Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University

Conclusion

195 What I’ve done in this book is used my own experience to reflect on the experience of all Christian faculty who finally have to cross the line in their teaching and their faith. The line is hard to define but nonetheless real and good—good for us both as intellectuals and as Christians. Without it, the necessary and creative tension between faith and reason is no longer possible. We can’t finally live on both sides of the divide. We can’t avoid the challenge and the choice. There’s important and productive and inspiring overlap, moments in the classroom when the boundaries seem to collapse and there is no tension, there is no gulf. But in the end my argument has been that to live in faith requires an intellectual as well as a personal sacrifice , an intellectual as well as a personal honesty. The difficult and shifting border that I’ve been describing must be crossed and is always being crossed, and the most important contribution we can make as Christian faculty is to keep crossing that line and professing that we have. S But the line doesn’t just exist for us, and we’re not the only ones who cross it. Our students cross the line, too, all the time, and their experience deepens and clarifies our own call as believers. One day in spring I was teaching my Advanced Composition class, using Tom Junod’s fine essay about Mr. Rogers, one of my heroes, and in it there was a line I really liked. Mr. Rogers is getting out of a taxicab in New York City. A homeless man is sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of a building, and when he sees Mr. Rogers—Mr. Rogers himself, of Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood—he blurts out: Holy Shucks, it’s Conclusion Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:21 PM Page 195 Mister Flipping Rogers (or words to that effect). I have a weakness for profanity, I have to admit, and here, in this context, the string of those words struck me as so earthy and funny and sharp that I couldn’t stop repeating them when we turned to the students’ own work. Whenever I saw a line that I liked in their own essays, I’d burst out myself: Holy Shucks, it’s Mister Flipping Rogers. Over and over again. I must have said it thirty or forty times that period, just riffing, unthinkingly. The next day a student from the class came to my office, a very good student, a single mother returning to school for a masters in teaching. She started talking about how I’d been repeating that line from the essay, and I thought, oh no, here it is, I should have watched myself. Once again I should have thought before I opened my mouth. But before I had a chance to apologize, she stopped and turned. She wanted to talk about becoming Catholic, she said. She wanted to talk about her spiritual journey and about coming into the church, and it was because I kept repeating that line in the essay. She knew I was Catholic and she thought, well, if he’s got a sense of humor anyway, maybe it’s alright after all. A year later, at the Easter Vigil, she was dunked in the water, fully immersed, coming up sputtering and smiling, then later confirmed . Through the grace of God my thoughtlessness became a way in for that young woman, a young woman who felt crowded out of the church, who couldn’t see how to get to Jesus through the front door. She knew Jesus was in there, and he is, he really is, in the church as in the house in the famous reading from Mark, the house in the second chapter where Jesus has come to teach. But all of us Christians were taking up the space, blocking the way, and like the friends of the paralytic in Mark’s story, who took off the roof and lowered him in from above, my student had to take off the roof of the church and lower herself in. My office was the back door. It was her assumptions about the church crowding her out in a way: that the church is full of disapproving moralists and terrifying rules and that you have to toe the line and sit up straight even to ask about it; that to be Catholic means...