How I Learned That Only a Few Words Are Needed If You Find the Right Ones and Are Alive Within Your Human Body

The most beautiful moment of my former life

Fr Stefan of Karoulia, alive beyond words

“The reason your classes are uninteresting is that you are listening to your professors talk about nature in classrooms illuminated by fluorescent lights. Isn't it pleasant for people just to talk to one another like we are now in the sunlight or in the cool shade of a tree?”

Masonobu Fukuoka, Sowing Seeds In the Desert

A couple days late and a few dollar short, but in this increasingly miscellaneous monthly slot for something mediumish in length, but not a whole essay, I wanted to share a little about my former life as a teacher, and how it connects to my life now as a writer.

And speaking of my life as a writer, my book Sunlilies: Eastern Orthodoxy as a Radical Counterculture, has just been published by Cista Mystica Press in the UK.

About the book, @ Paul Kingsnorth says: “A poetic, powerful, prophetic tract, Sunlilies is a gem I return to regularly. Wild, hopeful Christian dreaming for dark times: this is the way forward.” And @ Martin Shaw says, “There's something very fresh about it, restorative even.”

Thanks, lads!

And thanks, all of you, for being here with me!

-g

I was a schoolteacher for years, and loved it very much—a little wild and kind of quiet but ultimately people-loving and cooperative rebel soul, I wanted to convey to my students not just words, but life!

For example, I took my calculus boys running barefoot across the icy soccer field in the depths of January, to wake up for some maddening integrals—which was counterproductive, I guess, in that our feet were in pain for at least half an hour, which was distracting—but, as I recall, we—or at least some of us—did in fact slay those damn integrals in the end!

I probably could have gotten fired for that, and maybe I should have, but it wasn't as bad as the time I took a junior high science class out in a hailstorm by quasi-accident.

We'd been tracking atmospheric pressure over a period of days, and saw our biggest drop on record—we knew something crazy was about to go down, and we wanted to know what! Not just to know, but to see it with our own eyes, to touch it up close!

And it also so happened that a massive tent—still up from some kind of event the previous weekend—was standing there in the parking lot—a perfect shelter, we thought, to embrace the show from all four cardinal directions, so we dashed there through the falling rain, but the rain quickly turned to hail, and the wind, seriously way stronger than we'd imagined, miraculously blew from all four directions, so no matter what side of the tent we were on, we were getting nailed in the face almost horizontally by ice —it was amazing!

And, in retrospect, too dangerous for young lads such as they—I can see that now.

Well, anyway, that's what the dean told me after he whooped and hollered us inside like a cattle rancher herding the world's tiniest and most ridiculous sopping wet cattle, remarking that he hoped I thoroughly enjoyed what was both the first and last time any teacher at that particular institution would ever hold class outside during a tornado watch.

Ha!

Well, I didn't get fired for that, thank God...

...Or for taking another junior high science boys out to study rain, all of us lying in the grass without rain jackets or anything, watching the rain zoom straight into our faces, until we got too cold—though, since it was only third period, that meant a half day of cold, wet socks, wet shoes, wet uniforms, which their other teachers probably didn't appreciate, because of the smell, I realized later.

Ah, those were the good ol' days...

We teachers used to have to sub for each other, and I used to love walking into someone else's class, reading the usually pretty boring assignment for the day, then asking his or her students: “Don't you people ever get tired of reading so many books all the time?” And then we'd go for a little walk outside, taking deep breaths, taking it all in—the smell of green pines in our mouths, the yellow sun on our faces, the chickadees singing in the pines beside the green dumpster.

I took a class for one such walk down to our ponds, when the ponds had just frozen over in early winter, and we made wonderfully chaotic xylophone music by hurtling handfuls of crabapples against the ice—I have so many fond memories of “wasting” many of our fifty-five minutes of academic time connecting with the really real...

But that was nothing compared to when I dragged a pine branch into the library when I was supervising silent study hall after school and yelled, at the top of my lungs, this poem by the all-time great Persian lyric poet, Khwāje Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī:

Running

Through the streets

Screaming,

Throwing rocks through windows,

Using my own head to ring great bells,

Pulling out my hair,

Tearing off my clothes,

Tying everything I own

To a stick,

And setting it on

Fire.

What else can Hafiz do tonight

To celebrate the madness,

The joy,

Of seeing God

Everywhere!

The branch—which had fallen in a storm, and was oozing globs of fragrant sap—was because the library, in which students sat and worked in silence after the brutal slog of the day waiting to get picked up, was a sterile, windowless, sunless, windless room devoid of life and blasted from above by a form of lighting that, by some astounding miracle, was somehow way, way worse than the fluorescent light-tubes they replaced when the library was “upgraded”: LED light-tubes, made to look like fluorescent lights, to fit in their original sockets (which, of course, was the practical and efficient, albeit dehumanizing, thing to do—the only thing possible to imagine doing in the wastelands of the Machine...)

And which, since the sleek, new tables we got in the upgrade were very, very sleek, and also very, very, very, very white, they reflected the hostile brilliance of the LEDs, the same way the white plastic walls of an refrigerator reflect its white lights, when it's empty of anything to eat, so us going into the library to read was kind of like flies going into an appliance to die...

And so, yes, I did drag to them, as if a mammoth to my dearly beloved tribe, a fallen branch to smell—a glorious invasion of the world of God into the bland world of architectural nihilism their parents were helping us pay tons of rent for. And, yes, I did read to them Islamic mystical poetry about ripping one's own clothes off and setting them on fire because God is all around us, in everything...

