Reading is Fundamental

About once every semester a student will ask me why I chose English as a major.  I guess they’re wondering why someone as brilliant and accessible as I am chose a major that barely pays the bills.

I tell them that I became an English major for religious reasons.  This statement normally draws a few eyebrows up, as you can imagine.  Since when did choosing a college major become a religious decision (except, of course, for those “called” to a real Christian major like theology or pastoral ministry).

But my decision was a religious one, too.  I explain that I believe that the world is created through words, through language and speech.  The poem that is Genesis chapter 1, after all, tells us that God created the world, not with complex physics calculations and bio-chemical thingies, but with his word.  He spoke, and there it was.

I tell them I believe God was the first English major.

Our world—our histories, sciences, cultures, behaviors, and so one—then, can be traced back to language.  And it’s that quest to understand the world on those terms that fascinates me as a person, gentleman, and scholar.

Knowing that the world was created and sustained through language helps me read.  By trying to understand the origins of our human-ness and the cosmos, I believe I achieve a more satisfying reading.

Jesus spoke about himself as words, too, so maybe reading Christ will help us understand him.  Yes, we have God speaking the cosmos into existence in Gen. 1, and John 1 tells us that “(i)n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  And in Revelation, Jesus speaks about himself as letters: the Alpha and the Omega, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8).  Many Christians know this statement as Jesus reclaiming what is his—the cosmos.  He is the Beginning and the End, not just of the Greek alphabet, but of the entire universe.  A playful metaphor.

But this statement isn’t quite as heavy to us in the English-speaking world whose alphabet was more influenced by the Roman ordering of letters than the Greek one.  I suppose Christ’s proclamation of himself as “the Alpha and the Omega” is equivalent to our “A to Z,” but there’s something somewhat childish about saying it that latter way.  Our alphabet’s sing-songy melody infantilizes our lettering system, I think, and maybe takes away some of that meaningful “meat”.  I think if Jesus were to tell us that he was the A and the Z, we wouldn’t take that quite as seriously as we do the ethos-infused “Alpha and Omega.”

Why is that?

It has to do with what Alpha and Omega mean, not what they stand for.  For our contemporary alphabet, A is for apple or aardvark or avocado, and Z is usually only for zebra. Lucky zebras.  If your last name begins with A, that usually means you’re first, and other kids despise you for it; the closer to Z your name is, the less likely you’ll get what you (and others) want. The United States used to have a AAA credit rating, and we’ve been downgraded; the further we are from A, the worse we perceive ourselves. That’s about it. For us, A and Z don’t mean anything positive, really.  It’s just a way for us to judge ourselves and each other.

The word “alpha” originates, as far as we know, with the Phoenicians (whose civilization peaked between 1200 and 800 B.C., and were located around the area of what is today known as Turkey, Iraq, and Syria).  The Greek word “alpha” comes from the Phoenician word “aleph,” means “ox.”

The earliest forms of the letter looked like this: 

If you look at it, it’s a sketch of an ox: a triangular head with two horns.

As the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph makes sense: the ox was likely the most important part of a Phoenician’s life, a cornerstone of their agriculture, their commerce, their survival.

As the Greeks were developing their written language around the decline of the Assyrian empire in 800 B.C., they looked to the Phoenicians, their eastern neighbor, for help.  They took the aleph, turned it on its side, and called it “alpha”:

God forbid a civilization be accused of plagiarism.

Because of Greece’s regional dominance, the Phoenicians soon adopted the sideways aleph.

Not to be outdone 100 years later, the Romans took the Greek alpha around, turned it some more (again, to avoid being explicit plagiarists), and being proud of their bureaucratic efficiency, called it, simply, “A”.  You know, just to make themselves different and special. (Am I right, Virgil?)

Omega, on the other hand, seems to be a Greek invention.  Like alpha, omega is a vowel (representing the “aw” sound), and has a somewhat similar connotation.  Omega means “great O,” (“mega” in Greek meaning “great”, and “o” meaning, well, “o”). 

That’s it. It’s a great big “o”.  The greatest of the “o”s, I guess.  Not nearly as interesting as the all-important aleph/alpha.

So if it’s so great, then why is it last in their alphabet and why didn’t the Romans adopt it into their alphabet?  We do know that when letters are added to the alphabet, they are usually just tagged onto the end.  So, omega is last because, well, it’s the last one.  But that’s not to diminish its place.  It’s also the “greatest o,” too, for what it’s worth.

