The Comfort of Poetry during the Move to Atlanta

We have to wait for just the right day, and unfortunately for an English teacher trying to work with some sort of course plan, I cannot identify that day until it arrives on the lawn, buried in an assortment of leaves.

In Sonnet 73, Shakespeare asks us to look out into autumn, a particular moment in autumn, mind you, in order to see inside the heart of his speaker—a neat trick, particularly in iambic pentameter. The speaker begins matter-of-factly: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,/ When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

Among the reasons I love Sonnet 73 is that I remember reading it at different stages in my life. Indeed, we must bring the context of our own lives to poems we read: we cannot avoid it. Edward Hirsh notes in his bestselling book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry that, “reading poetry is an act of reciprocity,” meaning the relationship of poet and reader is, “a highly concentrated and passionate exchange… .” Just as Shakespeare uses this “exchange” to challenge us to look outside to the natural world in order to see inside his speaker, so too does great poetry challenge us to look out into the world in order to see inside ourselves or, perhaps even better, inside something greater than ourselves. The truth is both simple and profound: I am different than I was when I first encountered these fourteen lines; however, the lines will be the same as “long as men can breathe or eyes can see” (Sonnet 18).

John Fleming, who is Louis W. Fairchild Professor Emeritus at Princeton, echoed this point in a recent blog post, in which he reviewed this summer’s production of King Lear in New York: “The reason you cannot step into the same river twice is because the river is always changing. The reason you cannot read the same book twice is because you are always changing.” (http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2011/07/ripeness-is-most-of-it.html ) Fleming and I share an Alma Mater, Sewanee-The University of the South. A Rhodes Scholar, Fleming spent his career at Princeton where for many years he was English Department Chair. A couple of years ago he spent a day at Hawken School where I was Upper School Director, and I had the pleasure of seeing him not only as a scholar but also a master classroom teacher working with our ninth grade Humanities students. In his most recent post, entitled “Grace Abounding to the Least of Bloguistes,” Fleming reflects on Charles Grovsner Osgood’s Poetry as a Means of Grace. That post can be found at http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2011/07/grace-abounding-to-least-of-bloguistes.html . Reading his blog leaves me envious of the students who for decades populated his classroom.

Hirsch argues, “perhaps poetry exists because it carries necessary information that cannot be communicated in any other way.” Here, Hirsch makes a statement not only about the relevance of poetry, but more importantly, about the necessity of poetry—it can reveal what no other form of communication can. To place this statement in the context of our sonnet, we understand some things about the speaker in Sonnet 73 that we cannot come to understand about another human being in any other way, or even more notable, we can understand something about ourselves or others that we could not apprehend without this poem.

A number of years ago now, Rick Chess, Literature Professor at UNC-Asheville and recipient of the 2002 North Carolina Board of Governors Award for Teaching Excellence, led leading a reading and discussion series at the West Asheville Library as a complement to Edward Hirsch’s visit to Asheville to discuss his book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. Chess, a fine poet himself, expertly guided discussions of poems, including a number by Hirsch. Often at the heart of the discussion of an individual poem was the idea that poetry can provide us a kind of insight that no other means of communication can. Hirsch quotes Percy Shelley to emphasize this point; Shelley states in his Defense of Poetry that the language of poetry “is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension.” In my course, Sonnet 73 provides an apt platform upon which my students can discover that truth for themselves.

It is a confluence of reasons that brings me back to Sonnet 73 today not the least of which are the entries I referenced to John Fleming’s blog. Interestingly, my wife will be teaching King Lear this fall at Oglethorpe University, and she has asked me to stand in for her one day and provide a lecture on the play, so Fleming’s blog about Lear arrived at the right time. There are other reasons as well, ones that are harder to articulate. Recently, I attended a funeral service at Sewanee, and during the service in All Saints Chapel and later at the graveside, I glimpsed a number of the professors I had when I was a student in the 80s. For me Sonnet 73 was a natural resting place for my reflections about that day even though the weather was steamy mid-July not that of “yellow leaves, or few, or none.”

