Beyond School

Gloucester: O! let me kiss that hand!
Lear: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
–Shakespeare, King Lear, IV.vi.131-2

I don’t mean to get morbid here, it being summer and all, but I’ve been spending a good bit of time lately in the Intensive Care Unit with my mother-in-law, and the sights there of “old age, sickness, and death” are as forceful today as they were when they slammed into the mind of the young Buddha 2,600 years ago.¹

They put me in mind again of Will’s post, “My Blogging Legacy,” about how all his digital offerings may one day serve, as Will put it,  “as a piece of my brain [that] lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.”

To cut to the chase, this post is offered from that angle. It’s the first of about ten pieces that I wrote for a multiculturalism in education class I took in Mallorca, Spain about six summers ago. The professor, Dr. Tonya Huber, assigned us to select any “artifact” from our lives, write about it as a piece of our culture, and connect it to the pedagogical issues of the course. Because I love to write, because I was alone in an apartment with a balcony under soft Mediterranean moons perfect for writing, and because I was there alone with nothing to stop me from writing midnights to sunrises on that balcony, filling coffee cups and ashtrays and pages and pages (my wife was Stateside at the time), I ended up writing ten pieces that pretty much formed a skeletal autobiography.

I want to post those here, simply because I don’t write on any space but this one. (As a side-note, I wonder how many other people chafe at the pressures to “stay on topic” because they’ve somehow been pigeonholed as “edubloggers,” when really, they never signed any such contract. And maybe it would be fun for other people to spend the summer giving edu-topics a rest, and turning to personal narrative to make this ’sphere a little more, well, personal. You never know what affinities we may discover for each other as a result.)

So to steal a line from Petrarch, one of the coolest dead white males I know, consider this the first of ten “Letters to Posterity“ á la Will’s “blogging legacy” theme. Here’s clip one:

Ambivalent Apostasy

or,

Fear and Trembling at “Camp Joy”

Artifact: King James Bible

Date: August, 1972-present

From preschool to sixth grade, my maternal grandfather was my closest extended family relationship. I remember taking walks with him in my neighborhood before I was old enough to go to school—he always carried a walking stick that he would swing rhythmically in full circles as he walked, and I would pick up any old stick and imitate him as I walked beside him. He was an extremely handsome, curly-haired, square-jawed man with a glint in his blue eyes. Although I didn’t know it at the time, he had quite the womanizing past—but around the time I was born, he was rendered impotent by testicular cancer.

Apparently this was the trigger for his conversion from womanizing to proselytizing: he converted to the Southern Baptist faith and became a fervid evangelist to all, including me, his grandson. Visits to his house always found him with the Bible in his lap—he read two chapters a day, and claimed he’d read it through in its entirety several times. I remember one visit when I was apparently, in his eyes, overdue for a haircut. He opened the Book in his lap to chapter and verse which spelled out in no uncertain terms the absolute wrongness of a man (and boy) wearing long, womanly hair. The message was clear: get a haircut to be right with God.

So my Tennessee upbringing included in its macroculture the evangelical perspective. It didn’t require that my family regularly attend church—mine didn’t—for me to be gripped, one evening when I was maybe five years old, with such terror that I tore down the stairs from my bedroom to my parents’ bedroom and leapt sobbing into their bed. When they asked why I was so upset, I told them that I knew that I would go to heaven, but they would go to hell, and I would never see them again through all eternity.

At any rate, when I was 11 years old, my grandfather persuaded my parents to enroll me in the largest Southern Baptist summer camp in the American southeast: “Camp Joy.” Each night, the 400-odd campers, pubescent boys all, were herded into an outdoor revival tent, captive audiences for a sermon that fed us such vivid images of the sufferings of eternal hell that, when the call to come forward and be saved was issued, I was among the first to answer (again, that pubescent bit is key: what healthy 11-year-old boy isn’t guilty of epic “self-abuse” on the scale of Solomon, but without, unfortunately to the lad, Solomon’s thousand concubines?). I came forward, almost trotting, as all closed their eyes in prayer, was taken outside by a camp counselor, and instructed to repeat the magic formula that would save me from the torments the speaker had taken such trouble to invent for us. Tears streaming, I sputtered the formula in total fear and trembling, and was told by the counselor that I was saved.

