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This semester I am teaching a class called Theology and the Arts. In this class we are engaging the earth with the five senses of the body. During our last class we engaged the sense of vision and read about it. To see is modernity’s main sense; to see is to know, to define, to control, to classify, to order, to establish regulations and distinctions, rules and limits. To see is to establish or hide delineating social markers such as color/redlining, gender and sexuality, class, abled bodies, citizenship, and so on. Colonization is the mastering of a certain vision over the others’ vision. You have to see what I see. A view of the world means a way of living in the world. The panopticon is now the 24/7 surveillance that watches everyone. Control of vision is among the new forms of coloniality in the social sciences and scientific work as well, all marked by objective lenses and detached views. After our discussion we went to The Shed in New York city to see the exhibition Particular Matter(s) by the Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. The exhibition has several rooms showing particles and spider webs, but I will just describe the one named Free the Air: How To Hear the Universe In a Spider/Web, 2022. A huge round courtyard is organized in two levels of wire mesh nets, one suspended 12 feet above the floor and the other very high up at 40 feet. After about two minutes of walking on the net, you lay down, the doors are closed, and darkness takes over the room. You feel a mist flowing and you start to hear sounds from microphones attached to the net as well as vibrations throughout the net. Saraceno describes: Unheard voices become felt vibrations in this arachnid concert in four movements. The first movement of the concert is a quiet period, providing an opportunity to detect subtle signals from subsurface seismic sources that would have been concealed in noisier times… These vibrations were created from recordings of the Earth, including the movement of air particles and the spider/webs on view in the exhibition. [The sounds are like] an aria from Grandmother Spider, played by a solo Trichonephila clavipes, as she plots and maps her web of life… The rhythm of vibrating spider/webs—more audible since the pandemic-affected reduction of anthropogenic seismic noise—invite visitors to extend their senses towards new forms of embodied cognition. Yes indeed: new forms of embodied cognition. Spiders do taste and smell but their strongest sensorial organs are their legs. They sense vibrations through hairs and can “hear” these vibrations from 10 feet away. This “sixth sense” helps them discern the size and weight of things caught in their web. The students and I were trying to learn about cognitive variations by considering cognition from a spider’s perspective. Or perceiving or knowing the world through varieties of senses. (There were no spiders anywhere and we did not engage any.) I had to prepare myself before we went. Just knowing that I was going to be locked in a totally dark room produced a lot of anxiety in me. I had to decide if I could face it, so I meditated in darkness throughout the week. I talked to my psychoanalyst about it and asked my brother Greg Snyder, a Buddhist priest and scholar, to teach me how to wrestle with my fears. In our exchange of text messages, he wrote this for me: Breathe. Feel the energy of the anxiety in your body. Don’t concern yourself with the thoughts. Treat them like phantoms. Feel into the actual energetic force without needing to call it anxiety. Then allow that energy to be swept up by the current of the breathing, as if the banks of a river were eroding into the river itself. As the energy joins the breath, it will find the rhythm of the breath. Syncing the energy of the anxiety with the rhythm of the breath will give space and movement to that energy in ways that allow the system to calm down. Any excess anxious energy that cannot join the breath can be channeled down into the heart of the earth. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your connection to the earth. When you exhale, train yourself to exhale down into the earth. So you are inhaling energetically up from the center of the earth and exhaling down into the earth. As the anxious energy joins your breath, exhale that energy with the current of the breath down into the vast warmth of the earth. Inhale the vast warmth back up into the body. Exhale the anxious energy back down, each time the energy dissipating into the vastness and warmth of the earth, each time inhaling vastness and warmth, spaciousness and strength. This guidance truly prepared me for the experience. When we got there, I was tense but still determined to go. We were divided into those who would go into the 40-foot-high web or the 12-foot-high web. I was the only one on the 12-foot web. I told my students this was a huge challenge for me and they were very compassionate. I was embarrassed to be so vulnerable with my students but they were a group I could trust. We hear “Never trust your students, you never know what might come to you!” on the grapevine. This can be true. But sometimes it isn’t. They were immensely gentle and kind to me. While laying down on the net I had an incredible experience, one I cannot fully describe. It was an experience without feelings. I didn’t feel anxious, fearful, or joyful. It was close to feeling happy. The web felt like an earth womb; I felt I was laying down in the vastness of the universe. The sounds of the earth were sparkling sensations. The net vibrated and my body felt that intensely—almost an out-of-body experience lived fully in every inch of my body. Everything was in movement but at its own pace. It was as if the sounds and vibrations and forms of relations manifested in the dark had always been in my body and I was visiting the earth at its very formation. No anxiety, no hope, no fear, no desire, no love. Just a sense of what I could call fullness: past, present, and future disappeared. Another experience was very distinctive: I felt the wonder of perceiving the world from the perspective of another species. Well, sort of…. I have never before felt a sense of otherness so powerfully in my body. The awareness of that totally different world made me feel absolutely distinct; foreign and lost in every possible way. The worlds of the spider are truly something else. The way they live, connect, build their nets, perceive, engage, protect, hunt, hear, and see—everything has its own wisdom and language. The wonder was that in all its strangeness, the spiders’ worlds live in codependence with mine and with so many other worlds. A multiverse! In my house, they are building worlds in different places and they can sense my presence 3 meters away. As much as I might fear spiders, my awe and wonder for them now moves me towards respect, honor, and reciprocity. After the event my body was completely exhausted, like I was carrying the tiredness of all the years of my life. It took a whole week to go away. The connections between this experience and my classrooms are so many and I am still pondering it all: if a classroom is a web, we are literally entangled together. Hopefully not to eat each other up but to foster “net-works” of care and refuge. I need to learn to perceive my students not just with the objective eye of academia and checking their written work. I also need to perceive the pulsing of their hearts, the sounds they make, the fears they bring, the hopes they have, the anger they carry, the longings they vibrate. The classrooms as webs are like many worlds interlocked and we as spiders are catching the various sounds of the worlds, of people, and other species around us. Mostly blind to what we can’t see, we are trying to figure out sounds, vibrations, and temperatures around us. Depending on each other, different worlds making space for each other, holding each other in deep care as we discern how to live. I wish I was a spider! And my classes were spider webs!