The final reason I have stumbled back to Sonnet 73 is that I am making a transition to a new school and new town this summer. The boxes are still largely waiting to be unpacked, as my wife, my daughter and I stand in this strange middle place not having fully arrived in the new place though we have definitely left the old one. When we are between one stage of life and another, it somehow makes sense that we would reflect on things that are outside of time, such as Sonnet 73. The poem remains even though so much else seems to be moving, vanishing or appearing before our eyes. As a result, there is comfort in Sonnet 73 even though the poem itself captures the transience of our lives.

One day (many years into the future, I hope), in a moment as brief as late Fall, I will be the perfect speaker for Sonnet 73. I will be the embodiment of autumn, and my students might just see “that time of year…in me”—but not yet. Hirsch reminds all of us that the poem will forever be what Osip Mandelstam calls “the message in the bottle,” waiting to provide the solace of sound and meaning even when at last “that time of year” is beheld in us.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the deathbed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long. [Some portions of this post are reused from a piece I wrote for the Asheville Citizen Times around 2003].

Good Conversation--Statement of Educational Philosophy

In the epigraph to A Jacques Barzun Reader, one finds a surprising statement: “The finest achievement of human society and its rarest pleasure is Conversation.” To me, Barzun’s assertion serves paradoxically as a challenge and a comfort. A conversation is organic but defined, rambling but focused, a journey undertaken with a final destination in mind but an apparently infinite number of paths to reach it. The participants in a conversation listen as carefully as they speak, and they discuss what they care about with those about whom they care. The challenge of a school is to engage students in good conversation.

Good conversation allows students to discover their role in the world, to understand that they are part of something far greater any one person, and to value societal contribution at least as much as personal gain. This conversation, which must take place throughout the sweep of one’s education, should also equip each student with the ability to make complementary use of this discovery, understanding, and value. In short, a school should teach students not simply to think, but to think well. Students must learn to think within a context and to think armed with knowledge, principle, and humility. Perhaps most demanding, schools must teach students to bring this thoughtfulness to bear positively on the world. The best way to meet this goal is for schools to approach interactions with students as conversation because in the end students must own the decisions they make concerning how to live well in the communities they will inhabit. They must be led, not dragged, into the world that awaits them: they must participate in creating the meaning of the diplomas they will receive.

I find it comforting to know that in order to meet the challenge, educators need only bring their best selves to school. Given that this is anything but easy, it is relatively simple, and it means that students need teachers to be knowledgeable, honest, clear, and, to the best of their ability, fair in dealing with the young people in their charge. Great teachers meet this challenge without hesitation and find fulfillment in accepting and pursuing this avocation.

The beauty of good schools is that they engage students in what Barzun tells us is life’s “rarest pleasure.” We find the beauty of this conversation not only in learning for its own sake, but also in the fact that the larger community is among the beneficiaries of student learning because the community needs the thoughtful citizens that good schools help produce. Schools where teachers and students know each other, care for each other, and are committed to the shared dialogue of learning are therefore an imperative goal for more than simply parents, teachers, and students: everyone who is invested in a community should participate in the stewardship of good schools.

In order to help create citizens willing to engage in the difficult conversations of the world, schools must create opportunities for students to converse and to contribute—in the classroom, on the stage, on the athletic field, and in the community. Thus, in great schools and through the influence of great teachers, students learn perhaps the most important lesson of education, that is, we do not, nor can we pretend to, operate in a vacuum. Schools should be the place where young people learn to have a voice and to hear the voices of others. In this way schools can make the world both larger and smaller for students—larger because students will see the fullness of ideas present in the world and smaller because students will have the desire and ability to affect real influence on it.

With and Against the Waves

[Another from the archives...

I wrote this piece for the last page of the Winter 2009 Hawken Review. This feature, always appearing under the heading "Fair Play," is is a standing article in the Review "by or about individuals in the Hawken community who capture in deed the spirit of Fair Play. ... The School’s motto of “Fair Play” emphasizes the importance of integrity, respect and accountability."]

During each summer when I was a kid, I spent some days in the heavy push- me pull-me surf of Sandbridge Beach, Virginia. Whenever the waves were strong enough, we were in the water, learning to time our jump into and with the wave of our choice, and when we were good and lucky, we could stay with that wave all the way to shore, perhaps until the sand at last was close enough to scratch our boy skinny chests.

