We live building
with the motions that
compose a living or a
dying
The work of building in education touches the deepest structures of personhood, moving its way through the sinews of hope and desire, longing and fear, all bound up in the irrepressible energy that forms at the intersection of teachers, students, and administrators. There at that meeting place, thinking and feeling and acting layer upon each other, spiraling up and down. Those spiraling motions never stop. Like the wind, they can be incredibly creative or dreadfully destructive. They can facilitate healing or harm. By spiraling motions, I am referring to the energy constantly unleashed by the actual daily operations of an educational institution. This chapter explores how we might reshape those spiraling motions toward life by reframing the daily operations of a school inside a new vision of edification. We urgently need a new vision of edification informing our daily work that builds people toward each other.
We are yet caught in an institutionalizing practice set in place by the plantation and the slave master. The spiraling motions of that practice seek to draw us deeper inside the cultivation of a particular kind of institutionalizing masculinist persona—the man builder, one who, even in the operations of a school, performs an isolating self-sufficiency.
Could self-sufficiency
be redeemed?
But who would want
such a thing?
Certainly not one who asked
Mary for life, or one
who needed friends along
the way of discipleship, or
one who called on an Abba-God, or
one who fell onto God’s Spirit
like a limp body
in need of support just to
face the morning sun
or one who said, “This is my body and my blood,
eat me
because you need me in you.”
Certainly not one who on a cross
killed the illusion of
self-sufficiency.
Theological educational institutions live in a spiraling wind that must be freed from the white master’s motions by changing the motions—changing how we move into one another’s lives, how we move back and forth from inside to outside, and how we move in radically new directions. The thicker words I use for these three changes in motion are “assimilation,” “inwardness,” and “revolution.”
We need an assimilation that does not harm but heals. To assimilate is to be placed inside someone else’s way of life and to follow in that way. It is like entering a house and living inside its structure. The house of theological education as well as all Western education was built to make us men, and we are yet haunted by the motion to make us men. This house of education formed a duplex—two kinds of habitation in the same house, one of master formation and the other of slave emancipation.1 Both were inside this house of assimilation, and both aimed at moral formation. Master formation meant entrance into the racial paterfamilias through which indigenes would enter the European world of civilization and citizenship and thereby enter their humanity. This trajectory represented a marriage of ancient forms of Christian formation with modern colonialist logics, combining a civilizing impulse with a soteriological sensibility.2 To save a soul was to educate a body, and to educate a body was to save a soul. There is something right about such a sensibility, but woven inside greed, theft, chauvinism, and whiteness, that sensibility became encrusted with a veneer of a strange morality that in effect made Western educational assimilation the reality of salvation. Education as master formation always moves toward an assimilation that hides as it assimilates, sending up the message that it is engaged in a moral formation that cultivates people into thoughtful subjects, excellent workers, and good and responsible citizens.
The other side of the house, however, held a different way of educating, one aimed at emancipation and at weaponizing learning. Without denying master formation, this way of educating sought tools “to argue for one’s humanity, to angle toward freedom from various forms of social and cultural bondage and hegemony, and to challenge all forms of oppression.”3 This was education born of theft and fugitivity, as slaves (often under threat of death) and indigenous peoples taught themselves how to read the scripts of the European masters. They entered the language, thought forms, and cultural sensibilities of their colonizers and masters, aware but not fully aware of the price that would be paid to build freedom from the master’s tools of bondage.4 Each generation of former slave and indigene saw, in thankfulness and criticism, both their predecessors’ accomplishments in and their captivities to a house of educational bondage. This has been not only a history of progress and struggle but also a history of assimilation. Like master formation, this emancipatory formation also hides as it assimilates, sending up the message that it is engaged in a moral formation that cultivates people into advocates for justice and discerning citizen subjects able to spy out the signs of oppression.5
These two ways of educating born of the master’s house have never been mutually exclusive. Both education as master formation and education as emancipatory weapon aim at cultivating mastery—the freedom of mastery (moral formation) or the mastery of freedom (emancipation)—and both silence the sound of a door opening to a life together, toward a formation in communion. Of course, this tragedy formed in the master’s house.6
I remember my worst student and my worst time as a teacher. Connor was a middle-aged white guy from deep in the South, born and raised in the hateful power that structured an abiding racial antagonism. Connor carried that structure in his soul. But Connor also carried a deep love for his faith and a great respect for black preachers and ministry. He was the son of a minister, aiming to be a minister himself. He was the contradiction that one often meets in America and especially in the South—middle-aged white people who love much in black culture but are at war with black people. Connor had even attended and graduated from an HBCU (historically black college or university), because he could go as “a minority” and get significant tuition support. He and I met in my course on the history and theology of the black church, and we never knew a moment of peace together in that course. Connor believed he knew as much or more than I did about African American history, black church life, the plight of black people, and what needed to be done for us. He refused to let me be his teacher and with eager energy pressed me during each class period to be his student.
