Experience
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For the last two weeks my students and I have been in Petén, Guatemala, studying the ecology of the region. For half that time we stayed with local families. Our homestays were arranged by the Asociación Bio-Itzá, an indigenous Maya conservation organization that runs a Spanish school to support their work in preserving a section of the Maya Biosphere Reserve. The other half of the time we spent on the reserve and hiking the Ruta Chiclera, a forty-mile trek through the Zotz and Tikal reserves, vast areas of largely unbroken subtropical forest.
These are not always easy conditions. Many hard-working Guatemalans live in poverty that is hard to conceive in our country; it is hot and wet except for when it is cold and wet; biting insects are everywhere; disease and snakes and thorny vines like bayal are constant threats.
But it is also a beautiful place with astonishing biodiversity and remarkable people whose resilience and generosity always make me want to improve my own character. They welcome us into their homes and into their lives, and they are glad to see us come to appreciate the place they live.
I expect that my students will forget much of what I say in my lectures and much of what they read in books. But I doubt very much that they will forget the people they have met here. Guatemala has gone from being an abstraction to a concrete reality. When they meet kind people of good character who have walked across Mexico and made it into the USA only to be caught and deported, "illegal immigrants" now have a face, a home, a family at whose table my students have received a nourishing and welcoming meal.
Likewise, they will not likely forget the sound of howler monkeys at night or the experience of scrambling up Maya temples still covered in a thousand years of trees and soil. They won't forget the long walk in a deep green forest and the smells of tortillas and beans cooked over a wood fire.
It is expensive to bring students so far. One could object that the money could be better spent on viewing the forest online or donating it to rainforest conservation. I disagree. I'm not in the business of dispensing information; I'm in the business of transforming lives, and not much transforms like full-bodied experience. Before we leave for Guatemala my students read papers written by wildlife conservation researchers. In Guatemala they meet those researchers in person and get to hear their stories. They hear in their tone and see in their eyes what brought them to Guatemala and what keeps them here. In such times my students go from taking in data to rethinking their lives.
It is my hope - my exuberant, perhaps not wholly rational hope - that out of such lived experience of nature my students will become people who comfort orphans and widows in their distress, who receive the foreigner into their own homes, who marvel and the world's diversity and who, for the rest of their lives, work to preserve it.
Nature As A Classroom
These are not always easy conditions. Many hard-working Guatemalans live in poverty that is hard to conceive in our country; it is hot and wet except for when it is cold and wet; biting insects are everywhere; disease and snakes and thorny vines like bayal are constant threats.
But it is also a beautiful place with astonishing biodiversity and remarkable people whose resilience and generosity always make me want to improve my own character. They welcome us into their homes and into their lives, and they are glad to see us come to appreciate the place they live.
I expect that my students will forget much of what I say in my lectures and much of what they read in books. But I doubt very much that they will forget the people they have met here. Guatemala has gone from being an abstraction to a concrete reality. When they meet kind people of good character who have walked across Mexico and made it into the USA only to be caught and deported, "illegal immigrants" now have a face, a home, a family at whose table my students have received a nourishing and welcoming meal.
Likewise, they will not likely forget the sound of howler monkeys at night or the experience of scrambling up Maya temples still covered in a thousand years of trees and soil. They won't forget the long walk in a deep green forest and the smells of tortillas and beans cooked over a wood fire.
It is expensive to bring students so far. One could object that the money could be better spent on viewing the forest online or donating it to rainforest conservation. I disagree. I'm not in the business of dispensing information; I'm in the business of transforming lives, and not much transforms like full-bodied experience. Before we leave for Guatemala my students read papers written by wildlife conservation researchers. In Guatemala they meet those researchers in person and get to hear their stories. They hear in their tone and see in their eyes what brought them to Guatemala and what keeps them here. In such times my students go from taking in data to rethinking their lives.
It is my hope - my exuberant, perhaps not wholly rational hope - that out of such lived experience of nature my students will become people who comfort orphans and widows in their distress, who receive the foreigner into their own homes, who marvel and the world's diversity and who, for the rest of their lives, work to preserve it.
∞
The Music of the Spheres: The Sun Is A Morning Star
Students in my Ancient and Medieval Philosophy class are required to spend at least four hours outdoors, gazing at the skies.
That may sound odd, but it arises from my conviction that philosophy needs labs. I call it my "Music of the Spheres" project, in which I invite them to consider what it would have been like to be Thales (who was one of the first to predict a solar eclipse), gazing at the night sky and thinking about the laws that seem to guide the motions of the celestial bodies.
The students are given specific instructions and they must come up with a clear research project that can be accomplished using only the tools available to ancient astronomers.
For me, the best part of the class comes at the end when I read their work, and I get to see their offhand comments, like this:
If you don't know what planets are visible right now; if you can't quickly identify a few constellations; or if you aren't sure what phase the moon is in, why not go outside and have a look? And why not share the moment with a friend?
The heavens are not yet done revealing themselves to us, and "the sun is but a morning star."
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| The Morning Star, Good Earth State Park (SD), December 2013 |
That may sound odd, but it arises from my conviction that philosophy needs labs. I call it my "Music of the Spheres" project, in which I invite them to consider what it would have been like to be Thales (who was one of the first to predict a solar eclipse), gazing at the night sky and thinking about the laws that seem to guide the motions of the celestial bodies.
The students are given specific instructions and they must come up with a clear research project that can be accomplished using only the tools available to ancient astronomers.