On days when the waves were too small to carry our weight, we really didn’t know what to do with ourselves— sandcastles were for little kids, the fun of Virginia Beach was for people with driver’s licenses. There was one game, however, that provided some entertainment on the slow sunny days—maybe you’ve played it. It’s the one where you stand in the ocean up to just below your collar-bone or so and try to keep your feet in one place as the waves move by you...whoever moves first loses. Given that competition was the currency of my childhood friendships, this game had elements that compelled us to spend more time than a level head would predict. At first the task would seem too simple, so we might edge out deeper, and then a bit deeper, to make the test more challenging. We usually found that we would have been smarter to stay put, for the games never really lasted long before one of us would lose footing with the salt water muffling the expletives of our defeat.

Hawken is a long way from Sandbridge, but the way a child interacts with waves in an ocean is similar to the outcome we desire of a great education, one based on ideas as sublime as “Fair Play.” In the waves one is forever trying to do one of two things –attempting to go with a wave or attempting to maintain a position against one. A great education gives students the tools to do these two things well in the lives they will lead far from the seaside.

What waves should I catch? And, against what waves should I stand firm? These questions pertain to discovering the convictions upon which a student should learn to base answers to big questions in his or her life. I believe a Hawken education should strive to be one where students discover the decision making protocol that will stay with them for their adult lives. And I have some thoughts about what should center that protocol: I want graduates who are focused not simply on what they are going to be or what they are going to do for a living, but on who they are going to be. This requires the strength of one’s convictions.

In order to meet the demands of “Fair Play,” Hawken must work, however deliberately and at times imperfectly, to help students discover not only their convictions, but also the strength to make them live and breath in the decisions they will make as leaders in the world that awaits them. Here we come upon a second pair of questions: How am I going to catch the wave? And, how am I to maintain my stance in the face of a powerful wave? This pair of questions pertains to discovering the means within a student’s power to live by his or her convictions in moments of opportunity or of challenge. Hawken is rife with experiences that lend themselves to a discovery of these means. Every time students seek and find help from a teacher during Conference Period or assert and defend a minority view in Public Opinion class they are discovering these means. Every time students push beyond their known limits of strength and endurance to help the Hawks win a game they are discovering these means. And, most importantly, every time students make difficult, but correct, decisions in order to meet Hawken’s expectations regarding character and integrity, they are discovering these means.

In the moments before I would fall asleep in a cottage where the sound of window fans competed with the not too distant sound of waves on the beach, I could still feel the ocean pushing and pulling me. Certainly it was largely a result of the salt water in my ears that had scrambled my equilibrium, but maybe it was something more existential as well. My time in the ocean stayed with me because it had become a part of me. As a parent and faculty member in this school, I believe the Hawken experience, which at its core asks students to enrich the community in order to be enriched by it, can work the same way in the lives of our children. It will stay with them because it will become a part of them.

Thankful not to be the Prince of Denmark

A final one today from the archives...

[What follows is a Vespers talk from Asheville School]

December 5, 2004

Readings: Psalm 23

Hamlet 2.2.318-333

That Hamlet is a pretty smart guy, and in the audience we know it from the first moment he speaks to us. Indeed his first line of the play is directed not to his uncle-slash-step-father-slash-King, Claudius, and not to his mother Gertrude, but rather to us, out in the audience, sitting in row E, seat 12, nervously wondering if we forgot to turn off our cell phone. Claudius, after dealing with the business of the court, turns finally to Hamlet and says, “And now to my cousin Hamlet and my son.” Hamlet, leaving Claudius’ attentions hanging awkwardly in the air, turns to us…US, who are now fidgeting uncomfortably under his stare, and, while pointing his thumb back over his shoulder at Claudius says, knowing that we’ll understand: “A little more than kin and less than kind.” English IV students, I will leave it to you to analyze all this for your ignorant lower former friends, but know this—I’ll say it again—that Hamlet is a pretty smart guy. And with that thought, now also hanging awkwardly in the air here in beautiful Boyd Chapel, I say to you GOOD EVENING!

Thought number One: Hamlet is a pretty smart guy, but all his wit, savage intelligence, and stichomythic repartee is not enough to save him. By the time we first meet him his clock is already ticking: he does not have long to live—3-4 hours tops… and his death will be painful—certainly for him, and, if not acted well, painful for us as well. Intelligence is not enough, not by a long shot—intelligence is not enough for Hamlet and not enough for us. Friends, people who must live by their wits alone rarely have long to live. We need more. Alas, this is bad news for you all because you are a smart crowd, and if intelligence was all you needed, you would be set.

