A few weeks back, I took my daughter to one of the clinics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for extensive testing to build a picture of her learning abilities and disabilities. Yesterday, her mother met with a psychologist to go over the test results, and last night we sat at the kitchen table, Karen and I, and talked about them. It was a disorienting experience, grappling with those test results. Because the child described by the tests has both less ability than our child and more ability. Her weaknesses didn’t look as weak and her strengths didn’t appear at all. In some areas she scored better than the way we ever see her work; but also, the things in which she most excels are not measured by the tests.

For example:

A couple nights ago, Karen and Grace got into an eating contest. Karen timed Grace eating a cup of applesauce in 53 seconds. Then Grace timed Karen eating a cup of applesauce in 42 seconds. And Grace got all excited. “I won!” she said, “I won!” She was baffled that Karen’s 42 seconds was faster than her 53 seconds.

On another night, I told her that I could no longer trade her one square of a Mr. Goodbar candy bar for three correct spelling words because she was getting good at spelling and she’d wind up with too much candy bar before bedtime. I told her that I would give her one square of Mr. Goodbar for every four correct words. But Grace didn’t like that bargain. She wanted more of the candy bar. So she bargained with me. “No,“ she said, “what if you give me one square for every ten words I get right?”

I said I would, and she was delighted at the bargain she had made. The math scores she got on the standardized tests show that she has some ability to add and subtract, but they don’t show you how she still cannot understand the way in which numbers represent quantities.

At the same time, she is one of the three most acute observers I’ve ever known. She notices extremely small details; she notices changes in a room when she goes away and comes back. She notices the way people interact with one another, and she understands what those things mean–a touch on the arm here, a raised eyebrow there, an angry word or a tender one–she notices and understands these things far more attentively than I did when I was her age. But there is no test for powers of observation, and there is no test for how well you can put observation into context.

The long and the short of it is that the child Karen and I spoke about last night as we read the test results was not really our child. What she did on the test was not what she does every day after school. Some large part of her wasn’t described at all. And there isn’t even any way to measure by testing the things about Grace that are most Grace-like: no way to describe the Grace who responded—when asked how she might change an experiment about the rate at which a sugar cube dissolves in various solutions—that she would like to try the experiment again, but this time, she and her classmates get to eat the sugar cubes. There’s no test that quantifies the Grace who wears her red felt hat with the bow over her jacket hood. There’s no test to understand why Grace is so crazy about anything and everything that glows in the dark.

I have not yet met a teacher who believes that the standardized testing imposed by No Child Left Behind is a good thing for children. It’s not because teachers are lazy and don’t want to be measured. It’s because they understand that teaching to the test is not the same thing as teaching, and is not the same thing as teaching how to learn. But even more, it’s because, as teachers, they understand that there is no such thing as a standardized child.

I understand the impulse for standardized testing. I think, at least in the beginning, it comes from a generous concern for human community. We set standards because we want to be fair, we want to treat each other equally, without favoring one or another over anyone else in the classroom, or the hospital, or the job application process. So all the students must pass the same test, and all the patients eat dinner at the same time, and all the applicants respond to the same questions about education and past work experience. It’s only fair, after all, that everyone should meet the same requirements.

The problem is that sometimes what may be fair is far less than grace-filled. Sometimes maliciously, sometimes from shortness of vision, what may be fair is less than gracious. If we lived in a world where grace, rather than fairness, were the standard, each student would be helped to strengthen the parts of their mind that worked best, and assisted in finding the place where those strengths are the standard. Hospital patients might be able to choose, from among several options, the dinner time closest to their schedule at home. And job applicants would be allowed space and time to tell about work experience that won’t fit into the standard form.

Is this realistic? Maybe not. It’s probably absolutely subversive—but I’m convinced it is exactly as subversive as Jesus would be.

There is, after all, the way he nuanced the laws about the Sabbath. He insisted that the Sabbath was made for men and women, not men and women for the Sabbath. So Jesus is in a synagogue and he sees a woman so bent with her affliction that she can’t lift her head. [Luke 13] The rules say that no work can be done on the Sabbath. But here is this woman, who is suffering. She’s suffered for 18 years; why must she suffer any longer? Jesus heals her right then and there, because the Sabbath was made in service to women and men; women and men were not made to serve the Sabbath. Jesus doesn’t look at the rules and the standards—he looks at the individual woman, and he responds to her in love.

Many years ago, I read an essay by the theologian Howard Thurman entitled “Mysticism and the Experience of Love.” I’ve always remembered one particular sentence from that essay, word for word. Thurman wrote:“To be to another human being what is needed at the time that the need is most urgent and most acutely felt, this is to participate in the precise act of redemption.”

“To be to another human being what is needed at the time that the need is most urgent and most acutely felt, this is to participate in the precise act of redemption.”

