even though I am no longer in the classroom. If I were, I would have completed one week with students, and this weekend would be devoted to calling all of their parents, who by now might have heard strange (but true) tales about this guy teaching Government to their children.
Yes, there is some sadness that I am not in the classroom, but at the time I made the decision to take the buyout and retire it was the correct decision. I did not have the passion, nor the necessary love and openness, to teach with the kind of integrity I needed to. Ultimately it was that, and not changes in educational policy nor restrictions in what I could do within my classroom that was the ultimate decider for me to step aside.
During this summer I have reflected on what it is I want to do with what is left of my life. I have reinstated my teaching certificates for DC and Virginia, so I am now able to teach anyplace in the metropolitan DC area should an appropriate opening occur. I have interviewed for three positions, getting none. The process of interviewing was a positive one, and in two of the situations I was the runner up for reasons outside of my control.
Of greater importance, in the past month in particular I have been doing serious reflection on myself and my life. I have written about that previous, in this diary last Sunday. While I am still not ready to publicly discuss all the details this reflection will explore one of the lessons I have learned. It is personal to be sure. It also has other dimensions, for which I hope I have sufficient command of language to convey.
I invite you to keep reading.
The lesson learned has to do with the nature of the human heart and soul, at least as I have been experiencing them.
Here I think back to something read years ago, when I joined the Episcopal Church - this would be in 1974. Among the things I read was the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr. I remember clearly one of his images: the idea that love was like a candle, in that using it to light another candle in no way diminished its light.
I understand that we are socialized to think of love primarily as romantic love. In that we have a tendency to exclusivity: we look askance at the notion of have a strong romantic feeling to more than one person simultaneously. And for the good order of society, for the stability of the family, this certainly has its place.
We also have an incomplete notion of love derived from our concept of romantic love. We too often think of what we get from the love relationship, and we see things through a lens of jealousy, as if love offered to another somehow diminishes the love offered to us.
Now let me step back in time to explain what I think made me an effective teacher. Certainly I had pedagogical skill, which included an ability to call upon a wide variety of techniques to meet the needs of my students. I was more than knowledgeable about the subject I taught. I had an ability to engage my students. I had energy.
But all of these, and related abilities, put together, would not have made me the teacher i was.
What made me as a teacher was ultimately my heart. Simply put, I tried to find a way to love all of my students.
Love.
I cared passionately about what might happen to them.
I wanted the best for them.
I wanted them to succeed.
In my last two years of teaching, however, I was finding that I was too often losing sight of the individual students. I was not giving the energy necessary to know and understand them as individuals, not as I had in the past.
I did nto understand why this was happening. I now know it was because I was getting burned out, because I was forcing myself rather than opening myself.
Real love is a surrender. Whether we classify it as to romantic love or something else is to me no longer relevant. It is a gift freely given, wishing the best for the recipient, whether or not that recipient accepts it, abuses it, or even recognizes it.
As the wounded person I have been and still am, this surrender was hard for me. I feared that what i offered would not be accepted, so I did not surrender. I became increasingly clenched, anticipating that would I offered would not reach those to whom it was given, and that therefore became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The deepest love is, to me, when two persons each care selflessly and totally for the partner in the relationship. We may choose to restrict expressions of that care and concern - say, sexual intimacy - to one such relationship. But one can be in multiple such relationships simultaneously without it violating propriety nor necessarily threatening one's primary "romantic" relationship.
At least for me, I have had such difficulty trusting in the past that if I attempt to shut of my sense of deep caring in any direction, it inevitably has a deleterious affect upon all of my relationships, including those we my love - and I deliberately use that word - is that of a teacher for his students.
When I last explored this topic here, I was wrestling with the idea that what was hardest for me was surrendering and accepting the love offered in my direction. As I have come to understand that when I offer love I surrender to the beloved what I have offered, similarly when love is offered me, I need to be surrendered enough to accept as a gift, and that does not obligate or submerge me to anything with respect to the other person. I simple "thank you" is a sufficient beginning response.
Someone says something positive - perhaps we do not perceive that as love, but it is intended as an affirmation. In the past I would internally think of all the reasons that person was wrong, or why it would be wrong for me to accept that compliment. No longer.
This may seem unfocused. It may also seem inappropriate for a site whose primary purpose is politics, changing politics in this nation for the better.
Yet it is precisely because of how we want to change politics that I think my sharing this subject with which I wrestle, I struggle, is relevant. After all, our politics includes caring for others, wanting the best for them, seeing how government is often a necessary instrument of that care, understanding how greed, maximization of profit, and self-justification and selfishness are destructive of the well-being of others.