Thought number Two: Hamlet’s intelligence is not enough to save him, and he is missing things that he must have to survive: A) support from people who truly care about him, B) sustainable and guiding faith in something greater than himself. He is the definition of alone. The young man is so alone he has no one to talk to honestly but us, and as much as Hamlet intrigues us, many of us in the audience are possibly more focused on whether the bathroom will be too crowded during the intermission to get out of there in time to get a coke-cola before the curtain rises again than we are the fate of our protagonist. On stage, everyone, even the lovely Ophelia, has an ulterior motive. And to be honest, no matter how much Hamlet talks to us (he has more than 200 lines in the play directed to us and us alone), no matter how much he talks to us, we can’t do a thing for him. He is desperate, and we are frozen in our seats. We can’t get to him, and he can’t quite see us though it seems, particularly in the lines that Mr. Kussrow read to us this evening, that Hamlet is trying to see us. I can’t blame him. Here he is—the smartest guy in most every room he enters—without a shoulder to lean on, except his friend Horatio who is a philosopher and who seems to have the personality of boiled cabbage…ever tried to get good advice from a philosopher?...from a cabbage?

As this is a chapel talk, the next point is important—our kind chaplain will take my license to give such talks away if I miss this next step—Hamlet has no comfort in faith. My wording here is careful though I remain uncertain of how to say what I am thinking. I’ll try to mine more deeply: Hamlet says some things that represent a kind of faith in the existence of a divine being…of at least something eternal, and he believes in a soul; however, he can not translate this amount of faith into anything that is useful to him. Perhaps it even works against him and paralyzes his ability to take action in the world. The world, the real world of murder, despair, hate, and grief in which we find him, has the man spooked—literally (once again, English IV scholars, please don’t hesitate to explain the “spooked” part to your colleagues in lower forms). Hamlet’s God is only good for making rules, hard rules, and for setting up the unhappy situation in which Hamlet finds himself. His God is not love; his God is not a resource of hope. Hamlet’s God is the one Christ thought for a moment he was dealing with when he intoned in the desperate moments on the cross—“My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”…indeed the same God to whom San Manuel Bueno, Martir dice, “Mi Dios, mi Dios, porque me ha abandonado?” in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story that some of our Spanish students read entitled, “Saint Emmanuel, the Martyr.” Hamlet clearly desires something of his faith. In fact, when he first sees the ghost of his father he begs in somewhat of a frantic prayer—“Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!” Unfortunately for Hamlet, no one, certainly not “angels” or “ministers of grace,” is coming to his aid. My hope for you who are now sitting in our worn wooden pews or standing back there in the foyer is that you can find the comfort in faith that Hamlet lacks. Comfort in faith for me means that not only do we have faith, but that this faith is useful to us. In times of struggle, this kind of faith supports and nurtures us, and in times of ease and success, it humbles us. In short, it keeps us balanced so that our best self has the chance to do what our best self can do—share love and serve others without intellectualizing or calculating the sacrifice we think we are making.

Thought number Three: Hamlet’s intelligence is not enough to save him from catastrophe, he is missing some things he needs, and you have a couple of things that Hamlet does not have or, perhaps more accurately, has forgotten he has. A) you have, if you choose to have it, a family here, and B) you have the chance to make the world better. Hard to believe isn’t it?—but just listen to the seniors who have stood in this pulpit this year. Each seems to reference his or her connectedness to the people of this place. They celebrate teachers, staff, and students not as acquaintances but as family members, connected in powerful and therefore lasting ways. It is difficult to recognize the rarity and beauty of these connections until we find ourselves without them…this might just be part of Hamlet’s problem—that is, he once was connected, too, but once the connections are taken away, he has no idea how to rebuild his place in the world. Finding himself without connections, Hamlet cannot unify the world he once knew with the fallen world in which he feels he has been somewhat helplessly and unfairly cast. Hamlet does not have the ability to adjust and to make new connections, and while we can empathize with this flaw, we do not have to share it. My hope for you is that you take not only the specific connections to this community/this family with you when you graduate, but even more importantly, you also take the ability to create and to value connection, so that you can make them in your future life and indeed help others make them as well. In a sense Asheville School forces you to make connections, real connections, with other people. Like it or not, people know you here. Because he didn’t want anyone to know him, this might have driven Hamlet crazy but in the end being known should be a comfort to you. In your life after Asheville School (trust me, it does exist), you will have to work hard to make quality connections with others, but you can and will do it. You don’t have to be nearly as alone as Hamlet.

