Avengers: Time Runs Out

 

Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown) (1964)

When I look at Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown), I see a new moon.

There is no moon in the painting, of course. There is hardly anything recognizable at all. Rothko gives me no landscape, no figure, no horizon, and no narrative. There is only color: an immense field of plum surrounding a dark brown form that nearly disappears into it. One darkness settles inside another.

And yet I feel something there.

That, I think, is what draws me to Rothko at this particular moment.

His paintings resist the easy interpretation of emotion. There is no grieving face to tell me that I am looking at sadness, no gesture that signifies joy, no scene that provides a story. I am left with color, scale, atmosphere, and whatever happens inside me as I stand before them.

I do not simply see this painting.

I feel it.

Perhaps that is why I see the new moon.

The new moon seems to disappear into the night sky, but the moon itself has gone nowhere. It remains completely present even when there is almost nothing for us to see. Its apparent absence is a matter of relationship among light, position, and perspective.

Something can be present without announcing itself.

Something can be real without becoming immediately visible.

Some things are felt before they are seen.

I have been thinking about that because people ask me almost every day how my new position is going. Teachers stop me in the hallway. Administrators check in. People who knew me in my previous role want to know how I am adjusting. More than once, I have been told that I am doing a great job.

I appreciate hearing it. I believe the people who say it.

But I have also discovered how difficult it can be to recognize success while still living inside the work.

From inside my room, I do not experience something called “success.” I experience days.

Students come through the door. Assignments need to be found. Procedures need to be explained. Someone is frustrated. Someone needs redirecting. Someone surprises me. A conversation works better than I expected. Another does not. I reconsider something I thought was settled. I change a procedure. I think about what tomorrow needs to look like.

Other people encounter the effects of the work.

I encounter the labor of it.

Perhaps that is why they can sometimes feel something I cannot yet see.

There is rarely a single moment I can point toward and say, There. That proves this is working. Much of what happens in a classroom, especially one like mine, exists in atmosphere. Students begin to understand the rhythm of the room. Teachers sense that communication is working. Administrators notice changes in how the space functions. Students ask for circle at the end of the day.

None of these things is spectacular.

Together, however, they create a feeling.

Human beings are sensitive to these emotional environments. We enter a room and know when there has been tension. We can often tell when someone we know is carrying something heavy even when that person insists that everything is fine. We know the difference between being merely tolerated and genuinely welcomed, even when the words spoken in both places are equally polite.

That sensitivity is part of empathy.

I once thought empathy meant understanding what another person feels. I am less certain of that now. Another person’s interior life is never completely available to me. I can listen, observe, remember my own experiences, and try to understand, but there will always be some distance between us.

Perhaps empathy begins by respecting that distance.

It is not necessarily saying, “I know how you feel.”

Sometimes it is simply recognizing, “There is more here than I can see.”

That matters in an in-school detention room.

Students generally arrive because something visible has happened. There has been an argument, a violation, a referral, a disruption, or some other behavior significant enough to remove them temporarily from the ordinary rhythm of school. Institutions necessarily respond to what can be observed and documented.

But the visible behavior is never the whole person.

Anger may contain fear. Defiance may conceal embarrassment. Silence may hold grief. Exhaustion may appear as indifference. None of this excuses harmful behavior, nor does empathy require abandoning expectations. It simply asks me to remember that there may be more present than I can see.

Again, I think of the new moon.

It is there precisely when it appears not to be.

Rothko’s painting makes something similar available to me emotionally. The dark brown form initially seems almost empty, but the longer I remain with it, the more presence it acquires. The brown changes because of the plum around it. The plum changes because of the brown within it. Neither exists emotionally in isolation.

Color is relational.

So are people.

We alter the emotional environments we inhabit. A student changes a classroom simply by entering it. A teacher changes a school through the way they occupy a room. A colleague can make a difficult day lighter by stopping at the door. An administrator can alter an entire afternoon with a few sentences of encouragement.

Much of that influence is difficult to quantify.

But it is felt.

This has changed the way I understand the praise I have received. Perhaps when someone tells me I am doing a good job, they are not simply evaluating my performance. They are telling me something about what the work feels like from where they stand.

That requires something from me too.