[caption id="attachment_250814" align="alignleft" width="335"] Gesture drawing, charcoal on newsprint[/caption] I remember sitting beside a piece of blank newsprint, clutching a twig of willow charcoal, looking at a table covered in all sorts of objects—a shiny chrome blender base, a bleached cow’s skull, yards of loosely draped fabric, old pieces of driftwood, a single ice skate and various pots, pans, and kitchen bowls. We were doing “gesture drawing” and my task was to use my charcoal quickly and loosely to sketch the vaguest and most general shapes I was seeing. I had to look beyond the detail of the objects to the ways in which overall shapes emerged from the play of dark and light. My attempts looked ghostly and out of focus, primitive and unskilled. The truth was that I had never done this before, and I felt completely out of my depth. I was taking a drawing class in our Fine Arts department. This was my first undergraduate class in more than twenty years, and I was taking it for credit. I registered as a student at my own institution, going through a registration process where I was even asked to produce my high school transcripts. And here I was, sitting around the table with my charcoal twig and my newsprint along with the other students in the class, completely out of my comfort zone, remembering what it was like to be learning as an undergrad. I decided to take this course because I was becoming increasingly interested in the creative process and the ways in which creative expression could function to connect students with complex ideas and abstract notions.  But in exploring this creative entry point, I also wanted to remember what it was like to be coming at these issues as a student and to be learning about things that required one stepping beyond one’s usual range of experience and expertise. A drawing class was something I hoped would improve my drawing, but also allow me to consider with more empathy the experience of students in my classes who encounter challenging ideas and practices all the time.  I learned a lot in this drawing class. I learned the difference between drawing what you see and drawing what you think. I learned that the creative process is often about following one’s nose, taking cues from what is in front of you and then taking the next step. I learned that inspiration often happens in hindsight, arising from consistent and sometimes less than inspiring routines. And I was reminded that learning involves taking risks and being vulnerable, ideally with the support of others around you. In my own classes, I include a lot of creative expressions of religious ideas and beliefs from the history of art and literature. I have always found these examples invaluable as ways of further illuminating what can otherwise seem counterintuitive and elusive notions. Sometimes, even for the cultural Christian, notions of incarnation, sacred mystery, and ineffability, for example, can appear both overly familiar and bewilderingly abstract. Creative expressions from the tradition can serve to span the distance between ancient, paradoxical notions and provide a location for ideas to play out in connection with more familiar, contemporary experiences. And yet, even the greatest work of art, the greatest masters of Western culture, from the past and present, can sometimes fail to bridge the gap. Sometimes connecting what is counter-intuitive to what is creative means taking a risk. It means being out of one’s depth and feeling one’s way forward, exploring the link between mystery and possibility. My attempts at gesture drawing were disconcerting, for sure, but in the end, they proved to be quite liberating. I had to let go of my preconceptions of what constituted “good art,” to quiet my internal art critic and trust my eye and my arm to do the work. I was forced to draw what I saw rather than draw what I had in mind. Stepping out of my comfort zone meant discovering new ways of seeing and new ways of doing. I could see that taking creative risks had the potential to open richer veins of insight and to reveal the invisible limitations of convention and culture that can sometimes limit inquiry and stifle growth. But does this exercise work in the other direction? Drawing what one sees rather than what one thinks is one thing, but what about the reverse? What happens when we draw what we have in mind and turn this idea into something others can see? A simple exercise I have used to connect the abstract with the creative involves asking students to draw the concept of belief. I ask them to draw something that doesn’t easily translate to a discrete object in the world. In effect, I’m asking the students the impossible task of giving a complex, abstract idea discrete and specific form. Everyone knows what belief is, but what does it look like? While the results can be clever and are often surprising, they also reveal how obscure and unfamiliar the term was from the beginning. Drawing an abstract concept involves being creative, for sure, but it also means committing to something specific, making choices about what to put on the page versus what to leave out or unaddressed. Every picture is but a gesture of the totality. While, a single picture is always a limited account of a larger idea, when the resulting pictures from the class are gathered, a wonderful richness emerges, still fuzzy around the edges, still indistinct and relatively unformed and yet collectively, they are evocative, rich, and real. In this way, drawing involves embodying an idea, giving it a certain kind of flesh and form in ways that depart from the goals and achievements of writing alone. It is not that a picture tells a thousand words so much as pictures and creative expressions have the capacity to speak differently. The vividness of this creative act, the grappling with impossibility and the inspiration of a collective perspective prompts a learning journey that I view with renewed respect as deeply creative, slightly unnerving, and open to immense possibility. 