At the same time you are making these quality connections with people, you have the chance to help build the world into a better place whereas Hamlet is in the position of having to tear the world down. Our world is ready and willing to accept all the good we can do. In the play Hamlet, the only thing the character Hamlet thinks he can “pay forward” is violence—his inheritance from his family is murder and sin. Your inheritance from Asheville School is, to say the very least, neither as horrifying nor as crushing, and we can pay forward better things than poisoned cups and razor sharp swords.

The idea of paying something forward reminds me of this statement: “Those to whom much is given, much is expected.” To my ear, the logic is undeniable and the sound is threatening. This sentiment certainly threatened Hamlet. Hamlet would tell us that he didn’t ask to be given so much…to inherit so much, so then he should not have to meet anyone’s expectations for him. We should not be threatened, however. The world needs us to share what we have been given. In fact, the gifts we have been given are strangely both gifts and loans. The truth is we can’t take anything with us when we die—everything we have is a loan, including our material wealth, our health, and our strength. Sometimes we hold onto material wealth…or self-obsession…or hate so tightly in one hand that we neglect to see what is slipping away through the fingers of the other. For Hamlet, he holds onto hate in one hand, so he can not loosen his grip enough to see what gifts he has to offer the world in the other. My hope for you is that you will not make the same mistake. Don’t let your gifts slip through your hands—pay them forward.

Whatever we have to give can’t help Hamlet whose slain body at the end of Act V is an emblem of wasted potential. Whatever his faults, he also has generous doses of the best qualities of human kind, yet he dies a murderer in the tragic heap of a bloody stage. He could have been great and benevolent; he could have been a diplomat and a leader; he could have been a devoted husband and a loving father. His final act obviously is not yours, however, and fortunately, Act VI will be the one in which you are a player. What will your play be?

A Final Thought: Hamlet’s intelligence is not enough to save him; he is missing some things he needs; you have a couple of things working for you that Hamlet does not have or perhaps has forgotten he has; and the world ahead of us is ours to make. Hamlet’s play has gone on too long, and in Row E, seat 12, we are ready to stretch our legs.

Tribute to Mrs. Alley

[A second piece from my archives. I made the remarks that follow as part of the Cum Laude Induction Ceremony at Hawken School on April 30, 2009.]

My mother recently sent me an article from the Richmond Times Dispatch. This is not an unusual sort of post from my mother even though over the last decade or so, the necessity of sending a hard copy has long gone away; less and less often do I find an article stuffed in an envelope with nothing more to announce the sender than a “Love, Mom” signed quickly in a familiar hand on a yellow post-it note. It would be easy simply to send me the link via email, but she feels compelled to send some information my way via snail mail, using criteria of selection known only to mothers.

The two and half inch by sixteen inch strip of newsprint didn’t provide any bulk for the legal sized envelope that must have been the closest at hand when she folded it inside. It was insubstantial, delicate…it would have been easy to miss among the piles of bills, flyers, and catalogues, but when my mother sends something the old-fashioned way, I know better than to look passed it.

Now, I have been thinking about the end of a journey recently—the end of our seniors’ journey at Hawken in fact. For schoolteachers, this type of thinking is a kind of refrain we return to each spring—we are in the business of watching people come and go, and the going is always edged with a bit of sadness at the farewell. Specifically, I have been thinking about what we hope seniors take with them from the Hawken experience, an experience that for them must feel both substantial and ill defined in this exiting and uncertain moment in their educational path. It is for this reason that the article, more accurately, the obituary, that my mother sent to me was more shocking for its timing than its content, for at the moment I was thinking about the end of a journey, this particular obituary reminded me of the beginning of my own educational journey.

Norma Alley had faced three bouts with cancer—the first in 1970 when I was a far too young student in her second year as a kindergarten teacher at St. Christopher’s School. Many years later she surrendered her left arm but no part of her will to a second round of cancer in the early 1990s. And this winter, while successfully battling a new round of lung cancer, she fell and the injuries led to her passing earlier this month.