The last place in an alphabet seems to be an arbitrary place for letters, but one that also represents newness.  Case in point, the Latin alphabet ends with “Z,” which they, again, stole from the Greek’s “zeta,” the sixth letter in the Greek alphabet.  When the Romans adapted the Greek alphabet, they didn’t see any use for that sixth letter, zeta, so they dropped it. 

A few years later, the Romans experienced letter-regret and realized that they needed that sound after all. But it was too late to add it back in to its original spot, so they just threw it on the end.

Again, no special reasoning.  It just happened to be the newest sound re-added to the alphabet, so that’s where the Romans stuck it.

We’ll just put it at the end.  Sorry, z.

So, when Jesus says that he’s the Alpha and the Omega in Revelation, he’s not only saying that he’s “the first and the last, the beginning and the end,” he’s also saying that

·         he’s the oldest (alpha) and the newest (omega/zeta), which means he’s the origin of all things, he’s historical, and he’s relevant, even today.

·         he’s the most important thing and the most unimportant thing, which means everything revolves around him, from the most important things like getting married, to the mundane, everyday things like brushing your teeth.  He’s there.

·        he’s the cornerstone of our life and the greatest “aw”.  He’s full of “aw”.  He makes us open our mouths all the way.

So, to think of Christ as letters, then, that’s how we can read him. 

And, according to 2 Corinthians 3, Christ-followers are words, too.  We are letters (in a different sense that alpha and omega, though) to be read.  Christ is the Word, and we are his words.  This message of Christ as Alpha and Omega is what we should have on our hearts, what we have to live up to.  When others read us, Christ as Alpha and Omega is what they should be reading.

Do you feel, as a Christ-follower, that you are being read all the time by others?

I feel it.  It may not be always true, but I do feel it.  So I become very self-conscious about how others read me.

I feel this way because we read all the time.  Maybe not books and essays and magazines and the Bible, but we read signs, and people, and clothing, and food, and our budget, and our friends.  You’re reading me right now, just as I’m reading you.  (“Get on with it, Jared!”) We read all the time, and we are read by others all the time.

Feel the pressure?  I do.

So what does it mean to read?

Jesus talks about reading a few times in the Gospels—in Matthew mainly—as a way of reminding his followers of what they should know of Hebrew law and history, and of prophecy.  He uses phrases like “Have you not read…?” to point out what he thinks should be obvious to his disciples.

For us in education, and even for us parents, we use this rhetorical strategy all of the time.  When a student asks a simple question for is confused, we may retort:

“What do you mean you don’t know?  Haven’t you read the readings for today’s class?”

“What do you mean you don’t know?  Haven’t you done your homework?”

“What do you mean you haven’t cleaned your room?  Haven’t you read the chore list?”

“Haven’t you been paying attention to anything your entire life?”

For Christ, reading is a way of reminding us about two things:

·         what God has done (Matt. 12:3, 5; 19:4; Mark 12:26)

·         and what he’s going to do (Matt. 22:8, 31)

 Past and Future.  Beginning and End. Alpha and Omega.

So what happens when we read?

“Read” is an interesting word itself.  “Read” is actually an Old English word (with German and Norse roots) from about 700 a.d., and it means “to guess”.  It doesn’t mean simply to recognize letters and words (like A, O, and Z), but to guess, to reason, what they mean.

Simply put, reading, as it’s meant to be done, is guessing.  It means to think beyond the superficial or explicit definitions of these letters and words put in whatever particular order.  It means to look beyond the words and create a connection to yourself, the reader.

Does this mean that we should always be reading between the lines?

In a manner of speaking, yes.  Jesus actually tells us to do just that.

The word we’ve  interpreted as “read” in the New Testament is “anagin”, which, in Jesus’ time, actually means “to read again, or to know again.”  Taken literally, the word means “to be read aloud in public in order to know it again.”  When Jesus questions his disciples’ reading habits in Matthew, he’s asking them if they’ve really looked and paid attention to what they saw on the page, to what they’ve heard in the synagogue.  Did they read it once (which is the Greek word “diavzo”) or did they read again to get know it better “anagin”?

Reading something aloud again (anagin) helps us do a few things with a word or story: it helps us engage and absorb the meaning, and it helps us remember.  Neuroscience tells us that vocalizing something after you’ve processed it one way, say through reading, moves that information further and further back into your long term memory.  When we read something once (diavzo), it goes into our short term memory; reading something again in order to know it and say it aloud (anagin), moves it into our long term memory.

That’s why when Christ says “anaginesknone” (Have you not read…?) in Matthew 12, he is also saying:

“Do you not remember?” 

