Illustrations of the Book of Job

Six panels from another inspired final project, twenty-two amazing illustrations in the blue of a Medicine Buddha the student grew up with.

Next-to-last

Scenes from the penultimate day of classes! Each contains a story.

Second one first: this is how "Lived Religion in New York" worked out its response to the project on religion in Shanghai with which we began. The Shanghai team had found four categories helpful for telling the story of religion in a city presumed secular: landmarks, compounds, privacy, waterways. As we started the semester we expected something similar for New York. What we've come up with instead is an interestingly contrasting story. We start in once relatively homogeneous ethnic neighborhoods, whose ways and means spill over into the public (to the surprise and consternation of those who think New York paradigmatically secular), which everyone passes through as they journey in-between places... all of which provides a context, materials and acceptance of individual religious/spiritual choice. This literally came together in the last 5 minutes of class! I'm excited to see how it plays out in our sharing of final reflections on Thursday. The lead-up to our choice of four terms will have given them a lot of material to work with.

The former needs a little more explanation. Our final class text is Hsiao-Lan Hu's This-worldly Nibbana (a text you've heard about before). Hu provides an ingenious, and profound, reading of non-Self by way of dependent co-arising, cannily using Judith Butler's ideas of "performativity" and "sedimentation" to suggest that what we take to be our Selves are in fact the congealing of contingent cultural practices of body, language and values which constitute - and are constituted by - us. People find their way to identifying with a gender because they have been taught to perform, and continue to perform, culturally specific ways of being gendered. As an example, Hu mentions the different ways little boys and little girls are taught to move their bodies in space, the former encouraged to stretch their limbs about, the latter to keep them close, with all manner of implications for how they understand and comport themselves in the future. Becoming aware of this allows one to start resisting it, but unlearning the very way we inhabit our bodies is an uphill task.

I decided to illustrate Hu's point about culturally-mediated gender embodiment by reference to my penchant for crossing my legs. This is something I've become more aware of recently as a friend I ride the subway with has pointed out I do this when sitting, blocking the passage of other riders (even as I think I'm moving my leg in anticipation of their movements). It seemed a timely example as the way men take up space in the subway has been enough of a theme in the last year to have been memorialized in the New Yorker's annual "Eustace" cover, and the subway has also kept cropping up in our Ethics Diaries discussions as an arena for ethical questions: I'd promised my friend I'd try not to do it in the subway anymore. You can probably guess what happened. Despite my intent not to do it during the rest of class, it kept happening, like Dr. Strangelove's Nazi arm salute! But I suppose the point was made.

Today's class ended unusually, too - with a prayer. Indeed, with two. Our last two course readings, Hu and, just before it, Pope Francis' encyclical letter on the environment Laudato Si', both end with prayers (Hu's is from Sulak Sivaraksa), so I thought it offered a nice sort of closure to read both of them together, especially as the scope of these readings might make the effort to lead a good life seem too great for us.

A prayer for our earth

All-powerful God,


you are present in the whole universe


and in the smallest of your creatures.


You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.

Pour out upon us the power of your love,


that we may protect life and beauty.


Fill us with peace, that we may live


as brothers and sisters, harming no one.


O God of the poor,


help us to rescue the abandoned


and forgotten of this earth,


so precious in your eyes.


Bring healing to our lives,


that we may protect the world and not prey on it,

that we may sow beauty,


not pollution and destruction.


Touch the hearts


of those who look only for gain


at the expense of the poor and the earth.


Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,


to be filled with awe and contemplation,


to recognize that we are profoundly united


with every creature


as we journey towards your infinite light.


We thank you for being with us each day.

Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle

for justice, love and peace.

Let us pray for world peace, social justice and environmental balance, which begin with our own breathing.

I breathe in calmly and breathe out mindfully.

Once I have seeds of peace and happiness within me, I try to reduce my selfish desire and reconstitute my consciousness.

With less attachment to myself, I try to understand the structural violence in the world.

Linking my heart with my head, I perceive the world holistically, a sphere full of living beings who are all related to me.

I try to expand my understanding with love to help build a more nonviolent world.

I vow to live simply and offer myself to the oppressed.

By the grace of the Compassionate Ones and with the help of good friends, may I be a partner in lessening the suffering of the world so that it may be a proper habitat for all sentient beings to live in harmony during this millennium.

