Pomodoro, Jesus, and Rocky

 

How on earth could a timer that looks like a tomato, Jesus Christ, and the fictional southpaw boxer from Philadelphia named Rocky Balboa find their way into the same blog post?  A recent professional development session at my school had me pondering this very thing.

The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a strategy for time management that has been around since the 1980s.  The basic idea is that you set a timer, which may or may not be in the shape of a pomodoro (Italian for "tomato"), work on your task for that amount of time, take a break, and then set the timer again for your next task.

This is a great strategy and one that the learning coach at our school, Jeff Buckner, presented to us during one of our faculty Teaching & Learning sessions.  Many of our students struggle with time management, and this is an easy strategy for them to implement.  Of course, this isn't just for students, and as I began thinking about how this could play out in my own life, my thoughts turned to Jesus and Rocky Balboa.

Our Favorite Characters

Ezra Pound recalled the following anecdote, apparently a favorite of William Butler Yeats.

"A plain sailor man took a notion to study Latin, and his teacher tried him with Virgil; after many leassons he asked him something about the hero.

"Said the sailor:  'What hero?'

"Said the teacher:  'What hero, why, Aeneas, the hero.'

"Said the sailor:  'Ach, a hero, him a hero?  Bigob, I t'ought he was a priest.'"  (Homer:  A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George Steiner and Robert Fagles, 1962, pp. 17-18)

This anecdote well expresses the reaction many people have had to the characters of Achilles in the Iliad and Aeneas in the Aeneid.  If you prefer your heroes to be sword-wielding, spear-throwing warriors, the kind that yell out that their commander is a "bloated drunk with a dog's eyes and a rabbit's heart" and fight a river...yes, a river...then Achilles is your guy.  If, on the other hand, you want your hero to be the kind of person who suppresses his own feelings of pain as he inspires his troops and will do whatever it takes to fulfill his duty to gods, country, and family, then you want Aeneas.

For years, I was an Achilles kind of guy, and for that reason I did not enjoy all that much teaching Vergil's Aeneid.  At some point that changed, but I still gravitate to characters that leave it all out on the field, even if doing so does not lead to victory.  In addition to Achilles, I absolute love Diomedes in Book 5 of the Iliad.

Thus toiled the chiefs, in different parts engaged,
In every quarter fierce Tydides raged,
Amid the Greek, amid the Trojan train,
Rapt through the ranks, he thunders o'er the plain;
Now here, now there, he darts from place to place,
Pours on the rear, or lightens in their face.
Thus from high hills the torrents swift and strong
Deluge whole fields, and sweep the trees along;
Through ruined moles the rushing wave resounds,
O'erwhelms the bridge, and bursts the lofty bounds;
The yellow harvests of the ripened year,

And flatted vineyards, one sad waste appear,

While Jove descends in sluicy sheets of rain,
And all the labours of mankind are vain.
⁠So raged Tydides, boundless in his ire,
Drove armies back, and made all Troy retire.  (Iliad 5.110-125, Alexander Pope translation)

I love Rocky Balboa, giving it all, even when he loses to Apollo Creed in the first movie, and my favorite opponent of his is probably Clubber Lang, whose grit and determination, even though he loses, are simply brutal.  Yet I sometimes wonder.  Are these the models that should inspire me the most?

Front-running

Prefontaine and Bowerman

In the 1998 film Without Limits, University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman (Donald Sutherland) is having a planning session with long-distance phenom Steve Prefontaine (Billy Crudup), who does not agree with his coach's philosophy of running.  After stating flatly that running any other way than all out and leading for the entire race is little more than the excrement of chickens, Pre explains.

Pre:  What else do you call laying back for two and a half miles then stealing a race in the last two hundred yards?

Bowerman:  Winning!

There is a great part of me that thinks as Steve Prefontaine did.  I am a highly driven person, and like Achilles or Diomedes or Rocky or Pre, I want to hit hard and give it my all.  And then there's Jesus.

Pomodoro Paul?

Jesus took time away from the demands of ministry to pray.  He got up early and separated Himself from the hustle and bustle of life to spend time with His Father.  He was never in a hurry and even stopped to address the needs of an unknown woman who had suffered from bleeding for twelve years while on His way to heal the son of the synagogue leader.  He famously taught His friend Martha not to be stressed out over things of lesser importance and to focus on what truly mattered.  And despite His seemingly slow and deliberate pace, He accomplished all He was sent to do.

What, then, is my takeaway from the Teaching and Learning session at our school?  I know myself well enough to acknowledge that I am wired for action.  I will probably still declare those lines about Diomedes translated by Pope when I am in my golden years and with as much thrill and excitement as I read them today.  Yet I want to reach that time and fulfill all that God has called me to do, and therefore it's not so much the action-adventure heroes that are my models for how to live, however much I may enjoy reading and watching their exploits, but Paul.  Paul was a hard-driven sort of person, shown first in his zeal for his faith searching out Christians to have them punished.  Yet once his life was transformed by his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, he approached life a bit differently.  Still passionate, although for a different mission, he would say go on to say, "I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."  (Philippians 3:14, ESV)

Passion and drive are good, but they must be balanced with rest and restoration.  Fulfilling the call of God is more important than the thrill of any high adventure moment along the way.  I imagine that if tomato-shaped timers had existed in his day, Paul might have found value in the Pomodoro Technique.

