In Need of Grace

I wrote that Thursday was the last day of classes, but after a quick decision by the administration, we had four periods of class this morning. I pulled out an unseen passage that I have written about already when two other sections looked at it in October. It's a passage by Yashar Kemal, a striking portrayal of a human body, laid to ill-at-ease rest next to a river. It appears that the man died violently and uncomfortably, either at the hands of nature or another human, we never learn. 

The natural elements around him pay him little mind, and time moves steadily onward, as the sun rises, drawing a bitter smell from the burdock shrubs, warming the earth, and causing the plane trees to shine wetly. The violence of the death doesn't distinguish it. Nature responds as it would had the man simply lain down and expired. 

It makes me feel, as a human, as though my sentimental urges and tendency to dramatise what I see seem an anomaly in natural process, and an attempt to hold back the tide of life instead of moving on as quickly as the minnows skitter off to "rally against the next instant". Here's the passage:



He lay mouth up on the bank, a long, long body with his arms and legs spreadeagled. Beside him a wide pool of blood had soaked into the ground and dried into a crust. His striped shirt was torn from his right shoulder down and a dark streak of hairy chest showed through like a festering wound in the sun. On the left side of the shirt the blood had hardened into a large patch as stiff as a block of wood. Midges swarmed over his face, fighting for his eyes, and now and then a bright-winged green fly whizzed by, slashing through the sunlight like a long flash of lightning. His hands lay wide open, huge wet hands. The pebbles, the dusty burdock shrubs, the tamarisks, the laurels, the plane trees shone wetly as the sun rose. His grey hair fell over his forehead. His head, half sunk in the stream, lay pillowed against a large striated stone. Shoals of tiny fish skimmed up, sniffing at his right ear, then swam off like quicksilver to rally against the next instant. The sluggish river flowed, crystal-clear in the sunlight, its polished green-lichened stones bright as darting fish. The sun was higher now, warming up the earth. A bitter smell rose from the burdock shrubs as the sultry heat sank deeper into the water, the trees and the grass.


                                            Yashar Kamal The Undying Grass 1968


I feel strangely this afternoon, after my real final class. I feel an intense sense of inadequacy thinking about what I accomplished in that classroom today, and more broadly for my students. It sounds like I'm fishing for affirmation, but I'm not really. I just feel overwhelmed by the certainty that I failed many times to do something good, that I failed several times to engage students or respond appropriately to their questions or comments. 

More heavily, I feel I've actually hurt them with things I've said, with comments I haven't countered, with texts I've shown them, and attitudes I've displayed. It feels crummy. I feel as a foreigner I may have increased the gulf of distrust or the perception of unconquerable misperception between east and west. 

I feel ill-equipped to be any kind of liaison between here and the US when I return. I feel in need of grace for whatever transgressions I've committed in that classroom; I feel the weight of all the injustices, small or large, known and unknown to me, that I've perpetrated. 

From the Capital Church online bulletin

I found a reminder of that grace this afternoon in a sermon in a podcast from Capital Church in Salt Lake City, UT. This message (number seventy in this list), from pastor Troy Champ, is entitled The World's Greatest Sinner, and talks about Paul's writings in Timothy about what a first rate sinner Paul was before he started devoting his life to spreading Christ's message of love: he persecuted early Christians, and quite effectively. He says, in essence, in God's grace was large enough to encompass and indeed overwhelm my sin, then it's large and powerful enough to overwhelm anyone's past.


I haven't often found these assurances of God's grace compelling because a) I shrink from an emphasis on the sinful nature of humans and b) I have no sordid past that I carry like an albatross. But today, I feel, not the albatross, but some form of burden from what lines I, and probably all teachers, have crossed in the classroom. So I was moved by Paul's words in 1 Timothy: (This is the Message paraphrase)


"I'm so grateful to Christ Jesus for making me adequate to do this work. He went out on a limb, you know, in trusting me with this ministry. The only credentials I brought to it were invective, and witch hunts and arrogance. But I was treated mercifully because I didn't know what I was doing - didn't know who I was doing it against! Grace mixed with faith and love poured over me and into me." (1 Tim. 1:12=15)



While I don't think I went as far as witch hunting, there was certainly arrogance in my teaching at times. Arrogance, and fear, and pride, and misplaced frustration, and righteous indignation. Those are all harmful as well. This reassurance this afternoon did me good - that God did indeed go out on a limb in bringing me here, and apparently did so in the full knowledge of what I would do once on the ground. And that, because "I had no idea what I was doing," I was blessed with grace and the spirit which I felt so often pour over me.


I have this fantasy that when I go to complete the MAT program at Earlham College in May, I'll progress past my insecurities and doubts about my teaching abilities. I'll figure it out, and be able to be in the classroom without committing errors that leave collateral damage. In fact, that collateral damage is probably one of the hazards of teaching (or of most kinds of work) and coming to terms with inevitable blunders and harmful missteps will be part of my acceptance of self as imperfect. I can only pray for the willingness to stay honest and apologise where I realise that I've been in the wrong.