Connor did know a lot about the matters of the course, more than all the other students, but he turned all that knowledge toward a pathological reading of black folks. Each class period he turned everything we read and everything we discussed toward a black lack—of stable family life, of moral formation, and of proper education. And each class period made more visible the truth I wanted to deny: that I truly hated Connor. My faith in teaching, in Christianity, and in the academy was crumbling in this course as I felt helpless against my hate. Indeed, I cherished my hate.
The wall between anger and hate broke, and I was floating in the water until I could no longer feel the ground under my feet. How do you restore a wall when you cannot feel the ground? You release the anger until the waters of hate recede and you feel the ground again. Then you rebuild that wall.
But there was something else that I experienced with Connor—a woundedness and a longing. I could see that Connor’s adversarial posture bothered him and that he wanted to be something more than a racial antagonist. He wanted to connect with me—to have me walk into his life, walk with him in his life. But he had no way to allow me in as a teacher and as cotraveler on the journey of faithfulness. Whiteness was embedded in his thinking like thick weeds in a garden, and I had neither the energy nor the interest to separate wheat from malignant chaff. For this I carried sorrow, because I knew Connor wanted to be a minister, but I could not help him: all I could do was resist him.
Connor was a racist, but that was beside the point. We were caught in an educational motion or endeavor structured in antagonism, master formation versus emancipation. What the learning environment could be for me and for him carried the severe limitations to which we have all adjusted.
We sat together in our exhaustion, the black faculty members, eating lunch together, a few weeks left in the semester. Each of us on this day would be teaching our thorn class—the class with students who resisted our presence, challenged our authority, and made us work harder to prepare and teach than any faculty member should ever have to work. It was never a whole class, just the one or two, three or four students who reminded each of us that we lived in the master’s house. As we finished lunch and conversation, I began to recite the words “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me …,” and my colleagues finished them in unison, “for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light …” Then we all laughed out loud, probably in absurdity and hope. I whispered as we walked back to our offices, “and you will find rest for your souls.”
Educational institutions assimilate. They draw people into a way of life by drawing people into sight of ways of life. Such assimilation can be thick or thin depending on how pronounced that way of life is in a curriculum or a social ecology, and in the way the layers of thinking, feeling, and acting move between students, faculty, and administrative staff. This is their glory. Colonialist educational assimilation turned education into an imperialist endeavor, forcing a way of life that would reduce ways of life. Colonialist assimilation draws people down to silent objects even when they speak. They become anticipations of an echo, with variations, but nonetheless an echo. This is an assimilation that hides itself as assimilation. It can be hidden in such practices as critical thinking, or traditioned reflection, or the repetition that makes for skilled execution of a task, gesture, or performance. This is our curse. Echoing in and of itself is not the problem. All education rightly carries an element of the echoing back. The problem here is the absence of a reciprocity of echoing that speaks of life aimed at the together.
I remember the painful discussion I had at a college committed to educating its new reality of diverse students. The demographic shift at this school was dramatic, with significant increases of African American, Latinx, and central and east African students. Most of these students were the first generation in their families to attend college. Some of them sat in on this discussion with faculty and administrators and me. I dreamed with the group of a reverse assimilation. A few of the faculty members quickly ended that dream. “There is nothing a nineteen-year-old student can teach me,” said the senior professor of philosophy and theology. Almost thirty years of teaching students how to think critically, how to read texts and write clearly, had given him a clarity on his task that was truly impressive, but that clarity did not extend to his own life and the lives of his students. He went on, “I can see how knowing more about my students’ background, their struggles, and so forth may help me in the task of teaching them, but it is not going to alter in any significant way what I do and have always done.” Another professor spoke now, building on what his colleague said. “My goal is to help prepare these students to face a world filled with injustice and to expand the vision of the world they bring when they come to this institution.” This second professor was a historian who specialized in twentieth-century religious and social movements with a special focus on Malcolm X. The irony of his statement escaped him. I looked in the eyes of the students present. Some looked down, others looked away from the circled chairs, but most looked into my eyes registering a silence that was far more than their absent voices.
I felt the old anger. It had returned. But now the wall was built back again and I could keep the anger from flooding my soul, filling me with hate, and pulling me off my feet, taking from me a sense of the ground. God had done this for me.
These seasoned professors misunderstood my invitation to assimilate as meaning learning more things about their new students, coming to know their worlds, and aligning that knowledge with their knowledge. In such a frame of thinking and knowing, education is a calculation of exchange. How much do I need to know in order to give the student what I know? But if assimilation means lifeworlds brought inside lifeworlds, then something historically urgent and spiritually crucial is at stake in this moment. I was after something else with them—a deeper reality of entanglement. An entanglement in which they might give up attaining mastery, or possession, or control, and turn their entire school toward deeper involvement with the lifeworlds of their students whose communities surrounded and extended beyond the institution. To reverse that assimilation through the cultivation of an institutional reality of communion requires a new sense of shared habitation—geographic, intellectual, spiritual—and a new goal of self-articulation, to hear the many speaking through the one. Behind those students were communities that were a call to those professors to rethink their lives in their expansion in and toward both their students and those communities. But in order to hear that call, we who inhabit institutions need to know how to move back and forth from inside to outside.
