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 Dr. Baxter's Final Word
I confess that, after the amazing success of Professor Randy Pausch's "My Last Lecture", I was tempted to denominate this piece, "My Last Comment." Probably it will be. But, while I am dying just as we are all dying, I do not have a specific deadline (pun intended) to prompt these words-just a genuine desire to be sure that after twenty years, I will not leave Trinity College having been misunderstood.
It's hard for me to imagine that a student in one of my classes wasn't listening and missed what I was trying most to communicate. I am not one to hide my passions, interests, and values. My students probably get tired, if not irritated, at the frequency with which I state what I want most for them to learn, the earnestness with which I emphasize my central core beliefs about the subject. But just in case you dozed or were absent most of the classes, here goes...
I sort of fell into teaching from being a parish minister in the United Methodist Church in Philadelphia back in the early '70s. I was extremely frustrated in that position, not with the preaching, the teaching, the study and preparation, but with the mundane administrative stuff for which I have absolutely no gifts at all. I considered teaching as a temporary job. Providentially, I connected with a Christian high school in Norfolk, Virginia, and within three months, I knew for sure that I had found my true calling. At the same time, I knew absolutely nothing about Christian education at any level. I had started reading the books of Francis Schaeffer, relatively new in the late '60s and early '70s. These texts had revolutionized my thinking, particularly about Christ as the still point of the turning world, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot and his "Four Quartets." Again, providentially, Norfolk Christian, where I remained for the next seventeen years, had a headmaster and principal who fully understood the concept of the integration of faith and learning. His ideas further underscored what I had read in Schaeffer. From both, I learned that the integration of faith and learning was not just praying before class, proof-texting short story elements, or teaching from Bob Jones University Press textbooks! I was tutored, stimulated, and given the opportunity to learn how to do integration, and that is the first basic of what I want to communicate to my students.
You see, I had been living to that point, I confess, a dualistic life. I was a committed Christian and had been since the age of nineteen. But I realize now that my faith was one part of my life and my life was another part of my life, as it were. In other words, I could sing meaningfully the words to a familiar Gospel chorus of the time, "Thank you Lord for saving my soul," but it never dawned on me that the Lord had also saved my mind! I tended to think in unrelated categories. Schaeffer, as I said, helped me to see that Jesus is the center of my soul, indeed, but that He is also the center of my turning world of music, literature, and theology-at that time my three greatest and dearest interests. But even each of them was a separate category, unrelated to anything other than itself. Schaeffer and my Norfolk Christian mentor helped me to put it all together in a meaningful, exhilarating combination. I never really had to struggle with the concept of how do I make my American Lit. course "integrated"-it seemed so natural now. It wasn't putting a patina of spirituality over the content, or never reading stories with four-letter words in them or which dealt with homosexuality, or attempting to find some verse of Scripture which was relevant to the content of the story or novel, or singing only Christian music (yes, I directed the school choir, too!), but thinking about how the very discipline of literature reflected the presence of God, of asking questions about why there is Art or Music and attempting to answer those questions with Christ at the center. I tried to get my students to consider how a Christian would think about Hemingway that would be any different from the way anyone else would think about his work. Did he speak truth or was he dismissible because of his caustic and often profane language? Could I even convince my Christian students that reading fiction was worth the time? After all, fiction isn't true. The very name of the genre creates dubious feelings in many more conservative Christians. Does fiction, abstract art, aleatoric music "edify"? If it doesn't, why are we doing it? This was exciting; it was learning as I had never considered it before. It was as though all the education (BA, BD, ThM) were sort of partial because my teachers had only taught me content, not often meaning or approach. I was trained to be a specialist, not a generalist. You know what? I don't think I have it in me to specialize-there's too much out there to connect to. There is too much about which I can think as a believer, should think as a believer, and should find drawing me closer to the God who made me think this way in the first place.
Second and quite similar, something I try to teach in all of my courses is the integration of all of learning. This is not quite the same as integration of faith and learning but comes out of my passion for the humanities. I once asked my favorite seminary professor how I should decide which of my interests to emphasize: literature, theology, or music. I must admit that I felt guilty for loving literature and music for, I was convinced, God had called me to be a pastor-or so I thought at the time. And there certainly is little relevance for literature and music in a sermon, unless it is as illustration to "prove" a point or to show my Appalachian congregation that I was learned. When I asked him how to decide what to focus on, he told me to pray about it and God would sooner or later help me to decide. I loved the man but this was lousy advice, and though it was six years later, God did show me something, something much better, something I could not have imagined possible. My first teaching job was at the high school level: Literature, Apologetics to the Seniors, and directing the Chorus-all three of my frustrating interests, something I had never dared to think God would allow me to do. You see, I didn't yet understand how much He loved me and wanted me to be happy and fulfilled serving Him. But I'd learn!