For me, she was the person on the front end of my educational journey, and yet I remember little from my time in her classroom. I do remember her, however—prematurely gray, elegant, kind, patient. I remember knowing as well as I knew anything that she liked us, wanted to be around us, and missed us when she had to be away during her illness. I remember loving her the way small children love their teachers and the way my daughter Eleanor loves Mrs. McCrystal and Ms. Gilbride. I find that we remember with gratitude, which lasts longer than anecdotal memory, the rare adults who speak to us like human beings when we are very young. Mrs. Alley deserves that lasting gratitude and more.

I could detail for you the impressive tracks of her career—establishing the Junior Kindergarten program way back in 1986 far ahead of any other school in Richmond, being the second winner of the school’s Chair for Distinguished Teaching, and later having an award named in her honor become the school’s highest recognition for a master teacher. However, what matters most are not the trappings of her career, but rather the career itself—the countless interactions with children who needed her and the countless interactions with children in which she modeled the exact traits with which any faculty would be glad to send its graduates away to college:

• Mrs. Alley had time for the least of us. Always, without fail.
• She made the effort to find the good in others and was, as a result, successful in finding the good in others.
• She looked for ways to make the world, her small part of it, better, more humane and more kind.

If we sit still long enough to silence the static of our daily lives, I believe we would find that we need little else to recommend us to an uncertain future.

When I received word of Mrs. Alley’s passing, I felt a twinge of guilt because I hadn’t thought about her in what felt like an age. This moment was fleeting, however, as I quickly recognized that in many ways she had stayed with me all along. I believe the most valuable things we pack when we make the move from one stage of life to another are the things that take up no extra space in the suitcase. They are also the things that we don’t have to remember to pack. They are the things that determine WHO we are, so Mrs. Alley became part of who I am and what I take with me from place to new place. When I mentioned this thinking to Ms. Griffin, she offered me one of my favorite gifts to give and to receive—a poem—and so now I offer it to you.

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

by Sharon Olds

WEDNESDAY, 25 JUNE 2003

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that's been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that's been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

Thank you to our honorees who have joined a select group of Hawken’s finest students, and thank you everyone here assembled for joining us today.

Doers of the Word and Meditations of the Heart

As a way of getting this blog started, I plan to pull several pieces of writing from my personal archives as a way of introducing myself. The first piece is a chapel talk that I gave at Asheville School on September 10, 2006. The service preceding my talk included James I: verses 1-22 and Psalm 19. Two hymns Benjamin Britton included in Noyes Fludde were part of the service: the congregation sang “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” and our chapel choir sang “The Spacious Firmament.

Doers of the Word and Meditations of the Heart

My talk this morning is connected to the readings we heard this morning from the first chapter of James, specifically Verse 22, “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only,” and Psalm 19, verse 14, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” The hymns in this mornings’ service are both hymns included in Noyes Fludde, which I will reference in a moment.

While hiding under the altar and its thick floor length table cloth until our cue came, we could hear the din of the congregation as two by two the animals made their appearance in Benjamin Britten’s Noyes Fludde pageant at St. James Episcopal Church. Thick rubber bands, rolling on and rubbing against my neck, held my ornate grey fox mask in place.

My family had made the move from St. Mary’s Episcopal Church to St. James a couple of years earlier. St. James, far larger than St. Mary’s, sits on Franklin Street less than a block from where it becomes Monument Avenue in the shadow of the JEB Stuart monument. Unlike the other Monuments on the avenue that takes that name, the Stuart Monument is dynamic and athletic. Stuart is frozen moving north as he looks east toward downtown at the same instant his horse surveys points west. The two, horse and rider, are in total control, frozen potential, immortal in bronze. Stuart’s monument does not challenge us to think about the relative justness of the cause for which he fought, but only to admire the chivalric impression he left on the eve of the mortal wound he suffered at Yellow Tavern.

The spring air under the altar that evening was hot and still—except for an occasional shoulder punch to or from my partner grey fox, Whiz Howard. Whiz, by the way, could hit much harder than I could—he just might have been the hardest hitting seven year old on the planet. Above the altar rising in wooden relief from the back of the chancel was the suffering, yet somehow ascendant, Christ (a representation lost when the church was hit by lightning many years later). Higher still were these words from the 22^nd verse of James: “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.” So here I was—an animal hiding under the altar, beneath Christ writhing in crucifixion and words imploring me to do something beyond listening. I was apparently being called to action.