For me, the best part of the class comes at the end when I read their work, and I get to see their offhand comments, like this:
"I saw the Milky Way and its Great Rift for the first time."My heart leapt when I read that one. This next one didn't make my heart leap, but it did make my heart glad, because it too is an important discovery:
"Stargazing is much more fun with a friend."We live beneath these skies but so rarely do we lie on our backs beneath them and gaze upwards. Rarely do we lift our eyes to the heavens to see what is there, and when we do, we are quick to turn away in boredom, as though it were a small thing to gaze into the greatest distances.
If you don't know what planets are visible right now; if you can't quickly identify a few constellations; or if you aren't sure what phase the moon is in, why not go outside and have a look? And why not share the moment with a friend?
The heavens are not yet done revealing themselves to us, and "the sun is but a morning star."
∞
"Life Is Our Dictionary"
"Authors we have in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, set sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers to replenish their merchantable stock. If it were only for a vocabulary the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary."
R.W. Emerson, "The American Scholar"
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Wettstein on Narrative Theology
I have occasionally written about theology and theomythy in this blog. And in my book From Homer To Harry Potter my coauthor and I attempted a longer defense of the idea that the heart of the Bible is not propositional theology but narrative theology and storytelling. I am right now working up a review of a marvelous book by Howard Wettstein (the picture on his home page is worth a thousand words) entitled The Significance of Religious Experience. His book is thought-provoking and illuminating -- I'll save the details for the full review -- but for now, let me offer two helpful quotes.
“We often speak of the biblical narrative, and narrative is another aspect of the Bible’s literary character. The Bible’s characteristic mode of ‘theology’ is story telling, the stories overlaid with poetic language. Never does one find the sort of conceptually refined doctrinal propositions characteristic of a doctrinal approach. When the divine protagonist comes into view, we are not told much about his properties. Think about the divine perfections, the highly abstract omni-properties (omnipotence, omniscience, and the like), so dominant in medieval and post-medieval theology. One has to work very hard—too hard—to find even hints of these in the Biblical text. Instead of properties, perfection and the like the Bible speaks of God’s roles—father, king, friend, lover, judge, creator, and the like. Roles, as opposed to properties; this should give one pause.” (108)
I will confess that this is a difficult review to write; it's rare that I find a book that I'd rather quote at great length rather than summarize. His writing is lucid, combining analytic rigor and pragmatic vision with Talmudic wisdom. It is delicious in its suggestiveness. It's the sort of book I expect will tinge everything I write for a long time.“Biblical theology is poetically infused, not propositionally articulated.” (110)
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Future Hopes, Present Experience, and the Wisdom of the Past
A reflection on Henry Bugbee's Inward Morning, his entry dated Friday, September 5.
Bugbee writes: "Of experience...we may hope for understanding in our own time, and in this we do not seem to have the edge on preceding generations of men."
Science grows from one generation to another. What we know is more advanced than what previous generations knew. But precisely because of this, we are alienated from what science will know, what it aims to know when it reaches its goal. Science uses experience, it swims in the medium of experience on a long-distance swim. We are like generations of migratory butterflies, none of us making the whole journey, but each of us making part of it so that the next generation may fly further. Standing on one another's shoulders we become the giants upon whose shoulders our intellectual descendants may stand.
At first blush, experience seems less worth knowing, since it is subjective, unquantifiable, subject to the winds of time and the diurnal tides of the chemistry of our blood. But experience is immediate. No generation is privileged; every generation receives the same share. Here our knowledge is not a deposit that we hope will gain interest for our children; it is something in our hands and for us now. The wisdom of the past does not advance the next generation so much as clarify our own.
Bugbee again: "It is not a question of our beginning from where they leave off and going on to supersede them. We are fortunate if we can become communicant in our own way with what they have to say."
Tradition has roots that mean handed-down. Bugbee reminds me, gives me words to articulate, why it is worth continuing to try to read ancient wisdom. He reminds me why, when I could have chosen to work in science, it is not a bad choice to work as a teacher, priest, curator, historian, poet, librarian - a custodian of the narratives of experience. Science aims forward beyond our lives; but experience is here now, where we live. Is it such a bad thing to live here and now?
Bugbee writes: "Of experience...we may hope for understanding in our own time, and in this we do not seem to have the edge on preceding generations of men."
Science grows from one generation to another. What we know is more advanced than what previous generations knew. But precisely because of this, we are alienated from what science will know, what it aims to know when it reaches its goal. Science uses experience, it swims in the medium of experience on a long-distance swim. We are like generations of migratory butterflies, none of us making the whole journey, but each of us making part of it so that the next generation may fly further. Standing on one another's shoulders we become the giants upon whose shoulders our intellectual descendants may stand.
At first blush, experience seems less worth knowing, since it is subjective, unquantifiable, subject to the winds of time and the diurnal tides of the chemistry of our blood. But experience is immediate. No generation is privileged; every generation receives the same share. Here our knowledge is not a deposit that we hope will gain interest for our children; it is something in our hands and for us now. The wisdom of the past does not advance the next generation so much as clarify our own.
Bugbee again: "It is not a question of our beginning from where they leave off and going on to supersede them. We are fortunate if we can become communicant in our own way with what they have to say."
Tradition has roots that mean handed-down. Bugbee reminds me, gives me words to articulate, why it is worth continuing to try to read ancient wisdom. He reminds me why, when I could have chosen to work in science, it is not a bad choice to work as a teacher, priest, curator, historian, poet, librarian - a custodian of the narratives of experience. Science aims forward beyond our lives; but experience is here now, where we live. Is it such a bad thing to live here and now?