Winner at Jacob's Well

I keep tabs from time to time on the web site for Jacob’s Well, a church in Kansas City planted by an acquaintance of mine, Tim Keel. In perusing the MP3 files on the Jacob’s Well site, I noticed that earlier this year they hosted Lauren Winner, whose three public speaking engagements were included in the MP3s. While each of Winner’s three talks are well worth listening to, I was particularly struck by the one on “Sex, Marriage, and Singleness.”

In discussing Matthew 22:23-33 , Winner notes that the passage rankles and confuses happily married people:

This passage is to my mind on of the most revealing moments in the gospel about the radical nature of Jesus’s call to us, because it suggests not that married people won’t see their spouse again, it suggests that marriage is not the defining relationship of even a marital relationship, and that the defining relationship between all of us, the relationship that will obtain throughout time and beyond time into eternity is the relationship of brother and sister in Christ. […] If that confuses what you think about marriage, just try to think about what it means for parenting. […] It would be pretty wild and radical to think that what my job was as a parent would be to raise my sister or brother in Christ, and that that would be my fundamental relationship. Weird.

More generally, the talk focuses on both marriage and singleness and the lessons each has to teach the church. It concludes with a quotation from an Eastern Orthodox theologian, Paul Avdokomov (sp?). The quotation is about marriage and singleness, but—more interesting to me—it’s also about calling and vocation more generally.

We should think of vocation as an invitation, a call from the friend. I accept it today in the contours of my present situation, until the time when I will perhaps see more clearly. One’s vocation is found exactly on the crest between necessity and creative freedom, along the line of faith which reveals the direction as its free and strong confession grows. One’s entire vocation, whether to marriage or singleness, is an option. It is an answer to a call that has been heard. It can simply be the present condition. It is never a voice that clarifies everything. The dimness inherence in the life of faith never leaves us. There is one thing we can be sure of, that every vocation is accompanied by a renunciation. One who is married renounced monastic heroism. A monk renounced the married life. The rich young man of the gospel is not invited either to marry or to enter a monastery. He had to renounce his wealth, his having, his preferences, in order to follow the Lord. However, in all cases of deprivation that scripture speaks of, grace offers a gift, and out of a negative renunciation it creates a positive vocation.

Folks interested in listening to the entire MP3 can find it here.

One Thing Leads to Another

First, gotta love the Fixx. Another one of those weird convergence moments hit yesterday. To explain it, I need to go back. Last year, I applied for and was one of three persons interviewed for a position at a large state university. The committee decided not to make a hire, which, objectively, I can see was a wise choice for everyone involved. While I believe I could have done the job well, it meant redefining my professional life in ways I wasn't sure I wanted to pursue so singlemindedly. And, from their end, I didn't have some qualifications they desired--like a publication record or administrative experience at a university with a larger, more diverse student body. (Of course, I could have simply come across as a moron. One doesn't really get feedback after such interviews.) In any event, I don't know that I would have been a good fit for the job nor the job for me. But, as I told some friends, "It's one thing to not want to go to the party. It's another to not be invited."

Fast forward back to the present. After reading Wendell Berry's essay "The Unsettling of America" and beginning to consider what it might mean to pursue "settlement" in my life, my profession, etc., I stumble across the web to find a brief announcement about the aforementioned position being filled. I wasn't experiencing much in the way of "settlement," I'm afraid. Mostly indignation and dissatisfaction. Not because of the person who was hired, but because I wasn't.

So what do I do? I start Googling. I skim a couple of articles from the new hire's admirable vita. Insecurities surface. Indignation. Resentment and regret over all the choices that led me to where and who I am. The prideful part of me starts to reassure myself that I could have the new hire's vita if I really wanted it. I consider downloading the new hire's picture and using it as a motivational wallpaper on my computer's desktop. I start thinking about the school loans that could have been paid with the salary I would have made. Should have made....

About half way through the second article, however, I begin to realize that--admirable as the articles are--they aren't the kind of thing I really want to do. They are the kind of specialized scholarship that simply doesn't excite me. Perhaps I've been thoroughly converted to the liberal arts mindset, but I still hope to find a way to write (and perhaps publish) regularly and productively without having to select a narrow academic specialty.

So, I never downloaded the new hire's photo for my wallpaper (but I won't rule it out just yet), and I'm in the process of re-establishing an awkward peace about the whole thing. The peace comes from knowing that my insecurities and indignation arise from a prideful desire for a salary and position that aren't really connected with what I want to do. The awkwardness comes from the questions that linger after reading Berry--questions about the distinctions between "settlement" and merely "settling."

Settlement

Okay. I’ve decided that I really need to get (back?) into the habit of using this blog. Given the fact that I’m reading a lot of Wendell Berry for a presentation at the 2007 Midwest Writing Centers Association (MWCA) regional conference in October, this decision means that this blog is going to seem like a Berry blog for a while.

After talking with Liberty about my summer reading, I’ve decided that I’m going to alternate between Berry’s collection of short stories titled That Distant Land and his collection of essays titled The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (ed. Norman Wirzba). I just finished reading the essay titled “The Unsettling of America,” in which Berry sheds the dichotomy between conqueror and victim for the terms exploitation and nurture.

Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order--a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks of numbers, quantities, “hard facts”; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.(39)

Berry prefers these terms, in part, because they “describe a division not only between persons but also within persons” (39). When I consider this division in my professional life, I have to confront the fact that I serve--in some capacity--“an institution or organization.” Thankfully, my role as professor and director of a writing center place me in the service of the people who come to the university. I get to be one of the nurturers (I hope) within the institution. But, I can’t help wondering when and how I slide into the role of exploiter. For example, when do I find myself thinking in terms of the writing center (as institution) rather than the writers we seek to serve? When do I find myself thinking of my students in terms of “how much and how quickly [they] can be made to produce”? To what degree does the nature of the institution (generally or specifically) enable me to think, act, and live as nurturer rather than exploiter?

A classroom of students can respond just as unpredictably as a piece of land, and that response is tied to a whole bunch of variables--some of which are outside of the farmer’s/teacher’s influence. But the analogy breaks down when one considers that those students--individually and collectively--have a will that one doesn’t find in a piece of land. Students, too, can find themselves wrestling with the divisions between exploiter and nurturer. Thus, in addition to self-examination, one must end up asking how to help shape a community that tends toward nurturing.

Berry asserts that the answers (to his questions, at least) "are to be found in our history: in its until now subordinate tendency of settlement, of domestic permanence" (45). What does "settlement" look like for a professor? For a student? For a writing center? For communities--like institutions of higher education--that depend upon recurrent waves of students with an ambitious and decidedly unsettled eye toward the horizon?