I am clear in my mind that Thurman is writing about God’s redeeming power, and of our human capacity to be the agents of God’s grace. But this is also a perfect description of Jesus’ response to the crippled and bent woman who came to the synagogue on the sabbath. His redemptive act was to be present with her in the very moment that the two were together, and to meet her need in that same present tense. Not on Sunday, when the Sabbath would be over, or in some back alley where the leader of the synagogue couldn’t pass judgment. In the synagogue, on the Sabbath, because that’s where she was and what she needed. The healing was an individual solution, not a general rule.

I am always more and more convinced that Christianity is deeply subversive of the world as we know it, deeply subversive of our social order, of our institutions, of all our regulations and protocols. And the emphasis on responding with love to the needs of individuals, regardless of their category or class—this seems to me as profoundly subversive as anything else Jesus did.

That same emphasis is what I love about this place, about our college. It’s one place where we do absolutely live our Quaker character, even though we mostly don’t notice or acknowledge that we are doing so. It’s part of our institutional DNA to understand that the equality of our students demands that we accept them in all their differences; demands that we acknowledge that there are no standard-issue students and that our work with each student is to help them along from where they are to where they could be. And we do this reflexively, automatically, because there is no question that this is our mission, that this is one of the characteristics that distinguishes us, and distinguishes a Wilmington College education. We understand how to treat students equally in all their differences, rather than treating them equally by forcing them to be all the same. We treat them equally in their differences by loving each one individually.

I don’t know what else to say about that. Except it makes me glad to be here. And it allows me to believe that there are times when I, too, manage to be as radically subversive as Jesus was.

Grace loves umbrellas. Last week it was raining but warm, so she took her umbrella and held it over her head while we waited, trying to keep her coat and her backpack dry. I heard the rain dripping onto her umbrella and it reminded me of the movie Totoro, which the two of us watched together between Christmas and New Year’s.

I asked her whether she remembered the scene with Totoro, Satsuki, and Satsuki’s umbrella. Grace remembered, and she started to laugh. I asked if she remembered how Totoro reacted to the sound of rain dripping on the umbrella. Immediately she launched into an imitation of the electrical charge that pulses through Totoro’s body when he hears the rain drum on the umbrella.

Grace has a flexible face and she likes imitations, and her imitation of Totoro channeling the energy of the rain just cracked me up. I laughed, she did it again, we both laughed, and then the bus came.

Later that day, at Wednesday Worship, I gave a message on Tolstoy’s fable, “Three Questions.” He concludes that of all times, the most important time is now, because it’s the only time when we have any power; of all people the most important person is the one we’re with, because we never know whether we’ll ever be with any other; and of all that we might do, the most important thing to do, is to do good to the person we’re with.

It’s terribly difficult to live that way, I think. And it comes at a cost to timeliness and productivity. But with Grace at the bus stop, it’s easy. It’s the five minutes in my day when I’m sure I’m spending important time doing the most important thing with the most important person.

The primary mission of the church is to take the world back from the thugs…

Of everything John Dominic Crossan said in his lectures on Jesus and Paul, I think that’s the sentence that most stands out to me, the sentence that maybe best distinguishes who Jesus is as savior from who Caesar is as savior: “The primary mision of the church is to take the world back from the thugs…”

Finally, I’ve posted on Vimeo the finished version of Crossan’s appearance at the Earlham School of Religion, on April 16th and 17th:

Jesus & Paul: John Dominic Crossan at the Earlham School of Religion on Vimeo.

The interesting problem–interesting because I didn’t really know it was a problem till I tried this–is that the pictures of the event weren’t really an illustration of the ideas. Can theology be expressed by images? Yea, that’s gotta be possible–but not theology in history.

Of course, the other interesting question is why the experience of watching the same video on Vimeo and on YouTube is so entirely different…

I will get up and walk the dog at 6:30 a.m.
I will eat some fruit as part of my breakfast
I will shave
I will clean the sink after I shave
I will be at work by 8 a.m.
I will sit through two hour meetings
I will say “yes” when you want me to say “yes”
I will be quiet when you don’t want me to say “no”
I will take your call
I will listen to your opinion of my friends
I will listen to your friends’ opinions of my friends
I will be civil to your mother
I will put the seat down
I will separate the recycling
I will carry your lip balm
I will watch your vampire TV shows with you
I will take my socks off before getting into bed
I will put my underwear in the basket
and because I do this,
I will drive the car I want to drive.
Charger: Man’s Last Stand.