Three Johns

 

Our Latin students at Guerin Catholic High School explore a verse of the Bible in Latin each week, and this week the first-year students took a look at John 1:14, which reads, "And the Word became flesh and lived among us."  It is a verse that, especially when take with other verses from the Fourth Gospel, speaks to the divinity of Jesus, and we discussed that earlier in the week, but today we examined another aspect.

After the students spent some time reading the verse aloud to practice their Latin pronunciation, I told them to think back to the book of Genesis and then asked, "In whose image are we made?"  They quickly answered, "God's," and I pointed out that this was a pretty big deal.  After all, God could have created donkeys and then said, "Let us create man in the image of the donkey."  And then I suggested that what John 1:14 has to say is an even bigger deal than that.

From there we took a look at the work of another John, the English poet John Donne (1572-1631).  I pulled up on our large screen Holy Sonnet XV, and we spent a few minutes with the second half of the poem.  You can read the full sonnet at the link above, the but the lines on which we focused were these.

And as a robb'd man, which by search doth find

His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,

The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,

Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.

'Twas much, that man was made like God before,

But, that God should be made like man, much more.

I invited the students to turn to the faith section of their notebooks and to jot down their thoughts on what it means to them that God became one of us.  Often this will lead to a sharing of ideas, but this time I told them that their thoughts would remain their own.  This was to be a time of private reflection.

After they had taken their time to ponder, I told them a story, one that came from a third person named named John.  In Season 2, Episode 10 of The West Wing, a character named Leo McGarry, played by John Spencer, encourages a colleague by telling him the following parable.

This guy's walking down the street when he falls in a hole.  The walls are so steep he can't get out.  A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, "Hey, you! Can you help me out?"  The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.  Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, "Father, I'm down in this hole.  Can you help me out?"  The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.  Then a friend walks by.  "Hey, Joe, it's me!  Can you help me out?"  And the friend jumps in the hole.  Our guy says, "Are you stupid?  Now we're both down here."  The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out."

Before moving on with the grammatical lesson of the day, I suggested to the students that when they are overwhelmed in life, they should reach out to the One Who has been down here, with us, before.  He knows the way out.

Phaëthon vs. Jesus

What happens when someone challenges a young man's paternity?  Should he take up the challenge and prove his accusers wrong, or should he use a different approach?  And what is the role of pagan mythology in a Christian school?

Jesus Teaches Logic Class

In Books I and II of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Phaëthon, who was challenged by his friends regarding whether the sun, personified as Sol, was in fact his father.  To prove his lineage, Phaëthon asked Sol for permission to drive his chariot, which pulled the fiery ball across the sky.  Chaos ensued when the young man was unable to control the horses as they soared high above the earth, causing the tops of mountains to freeze, or dove too close to the earth's surface, burning the areas that became deserts.  In the end Zeus was forced to intervene by hurling a lightning bolt that killed Phaëthon and allowed Sol to regain control.

There is an interesting parallel between this famous story of Greco-Roman mythology and an episode we find with Jesus in Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-12.  After having fasted for forty days, Satan tempts, or tests Jesus regarding His identity as the Son of God.  In the first two of the three tests, Satan begins by saying, "If you are the Son of God."  For the sake of this piece, we will only look at the first of the three tests, the one in which Satan challenges Jesus to turn stones into bread.  His exact words are, translating literally from the Greek, "If you are the Son of God, speak to this stone so that it may become bread."

Whereas Phaëthon sees the challenge to his paternity as a simple matter to be proven, Jesus recognizes that there is more going on and that Satan has in fact presented Him with a dilemma, which runs as follows.

If you are the Son of God, you will turn this stone into bread.

If you turn this stone into bread, you are doing what I tell you to do and thus are subservient to me.

You have only two choices.  You will either turn the stone into bread or you will not.

If you do not turn the stone into bread, then you are not the Son of God, but if you do turn it into bread, then you are doing what I tell you and thus are subservient to me.

It would seem that Satan has trapped Jesus on the horns of a dilemma, but Jesus deftly avoids the logical trap by, as we say, going through the horns.  He simply refuses to accept either of the two unacceptable options, admitting to not being the Son of God or admitting to being subservient to Satan, and cites Deuteronomy 8:3, which says that we are not to live on bread alone in the first place but on every word that comes from God.  As we read so often throughout the gospels, Jesus simply will not be taken in by the verbal trickery of others, and this can be a good reminder to us as well that just because people may try to trap us in argument, we do not have to respond in the way they expect.  By keeping our eyes fixed on God and His word, we will respond in truth and need never fear the conversational dilemma.

Christians and Mythology

It may seem that Christians should not bother themselves with reading and studying pagan mythology, and some Christians have taken just such an approach to learning, relying on no less redoubtable a supporter for their position than St. Augustine.  In Confessions I.13 he wrote,

Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et flente Didonis mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean, non flente autem mortem suam, quae fiebat non amando te, Deus, lumen cordis mei...?

