For the Love of Teaching
. . . of all things visible and invisible .
The Nicene Creed
Some would say that it’s the invisible things we’re about in a
classroom like mine: God, for instance, or love or goodness or truth.
There’s truth in that, I suppose. Theology wrestles with much that is
unseen. And some would say that objectivity is the invisible goal in
such a setting: Just give them the facts; let them decide. And some
would say that the teaching enterprise itself is something of an
invisible pact: you fill their heads with knowledge, they prove their
mastery of it (or they don’t), transaction complete.
But here’s what I see: In the mysterious synergism of a classroom
discussion on, say, the lepers of Calcutta, we discover that God has a
face, and that love and goodness have arms and legs, hands and feet
that are about the work of love in the world. And I see that there is no
way that I can teach them about God or love or truth in a way that
exempts me from any of it. I’m not neutral—but neither am I an
evangelist . Wasn’t it Kierkegaard who said that the best teaching is
personal in the sense that the teacher impersonates—mimics, models
herself after a kind of selflessness that moves, persuades, compels,
convinces?
And I see that in our sterile, fluorescent-lighted classroom we operate
less by contract than by covenant: the mutual promise to show up, to
keep at it, to attend to the process and all its uncertainties, even when
we don’t feel like it, even when we struggle—I to communicate and
they to understand. Yes, there will be grades, but there is also, always,
grace.
Because my students are also neighbors I’ve been given to love, I see
in them—incomprehensible as it is to the bureaucrats of assessment
and of managed classroom expectations—the very face of God. And in
our common work, some days, once in a while, I think it was
yesterday, love, goodness, and truth are right there in our midst—in a
question asked, a doubt expressed, a circle closed. And at semester’s end, I hold onto the hope that beyond grades and through grace, each
of us will have been surprised by joy, our unseen hearts moved to
make the invisible visible: to be about the work of love in this world.
Meditation presented at Faculty Assembly on January 18, 2018
Debra Dean Murphy, Class of 1984, Associate Professor of Religion