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Part Two: Ritual Extends the Depth of Our Imagination. Ritual takes the familiar and enlivens it with our imagination.  Consider it this way, you have a favorite dance or song or prayer. The reason we can dance it, sing it, pray it, again and again is that each time our ingenuity takes the work to another dimension. Each time we feel, express, and see something new that we did not experience before. It is this aspect of ritual that makes it meaningful and alive and different from a routine.  Each time we engage in ritual it comes alive with the genius of our imagination. Ritual can even begin in our imagination and blossom through its application. We imagine a portal, a doorway in liminal spaces and to our delight, the ritual affords the opportunity to be in liminality and create. So, during the ritual there may be revelation, illumination and even inspiration that touches our spirit so that it becomes real. The ritual has moved from a familiar intent, or action, to the manifestation of our imagining.  With practice, we become fluid in ritual making and always expect our imagination to do what it does. In this way, ritual maintains the integrity of being in the present while reaching into the unseen (imagination). Because we are intentional in ritual, it also creates a kind of authority to dreaming and imagining. Ritual helps to declare that what we dream, what we imagine, is as much a part of our collective covenant in Spirit as the faith we have in our Creator and Ancestors working on our behalf.  So, do ritual; do ritual to imagine deeply!

“So, if anyone tells you to go to hell,” I say to my students, “you can say, ‘that’s fine—because Jesus has already been there, so I won’t be alone.’” When I started teaching theology at Columbia Seminary nearly twenty years ago, nobody told me that I needed to talk about hell. And for many years I barely mentioned it. In my own formation, from Sunday school through doctoral studies, the threat of hell had been either a quaint theological fragment of an earlier era, or a harmful piece of proclamation from Other Christians. It was not a pressing concern of the contemporary theologians I engaged, and it was not even a major topic for classical theologians like John Calvin. Like James Cone, I was more concerned about living conditions that might be called “hell on earth” than about any future state of punishment. The one place I did address hell was in connection with Jesus’ “descent into hell” (as affirmed in the Apostles’ Creed). Students wondered what in the world this might mean. It regularly prompted discussions between students who were familiar with this line and those whose churches had deleted it. “Do you ‘descend into hell’?” I began to ask my classes early on when we came to the topic. Students tended to have strong opinions. Ruminations on the presence or absence of hell in the creed led me to discover startling good news in this affirmation, in two ways: To say that the human Jesus of Nazareth experienced not only physical death, but the fullness of spiritual alienation from God—and to affirm that this same human is also one with God—is to affirm that God in Jesus somehow enters the depth of human suffering. There is nothing in human experience, not even hell, that is bereft of the presence of God. It’s Romans 8:38-39 all over again. The descent into hell is not the final word. As the ancient image of the “harrowing of hell” and the common Orthodox anastasis icon portrays it, Jesus descends into hell and then draws up those who are dead into new life. Those in Hades are now joined with Christ in resurrection. I would not have reached this recognition of the good news of Jesus’ descent into hell without following the questions of students. But for many years, this is all I said about hell in Theology 1 and 2. That changed recently, as students began to ask new questions. A couple of years ago, toward the end of the second semester of theology, my co-teacher Tim Hartman and I were talking about Christian faith in a world of religious diversity, and several students were troubled. “We have been taught our whole lives that if you do not accept Jesus Christ and confess him as savior, you are going to hell,” they noted. “Why have we not talked about hell all year?” Tim and I paused. When our classroom had been majority white, I had avoided this topic because I did not think it was important—and no one had questioned that choice. Now that our classroom includes a majority of students from communities that have been minoritized because of race or sexuality (or both), the question resounds differently. We decided to make a change. This year, we added some readings about hell in connection with our discussion of salvation. Engaging this conversation directly enabled students to interrogate what they meant by this term, and how it was related to the gospel. Is “salvation” solely an individual matter, as popular visions of hell seem to suggest? Or is it communal, concerned for the well-being of all people and the whole world? Are heaven and hell actual locations, and if so, what does that mean? What does “hell” suggest about the relation of bodies and souls—are we talking about “souls” going somewhere after death? Focusing on hell also enabled us to wrestle afresh with Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination, in which eternal damnation is not the main point, but is a logical consequence of God’s eternal decree. Not many people (including me) wanted to defend Calvin on this point, but how does hell acknowledge the reality of God’s righteousness, and the significance of human responsibility? And finally, how has teaching about hell functioned in our churches, particularly in ways that harm people who do not conform to social norms? When we followed our students’ questions and made room for conversation about hell, it defused the concerns about its absence. Hell, actually became a fruitful part of a larger whole. So, here’s the takeaway: Following the surprising questions of students, even into hell, led to my own deeper discovery of the good news of a topic that I had previously avoided. How might attention to other student questions similarly open new vistas of discovery in the theology classroom?

Before March 2020, the seminary where I teach didn’t do much in the way of remote learning. Like many educators, my colleagues and I found ourselves rushing to take our teaching online at the same time that many of our students were taking courses remotely for the first time. My colleagues and I found this new mode of teaching terribly awkward. Most of them found that awkwardness frustrating. Not me, though. I was gifted from childhood with a certain awkwardness. It’s cozy. Still, the awkwardness of remote learning wasn’t the only concern being raised in faculty meetings, especially as we were discerning the extent to which we would offer remote learning going forward. That awkwardness was increasingly framed as the consequence of a claim that had more weight behind it in conversations about theological education: that remote learning was disembodied. It seems obvious. When teachers and students aren’t in the same space, but instead find our interactions mediated by a screen and who knows how many miles of cables or electromagnetic waves of various sorts, our teaching and learning are necessarily disembodied. We lose the nonverbal feedback on which we so often rely in conversation. The flow of our class discussions becomes awkward, either with one person talking over another or with everyone raising their virtual or physical hands and waiting just a little too long to be called on. It is difficult to keep students’ attention for hours on end if we aren’t physically in person, and it’s hard to foster that sense of classroom community that often grows over the course of a term. It seems obvious that remote learning is necessarily disembodied learning… but that’s not actually the case. Everything we do, we do as creatures of flesh and blood, pain and pleasure, energy and fatigue. When our teaching and learning aren’t practiced in a shared physical space, they are nonetheless practiced in physical spaces that meaningfully impact our learning, in bodies that each have their own mix of needs and abilities. Our reception, processing, and expression of ideas are embodied processes, wherever our bodies happen to be in relation to one another. Intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement with teaching and learning happens within and between bodies. Remote learning is not necessarily disembodied. It just turns out that teaching techniques designed to harness one form of embodiment don’t always translate well to a significantly different form of embodiment. If we can accept that no teaching and learning are necessarily disembodied, but that they must be embodied differently, it is possible to turn what feels like disembodied teaching and learning into teaching and learning that are embodied in particularly meaningful ways. For those who—like me—continue to wonder just what it means to engage in embodied teaching at a distance, I offer three suggestions: Let go of the need for controlled learning environments in favor of precisely the kind of adaptability students will need in their own work. Consider how you might model and promote such adaptability in your teaching. Reflect on the value of people working in their everyday spaces (e.g., offices, homes), rather than the constructed space of the in-person classroom. Discern how you might invite people to treat their everyday spaces as spaces for learning just as they are, rather than as something out of which learning space must be carved. Re-commit to the truth that being embodied together in ways that promote rich learning—marked by equity no less than serious intellectual engagement—requires intentional practices of community formation, whether we’re in the same physical space or at a distance.