For what is more wretched than some wretch not pitying himself and weeping over the death of Dido, which happened by loving Aeneas, but not weeping for his own death, which happened by not loving You, O God, the light of my heart...?

Augustine rightly saw that it is folly to delve so deeply into the lives of fictional characters like Dido and Aeneas from Vergil's Aeneid while ignoring our own spiritual condition, but this does not mean that we must approach literature and faith as an either-or proposition.  Contrasting the story of Phaëthon with the episode of Jesus and Satan, we gain an even greater understanding of and appreciation for the boldness of Christ's response to His enemy.  It helps us see more clearly how we can respond to our own temptations as we endeavor to stand strong in imitation of our Lord.

What works of fiction have helped you grow in your walk with Jesus?  How has Scripture allowed you to critique and read differently the novels and plays and poetry and movies that enter your life?

Vowels and Baptism

It can be caused by viruses, bacteria, and parasites.  Lactose, fructose, and artificial sweeteners can cause it as well.  It can even be associated with diseases such as ulcerative colitis, and despite its relatively simple treatment, there is some debate over how to spell it, or at least there was recently among some of my friends.

When Wordsmiths Text

In a text thread of three other friends and me, one of us had shared a screenshot from a news update on a certain illness, one of the symptoms of which included the condition described above.  What bothered someone on the thread was that the word was spelled "diarrhoea" instead of the more familiar "diarrhea."  One of my friends quipped, "I'm sure Steve will give us a full etymological report, replete with Latin roots -- whether we want it or not!"  Since I am the obliging type, sent them a diagram tracing the roots of the word to the original Greek noun "diarrhoia," and began unpacking the matter at hand.

You will notice that the Greek noun ends with iota alpha (ia in the transliteration).  That iota often comes into English as "e," as in "Phoinix" becoming "Phoenix."  Same thing with Phoibos -> Phoebus, as in Apollo.  There is a tendency in English to collapse diphthongs into single vowels.  The spelling you see is legitimate and is closer to a transliteration from the Greek.  This is why "caelestis," the Latin word for "heavenly," comes into English as "celestial."  The "ae" diphthong has collapsed into the single vowel "e."

[Referring back to the original issue of why someone might spell "diarrhea" with an "o," I added the following.]  Richmond Lattimore did this kind of thing in his translations of Homer.  He wanted to convey a sense of the Greek, so he used transliterations of names, e.g. Achilleus (Achilles), Hektor (Hector), Achaians (Achaeans), etc.

After introducing Richmond Latimore into the discussion, I thought I would share with my friends the translation of the New Testament that this renowned translator of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had produced, and it was then that our conversation took an important turn.

From Vowels to Baptism

As I searched for a link to Lattimore's New Testament, I ran across the story of his baptism in 1983, just a year before his death.  The story was told more than twenty years later by Rev. Andrew Mead in a sermon on Sunday, January 16, 2005.  The message is short, and I urge you to follow this link and read it now.

I remember excitedly discovering Lattimore's translation of the New Testament nearly thirty years ago, and I was drawn, as I always am when picking up any translation, to the preface.  This preface did not, as one might expect in a Bible, give historical or theological or other specifically biblical information.  It did, however, as one would expect in a translation of Homer or Vergil, present stylistic information and a discussion of the translator's method and underlying theory of translation.  This was a scholar's work.  It was the work of a poet, and it never occurred to me that there might have been something more going on for Lattimore himself.  Yet there clearly was, as Lattimore revealed to Rev. Mead, to whom he had just admitted his desire for Christian baptism at the age of 73.  Mead shares in his sermon that he pressed Lattimore on what had apparently been Lattimore's known difficulties with the faith.

"Dr. Lattimore [though he preferred it, it was difficult for me to call him Dick], I thought you had reservations about the Christian faith and the Church."  "I did," he replied.  "But you don't any longer?"  "No, not any longer."  "Please then may I ask you, when did they go away?"  He was silent for a space; then, again with that smile and twinkling eyes, he answered, "Somewhere in Saint Luke."

The Closeness of Reading

Translation involves the close reading of a text.  Even someone with a cursory knowledge of another language can skim a text in that language and glean information, but translation is something entirely different.  Is the verb in the indicative or subjunctive mood?  To what does this relative pronoun refer?  Answering questions like these is essential to making an accurate translation, but when it comes to the biblical text, this close reading leads to another kind of closeness, one that Lattimore clearly experienced.  When we slow down and ponder a biblical text, when we look at it from multiple angles and ruminate on it, as it were, at the atomic level, we are drawn closer to the One Who is the author, or more simply, to The One Who Is.

There is a difference between “to hen,” The One, of Plotinus, and “ho ōn,” The One Who Is.  It is the latter that we see surrounding the head of Jesus in icons and that we find in Revelation 4:8.  A close reading of these two Greek phrases reveals an impersonal quality to the former and a personal aspect to the latter, and therein lies all the difference.  God is not an idea, but a person.  To be precise, He is three persons eternally existing as one deity, and it would seem that this is Whom the renowned translator Richmond Lattimore encountered when reading closely the biblical text.  It is not necessary, of course, to read Hebrew or Greek or Latin to encounter God in the Bible.  What is necessary is a slow, careful reading, one that does more than skim a text to glean information.  Lattimore said that his reservations about the Christian faith were allayed "somewhere in Saint Luke."  What an exciting proposition to think that you, too, may encounter “ ho ōn,” The One Who Is, as you read the Bible today!