The phenomenological teacher
Being never safe,
I always envied the phenomenological teacher
They could always stay in the air
above history
suspended between
Knowledge and belief
They could take
Peoples, ideas, hopes, dreams,
God, Jesus, the Spirit,
Islam, The Buddha, Mohammad, The Koran, the Bible,
Spiritualists, Pentecostals, Satanists
And present them all in the
3rd Person, singular or plural.
Being always skindarkbound and never the universal,
I could not get away with that
caught as I was in flesh and Spirit.
Phenomenologicals disappear
in teaching the “They”
the whiteness forming voice
from stage left aiming for stage right,
to be viewed by students
as knowledge itself for the taking
or leaving smooth and clean and in
pieces like a plate filled with different flavored options,
like a journalist in alluring drag,
handling them the same by not handling them
I, on the other hand, was only one option
Take it or leave it.
We work in the inwardness, existing in the journey of the quiet, moving from inside to outside and back inside again. There are two elements that are crucial to an academic ecology and to educational institutions, especially theological institutions: introversion and introspection. They have the same Latin root, intro, meaning “to the inside.” The latter includes specere, “to look at,” and the former includes vertere, “to turn.” Introversion is the state of being in which one is constantly thoughtful about one’s own existence, while introspection is the act of looking inwardly. One could imagine their relationship to be one of being and act, the being of introversion and the act of looking inwardly—introspection. Introversion organizes the external world through an ongoing internal calculus, and introspection is the energy and activity that give life to that organization. Academic institutions are structured inside both introversion and introspection, and in turn these institutions structure lives within an introspection and an introversion. Let’s designate this work of introversion and introspection as the formation of inwardness. In this regard, academic institutions remain inside the ancient theological trajectory of contemplation.
Contemplation is everything in the history of Christian thought. We were formed to contemplate God. It is at the beginning of our journey, and it will be at the end of it as we enter into the eternal reality of contemplating the divine life. From the magnificent root of Christian contemplative practice grew the fundamental structures of Western education and especially theological education. Even educational institutions that imagine themselves far removed from these contemplative roots, having exorcised the religious and the theological from the way they imagine their intellectual work, are yet on the terrain of a theologically drenched vision of reflection, solitude, and self-examination. The monastic gesture is yet performed in the modern educational setting.
Introversion and introspection, however, are troubled in the master’s house, penetrated by a calculus that mangles our inwardness and that often turns our thinking torturously insular, making the possibility of deep, abiding communion seem like an impossible dream.
I remember Rachel and Louise, these women both of a Philadelphia. Louise, white, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Rachel, black, from Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their friendship began in promise and ended in pain. They—both courageous and thoughtful—were willing to work at a friendship. But that work was clouded, as each was a layered thinker, analyzing and dissecting her actions and words toward the other. The chaplain and the dean of students and I were exhausted just watching them working at their relationship and thinking their relationship. Rachel thought her blackness, Louise her whiteness, Louise thought Rachel’s blackness, Rachel thought Louise’s whiteness, entering and exiting shadow and light as they corrected and explained, apologized and asserted their separate beings. They fought with the real and the imagined in their relationship and finally, as they approached the final semester of their program, Rachel said she had had enough—the friendship was over. What occasioned this break was less a thing between them and more one more racial event in the news, another senseless police-initiated shooting, more black mourning, and then the stupidity of whiteness explaining away the horror and the offense of another black death.
Louise was truly heartbroken, her tears heavy and constant in my office, and in the chaplain’s office, and in the dean of student life’s office. She could not bring her mind to a rest as she searched for the site of failure in herself. Rachel mourned as well. Her tears were reserved only for me and other black spaces. She searched as well for why she ended a friendship that yet carried promise and pleasure that neither she nor Louise was ready to admit. Rachel wove comments, words, ideas that Louise uttered over their several semesters together with the painful white explanations for black death and found Louise somehow closer to those from whom Rachel wanted great distance. The result: Louise gone.
Rachel was not wrong and Louise was not innocent. Louise was not wrong and Rachel was not innocent. They were working and thinking, and that was right and good and holy, but their working and thinking carried a torture that we could not articulate. They could see the work that needed to be done to be together, but they could not see that they were together, beholding one another’s journeys and holding one another in thought and hope.
The pain present was not the overthinking of their relationship but the thorny trail of moving from inside to outside, from their own individual thoughts to their conversations and back to their thoughts and then to the expectations that surrounded them—of mastering the racial problematic in their own lives—and back to their thoughts, then to their relating, and back to their thoughts.
