Morning Thanks--a letter and Marilynne Robinson

It's a blessing afforded to all of us, I imagine, but in abundance to old teachers. Out of nowhere, you get a note from some kid no longer a kid who was thinking about this or that when his or her old teacher, as if out of nowhere, made an appearance in his or her mind, she says. Maybe it's a he. "Was just thinking about you and thought I'd send you a note thanking you. . ."

Those who can do, those who can't teach; but those who can teach get their own rewards. Such notes are one of them.

Got one about a month ago from a woman I didn't remember--and her husband. Both were members of the very first class I ever had, class of 1972, seniors in a rural Wisconsin high school. Honestly, guilt grabs hold of me when I think of them because I knew so little and taught so poorly. The note was handwritten, six pages long. Every square inch got used. 

Most of it told the story of their son who joined the Navy, became a Seal, and then was shot in a live fire exercise, his life, for a time, in real danger. He was saved, they said, by a man I may have heard of because his book was a bestseller and there was a movie. . .

They wanted to tell me the story, I guess, assuming Mr. Schaap loved a good story. Evangelism wasn't a motivation, but the remarkable events in their son's life were preciously couched in piety that I didn't expect. "Every day we thank God for our son's Rebirthday," Sandy wrote. "Life has had its ups and downs. But God has blessed our marriage and our family. Hope this was not too long and boring."

Nope.

Nearly a half century ago, it was almost impossible for me to consider my first high school students to be Christians. They weren't like me, weren't born and reared and educated as a Dutch-American of vintage Calvinist persuasion. I didn't think about them as pagans or atheists, but getting that note last month was another reminder of the blinders of my own youthful religious vision. I needed to grow up.

I'm thinking about that letter and those blinders because of an article in Christian Century by Marilynne Robinson, who may well occupy an office otherwise vacant in America, our national theologian. Ms. Robinson's essay questions our use of the word "secular" because, she says, she wonders whether there are all that many "secular" folks around, especially when we use the term to designate those we think somehow "unspiritual." 

"All I wish to suggest," she writes, "is that faith lives in the human world by the grace of God, because of the love and loyalty of God." Which is to say, of course, not because of us or our orthodoxy or our pieties. And that faith lives "in the presence of God, which is free, and indifferent to our anxieties, to our categories, and, quite emphatically, I think, to our very negative judgments about the spiritual state of our neighbors." 

Perhaps we have a mutually short-sighted sense of the Almighty, she suggests. We perceive God by our standards, in part because we can't judge him by his--we're human. "If the churches are uneasy about their status in contemporary society, these are problems for the churches to deal with," she says. "Their waning, if it is real, cannot be interpreted as an invidious change in the Divine Nature."

Because God doesn't change. 

And we certainly do. 

If we suppress that slightly inquisitorial impulse to fret over the state and the nature of belief among those around us, we will no doubt find ourselves inclining toward at least a tentative universalism, toward extending the courtesy of nonjudgment very broadly indeed in deference to human mystery and divine grace.

The older I become, I feel that tendency toward universalism more and more, specifically in light of the limitations (the blinders) I once so broadly and even proudly drew out over other human beings, those who weren't of my tribe. There was us and there was them; the only difficulty was determining who was with us and for us--and who was not. 

It's amazing when I think of it, that I didn't know my students, even though I wanted to, even though I tried to. Years after I left, I drove through the farming communities that consolidated district considered its own, past dairies and old family-run cheese factories lying in and around the hills of southwest Wisconsin, and I told myself I should have made that same trip when I teaching there because I never really looked up close at the farms and acreages where my kids grew up. I should have. I didn't know them.

This morning, in the face of yet another gorgeous summer dawn, I'm thankful for the Haffeles, for their letter and the life of their son, their blessings of God's good graces, and for Marilynne Robinson's explanation of why we all too easily use the word "secularism," when what we do most often in employing the word is undercut our own faith in real live human beings, who are, we profess, created in the image of God, each with their own holy of holies.