Words Matter

Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo in Tombstone

The 1993 film Tombstone opens with a scene of violence as members of the ruthless gang known as the Cowboys invade a wedding party.  The priest hurls words of Scripture at them in Spanish, and one of the gang translates, albeit loosely, for their leader, Curly Bill Brosius.  Fearsome gunslinger Johnny Ringo, however, knows better what was said.

Cowboy:  Patron, he say, uh, someone will come to revenge for him.  Something like a, a... sick horse who comes to sit with him.  He talk crazy.

Ringo:  That's not what he said, ya ignorant wretch.  Your Spanish is worse than your English.

Later, as the Cowboys help themselves to food from the wedding banquet, Curly Bill revisits the topic.

Curly Bill:  Hey, Johnny, what'd that Mexican mean..."a sick horse is gonna get us," huh?

Ringo:  He's quoting the Bible.  Revelations.  "Behold, a pale horse.  The man who sat on him was Death.  And hell followed with him."

Words matter.  Translators bear an enormous responsibility, one that is almost impossible to fulfill perfectly, and this is the reason the Italian expression traduttore, traditore exists.  The translator is in one aspect or another nearly always a traitor.

Consider the story of the woman caught in adultery that is told in John, chapter 8.  When the Pharisees bring the woman to Jesus, they cite the law of Moses for what should happen to her, and both the original Greek and the Latin of the Vulgate are quite clear.

ἐν δὲ τῶ νόμῳ ἡμῖν μωϊσῆς ἐνετείλατο τὰς τοιαύτας λιθάζειν.

In lege autem Moyses mandavit nobis huiusmodi lapidare.

In the law Moses commanded us to stone women of this sort.

The key words here are τὰς τοιαύτας in the Greek and huismodi in the Latin.  They both indicate categories or types.  The Pharisees are applying the general to the specific.  In general, women caught in adultery are to be stoned.  This particular woman was caught in adultery, and the consequence is clear.

Most English translations of the Bible get this right, but one, the New Living Translation, misses the mark.  It translates John 8:5 to say, "The law of Moses says to stone her."  As we just saw, the implication of the law is precisely that, and so, on one hand the NLT scholars were justified in this translation, yet they have also proved the truth of the Italian expression traduttore, traditore, for they have betrayed a key aspect of this verse.  The Pharisees see the woman merely as a category, but Jesus sees her as something else, something more.  He sees her as a person.

Fr. Mark Toups in The Ascension Lenten Companion has this to say about what happened that day just east of Jerusalem.

They stand behind her, the scribes and the Pharisees, each of them teeming with righteousness.  They bend down, looking around, hunting for the perfect rock to hurl so that they can crush her to death.

They do not see a woman.  They do not see a person.  They see a category.  To them she is a category, a thing with a label:  "an adulteress."  They are ready to stone her, to kill her, because they want to remove the category.

Jesus does not see a category; he sees a woman.  Jesus sees a person.  Jesus sees this particular person.  To Jesus she is not a category:  "adulteress."  No, she is a person.  She is a person who has made an egregious mistake, but she is a person who can be forgiven.  (p. 135)

By rushing on to the implication of the law for this particular moment, the NLT passes too quickly over what is really going on here, but if we stop for a moment, we see a profound lesson for ourselves.  How often do we in the shrill age of screeching social media merely see people as the categories into which they seem to fit?  It is easy to rail against Debbie the Democrat or Rob the Republican, Harry the Hollywood Elite or Charlotte the CEO, especially from the anonymity of a social media screen name, but what do we actually know of Debbie or Rob or Harry or Charlotte the human beings created in the image of God who have the same opportunity to accept redemption through Jesus Christ as any other man or woman?  Of course, Jesus was right in Matthew 7 when He said that we can know people by their fruits, which is to say, by their words and actions, but what does that mean?  Does it mean that we can use what people say and do to assign them to categories that we can then proceed to pillory, reject, or dismiss?  Or does it mean that we can use those fruits to see when people are not walking with Christ so that we can reach out to them as the salt and light Jesus has called us to be?

This gospel story convicts me, for I, like most people these days, can get caught up in the bloodless blood sport of sitting around with like-minded friends to skewer with wicked wit groups of people whose words and deeds seem out of alignment with what we think is right.  We should not turn a blind eye to sin, nor should we excuse sinful behavior, but we must be careful not see people merely as categories and rather as Jesus saw them, as He has seen each of us, as friends in need of His grace. 

Imagination, Education, and Faith

Corpus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali, 1954

Imagine a square on a piece of paper.  Now, imagine stretching that square upward from the surface of the paper.  You would have a cube, right?  Try, if you can, to imagine expanding that cube into four spatial dimensions.  You can't really do it, because we our brains only think in three spatial dimensions (length, width, height), but if you could, you would be imagining a tesseract or a hypercube.  Dali painted one of his crucifixion works showing Christ on a hypercube.  Pretty imaginative, huh?