Rachel and Louise were caught in what we in the academy are all caught in—an introspection and an introversion permeated by the aspiration for self-sufficiency. But the drive toward self-sufficiency when joined to the realities of reflection, solitude, and self-examination creates a cruelty, like a biting dog that cannot be trained. The cruelty for Rachel and Louise showed itself precisely in the evaluative habit of mind that moved between them. Louise was not Connor—someone trapped in racial antagonism. She thoughtfully worked at unraveling the racial fabrics that covered her life. Rachel was willing to imagine a different state of being with her white friend—one in which she trusted the new. But in a space that demands self-sufficiency and aims at its displays, no one is able to stand, or more exactly, only one is able to stand—the one who achieves the image of a man finished.
The finished man was always the image held up and held out to colonized peoples in the processes of Western education. The first work of that image is to create inadequacies. This is the energy inside the master/slave dialectic within the legacies of plantation and colonial education. The first word of self-justification that masters told themselves was that the slaves had deficiencies that needed to be addressed. Slavery and colonialism always carried a therapeutic wish bound up in a soteriological illusion: they were addressing the deficiencies of the natives. For hundreds of years, generations of indigenous scholars and colonialized subjects have written powerfully and eloquently about the creation of the image and the inadequacies.7 Everyone must aim toward the finished man, toward a self-sufficiency that overcomes their inadequacies.
I remember when Stonewall quit. That was his nickname. We were doctoral students at the same time. He in a school on the West Coast of the United States, and I in an East Coast program. We were together at a gathering for doctoral students of color seeking additional financial support to make it through our programs. We had both passed our preliminary examinations (qualifying examinations in other contexts) and were deep into drafting our dissertation proposals. This gathering included established scholars of color and white scholars who were allies. This was not an enjoyable time. We were mercilessly questioned about our ideas, our proposals, and our vocation. At breakfast on the last day, Stonewall and I were sitting at a table with an African American scholar and one of his African American doctoral students who had successfully defended his dissertation and now had a tenure-track job. After a few pleasantries, they both started in on Stonewall in a continuation of their grilling of him from the previous day. They told him that he needed to read more widely beyond what he had already read and that he needed to master his German and he needed to attend to his French more rigorously and what about Latin given his interest and be careful of the limitations of his dissertation director whose thinking was too narrow…. The light was gone from Stonewall’s eyes. All he said in response was “This is what I get there. I thought it would be different here.” I did too. Stonewall left the meeting and left his doctoral program—too many inadequacies.
The inwardness of the academy is a troubled inwardness that brings a form of diseased evaluation. This diseased evaluation was formed through the longitudinal effects of years of inside assessments always tied to a white male persona, standing at every evaluative juncture of an academic life and a professorial career. The problem is not that judgments are made but that they are spoiled. They arrive to us already old and stale, filled with the colonialist’s tormenting spirits that are unleashed on us and that we then unleash on each other, moving from institution to institution, always turning judgments both local and contingent into a contorted universal perspective on people and their work. Here the white gatekeeper moves inside psychic space haunting interpretations of work and professional life and interrupting genuine self-affirmation. I have known too many scholars who have fallen into an abyss of critique or concealment against critique, moving through the academy in constant shadowboxing, throwing punches at anyone and everyone, bobbing and weaving, bracing for the impact of words that will surely sting. So many in response form a spirituality of resistance to that gatekeeper, but the point is that an unwanted glaring light has invaded the good work of introspection and interrogation. That glaring light slowly draws introspection and interrogation toward a form of surveillance that aims at control.
Search me, God, and know my heart,
Probe me and know my mind.
And see if a vexing way be in me,
And lead me on the eternal way.
There is a joy in not knowing. Like a ribbon of a bow being opened to a gift, the not-knowing opens curiosity and curiosity enters wonder, as Lisa Sideris suggests. This is wonder that hosts knowledge, allowing it to grow within the beauty of mystery.8 Not knowing is glorious energy that fuels intellectual life, pressing us to listen and learn, drawing out both an impatience and a patience that work collaboratively. But what happens when the not-knowing is turned into a weakness, like a hole in one’s armor or a flaw in one’s fighting technique? What becomes of the not-knowing when it becomes a crime and calls forth punishment? In the colonial master’s house, the not-knowing became a burden for inwardness, and a burdened inwardness. Colonial subjects were instructed to accept a searching and a probing that would locate the not-knowing and eradicate it, like a virus. Of course, what was not known was the world of the European in its fullness—its languages, its logics, the proper expressions of its cultures, its knowledges, and its ways of forming and framing knowledge. Such a not-knowing was endless, so the searching would be endless.