But by far the most beautiful, radically life-giving thing that ever happened at school was not something I myself instigated, or even remotely anticipated—of course!—I simply received it as a gift, the way of true life.

At this school, we didn't do report cards, which was awesome. What we did instead was a hell of a lot more work, but way more real: We wrote two-page narrative evaluations of each student's performance in class that semester, focusing first of all on their sense of wonder (their curiosity, their questions) and on their depth of inquiry (what they did with those questions)—and secondarily on their measurable competence in the skills entailed by the subject.

And then we'd have half hour evaluation meetings, in which all of a student's teachers would sit down together with his or her parents and share anecdotes and observations from the semester, as well as field questions regarding the written evaluation.

The juniors and seniors would be present at their own evaluation meetings, too, with their parents, and would evaluate themselves, as we all listened and encouraged them, adding our own thoughts as well—it was wonderful!

But only parents, or host-parents—and, in the case of upperclassmen, the students themselves—could attend these meetings—no friends, no siblings; we got very real in these meetings, talking about strengths and weaknesses with specificity and conviction.

So it was confusing to me when I walked into the evaluation meeting of a junior girl, whom I'd taught that semester for the first time, and saw not just what seemed to be her parents (whom I hadn't met before), but also someone who looked only a little older than she, but unrelated—a woman of twenty or twenty-five, maybe, who didn't look like an older sister or anything, and I wondered: Who is this?

Step-sister?

Cousin, for some reason?

Therapist?

Wait, hold on, parole officer, or something?

I dreamed up even more absurd scenarios than that, inspired and probably still scarred from my days of teaching drug-addicted, mentally ill gang kids in rural Wisconsin—something, anything to hang onto: The ambiguity really bothered me!

Whoever she was, she wasn't really supposed to be there...and no one explained, or justified, or at least asked special permission for her presence, no one told her she had to wait in the cold, cold white light of the library...it was confusing!

And then this young woman—let's call her Holly—made it all that much weirder by standing awkwardly exactly right next to where my student was sitting (let's call her Lily), when Lily was about to begin a conversation with her first teacher (we had all taken seats, the normal thing to do; Holly was still standing—it was getting more and more uncomfortable, more and more inexplicable....)

And as Lily—who is very shy—began to talk (“Well,” she said very meekly, “in calculus I didn't ask as many questions as I wanted to...”), Holly, standing right next to Holly still, but facing her parents, began to make her hands fly around themselves like little songbirds, face suddenly bright with intense, uninhibited, childlike human emotion—

—and then it hit me, oh man: She was translating Lily's words into American Sign Language for them!

She was their translator!

I mean: Of course!

It makes me cry even now, just to think of how tender the half hour was, how truly, truly, tenderly human: Lily's parents were both hearing impaired—just look at their massive hearing aids, just look at the way they watched everyone's mouths so intently!

I mean obviously! But somehow I'd missed that unmissable dimension of their radiantly beautiful human personhood when I entered the room, like some kind of imbecilic, sleeping thing...

And so we had our meeting, but it wasn't a “meeting” at all—there was a total and divine evaporation of BS, leaving only naked human hearts; we talked hardly at all. And the whole time I was trying to keep tears from welling up, because instead of the usual language games of quasi-sophisticated, teacherly blah blah blah, we slowed way, way down, looked one another in the eyes, and tried to say, only what was needful and elemental and real, from our hearts, which was overwhelming to me—it's what I've always wanted from a small group of us humans sitting together in a circle:

Yes, you didn't ask many questions, Lily,

But we saw that you had them.

We saw the light in your eyes, and

We want your parents to know how curious you are, how deep of heart.

We want you to know that you can always come to us for help

Because we're here for you:

It's the whole reason why became teachers in the first place

—Which Holly, through her total mastery of human emotion, human thought, stripped down even further for her mother and father—way, way down—into the flowing haiku of her hands and body, the brightness, the effortless, expressive power, the astonishing and transcendent simplicity of her guileless, divinely awakened, beautiful breathing mammal face saying the one thing, actually, that all of us had always been trying to say to all of our students, all along, we just never knew how:

They love you, Lily

They love you so much

And that is what I think all “religious” language could be like, also—raw, elemental—non-”religious”, even! Translatable into body movement, facial expression—tender, real, vivid, totally alive. A meeting of human hearts; almost nothing but silence and burning metaphor.

And this is what I think about when I work on my little versions of the psalms, for example 90:

...A thousand years of tooth and nail

Under your careful watch, are like a single day slashed off from the present,

A passing dream—they gush away.

They vanish like sleep, sprouting like grass

In the morning, at dawn blossoming like hay

Slashed down in the evening—and left out to dry: We're exhausted

We're annihilated, we're eaten up in the oven

Flaring forth from your nostrils; we flow away

Under your scorching blaze of sunlight.

You've set our tangles, our dark twistedness

Before yourself, our twilit shadow-selves

Over the horizon—you've placed them in the sunlight

Of your holy face...

Which I'm not pulling from thin air, but only discovering in the ancient Hebrew words—the vivid imagery is in them, in their roots.

But how to move from here to there? How to find new, concrete words, touching ancient things, in a world grown old with abstractions?

These are some of the questions I'd like to work on with you, if you're up for the adventure!

love,

graham