The day after the Atlanta spa shootings in March last year, my class on Asian and Asian American Theologies met via Zoom. We had scheduled to discuss worship and preaching for that class. But I knew that the murder of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, would weigh heavily on the students’ hearts. I sensed that this communal crisis would be an undercurrent in whatever we were going to discuss, and that students needed a space to process their thoughts and feelings. It turned out that several students lived close to one of the spas. One student passed by it almost every day. These students were particularly hard hit by the murders. [caption id="attachment_250943" align="alignright" width="476"] Students at Candler School of Theology held signs outside Gold Spa[/caption] The next day, two Asian and Asian American students in the class went to one of the spas to protest the shootings. One of them held a sign saying, “Stand with the Asian Community.” A New York Times journalist took a photo of them and wrote about their protest in the newspaper. Later that weekend, other students also visited the site to remember the victims and speak out against anti-Asian violence. Prompted by the students’ activism, I gathered the Asian and Asian American faculty of my school to find ways to respond to rising anti-Asian hatred in the country. We decided to organize a webinar and invited scholars and a local activist to address “Anti-Asian Racism and Christian Responses.” The response was beyond our expectations. More than 600 people of different racial backgrounds from across the US registered for the webinar and more than 430 people attended! During the webinar, some clergy and leaders of white churches asked for resources on the Asian American community and churches. I felt the need to educate the public about the long history of discrimination against the Asian American community and the people’s resilience. Living in the South, the discussion of racism usually follows a black and white binary, such that the oppression of Asian Americans, Latinx Americans, and Native Americans becomes invisible. Orientalized stereotypes portray Asian women as obedient, compliant, and hypersexualized. Popular media casts them as the long-suffering Madame Butterfly or the seductive Suzie Wong. During the Vietnam War, sex tourism flourished around American military bases in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Asian women’s bodies were exploited by American GIs for their “rest and recreation” during the brutal Vietnam war. Sex tourism created the myth that Asian women’s flesh is available and there for the taking. Robert Aaron Long, the white killer of the spa shootings, said that he has a “sex addiction” and that he thought the spas owned by Asians were “safer” than paying for sex elsewhere. A member of a Christian church, he has struggled with his addiction and lashed out at the spa businesses, which he viewed as sexual temptation. To provide opportunities to learn about Asian and Asian American women, I facilitated an online course on Asian and Asian American Feminist Theologies in the summer of 2021. I invited guest speakers from both Asia and the US to speak about feminist theology, interpretation of the Bible, Christian ethics and sexuality, interreligious learning, and leadership and ministry. The online short course attracted hundreds of participants from Asia and North America. It provided a forum for dialogue across geographical, racial, cultural, and religious differences. The pandemic forced us to shift our teaching online in the past years. While we lament the disruption and long for in-person contact, online teaching enables us to reach a wider audience. Millions are accustomed to using Zoom as a learning platform. My short course was truly transnational and the discussion was rich and riveting. The recordings of the course were uploaded to YouTube so that people can use them as resources. As scholars we have to begin thinking about the “community” we teach in a much broader sense. It is important to remember that Asian feminist theology emerged during the height of the Vietnam war. Some of the pioneering theologians, such as Mary John Mananzan from the Philippines, addressed the sexual exploitation of women, sex tourism, and militarism. Today, Asian and Asian American female scholars and activists continue to protest sexual abuses and harassment of Asian women by militarism, the police, and other powerful men. [caption id="attachment_250944" align="alignleft" width="425"] The altar created at the vigil service in the Cannon Chapel at Candler School of Theology[/caption] Close to the anniversary of the March spa shootings, I organized a vigil for the victims at my school’s chapel. During the vigil, we prayed for other victims of war and violence, especially those who died in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and their families. When the Korean hymn “O-So-So” was sung by a student, I invited the community gathered to place Japanese peace cranes on the altar to symbolize their prayers and solidarity. On the altar were two paintings by a local Korean American artist, Connie LaGoy, who painted them in response to the shootings. She has sold prints of the paintings to generate funds to donate to the victims’ families. When a community tragedy disrupts our classes and teaching agenda, it opens a window for rethinking our teaching and vocation as a scholar.