|
My voice trembles always at the sound of your voice, which began for me so long ago, gently guiding me to what was good, great, weak, strong, straight into the vise, tightening ever so slowly that I mistake the hurting for stability, constrictions for conscientiousness. I learn labored breathing, tighter thinking until I make the sound for help with every sound I make. But I think, this will not be forever. I will break free even if I must tear skin from my flesh to loose your stability. |
Sara saved her, took Joan from the other voice and placed her inside. She knew how, having lost enough skin to form a womb outside her body—the mindbodywomb— where bathing light would cover Joan’s thinking, protecting her from glaring light—light against light knitting truth into her inward being before it could be snatched away by the other voice, until she emerged from Sara’s wombbodymind intact, and hearing none, the i passed unharmed into Joan’s voice flowing like refreshing waters ready to heal torn skin and cracked voices. |
Many have rebelled against that search by pushing back against an academic institutional pathology that constantly tries to weave the good of not knowing into the horror of colonially formed inadequacies. Students, however, have a more difficult time discerning the difference. Some come to our institutions having had teachers who banished that shadow over their learning by celebrating the goodness of not knowing. They reduced Europeans from masters to learners and placed them alongside their students as colearners. Other teachers, however, pressed their students into full search mode, looking for their weaknesses, working feverishly to make their students into the finished man.
The lie is that in order to know the world, one must know the European world. The truth is that in order to know the world that has come to be, one must know the European world. The calamity is that coming to know the world should never have been put in this way. Students come to us confused about the search for knowledge, trying to find that difference between the honor of not knowing and the shame of colonial inadequacy, or they come to us in acute collapse, having merged the search to become the finished man with the search to know and understand.
The question is not what they should know. Too many educational institutions are lost in that question, looking obsessively at the commodities of learning. The question is, what should be the shape of the journey to know? What should be the character of the search? How might there be a shared inwardness that opens the joy of not knowing inside the joy of learning together? Yet here we must return to the rough ground of colonialism’s forced intimacy.
Slaves had no choice. They were inside what they did not want to be inside of—the masters’ and mistresses’ longings, desires, and fantasies all played out in front of them and oftentimes on their bodies. Masters and mistresses believed they had a right to the inner life of the slaves, because that was also their property. Slaves did, however, have a choice about what they allowed inside them—if not in their bodies, certainly in their minds and hearts. Masters and mistresses could pry open cracked doors in weakened bodies, yet even with forced entry, what they often discovered was not a slave’s inner life but just another room without a view. But the right to know lingers long after slavery’s end as well as the stubborn desire to center an intimacy born of whiteness where the search to know and understand remains plantation-like—with people of color made enhancers of knowledge, tools for use.
I remember those weary minds. I was speaking at a Christian college in the aftermath of a few racial incidents on campus that were evidence of the resurgence of white supremacy’s confidence. The students of color were feeling the stress of it all. I looked in their eyes and I saw the truth I knew too well, having gone to a college just like theirs—very Christian and painfully white—and I spoke a truth that all needed to hear. I said that students of color carry a double burden in their schools. In one arm they carry the weight of racial harm, of aggressions small and large, and in their other arm they carry the fatigue of their friends. Eyes opened wide as I spoke. They attend their classes, I said, hoping to learn just like other students learn, only to hear all too often an ignorance laced in the knowledge of their professors, an ignorance of them and of the racial world they all shared. And then they return to the private spaces of dorm rooms and meal halls and study rooms and places off campus, only to find they have a new job—teaching and explaining, debating and exposing the racial truths that they are only beginning to deeply understand themselves. Their friendships with white students and some assimilated students of color carry a labor totally unfair and cruelly taxing. This is why, I said, so many students of color by the time they are seniors are sick of their schools and sick in their schools. The joy of not knowing was taken from them in the work of having to know, and the joy of their friendships died in the heat of an exhaustion that they feel but cannot explain. At that moment, many students of color stood up and cheered; others sat crying—water in a thirsty land.
Many students of color arrive at our institutions friendship-fatigued and rightly suspicious of an educational journey that promises more burden. They yet aim for friendship, but they are skeptical of the depth it can reach, not because of time or space but because of a habit of mind born of the plantation that centers the feelings and needs of white bodies and turns such students of color into service providers in a search of shared knowledge. At the same time, they are entering an academic ecology that is itself suspended between isolation and exhaustion—the exhaustion of striving toward the finished man and the isolation of a cruel, constant self-examination.
Under these conditions, self-examination and interrogation feed a kind of segregationist sentiment and mentality that is a creeping malady plaguing our institutions, creating in us an isolationism that weaves together an individualism bound to an exploitative disposition. It teaches us to ask the question, “What can I get out of this place or this person?” I am not referring to the formation of affinity group meetings, or the processes of self-selection that go into course choice, or disciplinary interests, or curricular design, none of which should be singled out as problematic because such endeavors and gatherings are generally efforts to overcome the long histories of exclusion. The point here reaches to the work of institutions in creating the conditions for a productive inwardness, one in which introspection and introversion are life giving and communion gesturing.