In the next ten years or so, I knew I had found what I was looking for when a Master's Degree in the Humanities was introduced in a local university. So, I switched from an English master's program to a program which allowed me to emphasize all three areas, taking courses in literature, art, and, well, I already had the Bible background. And what a world it was I had stumbled onto. You see, I used to think so compartmentally that it never dawned on me that Mozart was composing his symphonies during the American revolution, that Picasso and Stravinsky not only lived at the same time but probably knew each other's work. It was as though Mozart lived on a separate planet unrelated to and unaffected by anything else happening on this planet, or that Picasso and Stravinsky were only starving artists living in a garret (I'm a romantic, you see), eking out a bohemian existence, knowing no one else and certainly never leaving that garret. I exaggerate, obviously, but that is the kind of intense compartmentalized thinking I was guilty of at that time. For this ridiculous understanding, I blame my professors who never taught me the interconnectedness of things. To me it is so exciting to look at a certain epoch, like the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, and realize how what happened in art, music, literature, theology, and the new medium of cinema is interrelated. Now if you already know and understand that, blessings on you and go spread the gospel. I had never thought that way. I learned that photography influenced art and medicine which influenced film and culture and so on. But I had never thought of that. This is one of the reasons I went on to get a PhD in the humanities...all things "connect", as E.M. Forster urged in his novel Howard's End - "only connect." At Florida State University, the professors didn't do this kind of integrating but I learned much because of the University Sunday School Class I taught at a local Presbyterian Church. Classes in Stravinsky and Berlioz at the university afforded me the opportunity not only to hear great music but to hear "religious" music from other than evangelical Christian perspectives. I took many art courses, almost always taught by someone who had no thought about spirituality or God in teaching the course, but I learned an awful lot about art, particularly abstract art. I discovered for the first time that my interest in movies could lead to an academic pursuit of the subject. I had always been made to feel that loving the movies was tantamount to kissing the devil's nether regions. Suddenly, film became not only academic but instructive to living as a culturally integrated person. I learned, then, that we Christians know what and how to connect and this is the second thing I try so passionately to urge upon my students. Make those connections; the course and your life will be so much richer.
Thirdly, another passion: "all truth is God's truth." I don't know whether Art Holmes invented this phrase (something tells me it's a lot older than Holmes) but he is the man who introduced the concept to me. This allows me to enjoy the art, the music, the film, the literature all the more because it lets me see that there can be truth in the atheist's story, the existentialist's film, the absurdist's art. Christians know the truth, indeed, but they don't have a corner on it even though we surely do behave as though that were the case. I used to be of the mind that only Christians could ever speak the real Truth and the thought that I could learn something spiritually, Christianly true from the likes of Ernest Hemingway or Albert Camus would have struck my benighted Christian mind as nearly blasphemous. Now, I rejoice when I can point out to students that in a story like "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver, the genuine, moving truth of human communication can be presented; and while Jesus is never named in that story, the truth of "love your neighbor as yourself" is presented as clearly as if it had been heralded from Sinai. Robert Mapplethorpe's offensive (and rightly so) homo-erotic photos can speak of the fallen-ness of humanity so eloquently and should cause us to weep at the accuracy of what happens to men in sin; but it IS true, it is so. Christians dare not flinch at accurate and honest portrayals of sin and man's fallenness. We do not embrace or celebrate such content but we do respect the talent of a brilliant photographer while we mourn his own emptiness and depravity. If for no other reason, consider, "there but for the grace of God, go I." We might say that truth sometimes surprises us in the most unusual contexts, and we should delight in and celebrate it when we see or hear it, regardless of the source. Illustration: Piet Mondrian's basic color grid canvases. In his abstract art, Mondrian demonstrates the three basic colors, the two basic lines (vertical and horizontal) and the structure of the canvas plane. But it is also true to say that he was painting "god" as he understood it, in that for the artist, these colors and lines and planes are all he has to work with; they are the absolutes; to this lapsed Calvinist, Art was a replacement, however uneasily, for the God he had rejected in his youth. This is true: if God is eliminated from our lives, we will seek to fill the picture plane with something, anything in his place. Seeing that in Art, Literature, Film, and Music is not only exciting but what I hope so strongly that I, as a teacher, am communicating.
This leads me to my final words. I quote from Frederick Buechner's novel, Love Feast, part of his very funny and very Christian Leo Bebb tetralogy, The Book of Bebb. The narrator is Antonin Parr, a high school English teacher (been there, done that): "... I could see that he really had gotten it... Stephen Kulak had learned from kindly old Mr. Parr, who had a hard time keeping his mouth shut, what irony was, and jokes, and life itself if you made the mistake of keeping your ears open. Once you get the reading and writing out of the way, I suppose what you teach children in an English class, is, God help you, yourself."
I look back on my years of education and have difficulty remembering content from Algebra, or American Literature, or Foreign Film, but I can remember each one of those teachers. They fired my imagination; they set the fine, good example; they modeled what it meant to be a learner, in love with life and learning, and people, if not God. It is also true that Tono Parr's last line has its reflexive meaning as well: "We teach...ourselves," we learn in the teaching process; we become more adept at integration; we see more and more and more of God's truth in the largest and smallest places and even in the interstices of the interconnected meanderings. I would pray, therefore, in closing, that you would come to see your faith fully integrated with all of your learning, indeed, with all of your experience-the exciting interconnectedness of all of life around the center of Jesus- and know in heart and marrow that God loves you and has only the best intentions and plans for you. And so I trust that the content I've presented and the self which I have taught in the last thirty-six years, twenty of them at Trinity, has been soli Deo Gloria, for the glory of God alone.
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