One of the many joys of reading poetry is the fluidity of meaning to which poems lend themselves. Mary Oliver’s poetry allows the reader to imagine their own situation, ponder, then gain dynamic insight. From A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry (Mariner Books; August 15, 1994), Mary Oliver wrote: For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Teachers! Can we make this declaration with firm regard and assuredness about our courses, our teaching, our livelihood as faculty? What would it mean if, with the help of Mary Oliver, we whispered one to another:   For courses are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry?   Often, I wonder what a course is, or what it is for. I know the mundane of why courses are taught. The curricular obvious and the institutional mechanics are part of my understanding; I am not asking about the obvious or the mechanical. Instead, I wonder if courses matter? Are courses important, impactful, and when they are – what makes them so? What makes a course fire? Rescue? Or sustenance for the poor? Mostly, when I was enrolled in courses, very few experiences had the gravitas of the comparison with Mary Oliver’s provocative images. Like most folks with a terminal degree, I was enrolled in formal course work for over twenty years – if I start counting from kindergarten. In most cases, the teacher did not do anything wrong, but neither had they done anything like bringing fire for my warmth or letting a rope down when I was in a pit. And, I have inhabited cold, dank, pits. It is too easy to recount experiences of flimsy teaching, but their commonness is crippling to our students. By the second week of a required course in college, my friends and I figured out that the lectures of the professor were excerpts from the primary text. During the weekly hour-long lectures, we sat quietly in class and highlighted the passages she read aloud from the re-typed pages she laid on the podium. Occasionally, the teacher would skip pages in the text causing us to, with a flurry, turn pages until we found the passages to which she had jumped. I always wondered if she noticed that we were not taking notes, but highlighting the textbook, and if so, what did she think about this. At mid-term and final, in preparation for the tests, my friends memorized the passages in the book. I, thinking that a waste of time, got a “B” in the course because I refused to “study.” I was bored in the course. We have all survived teaching that has been reduced to words, facts, and data. Mary Oliver bids us to take stock of the possibility that teaching could be, after all, life changing and lifegiving. Given this opportunity, it would behoove us to set our intentions as if we are about course design with transformative power. The power to feed the hungry, locate the lost, and set the captives free.  I have been a student in several courses where I received healing, inspiration, and renewed agency to meet my vocation well prepared. Some courses shifted my core values and deepened my commitments. Some courses were exemplars of a call to action for the rest of my career. In 1985, one such course was titled Ministry and Mission of the Church in the World Today. It was co-taught by Jack Seymour and Robert O’Gorman. I found the course interesting, and equally, I was fascinated to watch the two scholar/friends as they taught. I learned as much by watching them teach as I did by being taught by them. Three sessions before the end of the semester, I found myself sitting in the classroom quite frustrated. Near the end of that day’s lecture, I raised by hand, and fumbling for words, asked a question about implication and application. As was the established practice, each professor took a turn responding to my question. Both responses said that questions of implication were not part of this course. My frustration deepened. I furrowed my brow, frowned my face and spoke back - vehemently. I, in graduate student authorial voice, informed my teachers that our conversation had to include conversation on implication because without that, I said, “What was this course for?” The two men were surprised by my outburst, but not deterred. They said they would discuss my request. At the next class session, Jack and Bob informed us that they had adjusted the course syllabus for the final weeks. The new design now included two sessions focused on implications and applications. At the announcement, the class cheered! I was amazed and changed by having had my curiosity taken seriously. I am not suggesting that all courses should include questions of implication. I am suggesting that, if we are intentional, courses can become spaces for teachers and students, who together, learn to kindle passions, braid ropes to lower sojourners over sheer cliffs, something as necessary as cool water in drought. Thank you, Mary Oliver.

In Part I of this series on “Using Art to Activate Learning in the Classroom,” I discussed how the arts are powerful resources that can be used in the classroom to amplify and enhance our teaching-learning experiences. As social practices, the visual arts enable us to give language to how we are being in and with the world—for engaging meaning-in-the-making, to paraphrase Allan de Souza.[1] As witnesses to relationships, artworks expand our awareness of the complexities that give rise to our current contexts, thus opening up space to investigate, translate, decipher, reconfigure, and conjure new worlds. As educational tools, they allow for an “uncoercive rearrangement of our desires.”[2] Used in the classroom, the arts give rise to speculative imagination, integration of embodied, affective, and intellectual knowledge. I also explored some ways to introduce works of visual art into our pedagogical practices by discussing with teacher-learners the form, context, and content of the artwork. As we “enter” works of visual art, we will notice that they not only cross disciplines, allowing for connections, insights, and new meanings to emerge, but they also impact us sensorially. In other words, our intellectual, embodied, and emotional selves are activated as we engage with visual images. This is one of the reasons why using creative arts in the classroom is so generative: they let us dive into deep and integrative experiences, inclusive of nonverbal and preverbal ways of knowing, self-expression, participation, multi-sensorial connection, conscientização, personal and communal growth, and so much more. And to be able to absorb, discuss, and write about these experiences we need to practice sensing, probing, and staying with the images in order to reach such meanings with clarity and perceptiveness. In what follows, you will read a fellow teacher-learner’s response to Lorna Simpson’s Waterbearer. Eruke Ohwofasa is a PhD student in Comparative Theology and Philosophy at Claremont School of Theology and she wrote this reflection within the context of the class “Visual Arts, Spirit, and Place.” Here is how Simpson’s work reverberated for her—notice how her analysis of the work’s form gives rise to interpretation: Waterbearer by Lorna Simpson (1986), 5 gelatin silver prints in a frame, 15 plates engraved plastic, 24 ½ x 97 in (62.2 x 246.4cm) overall. Lorna Simpson’s piece displays the back view of a woman in front of a black background. She is wearing a white sleeveless dress baring the back of her neck