The Wonder of Imagination

In an age in which I can pull from my pocket a device that allows me both to see and hear a friend halfway around the world as we converse in real time, we may be losing our sense of amazement at imagination itself.  What was, not too many years ago, the province of science fiction is now mundane science.  We can certainly imagine amazing things, and we do on a regular basis, both in the design of products and in our entertainment, but then again, it is not that hard to do so.  We have split the atom and walked on the moon.  We have taken images of far-flung space and helped a 3,000 -year-old mummy speak.  Should it be surprising that we have imagined the Marvel universe onto the silver screen?  To see how amazing human imagination truly is, consider some of what we imagined when we didn't have technological marvels on every corner.

In Book IV of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid told the story of Venus and Mars.  It was an adulterous affair between the goddess of love and the god of war, and to get revenge, Vulcan, the husband of Venus and blacksmith of the gods, crafted a net of bronze in which to trap them.  Ovid wrote that the strands of the net lumina fallere possent.  They could deceive the human eye.  The net was so finely woven that it would move with the slightest touch and was unlike anything that a weaver or even a spider could spin.  Ovid, writing at the beginning of the first century A.D., imagined this adulterer's trap at a time when it could not have been produced in reality.  There were many excellent craftsman of that day, to be sure, but none that could have crafted what Ovid conceived in his mind.

Or take Lucian of Samosata, the second century A.D. satirist who wrote what some consider the first science fiction novel, A True Story, with its wild plot describing travel to the moon and interstellar war.  Lucian died sometime around 180 A.D., which is a long time before Neil Armstrong or Star Wars.  Such a tale from a time when there was no electricity or telescopes is, well, quite imaginative, and knowing the circumstances in which it was written, we likely experience a little wonder, if not jaw-dropping amazement, at the very act of Lucian's imagination.

The Necessity of Imagination

Imagination is a critical and foundational component of literacy, something I was discussing recently with a former student now at a major university preparing to become an English teacher.  As our Zoom conversation wound its way through many ideas, I recalled the story of one my of homeroom students years ago as he took our statewide assessment.  One part of the test asked the students to write to a prompt that said something like, "You and your class went on trip to a dairy farm.  Write about what happened on that trip."  This young man raised his hand, and when I went to his desk, quietly said, "I didn't go on that trip."  I replied that this was pretend, that he should imagine what it would have been like and to write about that.  He accepted the advice, and as I walked away, I noticed the ankle bracelet that this sophomore was required to wear while on house arrest.

Since he was in my homeroom, which only met once a week, I did not know him well, and I never learned all of his circumstances, but I was shaken deeply that day, and the ripples of that interaction are with me still.  I did not know what had warranted his house arrest, but I did know that he lacked a skill necessary for learning, imagination.  Whether that had anything to do with his legal trouble, I could not say, but it was heartbreaking to think that a high school sophomore did not recognize an imaginative assignment for what it was or, worse still, lacked the capacity to fulfill it.

The Treachery of Images, René Magritte, 1929

Imagination is at the heart of metaphor, and it is possible to see all language as metaphoric.  When I look at an object sitting on my desk and tell a friend, "That is my stapler," I have made a comparison, a reference.  I have uttered the two syllable word "stapler," perhaps even written its five consonants and two vowels on a piece of paper, and have asked my friend to connect those sounds and letters with the object on my desk and think of them as the same.  It is, when you think about it, an extraordinary act of imagination to think that seven distinct shapes on a piece of paper are the same as a metal and plastic, rectangular device capable of puncturing an object with a slender bit of metal and then bending that metal so that what has been punctured by it cannot readily escape from it.  It takes even greater imagination to suppose that an act of exhalation and vocal cord-vibration is equivalent to that metal and plastic, rectangular device.  If such imagination is required for the identification of a simple office item, how much do we need to understand math or physics or poetry?

Imagination's Raw Materials

Much goes into the making of imagination, both in terms of the material by which imagination works and the working of that material into what we call imagination.  In a similar way, a painting is the product both of physical elements such as paint, brushes, and canvas, along with the training and practice and work of the painter.  What, then, are the materials and the working that go into the formation of imagination?  The answers, of course, far exceed what can be explored here, but there are some basics that can be considered.

Experience, along with the realization that things can be other than they are, is one of the key elements of imagination.  When once I have experienced a coffee cup and have come to understand that its shaped may be varied, I can imagine a cup that will ride without spilling in my car, and so is born the travel mug.  One of the best ways for me to expand rapidly my experience of the world is through reading.  My grandmother used to say that she could go anywhere in a book, and she was right.  Faster than in a Star Trek transporter, I can be whisked by a book to any place in the universe and at any point in history, and this is one of the reasons why reading is crucial, especially in early childhood.  Maryanne Wolf, whose background is in neuroscience and psycholinguistics, has written much about this, and the point is quite simple.  Children need to be read to when they are young and need as much experience with reading as they can get once they are able to read for themselves.  I will never forget when one of my students asked if I had read Seamus Heaney's then new translation of Beowulf.  When I said that I had not, he offered to bring it to me when his dad had finished reading it.  As excited as I was to see the new Beowulf, I was more struck by the comment about his father's reading habits.  Reading was clearly a part of this family's life, not only engaged in with and for the children, but by the adults as well, thus modeling the look of literacy for the younger members.

