Wednesday, December 30, 2020

The Lessons They Taught Me

The last weeks of 2020 have brought me two unexpected and grievous losses.

In mid-December, I learned that my high school Latin teacher died. I hadn’t seen James Bigger since my freshman year, but his imprint was indelible. A big man with capillaries tracing down his nose, a dapper dresser who wore three-piece suits to teach in a suburban public high school, Mr. Bigger dominated the classroom. He addressed us all formally and led us unrelentingly through the first-year Latin curriculum. I loved his class, which set the intellectual foundation for the next seven years of my life, carrying me from northern Virginia to Princeton, where I majored in classics. The way he unpacked the structure of the Latin language taught me more about my native language than twelve years of instruction in English did and made studying German and even ancient Greek a breeze. Brilliant teaching wasn’t enough to turn his three sections of Latin into a full-time job, however, so Mr. Bigger left us for greener pastures at the end of the year. Eventually he settled down into long-term employment at McLean High School in Fairfax County, a position he retired from a few years ago.

Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi could not have been more physically different from Mr. Bigger. A slight and unassuming man with an irrepressible mop of black hair, Ashkan was killed last week along with 11 companions, mountain climbing in Iran. Ashkan was one of the best doctoral students I ever worked with. He took two graduate seminars with me before inviting me to sit on his dissertation committee. It was a pleasure to read the work of this luminous young man, whose study of public space in his home city of Tehran fearlessly took on the intellectual giants of social science. Before graduating, he left Milwaukee to live with his adored wife, who was pursuing her own advanced studies in Denver. When the American Historical Association met there in 2017, the two of them graciously welcomed me and a classmate into their home, serving a feast that he had spent all day preparing. Although I knew that Ashkan was a mountain climber and accomplished harmonica player, the stunning landscapes on their walls introduced me to his eye for photography. Soon after, they returned to Iran to care for their aging parents and raise their baby. Ashkan landed a position at the University of Tehran and settled down for what we all assumed would be a lengthy tenure teaching and researching urban design.

While we might resign ourselves to the prospect that our beloved teachers may die before us, we are never ready to lose our students. I feel Mr. Bigger’s and Ashkan’s deaths as body blows, but our student-teacher relationships had long since transcended physical space. I never spoke to Mr. Bigger after he left my high school, but in 2010 I tracked him down for a long-overdue thank you message for his influence on my life. Although an ocean and a continent and failures of international diplomacy separated us, I never believed I had seen Ashkan for the last time. I sometimes daydreamed of visiting his growing family in Tehran, and I was delighted when just a few weeks ago he asked me for letters of reference for postdoctoral work in the US. In the shock of knowing that both are now forever beyond my reach, cut off from attending their memorial services, unable to find obituaries, I mourn by revisiting the lessons they taught me.

Once in Mr. Bigger’s Latin class, he stood right next to me and pushed his pointer finger down hard on my desk. “Never second guess yourself in language, Miss Seligman!,” he admonished in his typically florid tones. Patrolling the class, he had spotted eraser marks on my test paper, where I had replaced a correct answer with a wrong one. Did I end up getting that answer right? Thirty-seven years later, I have no idea. But with decades of teaching experience under my belt, I can see what he was doing pedagogically—building my confidence. He had taken my measure as a person and intuited that much more than language instruction, what I needed was to trust my first instincts. Learning a “dead” language suited me because I could deliberate over my answers, but for a “live” language—or to teach, or to parent—I would need to be able to think and speak on my feet. In the decades since then, I’ve often reminded myself, “Never second guess yourself in language, Amanda.” Eventually that confidence has seeped out beyond language—a little more slowly, perhaps, but I am still a work in progress.