that show the pronounced bones in her spine. The subject’s arms are bare and extended. In the left hand, she is holding a silver water pitcher level to her hip. In her right hand she is holding a plastic jug of water extended out at her shoulder’s height. Both vessels are tilted over, pouring out a stream of water. Underneath the photograph are bold, black capital letters against a white background. They formulate a message in three lines that reads: “SHE SAW HIM DISAPPEAR BY THE RIVER/THEY ASKED HER TO TELL WHAT HAPPENED/ ONLY TO DISCOUNT HER MEMORY.” The name of the work, Waterbearer, suggests that the central figure in this work is also a source of water. Like the two vessels, she too is a vessel of water. Here, the symbolism of water is multilayered. Properties often associated with water are lifegiving, soothing, and calm, yet water also possesses the power to move any element out of its way, even rearranging the earth if it so chooses. Waves, rain, waterfalls, and oceans contain water. Water cleanses, refreshes, hydrates, and provides elements for sustaining life. The subject in this artwork is captured pouring out water from different containers, simultaneously. Such containers are usually used to capture water to be used for consumption. Water from a plastic jug is poured into another vessel like a cup or a bowl. Water from a silver pitcher indicates an elegance or formal setting, where water may be poured into china or crystal glasses. The artist has decided to make the distinctions of the vessels very clear. We notice, however, that the water from each vessel is being poured onto the ground, invoking an interesting response from the viewer: we may tense up as we assume that water is being “wasted.” The boldness of the letters indicates they are congruent with the image and function strategically to convey the artist’s intention. It is implied that the waterbearer is the “she” who witnessed the disappearance, the one asked to tell the story, and the same one who was discounted and ignored. The woman’s water can be interpreted as what she has seen, heard, experienced, and witnessed: her memory. These elements contain the properties of water as life and power. Learning her water is discounted conveys a sense of grief and loss. The naming, caption, and motion of the piece indicates that the woman deserves to be listened to. The brightness of her dress against a black and muted background draws the eye straight to her. The artist’s decision to hide her face can be read as a commentary on her invisibility; yet this pictorial configuration wants very much for the woman to be seen and more importantly, valued. Her strength is shown in her arms that carry the water. Her abundance is shown by the multitude of vessels displayed. Her generosity is shown by the multiple streams of water being poured out. Her water, memory, and value are dismissed, underutilized, and explicitly discounted. The water and the memory fall to the ground. The viewer, much like the words narrate, is left longing, contending with both the loss of her water, her memory, the disappearance, and the grief of one’s inability to value her story. She is the waterbearer. As Ohwofasa demonstrates in her writing, there are deep cross-threads that the image elicited to her. Her careful analysis confers visibility to a body that has been erased, discounted. By her looking, sensing, and writing, several layers of meaning have been unearthed to unsettle and reveal that which may be disregarded at first sight. As sites for world-making and choreographing new possibilities of being, the visual arts are capable of cultivating in us an orientation and openness toward that which we have othered, forgotten, disposed of, or lost. It is my hope that this two part-reflection on using art to activate learning has sparked a desire to co-weave imaginative webs within our teaching and learning practices.   [1] Allan de Souza, How Art Can Be Taught: A Handbook for Change (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 25, 28. [2] Gayatri C. Spivak as quoted in Allan de Souza’s How Art Can Be Taught, 60.

A tense moment in my classroom captured some of the changing dynamics at my seminary. We were learning about the rise of higher criticism within the history of biblical interpretation in the United States. As we were analyzing a lecture that Charles Augustus Briggs delivered at Union Theological Seminary in 1891, some students found Briggs’s honest grappling with factual errors in the Scriptures invigorating and resonated with his push for new interpretive methods distinct from the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. They were surprised and encouraged to encounter a scholar who declared that the “theory of inerrancy” was neither located in the Scriptures nor sanctioned in the ancient Christian creeds. Over one hundred years ago, Briggs excoriated the doctrine of inerrancy as “a ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children.” As I moved our discussion from this primary source to the ecclesial divisions that transpired in Briggs’s denomination (the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.) due in no small part to his scholarship, we reflected on how and where we see these ruptures today. In 1909, one presbytery in New York ordained a handful of ministerial candidates who did not affirm a belief in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. In the following years, Presbyterians vigorously debated whether it was possible to be a Christian without attesting to the virgin birth, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and the actuality of Christ’s miracles as recorded in the Gospels. Some students shared that these divisions persist in their congregations and denominations today. One student wondered aloud if their presbytery would allow a candidate to express a nuanced and complex position on the virgin birth today. But my classroom was not only buzzing with excitement and collaborative energy; it was also buzzing with trepidation and anger. Some students remained quiet and a few hardly looked away from their notebook computer screens. Finally, one student shared that this was not what they expected to learn at our seminary and that they thought any notion of Christianity without the doctrines of inerrancy and the virgin birth was heretical and dangerous. Another student expressed frustration with the trajectory of our discussion. They thought it was appropriate to learn this history, but how their peers were talking about the Bible deeply troubled them. The student added that conversations like this one were precisely why mainline Protestant congregations were in decline and losing members. Student populations at my seminary and other PC(USA) schools have shifted in the twenty-first century. In 2000, most of the students at my seminary were white, domestic, and Presbyterian. Since then, there have been large increases in the enrollment of international students and students of color. Black students comprised approximately 4/5 of the incoming class in 2021. There are now fewer Presbyterian students than students from other Christian traditions. In addition to educating students across wider diversities of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, culture, and national origin, students have a broader range of theological viewpoints. When my classroom was predominantly