If reading is a source of experience, one of the necessary ingredients for imagination, how is that experience kneaded and worked into imagination itself?  In no small part this happens through imaginative play among children.  When my son was little, we ran around the backyard in endless re-enactments of the Trojan War.  He was always the victorious Achilles, and I the doomed Hector, and there can be no doubt that the imaginative play of his youth, which included adventures with toy knights and kingdoms built of Legos, shaped the imagination that he now uses as an industrial design major.  Whether it is retelling a story through a classroom play complete with cardboard props and costumes cobbled together from the rummage sale to drawing pictures of a favorite story in a notebook, this sort of creative and recreative work is essential for developing the skill of imagining.

Imagining God

St. Anselm (1033-1109) is famous for putting forth his ontological proof for the existence of God.  In Proslogion 2 he says that God is aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest, that than which no greater can be imagined.  He is the very limit of our imagination because He is the source of our imagination, and it certainly takes imagination on our part even to attempt to get our minds around how John described the Incarnation in his gospel when he wrote that the Word was God and the Word became flesh and lived among us.  Our word "imagination" is derived from the Latin word imago, which we find in Colossians 1:15 where Jesus is described as the imago Dei, the image of God.  Just a few lines later in verse 19 we read that all the fullness of God dwelled in Him.  Once again, Jesus, Who is God, is the very limit of our imagination.  He is the fullness of God.  He is that than which no greater can be imagined.

Imagination is necessary not only for attempting to grasp theological concepts, but for the living out of our faith as well.  We live in the world of already-but-not-yet.  Christ is already victorious over all things, and yet we await His return and the renewal of all things.  This is why His description in Revelation 4:8 as the One Who was, Who is, and Who is to come, while seemingly illogical, makes sense, but it does take a stretching of our imagination to get there.  What does it mean, then, to live in such a reality?  We are everyday imagining new ways of doing just that.

Why We Read

Much more can be and has been written about imagination, but I want to close by revisiting the idea of reading.  Not only do books quickly broaden our experiences, the raw material of our imagination, but they allow us to see how others imagine.  For most of human history, people have learned skills through apprenticing, by seeing how others have done something, and this applies well to developing our imagination.  When we see how master authors, both of fiction and nonfiction, have imagined the tale they have to tell, we see yet another way for us to imagine our own tale, a way that we can follow or that will inspire us to imagine something new yet again.

Jesus and Seneca

 

Several years ago, the fifth-year Latin students at the school where I was teaching wanted to read some Roman philosophy, so I suggested Seneca, the 1st century A.D. Stoic.  After they had read some of his works, they insisted that I include him in one of my classes.  They thought his ideas and advice were sound and would be particularly well suited to teenagers.  Since they were teens themselves, I took their word on this last point, pulled together selections from Seneca's 124 philosophical epistles, and put them together in a small volume that would allow students to read some of his best works, record their translations on the pages with the Latin text, and have space to write their own philosophical musings.

My current Latin III students at Guerin Catholic High School have recently been reading and discussing Seneca, and one of them made an interesting connection with something Jesus had said.

Guerin Latin students discussing their translations of Seneca

We also have a Verse of the Week, a Latin verse from the Bible, that we read and discuss each week, and the verse for this particular week was Matthew 6:34, "Nolite ergo solliciti esse in crastinum.  Crastinus enim dies sollicitus erit sibi ipsi:  sufficit diei malitia sua."  "So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries.  Today's trouble is enough for today."  I commented that this seemed like the kind of thing Seneca would say, and Erin immediately replied, "It's like what he said in Epistle 13 about not worrying because things may not actually happen."  She was referring to the passage in which Seneca had written, "Illud tibi praecipio, ne sis miser ante tempus, cum illa quae velut imminentia expavisti fortasse numquam ventura sint, certe non venerint."  "I advise you this, that you not be miserable before the time, since those things at which you paled in fear as if imminent perhaps may never come, for they certainly have not come yet."

I wish I could write that I expounded upon this meaningfully, that I drew forth from this student's observation further profound insight, but I didn't.  I fumbled some sort of affirming comment and moved on because her keen insight had simply blown me away.  This high school student had made a connection between something Jesus had said and something Seneca had written as effortlessly as other people cite sports statistics or quote song lyrics.  Do not let anyone tell you that young minds are incapable of some of the sharpest and deepest thought.  Do not let anyone say that we must come down to some imagined inferior level when working with them.  That is nonsense.  High school students are more than capable of rich, meaningful engagement with the greatest art, music, poetry, philosophy, and science that we have created.  We do them and the world a disservice, whether by pandering to them with silliness or by burdening them with great quantities of work in misguided attempts to instill rigor into the curriculum.  What is needed is straightforward, deep, and deeply human interaction with the discoveries and achievements of the past as we guide our children to the fullest use of their gifts.