Ash
He could not see my ashes,
it being Wednesday and me
being so dark.
No need to see, he laughed.
Forty again, no mule this time
as I traveled inward
looking to remember
but finding ashy
legs, ankles, arms, hands
shamefully present without
oil and dirt in my mouth
bent down as I was with
Ashé
his torture, each step hounded
Ashé
by their ignorant laughter,
inappropriate after Tuesday so far from
Sunday morning, moving forward is
labor too tight for sweat, but this is what
I want to be ash of shared pain and suffering
denying nothing, absolutely present
when the ash becomes dust
and takes on immortality,
then I will breathe again
and laugh,
Ashé
We must come to revolution. The word has no natural confluence with education, the former an overturning and the latter a building up. In the history of Western education, revolution has been an object of study far more than a goal of formation. Indeed, the education born of the plantation and colonialism lives in the aftermath of revolution—the overturning of native worlds for the sake of establishing a new one. The new world that has come into existence formed educational institutions inside the refusal of revolution—one cannot have an overturning of an overturning, especially if the former overturning is understood to have established the common good, regardless of the screams and cries of native millions. Educational institutions can, however, entertain revolution as an idea worth exploring, mapping, even projecting as a possibility but always within an established way of being that intimates a resistance to change.
But the idea of revolution confronts theological educational institutions with a question: Why do you exist? This is our question because we exist inside a revolution, the overturning that is the turning the world right side up by God. It is an overturning that makes possible a beautifully strange kind of building up. It is a building up inside a crumbling. We are inside the Spirit’s crumbling of world orders, orders that reach all the way down to the body, claiming sovereignty over the ways we should understand ourselves. Yet we are an overturning that has been drawn into the colonial overturning, and our energies have been harnessed in establishing the plantation as a world order. And although we have formed our educational institutions inside that world order, we yet carry the contradictions.
We are an overturning that facilitates a building up, but it is a building up that glories in the crumbling. Contradiction. We are an overturning that has been co-opted by the long legacy of colonialist overturning that marshaled our considerable energies in sustaining systems of instruction and evaluation that yet signal the plantation world order. More contradiction. Theological education is caught in these contradictions. The first contradiction is good and right but difficult to grasp because through it we build in revolution, we build institution in the midst of an overturning and a passing away. The second contradiction is a tragedy. It hurts us because through it we build institution always against an overturning, always to maintain an order we have mistakenly come to believe is good for us and good for the world. Understanding how we come to this mistake is crucial to figuring out how we can together move in new directions, move in the revolution.
I remember when he took me to lunch, this man for the season. He was one of the most powerful people at the university, having served in several high-profile and important positions. Over many decades, he had amassed incomparable influence and had mentored many in the university and the divinity school. I was only a few years into teaching and only a few months into actually voicing my opinions in faculty meetings. I spoke of the need for diversity, for change in our pedagogies, and for more attention to be given to our students of color. Nothing very radical, just earnest. Even so, it was clear that some of my opinions were not being well received by some of the senior faculty. So he decided to take me to lunch for a gentle talk—just two colleagues sharing a meal. He was the quintessential southern gentleman who spoke quietly and slowly, each word demanding your full attention.
He was also a storyteller. This, of course, is a constitutive aspect of being a powerful southern gentleman. So, he told me stories. The stories were about his humble upbringing inside the scent and sound of poverty, and within small suffocating circles of thinking. He came from nothing. Then he told me stories about the various faculty members he had known over the years. Each of these faculty members was extraordinarily gifted—sheer inexplicable intellectual power married to quirkiness in many. He mentioned one man (they were all men in these stories) who had memorized the intricacies of Immanuel Kant’s critiques at the age of fifteen and had carried on a running argument against Kant for decades. Then he slowly and with the beautiful precision of a storyteller turned these stories toward a single point. “Any school that would have a significant future must always aim to gather together as many extraordinary people as possible and make no excuses for those who are not. A university or any academic institution must always be guided by the gifted.” Then he said to me, speaking with that southern cadence I knew so well, “Willie, I have always lived thankfully in the privilege of being among such extraordinary people, and I hope you will as well. As you continue here, it would be good for you to follow the lead of your senior colleagues.”
We have to recall at this moment what we know of the self-sufficient man. He wields power responsibly, never apologizing for fully acting in his abilities. What is also true of the self-sufficient man is that he identifies the sheer power of ability in others and never apologizes for identifying it. With this identification comes clarity about human beings and the way the world should be. Some are better than others—quicker, clearer, smarter, stronger, more gifted—and worlds, whether social, political, economic, or academic, should be ordered around such people. I am not sure if my would-be mentor imagined himself to be numbered among those with greater ability, but I am sure he did not imagine me in that number. He offered me this elitist anthropology as a kind of natural theology, that is, a way to recognize a divine intentionality for ordering the world through the natural occurrences of greater ability in some.