Presbyterian, there were certainly differences on matters of biblical interpretation and belief. As the PC(USA) wrestled over the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ persons, so too did the students in my classroom. But after the denomination made changes in its polity to permit the ordination of LGBTQIA+ pastors and allow ministers and sessions “to use their own discernment to conduct same-gender marriage ceremonies,” the enrollment of PC(USA) students opposed to these changes declined and the number of LGBTQIA+ students grew. These students, along with others seeking creative ways to enact intersectional justice in familiar and new ministries, are enlivening my classroom as they prompt and provoke us to fresh analyses and more expansive understandings of humanity and the divine throughout creation. The anxieties around this discussion of the virgin birth illustrate another shift. There are more students from theologically conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist traditions at my seminary today than there were twenty years ago. Some have deliberately chosen to enroll here because they too are yearning to expand their knowledge of God in an open and inclusive learning environment. They relish opportunities to excavate the depths of many theologies and ask the probing questions that they were discouraged from expressing in their churches. Others remain firmly rooted in their traditions and perpetually frustrated. They question why a seminary that is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion ignores their religious interpretations and cultural perspectives. As an Asian American with firsthand experience in conservative, evangelical, mainline, and progressive Protestant contexts, I am acutely aware of both the promise and peril of my changing classroom. The increasing diversity presents new possibilities for learning with a student population that more closely represents the breadth of Christianity locally and globally. Both the church and the world are bigger than the denomination to which my seminary belongs. Yet, there are chasms of difference between progressive and conservative Protestants on foundational issues of doctrine and human dignity. It can be difficult to find common ground when some of us stand so far apart from one another. However, the instruction in classrooms like mine must meet the demands of more complexity with more clarity about learning covenants and pedagogical commitments. My cultivation of a hospitable learning environment distinguishes between welcoming all students and facilitating the public expressions of their private beliefs to uphold my seminary’s intersectional commitment to the flourishing of women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons in the classroom. It also requires a differentiation between conversion and education. I must continually discern how my students are learning and acknowledge that, for a few, the gaps between their learning expectations and my teaching philosophy will remain significant.

It was Christmas break 2019 and I was exhausted. I had just finished my first full-time semester. I was frantically composing new lecture material during the day and at night nurturing twin toddlers. There was little self-care happening in my days, let alone a dynamic spiritual life. After losing myself in the holidays, as January came closer, my mind turned back to refining my spring classes. With the pedagogy of “workshops past” swirling in my head, it suddenly occurred to me: “Could I ‘backward design’ my life?”  For a refresher or introduction to “backward design,” I recommend Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s chapter “Backward Design” in Understanding by Design.[1] Their “what,” “how,” and “client centered” emphasis helped me frame my own journey of self-care below. Transitioning my thinking from the classroom to my own life, I found their quote from George Pólya’s 1945 work insightful, “We concentrate on the desired end, we visualize the final position in which we would like to be. From what foregoing position could we get there?”[2] That December I began a thought experiment, seriously asking myself where I wanted to be at the end of my life and how I would get there. Imagining myself as an elderly woman, I saw myself seated—peaceful, wise, and smiling. It was “quality” that I wanted out of life, not “quantity.” For me, a successful life could be measured through my relationships and my state of being.  In a backward design (from here forward, I will italicize the pedagogical elements), I would need a measurable outcome. For myself, I want my state of being to begin and end with a life lived richly in the Spirit, cultivated in peace, while having discipled others to find that peace, too. This was all very abstract and lovely, but my life in the present was hectic and over-full. What attitudes or actions would I need to cultivate or accomplish in the present to help me get there? How would I be able to assess if I was more peaceful at the end of the year? A yellow sticky note on my computer reminded me of a previous insight: “Time with God refuels my day.” I desperately needed to refuel, and I also wanted to work toward my end goal of being a woman at peace, but what could I do now and why? The only thing that was going to make me prioritize time spent reading my Bible was a public commitment. To this end I made a watershed decision: I went on my personal Facebook on January 1, 2020, and told “everyone” that I would go online daily to read the New Testament through in a year, and I would love it if they joined me. To my shock and relief, they did! What would I do? Read and pray each day on Facebook. Why would I read the New Testament online? As accountability to actually do it, trusting the work of the Holy Spirit to cultivate peace within me. How would I assess my growth? At the end of the year, am I more at peace? Had I discipled anyone else along the way? The result: It worked! Not only was it intellectually stimulating to track repeated themes in the New Testament, but it did indeed produce the spiritual strength I needed for a challenging year. Reading the Bible online in community brought me and others both peace and joy, which served as the evidence for this effective activity. The key to the success of this backward design was that it was “client centered,” and I was the primary client. This activity was about my own spiritual growth, centered on my own journey with God, with discipling others simply being a joyful expression of that and not the primary exercise. I share this in hopes of cementing the practice of backward design in my own life and to offer it to you. If this sounds intriguing to you, may I invite you to consider: What is the desired outcome for your life, year, or day?       How will you help yourself get there, through the years and today?  Where will you find evidence for the effectiveness of your choices and activities in your life?  May this journey of faith and life be one in which self-care is at the heart of the activities that help us achieve our life goals.   [1] Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, “Backward Design.” Understanding by Design. Vol. Expanded 2nd ed. Gale Virtual Reference Library (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2005). [2] George Pólya, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1945) 230.

