Adorning the Dark

  I highlighted much more of Andrew Peterson's Adorning the Dark than what appears below when I was reading it early this year, but these are the pieces that I wanted to share here. It is a work about art and 'a life work'; it is also about developing into who we are able to be, not just who we want to be. It deals with weaknesses that accompany strengths; it speaks of grace. It acted as a perfect complement to a book I'd read shortly before it, Tim Keller's Every Good Endeavor, which spoke of a biblical view of work more broadly and deeply. Adorning the Dark was like an illustration of one person's working out of those principles. Below I offer a few of the thoughts that I found meaningful or encouraging. 

Since we were made to glorify God, worship happens when someone is doing exactly what he or she was made to do. (p. 17). 

God, however, never takes his eyes off me, and on my good days I believe that he is smiling, never demanding an answer other than the fact of myself. I exist as his redeemed creation, and that is, pleasantly, enough for him. (p. 20). 

Dahl remembered what it was like to be a little boy. And he remembered that it is terrifying. It reminded me how vital it is that Christians bend low and speak tenderly to the children in our lives. These boys and girls at our churches, in our schools, down the street, are living a harrowing adventure. Every one of them falls into one of two categories: wounded, or soon-to-be-wounded. The depth and nature of those wounds will vary, but they’re all malleable souls in a world clanging with hammer blows. The bigger they get, the easier the target.

[...]

Those of us who write, who sing, who paint, must remember that to a child a song may glow like a nightlight in a scary bedroom. It may be the only thing holding back the monsters. That story may be the only beautiful, true thing that makes it through all the ugliness of a little girl’s world to rest in her secret heart. May we take that seriously. It is our job, it is our ministry, it is the sword we swing in the Kingdom, to remind children that the good guys win, that the stories are true, and that a fool’s hope may be the best kind. (p. 106). 

I’ll probably always be self-conscious, so the battle to make something out of nothing at all will rage on, and I’ll have to fight it in the familiar territory of selfishness until the Spirit winnows my work into something loving and lovable. I’m no longer surprised by my capacity for self-doubt, but I’ve learned that the only way to victory is to lose myself, to surrender to sacredness—which is safer than insecurity. I have to accept the fact that I’m beloved by God. That’s it. Compared to that, the songs don’t matter so much—a realization which has the surprising consequence of making them easier to write. (p. 26). 

All you really have is your willingness to fail, coupled with the mountain of evidence that the Maker has never left nor forsaken you. (p. 34). 

Either you’re willing to steward the gift God gave you by stepping into the ring and fighting for it, or you spend your life in training, cashing in excuse after excuse until there’s no time left, no fight left, no song, no story. (p. 108). 

Learning-Teaching and Loving-Being Angry - thoughts from Freire (and a bit beyond)

  Several years ago, Paulo Freire's work, Pedagogy of Freedom was recommended to me as a favorite work. While I got it shortly thereafter, I am just now getting around to reading it, and it has most certainly been worth it. It immediately joins my list of favorite books on good teaching such as Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach, Peter Elbow's various works (supposedly on teaching writing, but much more widely applicable), and Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children. 

There is, in fact, no teaching without learning. One requires the other. And the subject of each, despite their obvious differences, cannot be educated to the status of object. Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.  

[...]

To learn, then, logically precedes to teach. In other words, to teach is part of the very fabric of learning. This is true to such an extent that I do not hesitate to say that there is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been thought. In essence, teaching that does not emerge from the experience of learning cannot be learned by anyone. 

When we live our lives with the authenticity demanded by the practice of teaching that is also learning and learning that is also teaching, we are participating in a total experience that is simultaneously directive, political, ideological, gnostic, pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical. In this experience the beautiful, the decent, and the serious form a circle with hands joined. (pp. 31-32). 

The kind of education that does not recognize the right to express appropriate anger against injustice, against disloyalty, against the negation of love, against exploitation, and against violence fails to see the educational role implicit in the expression of these feelings. (p. 45). 

One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love. Capable of assuming themselves as “subject” because of the capacity to recognize themselves as “object.”  (pp. 45-46). 

To question, to search, and to research are parts of the nature of teaching practice. What is necessary is that, in their ongoing education, teachers consider themselves researchers because they are teachers.

 (p. 130, footnote 5). 

[The bold emphasis is mine throughout the above quotations.]

 I found the thoughts on the appropriateness of anger to be particularly interesting as I've been giving thought to this topic as part of a group study that I was invited to join. The readings are in Turkish, but the English edition is called "Putting Off Anger." So far, it has been valuable, and it has talked also about proper anger. 

 Random question I've had recently: What situations made Jesus angry in the New Testament?