I laughed. I thought it was hilarious. I noticed that my wife did not laugh, not even a single “ha,” nor even a grin, but I thought it was really funny. I laughed because I felt it, I felt how boxed up all those silent men were, I thought I understood the independence they were giving up just to go along and get along in their own lives, and how they needed that fast car to make it up to themselves. I thought I understood the necessity—or the victory—of rewarding ourselves for all of our compromises and for what we give up by finding other, secret pleasures that we share with no one. By, for instance, driving the sports car we want to drive, as this ad hopes we will.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that all those things the ad wants me to believe I’m giving up, maybe they’re really not that much of a sacrifice, and maybe, in fact I don’t need any more reward for those concessions than than what I have already gained by those little self-denials—which is life in relationship. [Although not all the sacrifices the ad points to are little ones, and especially the question of when we speak and what we’re allowed to say—that’s a big deal in a relationship. So throw that out of the list.] But those others:

I shave, I put down the toilet seat, I throw my dirty clothes in the clothes basket because I love the family with whom I share my life. Those little irritations are not really the slow death of my soul; they are the doorway to the life I was made for. They are the doorway to the opportunity to love and be loved. They are the small acts of relationship. After all, God created us for the work and the joy of love. Whether it’s romantic love or friendship and fellowship. The very first chapters of the bible try to explain how important relationship is to us, as God and Adam discover together that only the company of another creature made from the ground can be the company that Adam was made for.

“It is not good for the groundling to be alone.” Experience, in fact, shows that human beings in isolation literally begin to lose their minds. They begin to lose the ability to organize thoughts. We need each other, we need companionship to thrive—science tells us this, and so do all our myths.

So we put the toilet seat down, we do the dishes, we change diapers, we go off to work, we erase our dry boards, we put more paper in the copier, we show up at a special program, and then come home to cut firewood and stick dinner in the oven, and then do all those things over again the next day—we do these things because we are formed for companionship and love. And the speed and handling of the car I drive really has nothing to do with it.

An enforced Sabbath.

Thank God.

… We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world…

from Jack Gilbert’s poem, A Brief for the Defense

“As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of the innocent, the elderly, the helpless, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy…[this] is a faith that set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead.”

[A]s I look back on the service of my institution, as “special” as it seemed and truly was, it bears a striking resemblance to nearly every other service in the prayer book. It was like a wedding in which a couple vows to love and honor each other for a lifetime; like a baptism in which parents and godparents vow to raise another human being, as yet a stranger to them, in the image of Christ; like a Eucharist in which we say ‘amen’ to the announcement that the flimsy wafer we are about to eat is the body of Christ. In short, it was like every other service in which we are sent out to sea in a frail little craft with a few provisions and a few stars to guide us.

Irish monks in the Dark Ages would sometimes be set adrift, literally, in just this way, hoping to land somewhere as missionaries, but realizing they might just as likely drown. They were only a little braver than the average bride and groom. Their mission was only a little more desperate than that of a conscientious parent. They looked only a little more precarious bobbing over the horizon than I did rising from my solemn prayer that day. They required only a little more faith.

Here’s the thing. Now that I’m a campus minister, I am asked to pray publicly a good deal. I invoke, I send forth. I try, in these public prayers, to put words to the meaning of our gathering. Why have we come here, what are we doing, what will it mean after this moment?

And because I’m a Friend, I also invite people to find these meanings for themselves by silence. But I am usually speaking to non-Friends. So I describe the silence, how we bring ourselves to it, how we are together in it, what might happen within it.

Then I let silence be in the room—and I prepare for what might happen. I am always ready to let the silence last if ministry begins, if people rise and speak. But I am also ready for what will happen if no one speaks. Many people, unaccustomed to silence, don’t much like it at first. They find they can’t be quiet. They feel embarrassed at not knowing what to do.

But if I can stand their discomfort, if I can stand the initial restlessness, then probably half the people there can find something moving within them that’s worth paying attention to.

That’s the key. Can I stand their discomfort long enough for them to get past it?

So I count. 1…2…3…4…5… To 60 or 120 or 300. Sometimes I only count at the end, when I have to tell myself, “we can do another two minutes.” Sometimes I count from the very beginning when I tell myself, “no matter what, we can last for five.”

Because I know that folks with no experience of silent worship can come to God’s presence in it. I know that folks who’ve never been in silent worship before can be moved to speak because they’ve heard God’s still, small voice. I know this from experience—I’ve seen it happen. My mind knows it. I even plan on it when I plan religious observances.

And still I know that under the influence of concerns about my own performance I can easily shortchange God’s presence and power. Even knowing that God is able to move in such an unpromising group as this (because that’s how the group seems to me as I focus on myself), even knowing that God is able to use these people, this silence, this opportunity, I can stand up too soon in order to bring our uneasiness to an end.

Counting is my discipline for waiting on God when I have to wait for others, and not just myself. It’s the discipline I need to act as I believe when my emotions push me to act how I feel. I feel uneasy and my emotions push me to act uneasily. But I believe that God is present in our midst even if we feel uneasy. My counting gives me a chance to let that Presence be at work.

It isn’t the best option, I know. The best option would be listening more to God’s presence than to my uneasiness. But I haven’t got there yet. So I count.

Maybe this is one reason I’m so convinced that we can’t demand conformity in our spiritual biographies. Because the most basic kind of arithmetic is a form of faithfulness for me. How could I ever predict that about somebody else?