(Laudato Si’, 178-79; This-Worldly Nibbana, 178)

Job's ladder

And here's another of my students' brilliant final projects for "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts." This student designed a jacob's ladder, a book whose panels cascade and invert as you turn the top. She explains: "The imagery of the ouroboros at the top of the panels, along with the disorienting, flipping structure of the book is meant to represent the cyclical and changing experience of the Book of Job. God is the equivalent of the unending, unrelenting cycle of nature, while man tries painstakingly to stop the cycle." It's a really beautiful way of representing the narrative power and push of the book. She's chosen a passage from her favorite novel, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, about the impossibility of a full life without shadow, and painted scenes of light and dark between them.

The words are spoken by Woland (Satan) to a follower of Jesus, but she thinks it functions much the way God's speeches to Job do in the Bible: No sooner do you appear on the roof than you blab nonsense, and I’ll tell you what it is – it’s your intonation. You pronounced your words as if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of either shadows or evil. But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and from living things. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You’re stupid. Up and down, light and dark, God and Satan - amazing!

God's eye view

Another amazing final project for "Performing the Problem of Suffering." (I've only the write-up, since the student isn't in my discussion section.) A student asked several pastors why God permits the suffering of the innocent, and found each answer an evasion. This made him wonder about a system in which God has absolute authority and can choose when and when not to address questioning sufferers... so he set up a mock-religion, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, where someone named Colin (played by himself) promised to give people the "answer for your suffering."

People (presumably friends of his?) came to the meeting, "Colin" addressing each one intimately, often hugging and looking deep in people's eyes. "You've come to the right place," he told them, "I have the answer to your suffering." Then he withdrew behind a translucent glass door where people could see him... but for 20 minutes he did not respond to calls, knocks, phone calls. At the end, he came out and explained the project and what he had learned: the answer to the question of suffering must be found in yourself. I'm getting together with him to learn more about it - I know he has religious questions but also vocational ones, as someone interested in art therapy for trauma survivors. In his report he writes:

I did this performance because I wanted to experience and maybe feel God’s perspective in the power structure that I see. I wanted to know what it would be like to play with people’s hope and belief. I wanted to know if I feel any guilt for leaving people behind unanswered while they are calling out my name. 

I've said this before, but I'll say it again. The greatest reward of teaching, and the most humbling, is when you somehow create the conditions for things to happen you could never yourself have imagined.

BBG

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a little rain-sodden but splendid as ever!

MetroCITI adieu

Today was the last session of the MetroCITI pedagogy workshop I've been participating in all year - we started last July! In that time, the ten participants - from many different schools and teaching many different subjects) have gotten to know each other well. Over the course of ten months, one of us had a baby, another has one on the way, another got married. We also workshopped, carried out and debriefed about a classroom project and a faculty development project for each of us.

Excellent fun! Today we reflected a little on why it was such a special and fruitful experience. Some veterans of the program had told us, a third of the way in, to relish discussions about pedagogy which wouldn't become mired in the structures and dysfunctions of a particular institution, or in the particular foci of a given discipline. It's also a space without power dynamics and competition, where what unites us is a shared commitment to inquiry. Returning together today to the seminar's central idea that learning involves the coming together of students' prior knowledge and what we were calling subject matter knowledge, something else became clear.

The power of our discussions has come also from the fact that each of us is a non-specialist (to put it mildly) in the others' fields. As each described key subject matter ideas they were trying to convey to students, the rest of us were at once in the role of pedagogues and students. This might be the case for most pedagogy discussions, and should happen in the many settings where interdisciplinary exploration happens (I have sought it out betimes by taking classes in fields I don't know), but it is in fact a rare and precious thing. We were all grateful!

On the wall outside our classroom were two diagrammings of a famous line from James Clerk Maxwell: Metaphysical doctrine is not of much use in a world like this, in which the same antecedents never again concur and nothing ever happens twice. But pedagogical networks...!

PS Here'a a picture of the lot of us, bidding farewell at a Greek restaurant fittingly called Symposium. From right: a professor of

chemistry, TC grad student, sociology, convener, writing, economics, TC grad students, writing, chemistry, physics, government, history, me.

