Does Online Education Make Us More Human?

I get it.  Academia is seemingly shut down, and even those of us who aren’t panicking are forced to deal with a certain degree of uncertainty and inconvenience.  I am fairly devastated (in the drama queen, not actually devastated by definition way) that I cannot return to the campus of Harvard for class, because… come on… it’s been a real joy to walk through those huge gates from week to week, and it was kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity, but class is still on.  It’s just on my laptop.

To be honest, I was already teaching online this semester, so I have been less inconvenienced than most.  I am something of a pro when it comes to online education, and I love it, so I’m not sad.  I am thinking, however, of the many university faculty members who are making this switch for the first time, and based on things I am hearing and observing, I would like to offer this encouragement:  In answer to the question that is the title for this post, yes.  Online education makes us more human.

Here’s the thing.  Online education puts us in our natural environment.  It puts us in our homes.  Even if we’re still wearing suit jackets on top, everybody knows we’re wearing sweatpants on bottom.  We become more human.  We stumble to share the right screen, and suddenly complete strangers are privy to our screensaver that is a snapshot of a family vacation from six years ago as opposed to the lecture notes.  We become more human.  Our kids and our dogs run through the backdrop of our classes.  We become more human, and students find a little bit of joy in our chaos.  This is not a bad thing.  In fact, it takes some of the pressure off.  And there is a lot of pressure in the ivory tower! 

Perhaps my absolute favorite thing that I heard a student ask last semester was, “Do you actually care about me that much?”  Y’all…  I bought her a bottle of pop (side note, she had never heard the word “pop” to refer to “soda,” so that part was funny…).  The point, though, is that it doesn’t really take that much to humanize others and re-humanize ourselves.  This may be especially important for those of us teaching in degree programs for practitioners.  We are not machines.  We are people.  And people learn best from other people.  Funny how communicating through machines might actually make us more authentic if we let it…

Be well and carry on!

L.

Mid-September

I’m teaching Intro to Worship this fall, and the focus of this week is the Church Calendar.  Clearly, this could be the subject of an entire semester; but in an intro class, you only get a week.  This has me thinking about not only the great significance of marking time in terms of sacred feasts and sanctified souls but also more widely about how we mark time in a variety of ways.  Discussions lend themselves to everything from the civic calendar to particularities in the local community to family traditions.  The liturgist snob that lives inside of me wants to just push the Church Calendar and move on, but how inauthentic is that?  We do not live in a vacuum, and the rhythms and patterns of time that undergird our theology of new life… giving way to death… giving way to resurrection (way oversimplified, I know) are cyclical and intricately tied to our actual experience.  It’s all very important to discuss and debrief.     

In addition to all of the established ways that people have kept time for millennia, we are always creating new systems.  In an attempt to be more attentive to my use of social media, I have recently started scrolling through all of my Facebook Memories while on my commute.  Now, hear me out, social media is a poor substitute for actually capturing a full life.  It is certainly not even close to my only outlet for attempting to archive the events that have been most formational to me or the people who have been most beloved.  Of course, even my best attempts at memorializing such things will fall short of reality.  I’m always writing from my own perspective, through some narrow lens that cannot be expanded beyond my senses and intellect.[1]  But the purposes of this little experiment of mine, in which I subject myself to my own words and images from the past decade, day after day after day, is about considering what things I have found either important enough or ordinary enough to share publicly.  I have not actually decided which way the pendulum swings on this.  It might be a little bit of both.

So, mid-September…  It’s a weird time for me.  Ten years ago, I was downing pizza for breakfast, throwing up all day long, and trying to hold on a few more weeks before announcing my last pregnancy.  Last year I was sitting outside the very building I am sitting inside, now, drinking coffee that was really just OK with brand new people, who are really pretty great.  Somewhere in-between, there were academic paper proposals, a need for a new can opener, listening to my daughter play piano, subbing for second graders, quiz meets, and an inquiry into which neighbor might feed our fish while we were out of town.  Is this the stuff that marks the time of my life?  I don’t know.  Maybe.

If I’m honest, though, this mid-September week always brings with it a frustration for me if I stop to think about that one year when it may have been the dumbest week of my life!  It wasn’t the most tragic or the most painful or the most insanely busy (although there were elements of all of those things), but when I look back over it, the only appropriate word I can muster is “dumb” (well, and all of its synonyms).  It was not enough and too much, all at the same time, and the truth is, that’s exactly how I defined myself (hear me here, not the week, not the experience, but my actual embodied self) for far too long, after it was over.  But this post is not about that, at all.  Not really.  Because, today I ran across the funniest glimmer of hope, couched (perhaps too neatly) within the memories of that week.  This is what I wrote:

”Spraying my jeans with glitter just became the top priority in my life… I love vacation time…”[2]

I’m thankful the subway wasn’t very full, because in addition to laughing out loud, I also teared up.  That seems to be how emotion works for me lately.  There is almost always this tension between hope and lament.  And no one who knows me is surprised in the least.  I had such a strong reaction to these words, because I know myself, and I know I had reached a moment in which I could do nothing else.  All my cards were on all the tables, so I took a deep breath and let go for a second. 