Empathy usually feels outward-facing. I try to understand students whose experiences I cannot fully know. Yet perhaps I also need enough humility to accept that other people can perceive things about my work that remain difficult for me to perceive from within it.

Their perspective becomes a kind of reflected light.

I know every imperfection because I know where to look for it. I remember every uncertain decision because I was the one making it. I see the scaffolding because I am still building.

Other people may be experiencing the structure.

There is a difference between humility and refusing affirmation. If I am willing to believe people when they tell me something is not working, I should probably be willing to believe them when they tell me something is.

Perhaps that is what I am learning now.

Not certainty.

Trust.

Trust that something is happening.

Trust that atmosphere matters.

Trust that relationships do work that cannot always be observed directly.

Trust that what other people are reflecting back to me deserves to be received.

That is why this Rothko feels right to me now. It does not explain itself. It does not prove what it contains. Its meaning emerges through encounter.

I feel the painting.

I feel the moon even when the sky is dark.

And increasingly, I am learning that the work I am doing can be felt by the people around me even when its consequences cannot yet be clearly seen.

Perhaps education has always worked this way. Some of its most important effects become visible only much later. A conversation acquires meaning years afterward. A boundary once experienced as frustration becomes remembered as care. A teacher’s consistency becomes part of someone’s understanding of what a trustworthy adult can be.

Much of education happens by reflected light.

So I return to Rothko’s dark field.

I still see a new moon.

The moon is there.

The light is there too, even if, from where I am standing, I cannot yet see it.

I am still too close to the beginning of this new chapter to know what the work will become. There is much that remains unfinished.

But I can feel something.

Apparently, others can feel it too.

For now, that may be enough.

Not everything that matters asks to be seen.

Some things ask to be felt.

Lebanon Yellowjackets at Joplin Eagles (JV)

The Sin I Did Not Know I Was Committing

Part I: Before Curiosity Became a Sin 

Know Thyself

Long before Christianity warned against the dangers of curiosity, the Greeks carved a different command into the intellectual imagination of the West: gnōthi seauton—know thyself.

The words were associated with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where pilgrims came seeking answers from the oracle. Yet the command itself is less an answer than a warning. To know oneself in the ancient world was not simply to discover preferences, talents, or some hidden authentic identity. It was to recognize one's place. You are human. You are mortal. You are limited. You are not a god.

The ancient command to know oneself was never an invitation to unlimited intellectual conquest. It contained humility within it. Self-knowledge meant recognizing the boundaries of the self.

I find that tension increasingly compelling because the same command can lead in two very different directions. One response to human limitation is restraint: there are things beyond us, and wisdom requires leaving them alone. Another response is inquiry: because our understanding is limited, we should keep examining what we think we know.

Socrates chose the second path.

The Socrates who survives in Plato's dialogues is rarely presented as the man with the answers. He is the man with another question. Someone offers a definition of courage, justice, virtue, friendship, or piety, and Socrates begins pulling gently at its loose threads. What do you mean by that? Does your definition apply here? What about this exception? If that is true, does this follow? The conversation proceeds until something that initially appeared obvious becomes much less certain.

That method can be maddening.

It can also be liberating.

Socrates' peculiar wisdom rests partly in his recognition that confidence and knowledge are not the same thing. He repeatedly encounters people who believe they understand matters they have never seriously examined. Their ignorance is not the problem. Everyone is ignorant of something. Their problem is that they do not know that they are ignorant.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “I do not know,” and believing that there is nothing left to ask.

I spent many years thinking education worked in the opposite direction. The point of learning, I assumed, was gradually to replace uncertainty with certainty. You begin not knowing. You study. You acquire information. Eventually you know.

That is certainly true in limited ways. I once did not know how photosynthesis worked, how to calculate a particular equation, how a bill moved through a legislature, or how a research methodology differed from another. Those things can be learned. Questions can be answered.

But education has increasingly taught me something more unsettling: every answer reveals the boundary of another question.

The more history I learned, the more complicated history became.

The more theology I studied, the less singular Christianity appeared.

The more science I encountered, the larger the natural world became.

The more I learned about education, the more cautious I became about simple explanations for why students behave, learn, succeed, or struggle as they do.