Every week during my online course I assign a body-oriented spiritual practice that overlaps with what is often called “self-care.” I sometimes hesitate to use “self-care” as a descriptor because it has been so overused in some contexts that it has become a cliché catchphrase. Still, I recognize the need to take care of ourselves so that we can be of benefit to others. Resistance to meeting a need comes up regularly, too. A student wrote recently about her frustration at engaging a practice. “I don’t have time for this,” she poured out. “I have too many things to do.” I have compassion for such honesty. Even when the practice fulfills a class requirement, it can still be hard to do! We are often more attentive to checking items off our list, and just plowing through or getting on with it. Students and teachers alike are embedded in family and institutional systems that require attention and draw on our energy in differing ways. Where we can exercise control, it is helpful to do so. Hewing toward dutiful diligence comes with a price. The anger of the elder brother in the Lukan parable of the man and his two sons is a flashing signal warning us to pay attention to the need for spiritual and emotional sustenance while fulfilling daily tasks. Anger wakes us up and calls for beneficial action. Otherwise, it can morph into bitter resentment. A graduate school classmate once commented about our different approaches to work-life balance, as we encouraged one another through the writing of dissertations. “You work during the week and take the weekends off. I work on the weekends and take the week off!” The statement was a humorous exaggeration, even as it conveyed a point. We work within the bounds of our personalities, histories, and situations. In eastern philosophical systems, the term vasana refers to habitual tendencies and subtle inclinations imprinted in the mind that inform our desires and wants. Habit energy can carve deep ruts and fuel regularized healthy practice. We can choose its direction. Two years into a global pandemic, self-care is now more important than ever. Through it all, I have kept up whatever practices I could. When gyms closed, I put on my walking shoes and charted a three-mile course through several neighborhoods that allowed for an hour of outdoor activity. I bought a jacket that could help me keep going during winter’s freezing temperatures. When the local YMCA reopened, I resumed lap swimming. I am so committed to the practice that I hovered by the computer to reserve daily timed slots. I waited (sometimes not so) patiently at the facility to snag a slot left open by someone who did not show up. I have been attentive to exercise as a caring practice for years. During the pandemic, I have become vigilant because I know this about myself: I cannot focus and function well without releasing the anxiety and stress that resides in my body. I also begin each day with the rituals of contemplative silence and a few yoga poses. I even do the “chair pose,” a form of a standing squat, while heating the milk for my morning coffee. Such micro practices mirror a course exercise in which I ask students to be on the lookout for their own workable options. While the learning from practice is completion graded (meaning that students get credit for sharing), I always read the reflections with enthusiasm. I am curious to participate in their discoveries about self/spiritual care. I also glean tips for my own practice. Recently, a colleague remarked that she wanted to do better at self-care. “You are very good about it,” she said somewhat enviously about my daily regimen. “I cannot not do it,” I acknowledged. The habit energy creates its own momentum with noticeable benefits. A course participant shared a similar sentiment regarding how the weekly class spiritual/self-care practices were having an effect: “My wife noticed a difference in my mood, and said ‘Whatever you’re doing, keep at it!’” Through sustained caring practice, we recognize how restored of energy our body feels, and how much better we are at honoring our own and others’ emotional and relational boundaries. Living too dutifully with the burden of responsibilities can leave us brittle and grumpy. Learning to nourish ourselves with self and spiritual practices welcomes us home to who we are.

Teaching through pandemic brought home two basic lessons to me: What happens in our students’ lives affects their performance in the classroom. Professors are mere human beings who can only do so much before our health suffers. Both seem obvious. Surely, I knew all that even before the pandemic? Perhaps. But I hadn’t internalized it, and I certainly hadn’t acted as though it was true. I see many of my colleagues do the same. The pandemic was the first time I taught in a situation where my students and I were all doing poorly at the same time. We were jittery and frightened. We were trying to carry on as usual, but nothing was normal. It quickly became obvious that the pandemic would affect our students’ ability to work. In March 2020, kids in my class who had been great students the previous week suddenly become incapable of following basic instructions. They kept emailing me with oddly clueless questions. Expectations had to change, and I began settling for my students at least learning something. I assigned easier and shorter readings, more videos, and shorter papers. I gave more extensions, excused more absences, and talked to many more students about their mental health struggles. But my own workload didn’t lighten. I worked much harder than normal. And my life was in upheaval too (along with everybody else’s!). I would have benefited from the same sort of break and support that I was giving the students. My doctor considers me high risk for pandemic-related burnout because I’m a female professor at a small college. She sees me as a member of the helping professions. I initially downplayed her concerns, pointing out that healthcare workers have it much worse. They do of course. But she is right. I see signs of impending burnout in myself and in many of my colleagues—especially younger women and especially those with children. This isn’t sustainable. We’re just like our students. We can only do so much before our performance and our health suffers. Our limitations need more attention and more action than we have been giving them so far. We are, I hope, coming out of the pandemic, but in higher education we’re emerging into an uncertain future. Many of our institutions are deep into discussions of budget cuts; the crisis of the humanities continues, and programs are being eliminated. And mental health issues among our students are at an all-time high. It won’t stop being hard. Going forward, how can we respect our own limitations and set clearer boundaries with our institutions, our students, and our colleagues? How can those of us who are tenured and more experienced help our junior colleagues do this more effectively? And how do we do all this while continuing to be there for our students? Those are big questions, and figuring out how to go forward will take collective action. Institutions need to change, junior faculty need to be protected, and we need to get better at allowing people real time off. I have no idea how to make all that happen. So, I start small. My individual actions, for now: I will do for myself what I did for my students—I will recognize that my expectations of myself have to change. I can’t continue to work at my regular pace. I’m too tired. I and the people around me will have to settle for me doing less. And I will tell them that. Over the summer, I’m going to rest. I won’t try to catch up on my research (neglected for the past two years). I won’t revise my fall courses. They are good enough. I’ll read, following my curiosity and meandering from book to book. And I’ll write if I have something to say. I’ll take a few weeks off, and I’ll stay off email when I do, away message in place. I’ll rest. In the fall, I’ll work with an eye to my limits. If I’m still drained, I’ll accept that and I’ll say “no.” A lot. I’ll think about how to shift the cultures around me in a more sustainable direction so that rest isn’t just a privilege for faculty with tenure. I’ll think about how to help junior colleagues and students to set and maintain boundaries. I’ll remember that my students won’t be back to normal in the fall either and I’ll continue to treat them with compassion and understanding. It’s been a long two years—for all of us.   References and resources: “Burnout and How to Avoid It” from one of my favorite authorities on happiness, Dr. Laurie Santos at Yale. It’s part of her podcast The Happiness Lab. Santos is going on a leave of absence. She’s noticing that she is heading for burnout and thus wisely changing course. Newspaper article about that here. For more on showing compassion to ourselves as well as to our students, see Kristin Neff and Dr. Chris Germer’s work on self-compassion. A massive number of articles in the Chronicle, including the report Burned Out and Overburdened (which I haven’t read it yet).