In much less dramatic fashion, Ashkan also taught me. Since I was the professor and he was the student, it was ostensibly my job to do the teaching. But the best students also teach their teachers—about the stuff they are learning, and also about how to be in the world. In early 2013, I forwarded Ashkan an announcement about a public event relevant to his research. Born into an earlier generation, I would have been the kind of busybody who was forever mailing clippings to friends and family.  Not wanting to overwhelm Ashkan’s in-box, I cautioned him, “Tell me when these get annoying.” In gentlest fashion, he thanked me for the information and told me, “Acts of kindness never get annoying.” Although this might seem obvious to you, Askhan’s note pulled me up short—such a profound insight, delivered so straightforwardly. In retrospect, I can see that his message arrived the beginning of a journey to transform my teaching, learning how to make relationship and kindness the foundation of my pedagogy. In the moment, though, Ashkan’s words revealed the essential characteristic of a much younger person who already knew how to preach the gospel of kindness, even to his professors.

For years I’ve been telling my children that true love makes you a better person; if you are in a relationship with someone and your behavior becomes worse instead of better, if you feel yourself decaying instead of elevating, something is out of sync. You might love that person, but it’s not true love, not fully reciprocal, not one that you should commit your life to. Pedagogy is like that too. Minimal teaching fills a student with knowledge. Good teaching recognizes how relationship informs learning, motivates a student to dig deeper, creates aha! moments, earns hugs and tears at graduation. But great teaching transmutes you, you the teacher and you the learner. Great teaching—like great learning—builds you both into better people than you were when the classroom door opened. If you have passed through a crucible of great teaching, its lessons will spin out in unexpected moments, in forms tied to the original moment by a slender but unmistakable silver thread.

As 2020 draws to its awful close, Jim Bigger and Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi no longer walk the planet. But they are not absent from my life. For the remainder of my days, I will carry the lessons they taught me, mix them up in my being, and reweave them in new forms, for my future students, my future teachers.

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Thinking about St. Anne at Christmas

 

December 24, 2020

From my childhood until I was married at 30, my Christmases had three noteworthy aspects: gathering with my mother’s family, the celebration centered on bringing a pine tree into the house and decorating it with ornaments above and presents below, and the story of Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem—at least as it was filtered through my decidedly non-Christian Unitarian Universalist churches. Santa wasn’t really part of my direct experience; we rarely if ever had Christmas stockings, and no one except popular culture tried to fill my head with stories about a jolly old man with a white beard. To young Amanda, opening our gifts on Christmas Day was surely the heart of the experience. There were SO MANY presents that my aunt always called it “Pig’s Christmas.” My grandmother, perhaps making up for family money and status lost with the picture cord factory in the Great Depression, made sure there was always a multitude of gifts to unwrap. A family rule was that everyone had to watch everyone open every single present—no presents could be opened when it was time to tend the feast in the kitchen—so the whole thing took hours. The present-opening ritual was always capped off by a visit from the Table Fairy, an idiosyncratic guest who left inexpensive practical presents such as office pens or a fresh box of paperclips on everyone’s dinner plate. The Table Fairy ensured that as the presents under the tree dwindled, no one would selfishly lose interest in the process of watching the unwrapping because everyone could look forward to have one more gift just before dinner, to be opened simultaneously.

If you had asked me as a teenager, I probably could have told you about Mary and Joseph, as could most American children who grow up in a superficially secular society that nonetheless shapes itself around the rhythms of the Christian holiday cycle. The UU churches I attended as a child taught me to love Christmas carols and to know the basic outlines of the story of Jesus’s birth. One year my brother had a part in the Christmas pageant, playing Joseph. He had a line reassuring the ass who carried Mary to
Bethlehem: “There, there, Small One.” We spent so much time finding the right tone for this line that it became a family byword for years afterwards. But the recitation of the classic Christmas story, which I encountered on Christmas Eve, really functioned as a prelude to the main event of unwrapping a seemingly endless supply of presents. No one did the work to connect the dots between Christmas presents and the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that the kings brought for baby Jesus.

