A to B: our obsession …

Once, a long time ago, I went to Nova Scotia for a summer to start an Adult Education degree program. Self Directed learning at St Francis Xavier. They gave us our orientation and turned us loose. I remember pushing my advisor on whether or not to go in a certain direction, but he refused to advise me. It’s your project, he insisted. Seriously? How would I ever know if I was good enough for that coveted degree unless someone not me, told me.  But he insisted and over the next 5 years I often thought it might have been easier to register in a bunch of courses, get some grades, and after a few years, I would know if I passed.

Last week, at a MacDonald’s in Calgary, I had a mid-afternoon coffee with a friend.  Not an old friend. A new one I had briefly met.  He was born into a small dairy farm in Europe, came to Canada many years ago, had hoped to farm but then didn’t, and for the past 10 years or so, taught agriculture at the U of C.  He talked about how he began to teach a graduate level course at the University. Once you reach that level, he said, you are really not there to be weeded out nor even, really, tested. But still, they test and grade!  So, when he walked into his class on day one, he told the students that he was not going to tell them how to study, nor even what to study.  He would help them, but first, he told them, they would all pass with an A-.  If they wanted an A or an A+, they could talk to him and he might give them an assignment to work on, but yes, everyone gets an A-.  Done … and hmmmm!

When the U challenged him on this unorthodox approach to evaluation – in Alberta hundreds of schools are ranked each year, within the smallest margins of differences, by how well their students collectively do on any number of annual tests … as if learning can be that precisely measured – he reminded them that at the graduate level they already know everyone is capable; students are accepted into the program, so to speak, because they will succeed.  So on day one, he told his students to get together, decide what they wanted to study, how they would do it, how they would help each other, and how he could help them.  He walked out and they met again a few days later.  Near the end of the semester, the students arranged a final meeting in a larger room where there were some tables, and some beer and snacks. Again … what?!.  The students showed up in lab coats, sat down around him, and, with snacks and beer nearby, began to talk with each other about what they had learned, not in any formal show-and-tell format, but as a discussion.  A conversation.  And then they invited his feedback.  Now, despite the earlier doubts, the U of C is using this teaching model in some other programs.  

I’m sure the model breaks down and might not work in junior and senior high school, but maybe it would and maybe it does.  Variations of it, I’m sure, have been around in many places for many years. My point is not to make a pitch for one or another teaching model, but in his class, my friend said, the key was to guarantee them an A- on day one. It set the students free. The rest of the semester was not about working toward a grade (our world-wide early culling system) but about working with each other, and letting their learning take them to wherever it might. They would not have the pressure of the grade to mess up their learning experience.  

Last Sunday, Kathy and I listened to Cesar Garcia, General Secretary of Mennonite World Conference talk about the church, and hope … even though, as he said, the church is kind of a hopeless institution. The fracturing and divisiveness … it poorly represents the prayer of Christ in John 17 where he said that being unified, being one, was the primary way by which the world would be able to tell that Jesus was ever here.  He also talked about his own conversion experience during which he invited God, if God was there somewhere, to become part of his life. Nothing dramatic happened, except, he said, the next morning, he was different. He had not come to God as a repentant sinner, but (my words) as someone seriously wondering if God existed at all.  I was curious for more, but that was pretty much it, and what became clear throughout his q and a time and the sermon that followed, is that Garcia has a deep love for the church, and that he worries about the divisions we keep creating. Garcia talks about Mennonite World Conference becoming more inclusive. That there be room for all the different shades of Mennonite, and that it needs to be less about the rightness or wrongness of our doctrines or beliefs, and more about the gifts we, each of us, brings to the communion. (His word). Being one, he said, doesn’t mean we agree on everything. Maybe not even about vaccines. It means we figure out how to accommodate each other around the table.

So what do these two stories have to do with each other? Where everyone gets in …  and where everyone gets to sit at the table? Maybe not very much, but … also something.  In my later teen and early adult years, there was a lot of preaching about salvation and accepting Jesus and the four spiritual laws. It was a straightforward procedure and easily shared. If we took the prescribed steps then, well, we were in. If not, then, too bad.  But what if Campus Crusade for Christ and all the revival and evangelistic preachers had instead told us that God loved us all equally, without reservation, and that in fact, we all already had an A-. A pass.  Nothing further to earn … but a life to live. I suspect they would all have said that in fact, that’s how grace works and it’s kind of what they did mean, but somehow, in between the lines and the singing, we created an evangelical culture that was often about expectations and individual effort and getting from A to B, and failure, and trying harder, and measuring.  

Which also means that among people of faith, evangelicals are sometimes the most miserable … cause we have made sure that it often feels like we are not quite there and that it’s always we, by ourselves trying to get there.   We talk about judgement and accountability and repentance as if, somehow, it’s possible to work our way into the place where the grace of God is abundant; until we do some things, that grace is kind of hard to access. We pretty much come right out and say it like that.  So … what if we had been told, as Jesus did with so many people, that we all have the A-, that grace is not in an elusive place waiting for us to get there, that it comes towards us, and that the rest is a lifetime of encountering and learning and, as Garcia said near the end of his sermon, of enjoying it? Could God not have been more meaningfully present to us if we had not stuffed him inside our obsession with measurement? And could we not have become much better at the communion Garcia hopes for, with all of our neighbors, had we been told, over and over and over, that we were all born with the same A-?    

