I could let myself down. I get the sense that I’m doing this all on my own, and that my effort will earn a pass or fail over the course of the year. (Is it any wonder I’ve become a teacher? We all find our work!)

That attitude is a little bit of my own psychological imprint (am I good enough? will people like me?), and a little bit of the cultural surround, in as much as teachers are judged individually for their work. We start at A and must get to B, by the strength of our will — and the singular outcome is the measure of (unlikely) success.

So I feel like this guy in the Lotus Sutra, all alone, trying to cross an ocean of suffering — not realizing the crossing needn’t be done alone — in fact it’s done already. I come to my students who have math living in them already — my work is to draw it out. They come to me looking for structure and adult guidance — my work is to hold the space for them, just to be there, really there. Everything else — pedagogy, politics, grading, math ideas, emails, parent-teacher meetings, where’s a damn photocopier that works — they come in their time, and there’s a community of peers, colleagues, friends, that can help me if only I’m willing to ask.

Everything to be done is present from the start. There’s nothing to do but drop all the ideas, pay attention, and respond compassionately.

Teaching

On the power to create

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“What is teaching?”
A Haiku by Bill Maroon

We meet awkwardly
I invite you to walk
I find you dancing

From Teaching and the Religious Imagination by Maria Harris

Could anything better describe the first day of school and lay out the whole task of teaching and cultivating students’ knowledge, so succinctly? I was thrilled with this haiku immediately, and it prompted me to ask myself, how are my students already “dancing” with mathematics?

I mentioned in my last post that my guiding principle in my math classes this year will be cultivating my students’ power to create mathematics together. I was keyed into this particular phrasing by Tim Monreal on Medium, who is building on Paulo Freire’s paradigmatic work in pedagogy. As I reflected on the principles of progressive education, I adapted it — and as I test it against my vision of what a progressive math classroom should look like, it succeeds every time.

I can describe how each part of that phrase suggests what a classroom that uses it as a guide will look and sound like, how it will be structured and what its product should be. Those descriptions will be largely political and philosophical in nature — I will be discussing conscious ideals. But standing right behind those ideals will be a series of fundamental assumptions about what math and my students are in relation to one another, and what my rightful participation in their process is. At that level, I will be speaking of psyche and spirit, because math’s transcendence and immanence, its subjectivity and objectivity, make the affinities between psyche, spirit, and math too powerful to pass over.

This might take a few posts.

So. In no particular order.

Students’ power to create. This little flower is precisely what I gathered from Monreal’s article linked above. He is contrasting this with a broader (and vaguer) commitment to “creativity” in the classroom. The trend to foster creativity in education is popular now, perhaps even a buzzword among the education-reform types. This manifests itself in all kinds of ways; for instance, I notice that an “A” has popped up in the acronym “STEM” in some places, making it “STEAM”. That is to say, when we think about the complex of fields captured by Science-Technology-Engineering-Math, we are also meant to consider the “Art” in their midst. Thus STEAM, rather than STEM.

This is all well and good, and I really do appreciate an attempt to bring together fields that are often understood as disparate. But let’s dig a little. What exactly is the relationship between Art and Science-Technology-Engineering-Math, as those fields are popularly construed now? I’ve seen wonderful visualizations of quantifiable processes or mathematical concepts and no one doubts the inherently art-like beauty of natural processes at all levels.

But something else is lurking about here, and I couldn’t quite put it to words until I read William Deresiewicz’s fantastic article in Harper’s about the neoliberalization of higher education, the slow and steady mission creep of college into an information transfer focused primarily on business. I have questions about some of Deresiewicz’s conclusions, but he gets right to the heart of my suspicion on creativity and that A in STEM. He says:

“Creativity,” meanwhile, is basically a business concept, aligned with the other clichés that have come to us from the management schools by way of Silicon Valley: “disruption,” “innovation,” “transformation.” “Creativity” is not about becoming an artist. No one wants you to become an artist. It’s about devising “innovative” products, services, and techniques — “solutions,” which imply that you already know the problem. “Creativity” means design thinking, in the terms articulated by the writer Amy Whitaker, not art thinking: getting from A to a predetermined B, not engaging in an open-ended exploratory process in the course of which you discover the B.