Ahem, ahimsa

Few people notice the Gandhi statue at Union Square

It unfolds

The final projects for "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" are in, and they're really impressive. Let people work in the genres that matter to them, and they work hard. The mostly design students in my discussion section also brought completely different and delightful ways of tackling issues. Here's one from a

student in Communication Design - one of those foldy fortune-telling things where you make a few choices (Job/Friend/God/Satan, then some numbers) before arriving at o one of eight alternate endings (!) to the Book of Job. What a brilliant way of embodying the principle, as Robert Frost called it,

There’s no connection man can reason out


notherBetween his just deserts and what he gets

Another student's project is "a comic about the unnaturalness of trying to force-forget one's suffering: a version of Job (of the Book of Job) struggling to find peace after his restoration." I've borrowed these images (with permission) from her blog; make sure to go through them one by one, seeing only one at a time. The gaps are essential.

(Descriptions of some other projects here.)

Spirit of New York

A student brought a stack of money to class today - but it was all in a good cause. It's spirit money, and she showed us how it's folded before being burnt to transfer assets to departed relatives. This was only one of many highlights of the first set of final presentations in "Lived Religion in New York."

The Buddhism in New York presentation, of which the spirit money folding was part, compared a Tibetan center on 16th Street and several temples in Chinatown. The intrepid students were undeterred by the absence of public events at the former, and conducted an internet interview with a practitioner upstate. As for the latter, after meeting the same woman at two Mahayana temples (who was delighted to see them both times), they stumbled into a press conference being given by a top priest of Fo Guang Shan at a Buddhist youth center, and were permitted to interview him too. (Conveniently both he and one of the students are Taiwanese.) They asked the same questions to their Nyingma source (named Sam), getting similar ambivalence about the opportunities and distractions of the city, compared to the activities at their upstate headquarters. They posted the different answers in different places along the walls of our classroom, inviting us to get up and look at them and so letting us get a taste of the adventure they had. And then we got to fold paper...

Next came a presentation on the challenges of keeping a long fast in New York. One presenter focused on Ramadan, and interviewed a family member. Another focused on Greek Orthodox Lent and interviewed someone she works with. The results were fascinating, both from a comparative and a lived religion perspective. Neither interviewee described herself as religious, but both took on the ardors of fasting for their own interesting reasons. The Muslim had grown up in Karachi and Dubai and fasted in part to experience a connection to home, but described observing Ramadan in New York as far more difficult than it is in these Muslim cities, since shops here are open and colleagues blithely eat... not to mention that New York summer days can be 18 hours long! For the Orthodox fast, by contrast, New York turns out to be a great place "since there are so many vegan restaurants here."

After that we learned about the little floe left of what was once a major German population in New York City - a third of the population, making it the third-largest German-speaking city in the world. The presenters researched the German Lutheran church of St. Mark's - originally in Kleindeutschland in the Lower East Side (the building is now a synagogue), relocating to Yorkville on the Upper East Side after much of the congregation died in the General Slocum disaster of 1904. They still have services in German, not too poorly attended, according to a student who attended. Although their congregants long ago moved to the suburbs, many evidently return each week for services, as well as for German film screenings. But this tiny remnant of what was once a major part of New York's experience of itself is all but invisible today. "I've lived in the neighborhood for twenty years," said my (20-year-old) student, "and never noticed it was there."

Today's final presentation was about the St. Francis Xavier. The two students were interested in the parish's outreach to LGBTQ people, and found lots - though over the course of conversations with four different people connected to the parish they were able also to register the delicacy of being a gay-friendly Catholic church. The priest, and a long-term parishioner to whom they spoke, seemed to dodge their questions about inclusiveness by directing them to the parish's Catholic Lesbian and Gay Catholic groups, and pointing out the chapel for those lost to HIV/Aids: actions, not statements! And, they reported, everyone's favorite phrase seemed to be "who am I to judge?" - they didn't know the phrase's papal pedigree! But after talking to my colleague M, a parishioner there, they were able to end their presentation with an account of the congregation's public support of its LGBTQ ministries at the consecration after recent renovation, to which the (not so gay-friendly) Cardinal Archbishop of New York could only applaud.

A wonderfully multi-dimensional picture of New York as a place where religion lives is emerging - and we have yet to hear the presentations from groups exploring yoga centers, kosher bakeries and the Hare Krishnas who sing and dance at Union Square!

Torrey Pines in bloom

Jesus rocks love

I'm not usually in California this time of the year, so I wasn't prepared to find St. James Catholic Church awash in first communicants, little ladies - brides - and little gentlemen. (Each of the eighty-four had made a banner, like this one.)

Well, in fact I wasn't completely unprepared. By marvelous coincidence, the announcement below had emerged from a trunk just this morning.