Teaching In a Coat and Tie

I teach in a coat and tie.  Never in my career have I been required to do so, nor am I making a fashion statement.  As far as that goes, my sartorial selections are quite traditional, e.g. navy jacket with tan or grey slacks, blue tie with grey jacket and navy slacks, and so forth.  My reason for how I dress to teach each day is rooted in one of the most fundamental aspects of my teaching philosophy, the importance of modeling.  If anyone is having visions of me as a runway model, please stop.  That is not what I mean.

I am speaking of what the historian Livy meant in the preface to his Ab Urbe Condita.  He begins his 142-book history of Rome from its founding to the death of Drusus in 9 A.D. by stating his desire that his readers pay close attention to quae vita, qui mores fuerint, the life and habits of life that once were.  Cicero had earlier said something similar in his speech Pro Archia, an ostensibly defense oration that was more of an encomium on learning.  He asks rhetorically, "Quam multas nobis imagines--non solum ad intuendum, verum etiam ad imitandum--fortissimorum virorum expressas scriptores et Graeci et Latini reliquerunt?"  "How many images have both Greek and Latin authors left us, not only for gazing at, but also for imitating?"  (Pro Archia, 14)

What do an ancient Roman historian and statesman-cum-philosopher have to do with how I dress to teach high school students?  They both speak to the importance of models of behavior.  I dress as I do because that is how my dad dressed.  He had been an elementary teacher before I was born, but as I grew up I knew him as an elementary school principal.

Norman Perkins, Principal of Galena Elementary School, 1968-1991l

This picture, which was converted into a painting and hung in his school when he retired, represents the image of my dad that I saw every day when he came home from work.  It was a professional look, one that conveyed respect for his job as an educator and the people with whom he worked.  When I began teaching at a middle school in Kansas City, his was the model for my own apparel.  In fact, it was not until years later that I realized why I had made the dress decisions that I had.  At the time it was simply the natural thing to do.

Surely, you must be thinking, this cannot be the point of this blog post.  There must be a more significant purpose to this, and indeed there is.  Cicero and Livy were right.  Imitation is far more than a form of flattery, sincere or otherwise.  It is a foundational principle of learning, and this is part of why Cato the Elder's definition of an orator, quoted by Quintillian in Institutio Oratoria 12.1.1, was "Vir bonus dicendi peritus."  For both Cato and Quintillian, the ideal orator was not merely a person skilled in speaking, but a good person skilled in speaking.  It was not enough to learn phrasing and breath control and all manner of rhetorical devices.  These cannot exist in a vacuum but must be used by particular human beings, and what kind of people they are matters as much as the abilities they express.  The Stoic philosopher Seneca gave voice to this in his Epistle 88 when he suggested that rather than spending a great deal of time to earn the title o hominem litteratum, o well read man, "Simus hoc titulo rusticiore contenti:  O virum bonum!"  "Let us," he argues, "be content with a more rustic title:  O good man!"

Perhaps this is the reason that imitation of the true, the good, and the beautiful is rarely discussed in schools of education or in professional development conferences.  We have always, even in Seneca's time, distanced ourselves from that which smacked of the rustic because of an urban prejudice that values the supposed sophistication of the city over anything else.  It is helpful, as with any prejudice, to forego judgment until one has examined all sides fully, and once this is done regarding imitation of the good person, it will become clear why this should be a foundational educational principle and not merely a quaint rustic notion best forgotten.

Simply put, we do not like hypocrites.  We are unlikely to take seriously the advice to quit cigarettes if it is given by our chain-smoking doctor.  Once again, it is Seneca who speaks to this in Epistle 52 and summarizes the idea by admonishing his readers, "Eum elige adiutorem quem magis admireris cum videris quam cum audieris."  "Choose a guide whom you admire more when you see him than when you listen to him."

As a teacher I am called to a certain nobility of character.  Since I am a Latin teacher, that character should reflect the nobility and beauty of thought and creation expressed by the best of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  Teaching involves incarnation.  It is not enough that I dictate facts that students could just as easily and possibly better glean from a text or online source.  I must embody what I teach, for it is the witness of my life that will produce the most memorable lesson.  For a fuller discussion of this, read George Steiner's Lessons of the Masters, one of the finest books on what truly transpires between teachers and students.

Yet I am not a teacher first but rather a follower of Jesus Christ.  As a Christian I am called to follow my Father's example in far more significant ways than I did in patterning my professional dress after that of my earthly father.  This, of course, would be impossible if God were merely an abstract deity, an idea, a notion developed in the collective human mind over centuries.  Our Father is real and in the most basic, etymological sense of that word.  Those questioning this with the challenge that they have never seen Him join the ranks of Philip, the disciple of Jesus, and Christ's response to him applies today.

Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us."  Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip?  Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.  Hw can you say, "Show us the Father?"  (John 14:8-9, ESV)

I hope, at the end of the day, I have done more than just dress as Norman Perkins once did as the principal of an elementary school in southern Indiana.  My goal as a Christian teacher is to model, however imperfectly, my life on that of my Father in heaven, and this each of us can do by looking to the fullest representation of Him the world has seen, Jesus Christ.