“Have you not absorbed the meaning?”

“Can you not repeat in public what you have read and what it means?”

 “When people read you, do they read what you know, what you’ve read?”

The early church took this to heart and developed a manner of public reading and study that was further developed and systematized by Benedictine monks in 600 A.D.  This method is called “lectio divina”, which means “sacred reading.”  We’ll be getting some practice with it today with Matthew 14.

Here’s one way that it’s been adapted today:

Reading 1

1.  Knowing: Worship leader reads aloud a story from the Gospels or a parable slowly while the congregation listens.

2. Absorption: People reflect for a minute on one word only from the scripture passage just read.  This word is one that really sticks out to you.  At this point, you are guessing at what message God is sending to you.

3. Public reading: One at a time, members call out the word from scripture that stuck out to them.  Only one word.  No commentary needed.

Reading 2

1. Knowing: Leader reads aloud the story or parable again.

2. Absorption: Congregation reflects on a phrase (a few words or a sentence) that sticks out to them this time.

3. Public reading: Members call out the phrase from scripture they reflected on.

Reading 3

1. Knowing: Leaders reads aloud the story one last time.

2. Absorption: Congregation reflects on the whole story and what it means to them personally, in their everyday lives.

3. Public reading: Members call out in a sentence or two how what this story means to them, how it affects them.

Lectio Divina is an attempt for a person to not only read a portion of the Bible, but read themselves as a part of the story that God is writing for us. 

·         If Christ is the Alpha and Omega, then you are in between there somewhere, being written with him. 

·         If Christ is both old and new, then you are in between there somewhere, becoming new with him even as you get older. 

·         If Christ is both important and unimportant, then you are in between there somewhere, unworthy of his grace but remember this, you are also the most important person to him.

We heard a lot about journeys and transitions today in our prayer time.  Part of being a Christ follower is recognizing that your story is part of Christ’s Alpha-Omega story.  And the stories of others, even if they don’t know Christ like you may know him, are in there, too.

We know how our stories began and how it will end.  And we can know that Jesus was there in the beginning and at the end.  Our stories are indeed safe, as Peter was on the water.

Here’s a poem by Marilyn Nelson called “The Jesus Prayer”:

You ought not to ask,

but to understand

in silence.

Have mercy compels each cricket,

each pell-mell thought, the cosmos known

and imagined, to circle in yearning.

If I could go all the way,

beyond sobbing hunger, what might I hear?

Why can’t I shut up

that treeful of grackles,

the newsreels and coming attractions,

the camcorder clicking in memories, and just be still?

Letter to Kodiak Island Borough Assembly Concerning Education Funding

Dear Kodiak Island Borough Assembly,

Any cuts to the KIB contribution to KIBSD budget, if they absolutely must be made, should be minimal; any tax increase should be modest.

Granted, I’m new to this local conversation, having recently returned to the island after a 9-month furlough in Texas, which you may be aware, is experiencing education cuts of apocalyptic proportions (how’s that for overstatement?).  My research and deliberation on this is thin as a result, so apologies all around.

First, I’ll oblige myself to remind the Assembly of the inartistic logic that goes along with education funding, and then I’ll argue how the increasing epidemic of poverty in Kodiak obliges the Assembly to reassess any discussions of decreasing the borough’s contribution to KIBSD.

• ·         Education is KIB’s #1 priority.  It’s listed first in our Strategic Plan, holding a prominent position above all other responsibilities.  We need not be reminded ad nauseum of the ROI in education—in terms of local economics, academics, arts, and posterity.

• ·         While Superintendent McDonald’s fiscal assessment of the effects of a dramatic reduction in KIB contribution (only $4.5 million?) may be overstated in terms of personnel layoffs (i.e., not looking at other districts’/industries’ creative solutions to budget cutbacks will take the sting out: furloughs, salary reductions, burden-sharing with other like-institutions [Kodiak College, for instance, in the form of an extended Early College high school for KHS juniors and seniors]), there is certainly a logic behind the overstatements. The numbers indicate a delicate web of interdependence among Borough responsibilities and anxieties. Slash one, and they all become slashed in delayed aftershocks. Are these particular aftershocks (of proposed education cuts) we are willing to bear and defer to future Assemblies and Boards?  The earthquake would be bad enough, I’m afraid.  Surely, if the Borough is indeed facing such a dramatic shortfall, other, less prioritized responsibilities with more bearable aftershocks should face the ax.  No, not education.