Yes, 100%. The ‘A’ in STEAM cannot possibly be open-ended self-expression of some truth. It is not a living, speaking thing, not a spontaneous gesture. It is Design, that chimera of hope to anyone with a restless soul that finds themselves working in a technology or corporate setting, because it makes you think you can actually create something — but you can’t. All you can do is to make a product more producty (or maybe less producty, and so more profity).

STEAM shouldn’t have the A for Art, but the D for Design. We’re all being STEM’D to Death, for lack of any Art that is Alive.

And this is what makes Monreal’s instinct so appropriate — really, it’s what make Freire whole program, assuming that all education is political, so valuable and necessary and true. Creativity in pedagogy is not enough. If education is to produce empowered, critical, creative agents in the world, they must have the power to create. A student who has the power to create will engage their world as Creation . They will be able to evaluate and critique the creations of others. This includes political platforms, historical lenses, economic supersystems, (c.f. neoliberalism and capitalism) as well as literature, and scientific claims and (yes) mathematical propositions.

What else can education be about other than this?

Next up, I’ll talk about the power to create mathematics.

 

Teaching

On prepping for the first day of school

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This week and next, I start at my new job at a progressive school in Manhattan, teaching middle and high school math. This is my fourth school setting, right on my tenth anniversary of beginning to teach, so some of the anxious edge of the first week of school has diminished. Week one is important, but it is only week one. The first week sets the tone for the year, and you are not the only one determining that tone. You must meet your students to understand that tone fully. And then you create it with them.

Still there is some prep to do — I’m starting standards-based grading for the first time this year, which will take some practice and forethought. Of course it’s a new building and faculty and institution, so I have to learn the little details like where I can stow my papers and who knows how to fix the photocopier, etc. I’ve spent the last few weeks primarily thinking, reading, and writing about theology, so I anticipate a low-level whiplash as I swing around to the nitty-gritty of the teacher’s craft, but one of my goals in writing on this blog is to bring my study of theology, the spiritual life, and the psyche into my practice in a secular classroom.

A progressive school is an ideal setting for this project. Anyone who teaches gets into it (on some level) to relate an intellectual tradition to young people, and to give them the power to engage with it, even create their own contribution to it. Progressive teachers have a broader scope, one that is committed to considering students’ emotional and developmental needs and to integrating students’ context and community (both in the classroom and the wider surround) into the learning process, especially around matters of social justice. A progressive educator might summarize this as such: we are responding to the “whole child,” whom we are preparing for the appropriate and just use of power in a democracy.

When I am asked to respond to the whole child for participation in our society, I take an even wider scope. I ask, how does the psyche influence these young people in their work? How is their unconscious, both individually and collectively, being expressed in our class and the learning process? And finally, and characteristically most difficult to define (defying as it does being pinned down), how does the spirit move in the classroom? These types of questions I think begin to delimit my responsibility to both student and society, and guide me toward creating a classroom that is alive, compassionate, and fostering human freedom.

Remember, I teach math, so I’m seeking alive, compassionate and liberating math education as I begin my progressive education adventure.

My instinct now is to precisely define psyche and spirit, and to indicate exactly where they exist in a classroom dynamic. More helpful is to evoke what these considerations mean for me in practice. When I reflect on psyche and spirit in my classroom’s progressive mission, I ask:

  • in what situations do I feel that there is aliveness in my classroom?
  • what space exists for students to engage math with spontaneity, creativity, and excitement? how are my student empowered to act with math in mind?
  • when do the students become taken up by a power seemingly beyond them in doing their work?
  • how can students come to interact with the heart of the matter? what opens them to engagement with ideas that are initially opaque but close to the life of the math tradition?
  • when is it clear that we are addressing math as both an objective and subjective phenomena? that is, when are students engaging with math, both as if it exists beyond them, and as if they are creating it?
  • can we say we have heard each student’s distinct and authentic mathematical voice?
  • where is the material dead? is it because of the material, the kids, or me?
  • what are their projections on me, and mine on them? how do I detect these?
  • how am i encumbered by my own complexes? i.e. am I afraid to take a risk in the classroom? do my comments and questions come from a place of appreciative evaluation or desire to find something wrong, or because I’m afraid they’ll ask me something I don’t know?
  • what is my relationship to the power a teacher has? what should be my use of that power?
  • where has power emerged in the room, specifically the power to create math, a freeing intellectual power that uses knowledge rather than simply recites it?

Note that these questions are not exhaustive of the general pedagogical questions that I have to ask myself to fulfill my role. Those questions include: what are my students learning? how can they best demonstrate their learning for me? what feedback do they need from me? how are they involved with their learning process? how am I empowering them to participate in this process? and so on.

However, when I consider psyche and spirit in the classroom, I’m seeking the source of life, community, trust, and creative power that a progressive pedagogy intends to harness and develop. As a result of considerations like this, I’ve chosen the phrase, cultivating my students’ power to create mathematics together to be my watchword, my measure of trustworthiness, my regula fidei (so to speak), for how I structure my class.

More on that, and on specifics for how I imagine my classes looking, to come.

Religion in Culture

On religion in the news, the Republican debate, and reading ‘Fun Home’ at Duke

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I will write about religion in the news. There are two good reasons to do this:

  1. The way some religious people make news misrepresents what it looks like to do something with one’s religion. In America, this often takes the form of conservative Christians weaponizing this-or-that aspect of their faith to gain political leverage, at the expense of some marginalized group. It is worth responding to this approach on religious grounds, not just with claims of the separation of Church and State or the irrationality of religion in general. This can be achieved by responding from the Christian Left, or by responding as an interested and knowledgeable non-Christian. Either way, I don’t like letting hateful speech pass as religious.
  2. The way some nonreligious people react to religion in the news misunderstands the rightful place of religion in politics. Again, in America I think of this response coming from the liberal intellectual class, of which I am a member. This reaction takes for granted that religion in the public sphere looks like #1, and it’s default stance is to reject the religious narrative out of hand, backed by a reference to the nonestablishment of religion in this country, or the separation of Church and State, etc. I will continue to argue that the relationship between our secular state and our popular religiosity cannot be categorically dismissed by an appeal to separation of Church and State. As long as there are Americans whose primary language of value includes religion, Christian or otherwise, religious language and assertions will be a part of political discourse. Engaging them as such, rather than ruling them out a priori, opens up a new space in the dialogue.

Sometimes #1 is more applicable, and sometimes #2 is more applicable.

When I became aware of the fact that a Christian Left, in fact, exists — that is to say, there is another way to respond to religion in the public sphere, not just by fussing about the place of religion in American politics, but perhaps with a “your reading of that Biblical passage is not the only one” — did I recognize the power of #1. Of course, plenty of people have been doing this for centuries (from abolitionists to Civil Rights leaders to the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina over the past few years — notably many of these impressive and memorable religiously-based actions comes from African-American or Black communities). I will add my voice to that chorus to the extent that I am able.

I think #2 was framed rather nicely in the news not so long ago: when the question arose at the Republican debate a few weeks back, if any of the candidates had received a word form God on what they should address first in office.

Now I admit there was a time that my response to this would have involved a lot of dismissive blanket statements about how this was, “an obnoxious example of the fact that theistic superstition infects the nation and is taken for granted by many, including, apparently, the entire Republican party as well as Fox News,” and that, “in a reasonable world, such a question would not be asked of serious candidates.”