My parents had prepared me for him, this man of the old, because they were better storytellers than he was. I learned from my parents how to wield story with more precision than he did, how to use story as both shield and sword. Most importantly, I learned from them what story I was inside as I heard and told stories.
He showed me how educational institutions, especially theological institutions, often easily become imprecise defenders of the order of things. It happens in our ability to see ability. In the space between ability and seeing ability, a vision of order forms, moving from self-perception to a shared recognition of power. Academic institutions recognize three kinds of power: the power of intellectual ability, the power of notability (crudely designated as celebrity), and the power of money. There are other kinds of power, like the power to convene, but these three kinds of power shape sight. Scholars and administrators recognize power, and we sometimes see more than should be there. We see the way power makes things happen, and we commit to the way power makes things happen in and through powerful individuals. But the way to make things happen through those with power quickly slips from becoming a means to an end to becoming a stabilizing end in itself. We see an order to things that is in fact not an order but the imagined surest unit from which order must be built—the individual with power.
I remember Winston, who went by the nickname Win. Every line for him had fallen in a pleasant place. His great-grandfather was a lumber baron, and his grandfather the governor of a state. Professors and Presbyterian ministers and businessmen dotted his family tree, and he had graduated from an excellent school in the Ivy Northeast. A tall, blond, blue-eyed, handsome, articulate young man who after two years of stellar work in divinity school at the start of his third year was being urged by my colleagues to go on to doctoral work. Win came to see me with a question. I will never forget his words: “I love my father and my grandfather and the other men in my life. I appreciate what they have given me. But I don’t want to be them. How can I not be them?” I had waited all my teaching career for Win. He had been in my courses and those of my colleagues where a Being beyond the white self-sufficient man was beginning to be articulated, and Win heard what was being suggested. But now was the time of accounting for him and me as he was pressing me to help him see a way into that new being. I had no plan, only the sure knowledge that he would have to resist a world organized to build itself freshly on his body, making all things old through his newness. I also knew that once he left my office there would be very few people who would even understand his question.
Win was the first but not the last. Many have followed, and many such students inhabit our institutions trying to discern how to build a life inside a revolution that is being resisted and a crumbling that is being denied. Win knew how easy it would be for him to allow himself to become the building block of the old order, surrounded as he was by professors and family members who saw the perfecting of that order in him. Win needed friends who would discern with him the crumbling and live in it and toward it. He needed companions on a journey of building that together would discover what blueprints emerged from the overturning.
Do you hear the calling
from the new nothing,
not the old one
born of robbery and lack
but the nothing out of which
came that voice speaking light
to see clearly
the beginning of a new day
of rubble turned to hill and lifting head
and in an instant make refuse
the stuff of freeing legend
to glory thine be and belong
The shared work of discerning the overturning in the midst of the building is by far one of the most difficult tasks for theological institutions. That shared work is often confused or resisted. Theological schools tend to lean toward one of two types in relation to this difficult task:
These are schools with students who are learning of their liberation and are seeking the revolution. The students want to embody it, and they want their institutions to embody it as well. So they practice this work—speaking truth to power, calling into question the social order, protesting policies, demanding that the old ways must fall—on faculty, staff, administrators, other students, trustees, and anyone who will listen to their activist voices aiming for victory. These students carry to varying degrees a righteous anger sometimes cultivated by the courses they have taken and the lessons they have learned from the school itself. But this is messy work, because motives are always mixed and clarity usually elusive. Clarity is elusive because we often collapse the overturning into thinking critically or engaging in political, social, ideological, or theological critique of the prevailing orders. We forget that critique itself is being overturned, turned right side up within the new purpose of life together. Critique must aim at communion. The overturning is wider and deeper than expressing the critical faculties. Administrators and faculty always make a terrible mistake when they forget that students must practice on us, learning to feel their righteous anger and express it appropriately. Students and faculty make a terrible mistake when they forget that communion is the point.
These are schools that work diligently to control dissent. They do this not because they hate dissent, but because they understand the work of building to require that it be managed properly. From the admissions process, through faculty hiring and institutional governance, to alumni relations and the work of the board of trustees, these schools seek a clarity of purpose that joins all involved in a shared project of building. Their students come because of that clarity, and their faculty are there because they share in it as well. Yet these schools—faculty, staff, administrators, and students—often forget that clarity deepens and grows new like a perennial plant that returns for another season with bright new colors and differently shaped branches and fruit. Theological schools live in the soil of the overturning, which means that my metaphor is inadequate, because a new is always emerging that is not just a variation on the old but a new reality that brings with it a crumbling of the old. What remains, what is the same, is God. Unfortunately, such schools have learned to see the overturning as what God is doing in the world but not in their schools.
On the last day of worship
many souls yet present after finals
the summer already filling the sanctuary
we all wait for the service to begin
then we will hear in each other’s voices once more
that sound that creates new worlds
soon we will depart with that hidden power.
And then there is the money.