• ·         If we are having such a difficult time organizing ourselves around common priorities, developing creative solutions, and predicting and responding to our fiscal outlook now, I think it behooves us to maintain and increase investments in systems and institutions, such as local education, that will help us avoid these problems and then face them with assurance and reason when they do come up. Setting precedents like what has been proposed by KIB will only guarantee that we’ll be facing the same conversations in perpetuity.  And these conversations are tiring.

• ·         Few people envy you and the decisions you have to make for us.

One last plea to maintain funding, and this concerns our students directly and the poverty epidemic.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics (Dept. of Ed)

·         KIBSD students are increasingly affected by poverty.  As an indicator of local poverty rates, the free/reduced lunch program allows children from families with incomes at or below 130% of the poverty level to qualify for the program.

o   In 2010

§   37% of KHS students were eligible for free/reduced lunch

§  45% of KMS students were eligible for free/reduced lunch

§  60% of Main Elementary students were eligible for free/reduced lunch

§  District-wide, we had nearly 45% eligibility 

o   In other words, nearly half of KIBSD students live in poverty

o   While Alaska ranks lower than the national average, if Kodiak Island Borough were a state, we would feature a per capita .075 eligibility, which ties Oklahoma for #4, below Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico.

I know, I have a PhD in English and an M.Ed, not a degree in socioeconomics, but these numbers concern me.  And if you look at the 10-year trend, these numbers are not going down.

In  The Working Poor by David Shipler (of which I’ve attached the relevant chapter and strongly encourage you to read), he explores how interconnected poverty is with local public education systems, and how children living in poverty are much more vulnerable to cuts in education and other social services than middle-class children.  When I look at the Borough Assembly, the City Council, the School Board, and school administration, I don’t see groups that can feel the great impact that even the slightest change in funding can have on this delicate half of our students.  I see groups that can bear the hit.  My family and I can certainly bear that hit, too.

However, nearly half of the kids in our school district are not like us.  Please remember that.

Any cut in a school program (be it personnel, admin support, technology, facilities, etc.) echoes magnanimously in the lives of these kids and their families.  Their families are already on thin ice, every day, every paycheck.

It’s not like us in the other half, who can spend that extra time with our kids helping them with schoolwork, who can take them to paid extracurricular activities, hire tutors, etc.  The invisible kids in our district don’t have that support anywhere else but in our schools.  And if we chip away at that support, we are chipping away at the lives of nearly half of our future borough.

To paraphrase Shipler, we may have the skill to support these kids, and help break this increasingly dangerous cycle of local poverty, but we just don’t have the will.

Or do we?

Maintaining significant funding of our education system will show that we have both.

Regards,

Dr. Jared Griffin

Where I See Sue

This is where I see Sue:

There are times in the New Mexico desert
when the sun peers over the horizon,
and if you didn't know west from east,
you could never tell if the sun was rising or setting
because the golden light that colors the sparse landscape
is the same in the morning as it is in evening.

And in this golden light
Sue sits, I see,
gray, green, and pale,
in a wicker chair, on a wooden porch,
before an adobe cottage,
quilting by herself, but not alone.

And if you know Sue
and the maternal credibility she carries in her small, soft eyes,
she will pull, with gravitational authority,
the sun's golden light to her skin,
so she's no longer gray, green, and pale,
but a fiery bronze
like the bonfire of cosmetic scarves beside her.
Her slender fingers,
now like brazen needles,
patchworking a legacy from the ashen threads of those scarves,
quilted echoes that I can't wait to see.

This is not heaven, mind you,
for we are not promised a heaven immediate;
rather, I think,
this is sleep,
what the rabbis call "Sheol"--
peace and rest and silence,
a passing, like the New Mexican sun,
that is not night,
that is not morning,
but merely waiting.

The Comic God 1.0

I picked this book up from a Half Price bookstore last week, recognizing on the spine Gene Luen Yang's name from his wonderfulfantastic autobiographical graphic novel, American-Born Chinese (2007). I'm not familiar with Derek Kirk Kim's work, but, I promise, I will soon seek it out.

In American-Born Chinese, I liked how Yang approached spiritual and fantasy metaphors for creating identity in a world in which much of our identity is created for us, and I was looking to see how he extended this theme in The Eternal Smile, a collection of three short comic stories, published last year by First Second (which is quickly becoming my favorite graphic novel publisher).

So what is the eternal smile?

Before I read the book, I thought the title referred to God.  Words like "eternal" most often evoke that sort of transcendent-theme-feeling in me.  Plus, the artwork on the front suggest a happy, yellow, sunshiney deity, worshipped adoringly by a cosmopolitan group.