Knowledge did not eliminate mystery. It enlarged it.

That realization brings me back to Socrates.

Near the end of Plato's Apology, after defending a lifetime spent questioning the assumptions of his fellow Athenians, Socrates offers one of the most famous claims in Western philosophy: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

It is an astonishing statement.

Socrates does not say the comfortable life is not worth living. He does not say the unsuccessful life, the unbelieving life, or even the immoral life. He says the unexamined life.

Examination becomes a moral activity.

To ask questions about oneself, one's society, one's assumptions, and one's inherited beliefs is not merely an intellectual hobby. It is part of what it means to live responsibly.

That conviction resonates with me more deeply now than it would have when I first encountered the quotation in a textbook.

“Know thyself” has become less a destination than a practice.

Who am I?

Why do I think the way I do?

Where did these assumptions come from?

Which parts of myself have I chosen, and which were inherited before I knew I was inheriting anything?

What do I believe because I have examined it?

What do I believe because someone I trusted told me it was true?

What am I afraid to reconsider?

Those questions became particularly important as my relationship with religion changed. I was raised within a tradition that placed enormous emphasis on knowing: knowing scripture, knowing doctrine, knowing whether one was saved, knowing what God wanted, knowing where history was headed, knowing which beliefs were true and which were false.

There was remarkably little uncertainty in the vocabulary.

“I don't know” was often a temporary condition awaiting the correct biblical answer.

The strange thing is that I genuinely loved learning within that world. I read the Bible because I wanted to understand it. I listened closely in Sunday school. I read apologetics because I wanted Christianity to withstand scrutiny. I asked questions not because I hoped to destroy belief but because I assumed truth should survive examination.

For a time, I believed those impulses were entirely compatible.

Then the questions began producing answers I had not been taught to expect.

That is when I discovered that some communities value questions primarily when the questions return acceptable answers.

This distinction is easy to miss.

A tradition may encourage study enthusiastically. Read the Bible. Memorize it. Attend classes. Learn doctrine. Study church history. Read commentaries. Ask your pastor questions.

All of that can look intellectually open.

But the real test comes when inquiry begins moving somewhere unexpected.

What happens when geology complicates Genesis?

What happens when history complicates doctrine?

What happens when textual criticism complicates scripture?

What happens when another Christian tradition offers an interpretation that fits the evidence better than one's own?

What happens when a question does not return safely home?

Socrates understood the social danger of that kind of questioning.

Athens did not execute him because he lacked answers. It condemned him because his questions destabilized confidence. He made people uncomfortable by revealing that things they considered settled were not nearly as settled as they imagined.

There is something profoundly threatening about the person who asks one more question.

Not because every question is wise.

Not because every inherited belief is false.

But because a genuine question contains a possibility that the answer may change us.

That is what separates inquiry from performance.

A question whose answer has already been prescribed is not entirely a question. It may be an exercise, a catechism, or a test of whether the student has learned the approved response. Genuine inquiry is riskier. It allows the possibility that the person asking will emerge different from the person who began.

That difference helps me understand my own education more clearly.

For many years, I thought I was collecting knowledge.

I now think I was being trained in examination.

Each new field gave me another way of asking questions. History taught me to ask when an idea emerged and who benefited from it. Literature taught me to inhabit perspectives other than my own. Science taught me to ask whether a claim could be tested. Research taught me to distinguish evidence from assertion. Philosophy taught me to examine the assumptions beneath the argument. Art taught me that meaning can exceed literal explanation.

None of these disciplines gave me a final account of reality.

Together, they made final accounts harder to accept.

That is not intellectual failure.

It may be intellectual maturity.

To know oneself, then, is partly to know the limits of one's own knowing. It is to recognize that one's perspective is situated, inherited, partial, and revisable. It is to admit that certainty is not necessarily evidence of truth and that doubt is not necessarily evidence of weakness.

This is where the Delphic command and the Socratic life finally meet for me.

Know thyself.

Know that you are limited.

Know that you can be wrong.

Know that some of the things you are most certain about were given to you before you were old enough to examine them.

Know that every intellectual tradition, including your own, has blind spots.

Know that education does not free you from error.

It merely gives you better tools for discovering it.

And then keep asking.