My primarily secular understanding of Christmas changed when I married a Roman Catholic husband. Neither of us was going to convert for our marriage—he is too dyed in the wool of theism to understand Unitarian Universalism as a religion at all, much less one he would practice; and becoming a Christian would require me to believe multiple things that I find impossible. But we respect the importance of each other’s faiths and from time to time attend worship at each other’s churches. Until we had actual children, I assumed that the challenges of raising an interfaith family would be central to our marriage. But our distinct theologies lead us to the same fundamental values, and our children’s major challenges have little to do with our religious orientations. The interfaith quality of our family is peaceful and enriching rather than a source of conflict.

Attending Catholic services even once in a while did transform my experience of the major Christian holidays. I was so surprised when I realized that there were Trinitarian versions of the familiar Christmas hymns, which even in UU form are already much more theistic than I am entirely comfortable with. I couldn’t belt out lyrics about “the offspring of the Virgin’s womb” with the same kind of gusto I sang about fields and flocks or the silent night. But over decades of marriage, my appreciation for Christmas has only increased, while I have backed off of Easter altogether. I began to understand Easter as the spiritual centerpiece of Christianity. It was not, apparently, a holiday about rabbits and jellybeans and finally the blessed return of springtime, as my various UU churches took care to emphasize for our members who are come-outers, so wounded by the churches that rejected their sexuality and feminism and generally questioning spirits that the traditional, resurrection-oriented Easter triggers their deepest hurts instead of offering them the promise of salvation. So I decided to let my husband shape Easter for our family, providing a festive ham-oriented meal on his request each year, but leaving the candy buying and church-going priorities to him (though I did continue to supervise egg-dyeing and hunting until the teenagers took over that one for themselves). Most years now I don’t even try to get the children to a UU Easter service as well as the essential Catholic mass. But Christmas—perhaps because it is a holiday with a baby at the core—has taken on many new valences to me over the years.

Christmas first began to grow new meaning for me when our first child was a toddler. We hadn’t tried to travel for her first Christmas, when she was five months old. That year, perhaps in a misguided effort to recreate my childhood Pig’s Christmases, we spent three days trying to keep her attention by opening all of her presents between nursing and a precious few naps. But we discovered it didn’t really feel like Christmas when it was just the three of us, so in following years we packed ourselves up and traveled 800 miles east to my family or 2,000 miles west to his. It turns out that there is nothing like traveling with a baby at Christmas to help parents feel both empathy with and sympathy for Joseph, and especially Mary, great with child, riding Small One in search of a hospitable inn. Sure, travel with fractious children and many bags and teeming, keyed up crowds in 21st century America is hellish; but at least we knew that at the end of the ride our families would meet us at the airport and whisk us home for homemade spaghetti sauce and a futon made up with many warm blankets. Mary did not complain the way I did; but she was filled with the same love for her infant that I had.

My sense of connection to Christmas shifted again as my children grew old enough to participate in the pageant at my UU church, always held on the Sunday before Christmas (not Christmas Eve, which was reserved for a short homily; caroling culminating in the whole church singing Silent Night in a darkened sanctuary, the light from a single candle slowly spreading around the encircling congregation, one person at a time; and, of course, frosted cookies). The church I attend now, in the Universalist Midwest, tends not to use the opportunity of the Christmas pageant to relate the birth of Jesus. Our hard-working Director of Religious Education develops a new script every year, with evergreen woodlands, or elves, or once even a screaming latke at the center. I don’t much look forward to attending the pageant, which always feels like amateur acting rather than worship to me; but I definitely see the value of the children learning to take on these varied roles and the older members appreciating their efforts. My older child, inhabited by a level of stage lust I’d never previously witnessed in person, will take on any role asked of her, and is a very reliable narrator because she is naturally LOUD, even if she has to learn to slow down. My younger child, full of stage fright, will always try to participate but can’t always bring herself in front of all the loving eyes of the congregation. For her, the breakthrough year was the time she could manipulate a shadow puppet behind a screen.