I went back to my cabin that night and compared notes with another boy in my group, Lance, who was also saved. We both noted that we felt different since accepting the Lord in our hearts.

Later that week, all who had come forward were baptized. After the baptism ceremony (the baptismal water of which was suspected as the cause of a severe case of empitigo, a breaking out of scabs on my face and body, the week after camp, which is the best rorschach scene for medievalism - “It was demons leaving him!” - or modernism - “Didn’t they use chlorine in that tub?” - that I can imagine), awards were given for “Camper of the Week.” After announcing the second and first runners-up, they announced the winner.

Though they mispronounced my last name, I realized I had won. They awarded me with this Bible, inscribed with my (misspelled) name. Looking back on it now, I think I won because a) I ran fastest to the altar; b) When converting, I cried more than the other boys; and c) I was a real goody-goody at that age.

On the last day of camp, some Southern Baptist radio station - the biggest in the Southeast, I was told - interviewed the two “runners-up” and me, in that order, beauty pageant-like. The second and first runners-up, when asked about the experience at Camp Joy, answered in ways any healthy boy would: “Oh, it was great! I rode horses, played baseball, shot bow-and-arrow, made lots of new friends,” etc.  I picture my father at home nodding his approval as he listened.

Then it was my turn.

My voice was always deep, even as a child, and slow. Call it a drone (massive doses of caffeine became my remedy for that in recent years). So when asked the same question, drone I did:  “Well, I wuz saaaved, and I took the Looord into mah heaart, ‘n’ I wuz Baaa-ptiiized….”  I’ve always pictured my dad, the sports buff and former football coach, dropping his head and shaking it back and forth slowly, wondering what his father-in-law had done to his boy; I would have done so if I were him. But he was a good sport and never mentioned anything. (My grandfather died shortly after that, in true Faulknerian fashion, of a self-inflicted shot to the chest from a 12-gauge shotgun, and so, thus, did his influence upon my development. For a brief spell I pictured him watching me from heaven behind my locked bedroom door, an uncomfortable experience that soon, thankfully, passed as well.)

I took this Bible home and read it cover to cover in the summer between sixth and seventh grade. Since it’s a crazy-quilt of tracts cobbled together for the Roman emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea three entire centuries after the life of Jesus (if indeed he was an historical character at all, which scholars debate), and without any sort of editors’ introduction to tie all those chapters together so the reader knows what the heck it’s all about, it’s not something I’d recommend anybody try.

When I reached adolescence shortly after, in my junior high years, my circle of friends and I started experimenting with what I’ll euphemistically call “expansive thinking.” One conversation we had concerned what our reactions, as a planet, would be if Martians were to come to earth and reveal to us their divine revelations in a book entirely devoid of God, Jesus, and all that we ‘knew.’ This and similar conversations (not to mention the tendency I noted of my Christian community to justify hateful treatment of certain groups by virtue of Biblical authority) shortly led to my disavowal of Christianity.  Call it my hillbilly Rastafarian stage.

In my twenties and thirties, I would develop an interest in world religions and out of philosophical interest read the Bible again, as well as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and other key theologians. But I never considered rejoining the Christian faith.

Then a funny thing happened. I was forty years old and living in China, and my then-wife and I were in the States sifting through my library to decide what books to donate to Goodwill, and which to ship (at exorbitant cost) to China. I put the prize Bible from Camp Joy in the “donate” stack, but my wife, though not a Christian herself, urged me to keep it because it was “part of my story.” So I kept it.

I only kept a few other books. Most of them, it turns out, are in the Christian tradition: William Blake’s poetry and etchings and John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions particularly.

