Hopes and Dreams...

Every so often, I realize that I do not always have an eye on my end-goal. Recently, my friend, Brandon, wrote a post on his blog about thinking about what our hopes and dreams are for our lives. I have been trying to give it some thought. My hopes and dreams fall into a couple different categories:

1) Community: One of my professors at my undergraduate institution wrote a great deal about using communication in a way that promotes shalom. Often "shalom" is translated from the Hebrew simply as "peace," but it connotes so much more. It indicates a peace that is centered on being and living in community with one another. It is not an individualistic peace, as one might imagine the lone philosopher on the mountain might be at peace. It is a peace, together.

I have a dream/hope that no matter where my wife and I end up, we will be able to foster a movement towards the peace of togetherness. We try to do this now by doing the simple things. We get our friends together as much as possible. We make a point to contact and spend time listening to each other and those who we come in contact with. We say, "Come over any time," and mean it.

This might sound simple, but it becomes really hard. This is not just because we have to keep the house relatively neat (Neat is subjective, especially since most of our friends are grad students who are amazed that we actually have a table to eat at.), but we also have to work to overcome the innate cultural and personal belief that people hold that, "They couldn't possibly actually mean for me to just drop by." It also means that we have to resist the temptation to make people coming over always mean something. There doesn't always need to be a reason for having friends over. It is so nice to just sit and talk sometimes or maybe even just watch TV or listen to music together.

Community seems to be a big goal in my faith-work too, as if you could divide it so easily. It seems interesting to me that Jesus really kept this group of people, the disciples, with him that much of the time. There seems to be something there. I was reading the Gospel of St. Mark the other day, and it struck me that there are a number of stories that begin with something like, "As Jesus and the disciples ate...." This means that much of what Jesus gave to them, and they to him, I must suppose, was their presence.

Even at their most frustrating, the disciples were with Jesus. One must imagine that they could not keep up a deep theological conversation at all times for three years. They must have discussed normal things of the day, but this is not a message we hear often from the pulpit on Jesus and culture. However, this is an aspect of culture, and Jesus undoubtably participated in it.

2) Teaching: This is much harder, but a large part of my hopes for the future rest on being able to teach and work with young people. For a time, I was tempted to enter seminary and become a pastor (youth or otherwise), but I could get past the institutional requirements that seminaries place on their students.

Maybe this is a topic for a future post, but I am amazed at how a large quantity of conservatives see public academic institutions as bastions for training unthinking, uncaring liberals, but they do not observe the same trends in their own churches, schools, and seminaries. A friend of mine, who I will not name, had a large number of very choice words about the ways that seminaries prepare the future clergy. He compared it to his experience in law school. It was not encouraged to ask questions about why things were seen as they were. It was emphasized that one must become the best at manipulating the given system rather than working to change it.

Granted, this is a generalization, but looking at seminary websites, I notice a large reliance on words such as "orthodox" and "tradition." To paraphrase a great man, "Three thousand years of history from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you better believe I'm living in the past."

My teaching really aims at giving honor to the past but not, as Walter does, making the mistake that the past is the best that we can do. So often, teachers just mark time. Sure, we are busy all the time, but it is very hard to break out and do something different. Students resist it. Administrations resist it, and institutions resist it. How then can teaching make a difference?

I don't know, yet, but I aim to find out. I'll let you know if I discover anything.