The irony is that this kind of humility can look remarkably like rebellion from inside a system built upon certainty. The person who says “I do not know” may appear less faithful than the person who confidently repeats an inherited answer. The person who asks for evidence may appear arrogant. The person who continues reading may be accused of overthinking.

Yet Socrates suggests another possibility.

Perhaps humility is not knowing one's place beneath an answer.

Perhaps humility is knowing one's place before the question.

I am human.

I am limited.

I do not know everything.

That is precisely why I want to know more.

Pepsi Zero Sugar Raspberry

1408

The Smoking Crab and Seafood Co

Joplin Greenhouse & The Coffee Shop

Hot Mulled Apple Cider 

Practical Magic 2

They Went Out From Us

The First Baptist Family

On June 1, 1992, my pastor sent me a photograph.

In it, I am standing against a plain wall wearing a red shirt, looking directly at the camera with the expression of a child who has been told to stand still long enough for someone to take his picture. The photograph came with a typewritten letter.

“Dear David,” it begins.

The pastor explained that he was sending the picture “as a remembrance of the day you became a part of the First Baptist family.”

I have kept both.

At the time, there was nothing remarkable about the language. I understood what he meant. I belonged to the church. More importantly, I belonged to the faith the church represented.

The letter went on to express the hope that, as part of that family, I would join the church in reaching “those who are lost around us.”

There were two groups in that sentence.

There was the family.

And there were the lost.

I knew which one I belonged to.

I was a Christian.

That statement feels simple to me even now. It describes the world as I understood it then. I believed in God. I believed Jesus was the Son of God. I believed that human beings were separated from God by sin and that Jesus had died to save us. I believed the Bible told the truth about those things. I believed prayer mattered. I believed people could be saved, and I believed I was one of them.

As I grew older, those beliefs became more than something I had inherited from adults.

I participated.

I studied scripture.

I attended Sunday school.

I worshiped.

I evangelized.

I preached.

I worried about whether I was living as I should.

I tried to understand what God wanted from me.

Christianity was not an affiliation I checked on a form. It was one of the primary ways I understood who I was and what the world meant.

The people around me understood me that way too.

The letter matters to me now partly because it preserves that shared understanding.

Memory is unreliable. We revise our own histories. Details disappear. Later experiences change the emphasis we place on earlier ones. I know that the person remembering his childhood today is not the child who lived it.

But the letter is still there.

A pastor looked at that child and wrote that he had become part of the First Baptist family.

No one knew where his life would go.

No one knew what questions he would eventually ask.

No one knew that he would study religion closely enough to begin questioning some of the explanations he had been given for it.

No one knew that he would someday stop calling himself Christian.

The photograph contains none of that.

It is simply a picture of a boy who belonged.

That is what makes it important to me.

More than a decade later, in another Baptist church, I would stand in a small kitchenette between Sunday school and worship and have a very different conversation.

By then, I was in my early twenties. College had changed the kinds of questions I was asking. My beliefs had begun moving outside the boundaries of the congregation. Church leaders had discussed me. I had already lost roles that had once affirmed my place in the community.

During one of those conversations, an older deacon would tell me that I had never really been saved.

The statement did more than describe what he thought about the person standing in front of him.

It reached backward toward the boy in the photograph.

If I was not a Christian now, then perhaps I had never really been one.

If salvation could not be lost, then whatever had happened in 1992—and everything that came afterward—had to mean something other than what we had believed it meant at the time.

That tension has stayed with me.

A church once sent me a photograph to commemorate the day I became part of its family.

Years later, another church would help me understand that, according to the theology I had inherited, my eventual departure could be evidence that I had never truly belonged.

The ending could change the meaning of the beginning.

For a long time, I thought the important question was which interpretation was correct.

Was I really saved?

Was I never saved?

Did I lose something that theology said could not be lost?

Those questions once seemed enormous to me.

They do not anymore.

I have become more interested in a different question.

How do we construct the stories that allow our beliefs to survive?

We do it with scripture.

We do it with doctrine.

We do it with history.

And we do it with one another.

The photograph on my desk is a small reminder that, before anyone knew how the story would end, there was a time when the story meant something else.

And one of the things we believed then was very simple.

Once saved, always saved.