It is to my mind insufficient merely to be able to diagnose what is wrong with those who oppose us politically. While there is no doubt that we need to be fierce and effective in our advocacy and our action, I think here of the insight of someone who was very effective in achieving significant political and social change, Mohandas K Gandhi, who advised us "you must be the change you wish to see in the world."
As a teacher, I always understood it was incumbent upon me to model what I wanted from my students, whether it was being prepared, listening to others, taking responsibility for my mistakes.That did not mean I could not assist students in going places I could not, because I lacked some of their skills. Certainly i experienced as a soccer coach helping my athletes accomplish things well-beyond my own athletic ability, because I understood the process and I knew them.
I do not think we can convert the world around us unless we first convert ourselves. I am not here writing about conversion to a particular set of religious beliefs, although certainly there are parallels with such an action. Here I am thinking through the lens of the words just quoted from Gandhi.
I want a more loving world. Then I must be more loving.
I want an American society that is more tolerant and less repressive. Then I must open my heart to tolerance, and oppose oppression with every fiber of my being.
This brings me back to the personal level, which is where my current struggles have been most focused recently,again because of a chance encounter in the very place from which i write these words, my local Starbucks.
I have come to realize that I am very much of an extremist. That is, for myself I find it difficult to maintain shades of gray even as I acknowledge the wide range of subtle differences that can exist in the world. For myself, I am either totally open, or I am closed off. And if totally open I will find it very easy to love. And for me, the more I love the more capable of love I become.
I can sit here and watch people. I see a parent with a child, and I can delight in that child, and in the care I hope the parent is exercising. I can be amazed by the patience necessary to be the parent of a small child. And I can love that parent for what s/he is doing.
Yes, I said love. Not admire, although I do. Not respect, although that is also part of it.
Love.
To know someone is for me to begin to care about them.
To care about them is to want the best for them.
To want the best for them is the beginning of love.
I am learning that the only limits on my ability to love are the time necessary to get to know persons and my willingness to surrender.
When I first walked into the Strand Bookstore on 4th Avenue in Manhattan in 1963 I began to weep - I realized there were books I would never have the time to read.
If I look around me, in the Supermarket, on Metro, as I sit here, there are people who pass through my life I will never get to know. That is my loss.
For those I can get to know, if my heart is open the more I know the more deeply I should care.
I often refer to the saying of George Fox, that we should walk gladly across the earth answering that of God in each person we encounter.
Whether or not one believes in a deity, the thrust of that statement is the idea that each person we ecnounger has something "divine" - holy - in him. From the perspective of theistic believers, no person can permanently place themselves outside the love of God because that would make such a person the equal of God. Put in the terms in which I deal, it is not a question of the person's worthiness of being loved, for by that standard i myself would be a miserable failure.
If I want a more loving, more caring world, then I must be more loving and more caring.
What I have discovered, or perhaps finally begun to understand in my dotage, during the past month, is that the more I open myself to love, both the giving and receiving, the more capable I become of loving and receiving love. That process enriches all of my relationships, those closest to me and those that perhaps were at best cordial acquaintanceships.
How it is expressed is something I am still learning. I have noticed how little we make eye contact in American society, how rare it is we are willing to offer a friendly smile. I suspect that we are also reluctant to offer a kind word. These simple acts do much to diffuse tension, to assuage the hurt and isolation that are too often a part of American society. As a teacher I knew that gentle encouragement was often far better at encouraging positive effort than punitive responses were act correcting non-productive behavior.
Please do not use this post to try to psyche out what has been happening in my life. For one thing, you are likely to be quite inaccurate. For another, it is ultimately irrelevant. The chance encounter started a process which has led me to step back an examine and consider things in a way that I had not done at least in several decades. I found that what I was encountering and experiencing resonated with some of the best moments of my life. While I do not claim as yet to fully understand and also accept that my skills of language are insufficient to fully explain to others, I have chosen to share what i can in the hopes that it may be relevant to others.
This is a community.
Here we share our joys and sorrows.
Here we laugh at each other with gentle humor, and we laugh together.
We share our passions and our fears.
We express our concern for those in need, often those we have never directly encountered.
We honor the sacrifices of others.
In short, in this community we love.
That is one reason I have spent so much time here the past eight plus years.
It is why I post this "diary" now.
I thank the community for letting me do so.
And I say without embarrassment
I love you.
Peace.