There is hope for the future in this.  In fact, I was thinking just yesterday about what would happen if I suddenly failed at everything I am attempting to do with my life now (just FYI, I don’t think this is an issue anyone should be concerned about, I was simply pondering all the possible endgames I can imagine, as is fairly typical for me by week three of any school year), and I had the strangest sense of peace about the fact that I would still be me.  I would still be the girl who has enough hope left that even in the midst of stupid seasons, she can take a moment to spray glitter on her jeans.  Because here’s the thing, friends:  Those times are going to come.  You can count on it.  But, they’re not going to last forever.  Hope on…

L.

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[1] This, of course, makes collaboration all the more important!

[2] Me, Facebook, September 19, 2015.

Am I Your Pastor?

I’m not 100% sure where to begin this post, because the truth is I am exhausted (as denoted in my post, this morning, at These Ordinary Days), and I am vulnerable (as denoted all over the place—in writing, in real life, in spontaneous episodes of tearing up, recorded on podcasts… just… everywhere…).

My feelings were a little hurt the other day when I couldn’t wear a green scarf with any kind of integrity intact.  It’s pretty hard to be a woman with both an M.A. and an M. Div. in theology; who waited to start the formal ordination process, because I wanted to give adequate time to the educational requirements while raising a family; who writes and edits theological works; who counsels and encourages other women who struggle with their callings; who really loves scarves a whole lot… and to realize (kind of brutally) that your tribe doesn’t consider you a pastor… or, at least not a pastor ‘enough’…

There’s that stupid word again.

Now, thankfully… right in the midst of this there was a denominational leader who was all like, “This isn’t a red flag, L.  You’re OK.  Just start the process.  And come teach and stuff” (super great paraphrase, mine).  Then we smiled, and I went on feeling OK in my orange paisley pants, without my green scarf.

But I say all of this not to expose my bitterness (I’m actually not bitter… I made choices based on what I could handle at any given moment, sometimes I absolutely stretched that to the max, and it really is OK that my formal process is just going to take a little more time than others) and not even to express my gratitude (although, thankful was definitely the word of the hour after that conversation).  Everything I have just written is a preface to what I’ve felt in the ensuing week (and more often than I’d like to admit).

I never set out to be a pastor.  Seriously, who does?  It still surprises me when I walk into ERs or nursing homes or salons or down grocery aisles or sit down to have coffee and someone introduces me to another human being by saying, “This is L.  She’s my pastor.” 

Interestingly, this is almost always followed by some ironic disclaimer such as, “You can go ahead and say whatever you need to say in front of her,” and I laugh (really hard, on the inside), because I know it’s coming.  People say stuff to me that I never would have imagined anyone would be willing to share with a pastor!  But I love that they do.

So I had this moment where one of my people was hospitalized last week, and I actually couldn’t get to him, because this bilocational life is for the birds, but my emotions were telling.  He’s mine.  I’m his pastor.  I immediately worried that some other pastor who doesn’t know or care about his story would step in and be stupid or something.  How is this even a concern?  Well, it’s because I have often been a pastor to the pastorless… to the people on the margins who don’t quite fit the church mold.  In many ways, my not-enough-ness has made me exactly the kind of pastor they need.  Go figure.  We gravitate toward people who look like us.

So, speaking of birds, I thought of the children’s story, Are You My Mother, as this post was forming in my mind.  If you are unfamiliar with it, please take the time to watch this 8 minute video:      

    

 As the baby bird searches for his mother, the responses are telling:

“It did not say a thing…” (Isolation)

“No…” (Exclusion)

“I am not your mother, I am a dog.” (Duh… don’t you know anything, baby bird… uh… he’s a baby!)

“How could I be your mother?” (Do you really want to know?) 

Poor baby bird begins to doubt whether or not he has a mother, at all…

He is so desperate he tries to self-identify as a boat… as a plane… a ‘snort’ (backhoe)…  Well, that’s just crazy and pitiful!

It’s not until the baby bird arrives home that he finds his mother, and the interesting question she asks is, “Do you know who I am?”

Of course the baby bird does; but before he identifies her, he speaks to all of the things she is not (not a cat, not a hen, not a dog, not a cow, not a car, not a boat, not a plane, not a snort…)

Sometimes I think we have to figure out who we’re not before we ever figure out who we are, and it can be a heck of a journey…  It can take a really long time…

I’m a pastor, and I might even be yours—formal process or not, green scarf or not, it’s coming.  The people who will one day give the green light and lay their hands on my head to make it official already know this.  We’re all just waiting in eager expectation, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life; it’s that I’d better take a moment to rest when it seems like nothing is happening, because once it breaks loose I’ll have to hit the ground running, and there’s no telling when another respite will follow.

And… marking time…

L.