Searching for God # 46

In the last post words like agency, intervention, action, birthed and nurtured under several banners such as ‘purpose, meaning, training, ambition, imagination, commitment, and occasionally prevention.’ The church, too, has a vocabulary and a mind-set to ‘intervene’ and to ‘save’ and to ‘comfort’ and to ‘accompany’ and to ‘support’ and to ‘remember’ and also ‘to prevent’….

Institutional growth, however it might be measured, is presumed to be a matter of designed plans, processes, training, interventions and hard work. Similarly personal growth, whether it be of a psychic or spiritual or intellectual nature, is premised on ‘doing the work’ as if we are each expected to consider ourselves our own special ‘project’ as an indication, perhaps to God, that we take ourselves seriously and operate under the belief that God also  takes each of us very seriously. High standards, high criticisms and retribution and reformation and rehabilitation programs abound for all of us, depending on our specific lists of ‘deficiencies’.

And we have trained and mentored and supervised millions of professionals in many fields to assist with our ‘remediation,’ ‘reformation,’ ‘rehabilitation,’ and ‘development’….as if each of our lives were a design piece on a continuum of normality. Age stages, imagined and researched by various academics, like Erikson, and Piaget, Montessorie, have helped ‘define’ norms by which we attempt to ‘gauge’ the relative development of many young boys and girls.

And, normalcy, like some kind of ‘mannah’ from heaven, both physically, emotionally, psychically, and intellectually has become a kind of ‘obsession’ especially for those who have either been told, or have observed that a particular child is ‘different’…..almost like the Green Witch of the West. Her archetype is so familiar to so many that one is tempted and even prompted to ask, ‘Who among us has not felt ‘different’ depending on the perception, attitude and insensitivity of others?’ I recall, in my sixties walking up a street near the downtown core of a modern middle-sized city, when  I heard a male voice, that I thought I recognized, cough briefly and then exclaim, ‘There is an ass I would recognize anywhere!’ as he passed me. It was a colleague of some two decades from a previous life, who, one supposes, was attempting to crack a joke about an obese body, as his way of ‘greeting’.

As a mid-adolescent, at fifteen and sixteen I was 5’9” and weighed 195 pounds. I knew that ours of piano practice had contributed to my ‘body image’ and a menu of home cooking that would rival a castle for richness and tastiness only added to the issue. As if by some ‘accident’ or some other ‘blip’ in the universe, I had an accident while driving my father’s half-ton pick-up, after which the now-disposable vehicle was parked, it seemed for weeks, (perhaps only a few days) on the lot of a prominent car dealership, complete with his name printed in bold letters on the side of the box. For the next three weeks, while working a summer job in a Dominion Store (now they have all disappeared), I lost 25 pounds and was then able to enter the school track meet in the fall.

Prior to that accident, given a likely longer list of objections to date than I can conceivably imagine, my ‘dating life’ was non-existent. Who would have wanted to go out with an obese kid whose only hobby or interest seemed to be the piano? I recall standing against the wall at a teen-town dance in the Oddfellows Hall, in the summer of grade nine, wearing the brown flecked sport jacket and open-necked seersucker shirt over the jacket collar (a wardrobe insisted on by my mother), neither approaching a young girl of my acquaintance to dance, or certainly even being asked to dance by anyone else. In that same grade nine school year, while taking part in dancing classes at noon in the high school, I also recall the female PE teacher asking me to dance, presumably as part of her designed purpose to integrate everyone into the program. Testing dance students on their grasp of the dance steps was likely another of her purposes in asking.

Being ‘different’ in body shape and size was also supplemented by my not joining other young males in their hunting and/or fishing adventures. Oh, I was also among the small few, until sixteen, who were regular church attenders, ‘courtesy’ of my parents’ requirements. So in one calendar year, I publicly ‘left’ the church, has the truck accident, lost 25 pounds and was determined to begin some kind of athletic activity, starting with track and then with basketball, all of in my graduating year.

Private hours, however, during adolescence, were filled with popular hit tunes primarily aired over radio station CKEY out of Toronto. Hosts with names like Stu Kenny, Russ Thompson, Carl Bannis, were as familiar to me as the local mayor, or the local law fraternity. Voice modulation of those hosts, tone, tempo, and resonance, although none of those words were familiar, was something to which I was drawn, and would compare inside my own imagination…trying to ascertain what each of the hosts ‘looked like’ and what kind of person they might be.

At the same time, of course, I was following, apparently somewhat assiduously, the various solo singers and their rotating entries into the pop charts. I even sent away an order for a special magazine featuring and comparing Pat Boone and Perry Como. I had ‘graduated’ from Toronto Maple Leaf players photos and photo rings of players like Harry Watson and Sid Smith and Teeter Kennedy and Max Bentley to popular vocalists.

Imaginary ‘relationships’ with mere visions of men I admired, emulated and wanted to know more about comprised a ‘social life’ long before social media was a glint in anyone’s eye or imagination. I did not think about it then, being different was an almost imperceptible way for one to have more than one ‘path’ of life simultaneously. I was a radio ‘geek’ (in today’s parlance, secretly) and a hockey fan publicly, and a private piano student as a ‘performer’.