I don’t feel that way anymore. If I were a Christian, this would be an interesting and serious question — a lot of sincere, religious people who also happen to be American citizens believe that a personal relationship with God is central to one’s capacity to navigate the world — and I would be disappointed to hear the often incoherent, answering-their-own-question responses of the various candidates. Ted Cruz talks about his dad? Why? Marco Rubio makes a laundry list of blessings, John Kasich asserts that miracles are a thing, and Scott Walker — what are you doing? Reciting the catechism to us? What the hell?

But they have plenty good reason not to actually answer it. This question means: “Do you have some relationship with the ultimate in your day-to-day life? Does it hold you accountable? Does something more than contingency guide your actions? Or have you been bought already? Have you ceded your capacity to freely act for the good? Or do you just make it all up based on what certain people think? Are you a person, or a machine?” These are important and challenging questions, which I think every person should consider whether they’re running for president or not. They are also succinctly evoked in the question, “have you received a word from God?”

My bottom line here: the mention of a religious symbol or value is not a mortal sin in American politics. Sometimes you have to know the tree by its fruit and not whether you don’t like that its a tree. (See what I did there?)

I didn’t have a chance to write about the Republican debate when the topic was hot a few weeks ago, and I sat there thinking, “Man, I missed a good chance to talk about religion in the news!”

I did not have to wait long for another thing to come along. This time, it belongs to #1.

So, Brian Grasso, an incoming Duke first-year has publicly — on a Duke Facebook page and then in that Washington Post article above — refused to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home for Duke’s first-year summer reading program. He makes a religious argument to justify his refusal.

The response in the media seems overwhelmingly (in my completely non-scientific scanning of Google Search results) to focus on the fact that Fun Home has “gay themes” or is an “LGBT graphic novel”. This is not argument that Mr. Grasso puts forward, and though the coincidence is striking, I find it fruitful enough to stick to the text.

Mr. Grasso states that he morally objects to depiction of sexual acts. Viewing any depiction of a sexual act will “conflict with the inherent sacredness of sex,” no matter who it is that is depicted in the sexual act. He categorically separates image and written word — the same story presented only as text would not have presented him with a problem. He would extend this to “pop culture and Renaissance art”. Because he finds the material morally objectionable and not “offensive or discomforting”, he thinks his professors should warn him if coursework will include any “titillating” content, so he can avoid it. He demonstrates how his public statement has lead to several private affirmations and fruitful cross-cultural conversations, and he goes on to reassert the value of “genuine” cultural diversity, as opposed to losing one’s identity “in the name of secularism, open-mindedness, or liberalism,” as one of his private correspondents puts it. He then wraps everything up by describing his interaction with “a new friend, who considers herself bisexual and a Buddhist.” They leave their open encounter with “a deeper understanding and compassion for each other.” And so our author present us with the ideal of a collegiate encounter.

Before I work through this a little more closely, let me say that this young man knows how to write simply and succinctly, especially given his age. He anticipates objections, prepares evidence, presents positive consequences, and does so in a straightforward, sincere tone. I doubt that I could write with such clarity at his age, or even now (see above, below, etc.). I have no doubt of his commitment to the Bible, and its clear from his “passion” for economic development in sub-Saharan Africa that he has a strong vision for how to proceed with his career and life, and to act with compassion.

That being said, clarity and conviction are not all that college is about — and neither is claiming your own “deeper understanding” of a peer whom you insist on seeing through your own tinted lens — if you can even recognize the tint. Mr. Grasso is clever to anticipate objections, but his own clarity gives away a few hints that form a basis for our response to him on religious grounds. Here are some quotes that raised my eyebrows:

  • His first line: As a Christian, I knew that my beliefs and identity would be challenged at a progressive university like Duke. For his authenticity, he reveals his savvy right at the beginning. Surely he knows that there are progressive Christians — indeed, that Christianity is one of the most effective launch pads into progressive politics. But he tells us that a progressive institution will only challenge his beliefs and identity, and he doesn’t mean the good kind of challenge. Scene: set.
  • The biblical evidence he marshals in opposition to pornography: …Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he says in Matthew 5:28-29. “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” He offers a curiously narrow interpretation of this well-known text. Jesus is telling us here that the Law of Moses is not being abolished with his ministry, but being fulfilled. He references the commandment to not commit adultery, and makes it substantially stricter, stating that any gaze that is rooted in lust disobeys the commandment — it is considered adultery. His advice? The grasping eye should be cast out, just as in the next line he recommends the grasping hand be cut off. No one, not even literalists, take that instruction literally, so what can it mean? How can anyone be expected to fulfill this impossible standard? It seems to me that the answer is: they’re not. They can try but will inevitably fail. For Christians this is where Jesus comes in to do what humans can’t (remember, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak?). I could go on, but suffice to say that Mr. Grasso will likely defy this commandment anytime he walks across campus, let alone if he reads Fun Home. His argument is weaker than his Biblical citation would suggest.
  • The distinction between words and images: If the book explored the same themes without sexual images or erotic language, I would have read it. Is it not possible for text to “titillate,” or be pornographic? Experience suggests otherwise, but he is young. It seems like he uses this to shore up a claim he makes earlier in his argument: My choice had nothing to do with the ideas presented. I’m not opposed to reading memoirs written by LGBTQ individuals or stories containing suicide. Pushing this further, could a textual description of a lesbian sex scene categorically not excite? Once again, a curiously narrow reading of Matthew 5 — Jesus uses the eye and the hand as human parts that grasp. Can the mind not grasp as well?
  • Morality versus comfort: And I believe professors should warn me about such material, not because I might consider them offensive or discomforting, but because I consider it immoral. Oh boy. It might be more a philosophical question to parse exactly what the difference is between ‘recognizing immorality’ and ‘experiencing offensive discomfort’. It’s clear from above that he could use a little space around how he understands his relationship to media, and its affect on him. I assume he’s trying to sidestep every think-piece that’s come out this year lamenting a (sparsely-evidenced) trend of overly-sensitive undergrads. Now would be a fine time to recognize that in this piece we find a white Christian American male claiming his right to not engage certain offensive material, but distancing himself from the trigger warnings that marginalized communities use to avoid revisiting trauma by surprise and in an unsafe space. He fits all that into his distinction here.
  • The true source of dialogue and growth: Without genuine diversity, intellectual dialogue and growth are stifled. I’m all for ‘genuine’ diversity, though he defines it only negatively as NOT giving away one’s “identity in college in the name of secularism, open-mindedness, or liberalism.” (Again, attributed to someone who wrote to him.) If I were to define it positively, I’d probably start by being willing to meet people as they are, and allowing them define who they are, with as little interference of my own prior views as possible. That’s what makes this next line so frustrating…
  • …because here it turns out we’re just dealing with a very clever and savvy but still quite conservative, judgy-wudgy Christian: Over the past couple of days, I have received many encouraging messages from a new friend, who considers herself bisexual and a Buddhist. The cheat word here is “considers”. I wonder if it refers to his new friend’s bisexuality, Buddhism, or both. As with his before-the-fact assessment of Fun Home and whatever insight might be gained from a sexual act depicted, I suspect that when he talks about having a deeper understanding and compassion of his new friend, he means he has a deeper understanding and compassion for what he sees as her misguided self-descriptions. That is — he understands her better than she does herself, she who considers herself such things. Does he consider himself Christian, or is he a Christian?

To be sure, he knows his Bible, so no doubt he knows Jesus’ mission instructions at Matthew 10:16: “See, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Mr. Grasso has taken this teaching to heart. It’s worth noting that the assignment of Fun Home was not for a class and did not come yoked to a graded assignment. It’s intention is to give the incoming Duke first-years a common experience to build upon for orientation. Mr. Grasso is destined to be an organizer, so publicly did he utilize this opportunity to create his own common experience to build on, with a community that was (thanks to his efforts) ready to meet him when he arrives on campus. We shall hear from him again.

Which is all the more reason to be ready to respond to religion with religion, and to “always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks your reason for the hope that you cherish,” even (especially) if you are a Christian-trained Zen Buddhist.