A Pilgrimage to Oshawa

I made a pilgrimage last week back to Ontario, or, it may be better called a “sentimental journey home.” It's the place where I have had the most loved ones and whose people with whom I can most easily identify, even though I've never had a legal address there.

Robert Frost's famous definition of home as “the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in,” has always seemed a travesty to me and I've often wondered why people quote it or think it's funny or something.

There was one grave site in Oshawa in particular where I prayed during this pilgrimage that felt like real home. This was the grave of a lady who lived a very difficult eighty-four years of hardship capped off at the end with a few years of Alzheimer's. She had no formal education, no money, no worldly fame nor power, but she did the true things all along the way and was utterly humble. Whenever I pointed out to her the magnificence of something she had done for someone, she would reply something to the effect that God had just put it in her path to do, that no credit was due to herself.

She adopted an infant whose parents had died shortly after his birth and raised him alone, as well as caring for many other children. It's a long story of many difficulties, but of a true woman. She taught me so much.

Here is a photo of her that I took one day when we went for a pilgrimage back to her own childhood home shortly before her death. I would take her places in my big truck whenever I was in Oshawa, even to church, and she was never embarrassed by it. I always found it very refreshing that she never felt embarrassed by me, who am distant from respectability and rich people.

She was only about four years old when her mother died and often thought of her mother as she went through her difficult life. I think she silently hoped that they would meet again on the other side. I trust it's so.

New Teacher Advice: “Don't smile until Christmas”

“Don't smile until Christmas.” That used to be standard advice to any first-year teacher in secondary school. If you smile, they'll discover that you're human and then you'll really be in for it. You will have “discipline problems.”

It was one of those things that they didn't usually tell you in the Fundamentals of Teaching course at teacher's college, but rather was just practical, experience-derived, realistic, friendly advice.

I remember one particularly difficult student during my first month of teaching in a secondary school. This poor kid was constantly causing trouble, so I talked with him, respectfully, about it after school one day. The following were his exact words:

“You really want to know why I do it? You really want to know? It's because you have these big soft eyes that just ask for it.”

It was a magnificently human moment, for me, and I hope and believe for him, too. I would love to talk with him now, fifty years later, to learn whether or not our talk made a difference in his life.

I resigned from the job, and from secondary-school teaching, after Christmas. The world was too big, with too many people and places to see, for me to stay in that job.

One of my students, who was particularly funny, laughingly said to me after a study hall – one of my duties was to “patrol” a study period in the auditorium filled with 200 energetic high school students - “What you really need is a German Shepherd dog that will go after them as soon as they move.”

Some of my students felt by that time that I was “a prophet” - their word – and others felt that I was from outer space.

But certain parents became really hostile, demanding of the principal that I be fired. “I don't want my son to grow up to be a hippie.” Exact words. There had to be more to life than fighting this particular battle.

I laugh to myself now because I have come to feel, after all these years, that probably the large problem of “inhumanity,” of which the above is just a particular example, is the central work of my own life and our times.

There are two articles in today's New York Times - In Ferguson and Beyond, Punishing Humanity – NYTimes.com and How Righteousness Killed the World Economy – NYTimes.com - which were very much about our situation after thirty-five years of conscious, programmatic, considered, selfishness. These articles are only two among many new indications that the whole Margaret Thatcher “There's no such thing as society” and Ronald Reagan “Government is the problem” thing is showing cracks.

Sheer, Simple Humanity

The above photo taken by Koran Addo in St. Louis is the centerpiece of a blog by Shaun King at Daily Kos today.  King asks, “What does the photo mean to you? What connects with you most about it?”

The Kossacks had some excellent responses, but the photo is so good that there is a lot more to be said.  Two main thoughts immediately came into my own mind on seeing it.

The first thought that came to my mind was that this is a magnificent little boy and that “they” will see it, too, but would want to shoot him with their precious, powerful, state-of-the-art, automatic weapons. There is something about sheer, pure, simple humanity that drives them crazy.

And my second thought that immediately followed was of a passage at the end of Abraham Johannes Muste's essay “Of Holy Disobedience” that goes as follows:

Precisely on that day when the individual appears to be utterly hopeless, to 'have no choice,' when the aim of the 'system' is to convince him that he is helpless as an individual and that the only way to meet regimentation is by regimentation, there is absolutely no hope save in going back to the beginning. The human being, the child of God, must assert his humanity and sonship again. He must exercise the choice which no longer is accorded him by society, which, 'naked, weaponless, armourless, without shield or spear, but only with naked hands and open eyes,' he must create again. He must understand that this naked human being is the one real thing in the face of the machines and the mechanized institutions of our age. He, by the grace of God, is the seed of all the human life there will be on earth, though he may have to die to make that harvest possible.

Please write your own response to the photo in the comment box below and let me know what you think.