Money is already a story. Money has been an ever-present sign of commitment to a way of life. The New Testament designation of mammon captures this reality nicely. We are caught always between God and mammon, caught between the way God organizes relations and the way relations are organized by mammon. While we could easily slip into a Manichaean logic in talking about God and mammon, in truth we are inside both of their stories. The story of mammon is inside the story of God, and the story of God is inside the story of mammon. The incarnation formed this dilemma for us, becoming a crucial site of struggle. Jesus was subject to the power of mammon, and mammon was made subject to the power of God through Jesus. We live under mammon and we live under the reign of God. These are not equal statements, but they share a fierce urgency. That fierce urgency penetrates our work and life.
How will we live? This is the crucial question for theological institutions. By this question we are asking both how will we survive and what will be the character of our surviving. The double meaning of the question helps to locate the ways we lose sight of the overturning and the crumbling. Theological institutions are caught in the treacherous economic currents that are destroying so many in this world. Students come to us in the currents, feeling and knowing their pull. The students may or may not come to an institution that has enough resources to allow them a reprieve from hard swimming—from working long hours to make ends meet, from living hand to mouth or paycheck to paycheck and carrying ever-growing stress as they move through their theological education. Some students come resourced and are spared financial anxiety, but they too keep a keen eye on shifting currents, making sure they will not turn against them. But between the anxiety of an institution and the anxiety of students lies the real danger of alienation.
How did misery slip in?
Bound as we were
to promise and hope,
our hands all turned
out and up waiting for
the latter rain to touch
our dry lips and then we
looked for fruit from trees
closer to own, listening
to him tell us the differences
between us, no God here,
from there we struck out,
missing the reason for our hands
in the first place, their identical
being their identity for shared
feeding, filling, touching, holding
the water that will surely come
and wash away need but not
want that will be turned into
more hands
Alienation is distance where there should be none, and denial of the deep connection that is the birthright of living creatures and living prosperously as creatures together. The Western world is submerged in alienated labor, which means that the quest to make and get money often cultivates the severest segregation and deepest suspicions of people and institutions. A soul-crushing silence exists between institutional need and student need in many places where unrequited feelings pass like ships in the night, missing each other by inches and minutes. So many schools agonize over not having enough money to make the education and the school living free and easy and needing to take from students their hard-earned resources and more of their freedom lost in financial debt. So many students agonize over not having enough money to make the education and the school living easy and needing to find resources when sources are slim or costly. But the feelings almost never meet, barred as they are by shared doubt. Students will often doubt that the institution is doing all it can do to ease their burden. It finds money for some things, they suppose, but not enough for them. Some schools will doubt that their students are exercising enough frugality, discipline, sacrifice, and maturity in how they handle their money. The word often spoken by students and school alike for this situation is “entitlement,” which is shorthand for “we are alienated from each other.”
What do we share? This is the question that God demands we ask ourselves after we have asked the question of how we live. Sharing is the key that moves us from mammon to God. Even its gesture shakes the foundations of ways of relating built on dehumanizing processes of exchange. The overturning begins in the sharing and the sharing opens to eternity. Sharing crumbles a world of possession, exchange, and debt formed through mammon’s way of organizing living. This is the trajectory that theological institutions are on: we share what we have and we cultivate an education in sharing. We share in hope that we will come to see each other at the journey’s end even as we journey together toward God.
I remember consulting with a school that wanted to form a teacher-training program for its doctoral students who, as a group, were in very bad financial shape. The school provided very little monetary support, charging the students half tuition and paying them little for loads of teaching. There was plenty of discouragement and resentment to go around and few ideas of how to get out of this terrible trap. I asked the faculty and administration if they could make a simple gesture. The doctoral students commuted to school and squeezed meals into their backbreaking schedules, so I asked if the school could provide one of their on-campus apartments reserved for visiting guest speakers as a lounge and napping area for them, keep food in the refrigerator for them, and as a faculty and staff provide free meals three times a day for them. The school was strapped for cash, but there was unused gospel lying all around.
I have again covered a lot in a chapter, aiming at an urgent institutional need: to change our operations, that is, to change our motions in the spiraling wind, terrifying as that may feel to some, given the utter uncontrollability of it. But this is an inescapable place—nothing hides from wind—that never stands still but that calls us to the vulnerability of motion itself where balance is fragile, direction constantly needed, and falling down is a real possibility. But so too is a reality of formation that presents an assimilation, an inwardness, and a revolution that help to form an erotic soul, much like Mary’s son who came to gather us. Yet it is precisely the problem of gathering that I need to consider as I end this brief meditation on formation. We already live in the midst of a process of gathering, a global gathering that does not cultivate life but pulls us toward a bondage and death found in a managed diversity and a stupefying docility. This is not the crowd but the crowd in chains, and only holy desire that forms in us for one another can break those chains and guide us to a place where we meet each other in ways that announce eternity.