Sharing a Classroom

My classroom is small, measuring about 23' x 13'.  For this reason, most of my Latin classes meet in other classrooms.  As I have written elsewhere, and borrowing Hamlet's expression, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, and because this is true, I do not mind at all sharing my small classroom with many, many other teachers.  Both in this classroom, which is really more of an office, and in any place where I teach, I do not teach alone but am engaged in a most collaborative enterprise, for I have the pleasure of working alongside some of the greatest teachers the world has ever known.

There are Socrates and Plato and Alexander Pope, to say nothing of Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Vergil.  The history teachers have their say thanks to Livy and Tacitus, and of course Homer holds a mighty sway.

Texts and commentaries

Oxford and Loeb texts

Penguin translations

Sometimes they speak their native Greek or Latin, and sometimes they speak in English, but always they are there, guiding the conversations I have with my students.  Even when their voices cannot be heard directly, they are teaching nonetheless, for they are like the waters described by William Butler Yeats in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Although the majority of my fellow teachers speak their wisdom from across the centuries, there are more modern educators as well, speaking to matters of linguistics and philosophy and the natural sciences.

A few of my colleagues who teach philosophy and science

Surely, you say, these do not all make their way into the daily curriculum of a high school Latin class.  Surely it would not be appropriate for them to do so.  Isn't a secondary language class about nouns and verbs and learning the basics?  No, they do not all make their way into our daily lessons, at least not explicitly so, but I disagree with the notion that any of these teachers should not be allowed through the door.  In 1970, G. P. Goold, who over his illustrious career served as the chair of Classics departments at Harvard, University College London, and Yale, as well as serving as the chief editor of the Loeb Classical Library for twenty-five years, wrote a most unfortunate statement with which I took issue in an article I wrote a few years ago about a textual difficulty in Vergil's Aeneid.  Goold wrote, "An elementary teacher, to reach in due season the end of his curriculum, must every hour turn a Nelson eye to serious problems and refrain from pursuing truth beyond the charted boundaries of the textbook."  I wrote in response, "I would argue that the true magister can never be so bound, but must, along with the students, pursue the truth, no matter how anfractuous the path."

And if truth, rather than the important but necessarily lesser goals of skills proficiency and career readiness, is the foundation and raison d'etre of education, then surely there must be another teacher in every classroom, even the one who claimed to be truth itself, Jesus Christ.

The 3-D printed bust of Christ, courtesy of my son

You see, all of these great teachers have taught me.  I am the product of their wisdom, eloquence, and art, and in that way alone, they are teaching my students as surely as I am.  Because I have spent considerable time with many of them, their words and ideas are also at the ready when I attempt to do what all teachers do, make connections.  Education is essentially helping someone see that this is that.  In its simplest expression it may be an equation, for example one connecting the ideas of 2 + 2 and 4.  In more complex forms it can be seen in metaphors, allusions, and parables.  Indeed the metaphoric nature of all language points to the this-is-that nature of communication, of which formal education is but one particular instance.  For this reason, the assassination of President Kennedy can make its way into a reading of Caesar in Gaul.  The dual nature of light as wave and particle will enter into a discussion about the opening of Vergil's Aeneid.  Even Disney's The Lion King will help to illustrate the aspects of Catiline's conspiracy and the fertile ground for demagoguery among the poor and disenfranchised.

Just as these secular teachers weave their way seamlessly and effortlessly through our exploration of Latin, so does the greatest teacher of them all, but for a different reason and in different ways.  I am blessed now, somewhere past the midpoint of my career, to teach in a school where Christ is acknowledged as Lord.  We are, therefore, free to offer a complete approach to learning, one that does not exclude faith as a way of knowing.  My students and I can easily make references to Scripture just as we do to writings by Plato or Homer.  Yet, and far more significantly, Christ is present in our classes in a way the others cannot be, for He is still alive.  His Holy Spirit dwells within us, leading us, according to John 16:13, into all truth, which, as stated above, is the reason a school exists.  Although it is my name on the door, my small classroom is actually crowded with the greatest of all teachers, and I am more than grateful to share with them the delightful, exciting, and provocative calling of teaching.

When Christ Is The Teacher

When you enter our school, you see this sign on the wall to the right.  It reads, "Be it known to all who enter here that Christ is the reason for this school.  He is the unseen but ever present teacher in its classes.  He is the model of its faculty and the inspiration of its students."  If this is true, then there should be some proof of it, and this post offers just a fraction of the ample evidence that can be seen on any day at Guerin Catholic High School.

We are on a trimester system and just finished the final exams for our first trimester.  Each week my Latin I and Latin II students had received a Bible verse in Latin, different for each of the two courses, that they copied into their notebooks.  Each day we would practice pronunciation of Latin by reciting the verse together and then inviting one student to read it solo.  We talked each day a bit about the given verse, often asking questions and exploring its theological and sometimes its grammatical depth.  The last question on the final exam for each of these courses asked the students to identify one verse from the trimester, explain what it means, and discuss what it means to them.  You do not need to hear any more from me.  What follows are the words of some of my students.  They prove without a shadow of a doubt that the sign hanging inside the entrance to our school speaks the truth.