If someone had asked me growing up to quote biblical verse, “be ye doers of the word and not hearers only” would have been one of only two responses I could give without fumbling.

After several years spending summers meandering around Virginia playing junior tennis tournaments, I shifted gears and headed to Camp Maxwelton, a small all-boys camp at the foot of Jump Mountain northwest of Lexington, Virgina. I turned fourteen that first summer there, and I can’t think at all about that place without thinking of many things. The shortest and most important telling of the story is: I caught a glimpse of who I might become there without yet becoming that person. I think I learned at Maxwelton that one day I would grow up—a beautiful and yet disconcerting discovery.

Each morning, Leebo McLaughlin, the camp owner and director, would start the day with the assembled menagerie of 8-15 year old boys for a devotion. We would sit on low benches sunk into the ground, and he would sit on a plank grown between two mature White Oaks in a place we called “Death Valley” because of how the heat pooled there. That summer he focused primarily on the Lord’s Prayer. However, we ended each morning’s devotion with the only other verse I had in easy quoting reach: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.” That verse stopped me cold every time, and between it and St. James’ directive set a challenge that to me seemed and, certainly can still seem, impossible.

My thoughts were for the better part of any day far from being acceptable to anyone, much less to God, I thought. My words weren’t much better (in fact, were worse, particularly if I was speaking to more than one peer at a time), and most of what I did resembled petty transgressions far more than a campaign to “do the word of God.” So after years of Sunday school and an exemplary education in a fine Episcopal school, I had little to show except a failure to meet the demands of the only biblical quotations I had committed to heart. My start as a Christian and as an Episcopalian did not seem promising.

Yet I certainly had good examples in my family to follow. I knew that if I were to face St. Peter the following day, I would be better to trade my grandmother Peters’ thoughts, or my grandfather Totten’s thoughts for mine.

The living of our lives, the day-to-dayness of it, tends to move us away from thinking about verses painted in gold around the chancel of a church or recited in the humid and temporary still of June mornings. However, as a teacher, one filled at times with inappropriate thoughts and an inability to complete my “to do” list much less fulfill the word of God on earth, I am required to fall into a rhythm that encourages reflection—what Joseph Conrad called “the auGUST light of abiding memories.” For me, this time is the two weeks before school really starts (perhaps for teachers it should be called the “AUgust light of abiding memories”)—before the first wind sprint is run on the field hockey field, before the first freshman has his shoulder-blades pushed deep into the football practice field turf, before the teachers move back into sweltering classrooms and stare at the perfection of a new planning book, and before one thing happens to limit the coming school year to anything less than what is ideal—frozen potential, immortal in bronze.

During this brief moment, besides rediscovering memories that lead me to verses memorized long ago, I try to remember exactly why I decided to teach in the first place. What was it that made me choose this trail and follow it passionately? Interestingly, the images that come to mind each year about this time are not only the images that led me to teaching, but they are also woven into my reconciliation with the two quotations that have troubled me intermittently for several decades now.

The first image is a very early memory. I was standing in the doorway to the dining room in our old house on Bromley Lane looking at my mother across the table. She was fumbling with something. Scooped suddenly into the air by my father, I could see that she was fumbling with photographs and sheets of paper that a summer breeze had scattered across the table and onto the floor. As my mother worked to put everything back in order, my father explained they were writing a book. I'm not sure why this image comes to mind, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with learning—my parents remained learners, so they, in many ways, naturally became teachers. They had researched the book, a short history of courthouses in the Richmond area, together, written it together, and decided to share it with others together. Twenty-five years later they completed a much more ambitious work on courthouses in Virginia. My parents remain writers, researchers, photographers—they are lifelong students and teachers. During this time of year I remember that their work, like mine, offers a place in the world of learning and teaching.