But the eternal smile in the book is a joke.

Not to suggest that the book argues that God is a joke.  I don't think the book argues that at all--perhaps, in an implicit way, the book argues the opposite.  If anything, the joke is us and the realities we create for ourselves and, oppresively, for others.

These aren't some solipsistic adventures that Yang and Kim throw their characters into in order to justify a new (but cliched) relativism.  They do, instead, emphasize the arbitrariness of our "mind-forged manacles".  (Like how I threw in some William Blake?)  In these stories, there is always an ultimate reality, a really real (to invoke some worldview jargon)--these aren't realities that are self-delusional.  I want to say that in these stories is a call for readers to look for what's really real, but I think Yang and Kim assert that we already know, somewhere deep inside us, what's really real.  But, around the really real, we've unfortunately built up layers and layers of fantasy, delusion, sin, bad habits, and, most of all, a deeply wounding shame.

In "Duncan's Kingdom", the first story, Duncan is a young man whose stepfather sends into a coma for protecting his mother against his violent whims.  Duncan is ashamed of his mother for failing to protect herself and him from this monster, even at one point saying she deserves this treatment because of her lack of self-will.  But, most of all, Duncan is ashamed of himself, failing as a son and as a man in his defeat.

While in his coma, Duncan weaves together this dream-world in which he is a brave young knave in a medieval kingdom, whose king has just been murdered by the Frog King.  The now-fatherless princess implores him to slay the Frog King in revenge, and will receive her hand in marriage and keys to kingdom upon his success.

Through his quest, Duncan realizes (I won't reveal in exactly what manner the ephipany arrives) that this kingdom-reality is a false reality.  In fact, signs from the really real (his real mother appearing in dreams, an errant soda bottle) invade this fantasy.  These signs act as echoes, or remnants, from a reality that is not ideal, but it is real.

The ultimate question for Duncan, then, is why does he give up this perfectly laid-out world, in which he is sovreign, in which he is a hero, in which he is unashamed, in which he is sinless, in which he is loved by all?  And why does he give it up for this dark, sad, violent, disgraceful, ungraceful, shameful world we live in?

It's because we can't help it.  It's our tragic flaw--or our comic flaw: we must know truth.  We must.

And when there's a truth we don't like, we create a separate reality for ourselves--not a new philosophy.

                (There's some perfect lines about this in Emery's song "After the Devil Beats His Wife":
                        "People want the truth, but never want the scars.../
                        This is the pain of believing.")



The solipsistic philosophies of our time, and times past, have certainly created a severe moral relativism that we don't really know how to navigate, but navigating truth is painful, too.  Yang and Kim, however, seem to be saying that the realities we create for ourselves are:

        1. created out of shame and guilt

        2. paradoxically moral

We conquer our shame by embracing truth.  We find truth, a redemptive truth, by confronting our guilt.

Failing to do that, at least in Duncan's kingdom, separates us from people and creates a self divided against itself.  Relying on yourself for salvation, then, is quixotic.  Salvation lies outside of ourselves . . .

On the surface Duncan's kingdom seems perfect for him: he defeats the king's enemy, marries the princess, inherits a kingdom, and his subjects adore him.  But something from the outside lingers--this bottle of Snappy Cola, a remnant or echo of what is true and real, has infiltrated this fantastic dimension.  There's no mistake in this story that the very first frame is of a giant castle, colored purple in the night, and the last frame is of the hospital where Duncan is recovering, drawn with the same scale, perspective, and color as the castle in the first frame.  The story emphasizes a healing that can only be accomplished by searching the stone fantasies for those more ephemeral signs, lurking and waiting to take us home, back to truth.

The bottle of Snappy Cola functions like that, like a miracle--unexplained phenomena in a solipsistic universe.

As readers, then, maybe we are asked: what are the aberrations in your reality, in your world?  The lie is that these are merely aberrations--those things (people, events, experiences, objects, words, songs, etc.) are actually signs of truth, the ultimate reality, the really real.  Because when you come face-to-face with the truth, you'll find that you are the one who is lying to you.

I like how this story emphasizes signs--signs are placed in our reality to remind us, to compel us to remember, that this is not what's really real.  Not to chase some kind of platonist rabbit because I think this problem of dualism is answered in later stories, but there is something to be said about how, if we look for signs of truth and salvation, we'll find them.

Free will is exercising the choice to pursue them.

I'll pursue the titular eternal smile in the next post about the second story: "The Eternal Smile."  (Sadly, more frogs die in that one, too.)