My students know what I’m considering, especially what I’m occupied with them. I tell them on a regular basis, though not in so many words, or sometimes in no words in any respect. They’re attuned to my body because it pertains to them: tone of voice, physical twitches, facial expressions. My many lectures, words flowing over and thru them, pulling them into thought, sometimes, just like the undertow of a river, snagging at limbs.
Sometimes I’m not saying anything. But that is data, too: there are things I don’t say, as I stand there and select what I need to complement in a student’s guess or comment or query. I apply my comments like gold filigree—delicate, specific, spare. In spite of everything, I cannot say all the pieces. And students cannot learn all the pieces without delay. I actually have a selected way of pausing, or so I’m told, where I seem wholly absorbed in considering through what we’re saying to at least one one other. I stop and I give it some thought. I say nothing. I’m there and distant. Into the silences, students read tacit admissions and omissions of all types. I’m a book that they read repeatedly.
Into the silences, students read tacit admissions and omissions of all types. I’m a book that they read repeatedly.
Aware of this dynamic, I work hard to let go of any tiny resentments that may construct behind a professor’s head after which be read by those in front of it: Why do you not read? I catch myself considering. Why do you not listen? Why do you not know this thing you may have been told? Why are you not curious? Why do you refuse my passion along with your gestures of indifference?
My feeling is felt by them, mediated through the veils of their experience. That they intuit my feelings is an important thing for me to recollect. And remembering it signifies that I need to let go of what I had desired to occur during our time together, or what I had imagined would happen. Perhaps I assumed that reading Irenaeus would lead us to reflect on how bodies are crucial for temporality, but really they didn’t read Irenaeus in any respect. Perhaps I forgot that we humans haven’t considered bodies all that much other than our anxieties about them. So I should ask, “Do you ever take into consideration what it’s prefer to have a body?” And proceed: “What’s it like? What do you’re thinking that of after I mention the human body?” We won’t get thus far in Irenaeus, but I believe he could be pleased. I can ask any student my latest query, even in the event that they didn’t do the reading.
Our struggle is to learn, which is a piece, a deed. A working, energēmatōn, in that peculiar usage in Paul’s letters: “There are different workings but the identical God who produces all of them in everyone” (1 Cor 12:6). Learning is a working that I can force upon nobody who doesn’t want it.
Our struggle is to learn, which is a piece, a deed. A working, energēmatōn, in that peculiar usage in Paul’s letters.
Students often don’t want to be in my classes. They’re busy, immensely busy. They will be lazy (as all of us will be). They will be utterly marooned by years and years of education whose purposes and tasks and quality will be relatively, allow us to say, various and infrequently opaque. They’ve made it to school, but they’re weary already. Often enough, students are usually not in any respect excited by my topic, which is theology. But Catholic institutions understandably require theology courses, and so here they’re, and here I’m. And one among us a minimum of is enthusiastic about religion.
This brings me to a type of madness. The madness of a broken heart, one which knows that it wants all the pieces, a wanting that could be a taste of a pure desire to know. And this heart that wishes all the pieces can want nothing for anyone. I cannot make people desire what I desire. So it’s the madness of a type of love, one pierced by its mysterious futility. As in a line from “King Lear”: “As mad because the vex’d sea; singing aloud.” And I sing and sing and sing: Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, on this futile heart exposed.
It is difficult not to show to students who don’t want to be there and to wish that they were another person. Someone who didn’t wish to extract a grade from me, or to merely survive my class (survive me). They read me, but I read them, too: You who stare, do you wonder with me or wonder at me? Do you wonder, on this moment, anything in any respect? Am I not a subject and an object—strange, lovely, terrible?
I work hard to let go of any tiny resentments that may construct behind a professor’s head.
But it surely is unforgivable, I believe, for me to actually wish that my students were different than they in actual fact are. It’s unfair to want them to be another students. That is different than expecting much from them, which I proceed to do. It will not be the identical since the wish for them to be different is upset before we even begin, and it stays upset. They may know. And I may have forsaken them, though perhaps not out loud.
I cannot reach what I never seek for. I cannot bring into the fold of information the lamb I never find. I cannot scaffold upward from some “whence” I never discover. And so I attempt to let go, and I’m going forward to satisfy my students as they’re. I actually have a job to do, which is to construct those scaffolds that help my students reach what they seek, that help them climb to the heights we seek together. The unforgivable thing could be the refusal to go after the lost students, and it might be the price of such a refusal. The unforgivable thing is to attend for college kids to be some stranger that I once imagined them to be, someone that they have no idea, someone that they are usually not.
Here I grant 100 million caveats to my fellow teachers about how hard we work, about how there isn’t any time, about how we must make decisions about what’s most significant and what will not be. I grant these and plenty of others. And I reply with this one: that, as a Catholic and as a theologian, I’m not allowed to disclaim the true. I’m not allowed. For the true is God’s. And my students are as real because it gets. Their struggles, their joys, their boredom, their pain. All of it. And all the pieces in our glorious, miserable, mystical, disappointing cosmos of triumphs and mediocrities, this world on fire, this mess—including myself—is divine in origin and divine in end. Every thing and all and sundry in front of me is a mysterious instrument of the glory of God. (O Lord of my passion and my futility, you reign even here.)
This, then, is the truly Catholic moment, truly cosmic in scale. The breath of eternity in any breath in any respect. To look upon the world because it in actual fact is, and to listen to, “Be still and know that I’m God!” (Ps 46:11).
Updated, Aug. 20, 2022; 8:43 p.m.