The second image comes from a public hearing in which my mother, as an architectural historian, was involved. The City of Richmond in the early seventies was planning to tear down Old City Hall, a gothic revival building which sits just north of the State Capitol. Many Richmonders had come to plead for the preservation of the building, but it didn’t seem as if they were getting very far. After patiently waiting his turn, an elderly, and apparently homeless, gentleman approached the podium. At first clearly nervous in front of the television cameras, he smiled, “[T]his building’s been here longer than I have,” he paused as if to demand the careful attention of his audience. “It’s like a rock in that river,” he said casually waving a hand toward the James River, which runs through town five blocks to the south. Although I cannot quote him accurately, the gist of his speech was that a rock in the river affects the whole flow. Through his metaphor that seemed to stretch until it might have broken, this man taught an entire city how to see City Hall. He understood what was beyond the grasp of some city planners; that is, the building had meaning that transcended its failings as a modern City Hall. Today Old City Hall remains—photogenic and functional as an office building. This gentleman knew the power of words, and Old City Hall still stands. Through his teaching, he influenced the world around him, and, as a result he placed himself in it—he was like a rock in the river, too.

I have come to believe that when James implores his fellow disciples to be “doers of the Word and not hearers only,” he is asking them to take their place in the river, also. This river is the river of time and space—a river of God’s creation. In the verses that precede verse 22, James speaks about endurance in resisting temptation; he speaks about humility; and most importantly, he asks of every person that we be “swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.” It strikes me as more than simply good advice in that it presents a way to be a doer of the word—a way to be a rock in the river. He is not just challenging us—he is teaching us how to meet the challenge.

Challenging us and teaching us how to meet challenge is one of the key characteristics great teachers share. Great teachers also have the ability to teach things worth knowing. With this in mind, it is worth remembering that James had had a good teacher, one who shared parables, and, thankfully, if not always “slow to speak,” was certainly “swift to hear” and “slow to wrath.” Finally, great teachers have the ability to reveal to students that all of us should be in the process of becoming—becoming thinkers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, speakers, listeners, challengers and leaders, as well as becoming kind, charitable, and faithful. I believe that whenever we strive to be great teachers, we are necessarily striving to be “doers of the Word,” for we are striving to be as Christ was. For me, the challenge of “Be ye doers of the Word and not hearers only” becomes more approachable in this light—this “august light”—and the idea of becoming a rock in the river becomes more understandable.

But David’s psalm is still echoing—“Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.” There are several things about this worth noting—things, frankly, I missed for a long time: first of all, it is a prayer from flawed man not a demand from a wrathful god. (Note how the sentence would sound if we changed the pronoun: “Let the words of YOUR mouth, and the meditation of YOUR heart be acceptable in MY sight.”) As a result, it represents the human desire to have words, feelings, and thoughts be acceptable to God rather than a command from God that it be so. The renaissance poet, George Herbert, recognized a similar desire as the psalmist when he wrote in the poem “Discipline”:

Though I fail, I weep

Though I halt in place,

Yet I creep

To the throne of grace.

Here Herbert asserts that it is a process of becoming that leads to God. This is particularly comforting when I think of the man to whom we traditionally attribute the psalms—David. The David of the Hebrew Bible certainly was not a man who brought a clean slate to his prayers. In the context of James’ advice, David was often slow to hear, quick to speak, and quick to wrath. The second thing worth noting about the quotation from the 19^th psalm is that God already knows all our words and meditations and loves us anyway. Finally, the psalmist refers to God as his “strength”; therefore he believes the strength, which is necessary to reach for words and meditations acceptable to God, comes from God. This too is comforting, for just like James giving us a way to meet the challenge he believes God has set, the psalmist has a desire to reach God and knows that the strength to do so comes from God. For the psalmist, for George Herbert, and for us, I believe, God is creating a challenge, as well as offering us the strength to attain it. Talk about a great teacher!

As I stand here this morning, I feel prepared for the stretch of river that lies in front of us here at Asheville School this year. The rhythm of academic schedules, still new, yet already familiar, has started to obscure the “auGUST or “AUgust light” that led me to the ruminations that I have shared this morning, and I feel the tug of the current that forever pulls us toward what is next. I move on though to what John Milton, at the end of his poem “Lycidas,” calls “fresh woods, and pastures new” knowing that the quotations from James and from the psalmist will continue to both challenge and sustain me. I hope that you will take time to think about the things—the stories, the quotations, the people, and the faith—that challenge and sustain you. I also hope you will take the step to share those things with others, for in doing so you become not a statue—frozen potential, immortal only in bronze—but rather part of the rock that challenges and sustains all of us.