Why would Christian works still loom so large in my preferred reading, when there was little chance of me ever returning to the faith? First, I think it reflects my discomfort with living a life completely devoid of a routine and communal spiritual/moral focus. Though I cannot rationally (or, after reading Deuteronomy and Joshua, among other books, morally) accept the tenets of Christianity, I am at the same time uncomfortable with the alternative of having no spiritual community or fellowship at all. I still desire the inclusion in the structure of my life of regular, communal reflection on spiritual matters—the weekly church meeting on Sundays structure is very appealing to me. My rejection of Christianity unfortunately means, in American culture, that there are few if any substitutes to replace it. Consumerism and hedonism do not fill this vacuum—and unfortunately, the one satisfying alternative I have found, Unitarian Universalism, does not exist in Shanghai.

Second, the Bible is ironically a source of the concern for social justice that infuses the radical elements of progressive society. As such, I won’t categorically condemn its followers. I prefer the company and the agency of many good-hearted Christians I have known to that of many non-Christians I have known, while I have also known many non-Christians who are better practicing “Christians” than professing ones. I also note the incremental gains made for multiculturalism and tolerance within its tradition: a case in point is the recent nomination for arch-deacon of an openly gay cleric in the Anglican Church.

Third, my experience of apostasy turns out to be part and parcel of the cultural script of “Aggregate Individualism,” in which “individuals are strongly encouraged to separate from their ascribed relationships such as family, relatives, community, and religion” (Choi, 234).  Would I have been better off never to have encountered evangelical Christianity? Though the full answer to this would be “in many ways, yes, and in many ways, no,” I think that the engagement with moral and religious questions this experience gave me prepared me for later, culturally-transcendent explorations of non-Western religions—above all, Buddhism, Taoism, and the Native American Sun-Dance and Peyote religions. While I may regret the monolithic hold of Christianity on the environment of my childhood, and wish that Buddhism or any number of naturalistic spiritualities had captured me first, Christianity nonetheless allowed me to cut my teeth on it, and developmentally wrestle with its doctrine and its paradigm. I would be spiritually skinnier without that encounter.

Related to this is the issue of the value of Aggregate Individualism itself. We Westerners—including, perhaps especially, the intellectuals—pride ourselves on transcending and leaving behind our “families, relatives, community, and religion” (Choi). Such accomplishments would be frowned upon by collective cultures. There is a curious irony in the fact that the Western intellectuals of the classic Aggregate Individualistic pattern very often valorize the ‘relational,’ culturally-conservative collectivism of ‘other’ cultures — cultures that would never dream of approving of individual separation from culturally sanctioned affiliations with traditional familial, communal, and (religious-) institutional structures. Culturally atomized, we very often valorize cultural conformity—toward non-Western cultures, at any rate. I only observe this irony…I don’t know what to make of it.

So how is this relevant to culturally responsible pedagogy? It makes me aware that I should respect “even” the Christian roads that my students may be traveling, and strive to communicate with them in terms of their own scripts, rather than condescendingly “tutoring” them from my own. Whether they renounce or affirm their faith is immaterial to the real issue, which is whether they become conscious shapers of their scripts toward their fellow human beings. In the final analysis, we can’t wish Christianity away. Pragmatically, the best we can do is to try to foster a critical and reformist impulse toward it—and within it.

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References: Kim, Uichol and Choi, Soo-Hyang: “Individualism, Collectivism, and Child Development: A Korean Perspective,” Cross-cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, Patricia Marks Greenfield, Rodney R. Cocking.

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¹Speaking of the Buddha, here’s a clip from the BBC’s The Life of the Buddha that I’ve used in Asian history classes. It’s brilliant, and my students loved it. You’ll see why in this segment, in which Gatauma, under the Bo Tree, faces the twin “demons” of Fear and Desire and, with some wicked good special effects, vanquishes them both to attain Englightenment.  I made a viewing guide that I’ll share with anybody who’s interested in using it in their classes. The whole show is available here:

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