A couple of years after joining the faculty at Concordia Seminary, I decided to audition for the Saint Louis Civic Orchestra, a community orchestra made up of professional, semiprofessional, and accomplished amateur musicians from the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. My training on the double bass goes back to my middle-high school years at the conservatory in Panama City, Panama, where I had my first orchestral experiences. Coming to the US for high school and undergraduate studies still afforded me opportunities to play in concert and jazz bands and take double bass lessons. That changed with graduate studies. The pressures of performing well in school in a foreign language, increasing time constraints due to important family and work obligations, and very few chances to play the instrument in ecclesial settings led to a period of decline in creative engagement with music. Not an uncommon problem among graduate students and teachers of theology and religion, I spent so much time focusing on the True and the Good that I ignored the Beautiful. By the time I started my first job at the seminary, Beauty had become the Cinderella of my life: Truth and Goodness made it to the Ball. Beauty got left behind. And my life was the poorer for it. But joining the symphony carved out a space once again in my life for the gift of play. What is play but the habit of reveling in the beauty of God’s creation, delighting in its colors, sounds, aromas, tastes, and textures? Being alive in the body! Being engaged by the senses! The symphony became my playground in the theater (better yet, in the concert hall) of God’s creation. [caption id="attachment_250618" align="alignright" width="376"] (Leopoldo A. Sánchez M. has been a member of the Saint Louis Civic Orchestra for fifteen years, the last eight as Principal Bass. He is pictured third from the left. Photo used with permission.)[/caption] So, where’s your playground? We all need one. When I talk to my seminary students about the place of play in life, I frame our conversations in the context of the need to establish a rhythm in life. Got rhythm? Yes, a rhythm, just like in music! A regular, steady, habitual pattern of sound and movement in which we live, and move, and have our being. I use the Genesis story to show that humans were not only created for movement and labor, but also for repose and sabbath rest. The first day of creation already sets a rhythm for life on earth, evening and morning—what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls the dialectic of creation. Yes, we were created to be responsible stewards of our gardens. But we were also made to be thankful stewards who carve out time to stand still and delight in the Creator’s handiwork. As in music, there is in life a time for sound, a time for silence, and a time for play. Indeed, sound, silence, and play in music may be seen as extensions or embodiments of the musician’s own rhythm of movement, rest, and delight. Music imitates, breathes life. Getting into the rhythm of the orchestra reminds me of the need for rhythm in my own life as a teacher. It reminds me to ask myself: How do I embody in the classroom not only a strong work ethic, but also a restful presence, and a joyful wonder about God’s world? In conversations with students, I use the metaphor of the garden, the mountain, and the playground. We were created for the garden and the mountain, for labor and rest. Rest includes time with God in prayer, praise, and thanksgiving. Ora et labora, work and pray, as the monks proclaim. Rest also includes literal rest, especially sleep. Had enough sleep lately? Busy teachers tend to be quite knowledgeable and hands on when it comes to the gardens they are called to tend to. But it can be quite difficult to find that mountain to retreat to amid piles of papers to grade, articles to write, and meetings to attend. It can be just as hard to find time for the playground, for cultivating curiosity and wonder in the beauty of God’s creation. Playing in the symphony has become that creative space between work and rest for me. Like playing the double bass in the symphony, play involves practice, honing a craft, activity, movement. You can’t exactly wing a symphony! And yet weekly practices with the symphony do not feel like regular everyday work. They are more like oases of refreshment in the desert. And more than that, they are like being in a workshop where you imagine and experiment together with sounds, bowings, fingerings, rhythms, and colors to make something beautiful together. The symphony reminds the teacher in me to see my activity and time with students not only in terms of fulfilling a task, but in terms of finding and embodying a rhythm that allows for time in the garden, the mountain, and the playground. Like playing with colleagues in the symphony, life with students is a creative endeavor that glorifies the Creator and enriches all our lives with beauty in ways that allow us to do things together with curiosity, imagination, and delight. Got rhythm? Let’s play!