On Pentecost and PMTs

When I was about her Highness’s age or perhaps a bit younger, my Mama told me that her favorite color was red. At that moment, I decided that red was my favorite color, too. Even though I probably wear purple more often these days because it’s almost as fun as red but with the advantage of being easier to put outfits together around, red remains my favorite.

Today at church we celebrated Pentecost, when everyone is supposed to wear red to church, and the vestments are red and all the flowers and drapey stuff on the altar and other front-of-the-church fixtures (why yes, I did grow up in a church where the only furniture was chairs and podiums—how could you tell?) are red. The kids made red windsocks with fiery streamers and paraded around them the sanctuary. I was tremendously disappointed that my bright red jeans don’t currently fit, but I made do J

Red is for fire and for the Holy Spirit’s descent like fire on the first Christians at Pentecost—God with them even after Jesus’s ascent—so at Pentecost the church is practically blazing with it. I can’t really grasp it—it’s almost too much for me.

It reminded me of the Tenebrae service. Which seems counter-intuitive, since that service on Good Friday involved every single light in the church being gradually extinguished with each Scripture reading until the moment of Christ’s death, leaving everyone in total darkness. The space that had held the Christ candle (now removed) seemed especially black and empty, and there was a corresponding hollowness in my stomach—that feeling that I get sometimes when it seems like the world itself is empty underneath it all. It feels like the inversion of Pentecost—God wasn’t just gone, but God had been killed.

Except that it wasn’t actually completely dark—the red sanctuary candle reminding us of the eternal presence of God was still glowing in the corner. Even when God was dead, God was there.

In the lab my husband worked in as a graduate student, there was one room that was completely sealed off from light so that they could use special instruments that could count photons. If someone accidentally opened the door and let too much light in, the sensitive photomultiplier tube (PMT) would be overwhelmed and explode. But he also told me that once your eyes adjusted to the darkness, even your human eyes could count the individual photons. It’s kind of miraculous, how our eyes can bear the brilliance of full daylight while also being able to adjust to seeing only the tiniest unit of light.

Sometimes it feels like God’s presence is overflowing, running over and spilling on the floor where we can all splash around, so bright we have to squint. And sometimes it’s just the tiniest point of light, not even bright enough to light our next step. Maybe I can train the eyes of my heart to see the brilliance of God in the same ways—both in the overwhelming fire and in the tiny flicker.

First attempt at another teaching philosophy (this time for Sunday school)

Anyone who has applied for more than a handful of college-level teaching positions is probably familiar with the so-called “teaching philosophy”--a document that attempts to summarize the author’s priorities and philosophical approach to education. I’ve written a few, and while none of them were eloquent enough (or used sufficiently trendy pedagogical lingo) to land me the tenure-track position of my dreams, the process of writing one turned out to be useful for my own classroom. I even made my students write their own “learning philosophies” at the beginning of the semester. In general, writing through a personal philosophy often clarifies it, both for me and for my students. I understood more why certain activities in my classroom were more productive than others, how I could prioritize my time more effectively, and how I knew when something had been a success.

On Sunday afternoon, about a week and a half ago, I was wondering what had possessed me to decide that it was a good idea to show my 3^rd and 4^th grade Sunday school students “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies” during a lesson on the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, much less to follow that up with a little detour on the femininity of the Holy Spirit. Not because it went badly (the faces of the two girls in the class lit up when my response to the question, “So wait, is God male or female?!” was “yes!”), but because it seemed like an odd choice.

And then I realized it was probably time to start thinking about my Sunday school teaching philosophy. At its heart, it’s not radically different from my philosophy of teaching college English—that learning is a lifelong process of exploration and revision that often happens most vigorously in community. But with younger students and subject matter that is primarily tested over the course of lived experiences rather than in coursework and career success, it works itself out a little differently.

When I was in 3^rd grade, I knew all the answers—at least, all the answers to any questions that my Sunday school teacher might ask. For a long time, I thought that was what it meant to be a good Christian—answering all the questions right. That’s about the age I was baptized, and when my pastor met with me to talk to me about whether or not I knew what I was doing, I answered all those questions right, too, or at least right enough that he decided I was enough of a believer for a believer’s baptism. I loved seeking out the right answers—I was a front-row, straight-A student at both school and church. I loved raising my hand and announcing those right answers even more, whether or not anyone had even asked a question. And when I made my faith my own, and stepped out of the church I had grown up in, it was for another church that seemed to have even more right answers to questions that my childhood church hadn’t even asked. I might call myself an answer-addict.

Naturally, I eventually started have questions that my church didn’t have satisfactory answers to—I mean, they did have answers, but they didn’t seem nearly as clear and obvious to me as they did to everyone else. So I scrounged and scrambled and read a lot, but the only thing that became clearer was that those answers weren’t nearly as right as I was told. I found a lot of other answers that *might* have been right, but I couldn’t be certain of any of them. The experience was profoundly disorienting, but eventually my questions and I learned to live together, as I discovered that not knowing the answers often meant it was easier to keep my eyes, ears, and heart open when I encountered new people and new experiences that didn’t square with my previous assumptions.

So, what does this have to do with teaching Sunday school?

I don’t think that 3^rd graders need to be given only answers, or to be encouraged to see answers as being the Answer to their challenges. Kids are good enough at being know-it-alls—they don’t need my help! What they do need is someone who will validate their wonder at this world that grows bigger and more mysterious and beautiful as they grow up and become aware of more and more of it. My students arrive every Sunday full of questions. Some of them are easy: “How do I find 2^nd Samuel?” Some are a little more involved, but I can give a stab at them: “Why did Jesus die?” And some are the questions that used to keep me up at night when I was their age, but I quit thinking about them because not knowing made me anxious: “What existed before God created the world? Where did God come from?” And I’m not doing them any favors if I blow those questions off.

Instead, I go out of my way to show them that they should be asking questions. Everyone should. Hence St. Patrick’s bad analogies. The handout for that day gave them several activities intended to help them get a handle on the concept of the Trinity, but I couldn’t help noticing that an example in one of the activities was also one of the “Bad Analogies” (specifically as an illustration of modalism). My purpose wasn’t to claim that the handout author was an evil heretic (because with the Trinity it's almost impossible to talk about it without accidentally saying something heretical, as poor St. Patrick did, and anyway I'm hardly someone to get my undies in a bunch over a little heresy between friends), but to emphasize that in church we often throw around words and phrases like “Trinity” and “created ex nihilo” without actually having any idea what we’re talking about, and it’s good and proper to find it strange and confusing, no matter how old or how smart or how faithful you are.

I try to make my Sunday school classroom a space where it’s ok to ask those questions, and to make it clear that having answers isn’t what makes you a good Christian. I hope I encourage my students to grow into their questions, because someday they'll probably need to remember that questions don’t have to have answers.