Where is Christianity and the connection to Christmas in that reflection about non-nativity pageants, you ask? Well, it’s admittedly a bit more tenuous. Traveling with older children was easier than with infants, but we started staying home on Christmas to allow them to be in the pageant; and being home also makes it easier to go to both a UU service and a Catholic mass (a feat, by the way, that makes it very hard to feed a family on Christmas Eve; no time to cook, and the only restaurant open in Wisconsin is McDonald’s). But around the time of the pageant years, the UU Religious Educator Sophia Lyon Fahs’s words often got repeated at Christmas Eve services and on Facebook memes, words that make the birth of Jesus once again a universalizing experience: “Each night a child is born is a holy night.” My children might not have been sent to save the world, but their lives are sacred; I can treasure them; and I can try to raise them to bless the world despite our imperfections and brokenness.

And now this year. 2020. The year of the pandemic. This year my older child is 16, the same age Mary was when the state sent her off to Bethlehem, nine months pregnant, to be counted with her husband’s family (this version of a census never made sense to me, and still doesn’t; what kind of government counts people where they come from instead of where they actually are? One that doesn’t care about efficiency but does care about controlling people, I suppose). We aren’t staying home this pandemic year because the state insists we do; in fact, in Wisconsin the state’s power to order us home has been severely attenuated. But we are staying home voluntarily because we treasure other people’s children and the elders that they love and depend on. In the absence of church services, what does the Christmas story have to teach us this year?

My 16 year old hopes that she won’t be at home next Christmas; she has applied to spend it with a host family in another country. If she is away, I will miss her terribly. My thoughts turn to Mary’s mother, St. Anne, who is of course never pictured at the nativity in the manger, where Joseph was Mary’s only human companion. What was that first Christmas like for Anne? I wondered how she felt about sending her own pregnant child off with a much older man, even one to whom she was betrothed. Giving birth leads as easily to death as to new life. How much anguish did Anne experience, worried about how her beloved child would manage in childbirth, especially without her mother’s comfort to carry her through?

I do a little superficial research about St. Anne (and ask friends more knowledgeable about church history for a boost). I am shocked to learn that their mother-daughter story is one that is about familial separation well before the first Christmas. Anne and her husband Joachim do not appear in the Christian Bible. Instead, their story is related in the Gospel of James, which the Bible’s compilers decided to exclude from the canon.[1] Anne and Joachim are wealthy, and pious, but refused from certain desirable statuses because they are childless. Anne miraculously conceives—the Immaculate Conception—and gives birth to Mary. Anne cossets her child Mary throughout her infancy, but delivers her to the temple to be raised by priests when Mary turns three, as a way of offering thanks for the gift of her life. Did Anne ever see Mary after that? Was the first Christmas only one of many in which mother and daughter were apart? The tradition seems murky. For a while, teenage Mary, alarmed by a pregnancy she cannot hide or explain to the satisfaction of the priests, takes refuge with her cousin Elizabeth. Was Mary still connected with her family but fearful of the prospect of her mother’s wrath at the pregnancy? Depictions of Mary and Anne in the medieval period show mother teaching daughter to read, suggesting that then, at least, the church accepted the idea that they had an ongoing relationship, even if they were not together when Mary birthed Jesus.[2]

But 2020’s Christmas lesson is a poignant one for me. For 2000 years, Christians have celebrated the mother and son, Mary’s bond with Joseph solidified by the birth of the precious baby Jesus. But what of the mother Anne and daughter Mary, separated at the time of travail, by an unholy conspiracy of state and social dictates? Were they not also a family? Christmas is a time of family celebration but also of family put asunder.



Photo by my mother, Kerry Mueller, the artist.

[1] Why is the Gospel of James excluded, you ask? Read it for yourself here or here. It’s shockingly different from the more familiar gospels, and not only because a midwife attends Mary’s labor in a cave instead of a manger.

[2] Pamela Sheingorn, “‘The Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” Gesta 32 1) (1993): 69-80, https://www.jstor.org/stable/767018