…our game changer …

Kathy and I watch Trevor Noah on The Daily Show sometimes.  We catch some global news there, but also his cutting commentary on the world as it’s happening.  He always finishes his show with a pitch to donate to one or another charity, not-for-profit or foundation working with people who are seriously disadvantaged. Often, it’s about one or another impact of racism.  Noah also has his own Foundation working to improve access to education for children in his homeland, South Africa, where he grew up in later apartheid years. UNICEF says there are 3.5 million orphaned children in South Africa. 

Noah is a comedian. It’s how he makes his money.  But he’s also on a mission. A week or so ago, he was interviewing another comedian. Near the end, Neal Brennan said to Noah … ‘you are a walking reconciliation’. And so, he seems to be.  I don’t know anything about his personal life, except from reading his story, Born a Crime. Worth reading. It was a crime in South Africa for a black woman to marry or be with a white man and Trevor was born out of such a ‘criminal’ relationship.

Why write about Trevor Noah?  No reason except that he pokes away at the moral corruption and the hypocricies that inhabit so much of the American (and worldwide) Political, Religious Evangelical and Social picture these years. He entertains, yes, but he shines a light on what is happening in the world, and he comes at it all from his own ghettoed experience as a black kid in South Africa.  A bit like what Nathan, the prophet did to King David in 2 Samuel.  But that comment about being a walking reconciliation caught my attention. Brennan didn’t say that Noah is a walking reconciler, but that he is, as a person, reconciliation. 

I was born after the second World War, after the great depression, was too young to know anything about the Korean War, and grew into, along with everyone else in Canada, universal health care, government pension plans, an economy and a social fabric that, over many decades, offered significant promise and stability to young people growing up. But I was also aware of WW II Germany, of Stalin, of the recent genocide in Rwanda, and more recently (how did we not know this earlier?) of our own dark history with residential schools in Canada. We had neighbors in Saskatchewan who had barely survived Russia and they visited with our parents. Our dad told us stories. So … as good fortune became almost our entitlement here in Canada and so much of the Western world, I’ve often wondered if, during my lifetime, something would upend it all. Like the two wars did for so many millions. The Depression. The Toubles in Ireland. Vietnam and Laos. Central America in the 90s. Argentina and Chile in the 70s. Or the Spanish flu. Or the AIDS pandemic. Or what Assad did to Syria. Were we really so secure that a game changer couldn’t happen here?  

And then, it sort of did. I don’t think we can compare covid with the horrors of any wars. WWII killed 56 million people. But covid is a silent killer that sneaks up on people and has created a worldwide wariness.  Over 733,000 deaths in the United States. Worldwide, 4.55 million have died. During the first year or so, I didn’t know many who were affected, but now, with the delta variant, it’s come closer, and hardly a week passes that we don’t hear of someone, friend or relative of a friend or relative … who is seriously ill.  

What is bewildering is that about a year ago, the thought of a vaccine was hard to imagine.  It would come, yes, but most certainly would take a few years. And then, it was here and we clamoured for it. We could not get it soon enough and of course, we would all take it.  It didn’t occur to me that maybe the most difficult thing about covid would become the division, with the end almost in sight, between those who take and have taken the vaccines, and those who, for any number of reasons, refuse it. Vaccinated and unvaccinated are now, late in this covid day, paying a price for that. 

I can lament all this and rage about it, and I have, as have plenty of others. But I heard a sermon two Sundays ago, about the sower (Matthew 13) who spread the seed on the different soils, knowing, apparently quite well (if he was any kind of farmer) that ¾ of it would not produce much at all. There was the fertile soil, the rocky soil, the soil where weeds and thistles would overgrow the seeds, and the hard soil along the path, where the birds quickly ate up the seeds because they were exposed. They didn’t even sprout.  So, why do that? What kind of farmer wastes his input seed that way? Was the point of the parable as Jesus told it, simply to remind us that most of us aren’t very good people and that only about ¼ of us will really ‘bear fruit’ and live the kinds of lives we were intended to live? Jesus didn’t usually speak that way, but that’s pretty much how I had thought about that parable … until two weeks ago. 

What if the point was that the farmer didn’t know?  Apparently the weed Jesus mentions in the parable, when it grows to a plant, is almost indistinguishable from a wheat plant so that the farmer didn’t know for sure, and so, the point Jesus was making was that God, like the farmer, will ‘waste’ himself, his love, his caring over us all, equally. Vaccinated or not.  Masked or not. Liberal or Conservative or something else. We are all unfinished stories, said the preacher, and God will invest in us, in each of our stories … without reservation! 

I don’t know if Trevor Noah is a church goer or even a believer. I’m pretty sure his mother is; he writes about her in his book. It’s all about her, actually.  But I’m glad Noah, and others, like the prophet Nathan, are impatient with our hypocrisies, and that they poke at us, and expose us to ourselves. It’s important that this happens. But I’m also glad for reminders that each of us, in our corner, is the farmer, invited by God and all of creation itself, to keep sowing seeds … of hope, kindness, joy, forgiveness …and to be reconciliation, as we live our unfinished stories in this, our game changer.