Apparently, I was also growing a muscle that was completely unfamiliar, whether because it was unconscious or whether it did not want to be ‘known’ to its human. That muscle was ‘critic’, that jumped out in my rebellion to the specific bigoted homily from the church pulpit. It jumped out when I heard my dad tell me, ‘You are being raised by Hitler and Chamberlain,’ a moment that clarified so many things that had puzzled me.  It had started to climb out of its ‘womb’ when I silently protested about ‘that drunken hockey player’ observation from my mother, to which I silently retorted, ‘what do you know about him and his pain?’

It was growing in both strength and clarity when I opposed the termination of the Arrow jet by the Diefenbaker government, an engine production facility with British engineers had already been operating only about 7 miles from town. It gathered some more resilience when I asked my mother to stop smoking DuMauriers, in our family kitchen. It gathered some confidence when, in a conversation with a visiting African clergy on the deck of my aunts’ cottage, I asked him about the possible relevance of the American ‘separation of church and state’ to which he affirmed it was impossible to separate. In grade thirteen, I asked the history teacher a ‘why’ question about the United Nations, and received a blunt and unappealable reply, ‘We do not have time for that question; we have to prepare for the final examination!’

University ‘questions’ were more about ‘what do I need to know’ and ‘will memory work ‘do’ here, especially memory work to regurgitate the professors’ notes? And why is there not more ‘challenging intellectual’ opportunity inside the classroom? It seems to be a repeat, at a more condensed level, of the pedagogy of that history teacher. Learn, memorize, write papers, something I fully engaged in, although not often with high grades, and then how to fill out a need to be engaged with the campus.

Fraternity membership was a Christmas gift from my parents, and minor responsibilities, like organizing a weekend conference, and then, helping to plan and organize a campus-formal were at the centre of my years as an undergrad.

Learning to teach, coach and supervise residents in a private school took time and energy, as a finished my degree with a correspondence course in Canadian History. Challenging the local clergy in a public debate on the subject: ‘Is the Christian faith relevant today?’ as part of a Lenten Study program, organized by the local clergy, stretched my ‘pushing the envelope’ muscle’ as did a Rotary classification ‘talk’ on education in which I invited two high school students, a vocalist and a guitarist, to perform ‘Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They are a’Changin’ and Gordon Lighfoot’s ‘In the Early Morning Rain’ as bookends to my little offering.

Now engaged in the teaching profession, I was determined to resist a path detailed by ‘salary incentives’ to complete a ‘specialist’ qualifications, in a specific subject. I chose instead, to the dismay of colleagues, to enroll and complete a master’s degree in administration. I had no idea that there even was such a program at that time in Counselling. I simply wanted more ‘education’ and more opportunity to learn, and I somehow thought broadening was more important than specializing. I had this nagging voice in my head saying, ‘you teach kids’ not ‘you teach English, or History’…

And then, surprise, I had an opportunity to ask questions as a requirement in a free-lance television journalism job covering local city hall. Wow! I was, without a single minute of formal training, asking local politicians why they were voting ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ on local issues. My Walter Mitty had found a playground for my curiosity! And then, I was invited to write a weekly opinion column from city hall, and also some radio editorials on public issues. And, to some it likely seemed that I was more interested and engaged in my ‘Walter Mitty’ life than I was in my profession as an English teacher.

In the vortex of deadlines, issues, personalities and trying to find my own voice, I found many opportunities to object to a decision, or to question a non-decision, through more than a dozen years of this Walter Mitty free-lance escapade.

Throughout these various ‘chapters’ (certainly not stages!) I was also exploring my curiosity about God, faith, religion, and questions about the meaning and purpose of death. These subjects were at the centre of much of the literature that was included in the curriculum of senior English students. And, as any teacher knows, the teacher needs to learn what s/he is teaching as much as the students might wish to learn. Indeed, we teach best what we need to know….and we also learn, likely more than some students who seem merely to attend class is their maximum commitment to their learning.

I bought into the cultural, and intellectual concept of ‘activity, intervention, agency,’ as it seemed integral and inherent to the process of ‘teaching’ and then ‘reporting’ as a freelancer. The world is  fast-moving kaleidoscope of colours, faces, words, sounds, ideas, and even prayers petitions to God…..and the human ‘separation’ as observer, curator, consumer,  reporter, interpreter and even gardener seemed to be the primary ‘lens’ through which I and many others perceived the world and attempted to find a place of ‘agency’ within that world.

And as I began to ‘experience’ a sense of hollowness in my own commitment to that process of being both an agent and an employee in a world dominated and tyrannized by economics, by amount of dollars as the primary criterion for so many decisions, both personal and public, I wanted to withdraw, to step back and to reflect both on my obsessive needs for ‘gratification and applause’ and how  I might live my life by peering through a different lens.

And as the years have flown, I have watched a changing horizon on both my perceptions and on the horizon itself. And those changes have some over-laping common characteristics. Although I was appalled with I heard a post-secondary educator-executive ponder that many issues, if left alone without especially urgent intervention, would probably resolve themselves, without much turbulence or disturbance.

And that whole ‘lens’ of ‘non-intervention’ has been taking more and more prominence in my perceptions for several decades.

To be continued……