[from C S Lewis’ ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, vol. XXIV (4 September 1943), p. 717]
Every now and then one stands and looks at oneself in the now as compared to what we have been in the past. Perhaps a photo falls out of a box, perhaps we meet an old friend after many years of separation, perhaps we have a conversation with someone younger who wakens in us a memory…. whatever the spur, we are left thinking, “this is me as I was, and I am because of that, but that is not what I am”.
C.S. Lewis tells of meeting a young man ready to go back to school and of his shock at finding that the young man was not entirely unhappy to be back in term. Indeed, Lewis was shocked to find himself shocked – and it drove him to consider what of his own schooling had contributed to the person he became.
“Very little” and “a great deal” is his answer.
On the one hand, Lewis’ first school was a brutal and dehumanizing experience. English public schools (by which is meant the great private schools at the head of which are Rugby and Eton, a usage of the term ‘public’ quite different from that in Australia), were only then coming out of the nineteenth century of “Tom Brown’s School Days” – a system where cold baths and abuse was considered “good for the character”. It produced the rulers of empire, but (as Lewis could testify, as he watched his brother decline into alcoholism and physical decay) it also had a brutal impact on generations of “public servants” - and fathers and sons.
Added to the normal abuse and “fagging”, Lewis’ school was run by a genuine, certifiable madman, who died a year after the school collapsed in 1910. “The bellowing and grimacing old man with his cane, his threats, and his ogreish facetiousness, the inky walls, the stinking shed which served both as a latrine and a store for our play boxes, all “heavily vanished” like a dream’. Whatever other impact Lewis’s schooling had, it was vicious enough to leave a remarkably clear trace on a very small, bright boy’s mind.
Perhaps (or, rather, certainly!) it is because I am not as bright as Lewis –but I cannot remember anything of such significance in my own earliest schooling. My mother tells me I was somewhat vague and did not read at all until I reached fourth class – from which time I was so socially inept as to never again seen without a book in hand. My own haziness, and the brutal precisions of his own memories are perhaps a measure of the contrast between my own fairly happy upbringing and schooling experience and that relentlessly described by Lewis.
For Lewis, the occasion is grounds for reflection. He goes searching for the source of his reaction. He dismisses the thought that his envy was provoked by “the spirit which says “I went through it, why shouldn’t they”? He is right not to pass too quickly over this, though it does not apply in this case. The spirit of tradition is not all bad, the summary reflection of all that is good in local church traditions by many modern speakers notwithstanding. Tradition becomes deadly, not because it carries forward elements of the past, but when there is a “spirit” of condemning one generation to the pain and anguish of those that have gone before. No wonder that later generations looked upon the blood and oppression that were locked up in the Victorian categories of “manhood”, “womanhood”, “courage”, “duty” etc, and said “no thank you”. One may be proud of one’s forebears and their sacrifices without feeling the requirement to baptize the actions of contemporary stupid and venal political leaders in the blood of those who have gone before. Moral choices in the present are still present, and fully free, both for the good and the bad. “If it was good enough for them” doesn’t necessarily mean it is good enough for me – it simply means that previous generations had their frameworks and responsibilities to work within, and I have mine. Neither of us is acquitted by the other.
Lewis also does well in identifying the “dead hand” in intergenerational relationships for another reason. One of the great social institutions left my own generation – and we will perhaps be the last generation to carry this particular mark – was an almost total disconnection between public life and private life, between thought and emotion, between fathers as people and their children.
In churches, the marker for this shift has been the emergence of common worship styles, and disappearance of “the church of the ten commandments”. We threaten to replace that form of legalism with another, of course, removing the echoing voice from Sinai and replacing it with the bribery of blessing theology, but that is a more nakedly obvious institution, and one from which people have shown themselves capable of voting with their feet.
In the interim, there is space for freedom, for people to truly connect with one another in ways which are personal rather than institutional. It is a thought which came home to me forcefully when interviewing a leader of the 1970’s charismatic movement. Describing how he boarded a boat to go to Sydney for training, my subject noted that he watched the figure of his father retreating on the dock, his figure become smaller and smaller as the boat moved away, only to realize that neither of them had told the other that he loved him. His father, an “old school man”, never did so throughout his long life.
Like Lewis’ experience, there was something about that generation which was the fruit of bitter experience. They (finding the love of God) were great pathfinders and starters of things. They founded missions, agencies, journals, schools, churches, hospitals and you name it, with astonishing energy. They were the generation of the Everready Bunny, driven by tasks and outcomes in part because they spent their lives seeking for the Father they had never met. In turn, they sought to become the fathers that they never had. The result is an experiment in progress.
The current generation is certainly better at emotional engagement and the life of groups – a factor which has shown itself in the growth of urban church cultures and perhaps in the decline of the spiritual frontiersmen (the “Pastor/Evangelist”) which typified the early Pentecostal churches. It is yet to be seen, however, whether they can engage with ideas and the life of the mind with the clarity required by the apologetics of their generation. There is an observable struggle with entering into maturity (whatever that is) which their parents didn’t know, simply because there is no point in which they are ‘kicked out of the nest’. Some have gone back down the pathway towards Sinai – others are enjoying the fading glow of the blessers. Yet others are seeking for a home somewhere between the two, and are discovering that unless they build it themselves, there is no home to be found in an age which Peter Berger has called the age of the ‘Homeless Mind’.
Lewis’ short account of his very first school is instructive here. If my experience of schooling in 1960’s Western Sydney and his in the supposedly privileged world of the English Public Schools in 1908-1910 (which he called “Belsen”) are worlds apart, they are similar on one point. Lewis ends his reflection by saying that “while we are planning the education of the future we can be rid of the illusions that we shall ever replace destiny. Make the plans as good as you can, of course. But be sure that the deep and final effect on every single boy [sic] will be something you never envisaged and will spring from little free movements is your machine which neither your blueprint nor your working model gave any hint of”. (p. 26). It is a sobering thought, but one which rings true.
The boy that was me at Kingswood Primary School can remember almost nothing of what he was taught. What I, and a thousand others learnt in Penrith’s schools in those days related to those elements of schooling (hours, holidays, friendships, sour milk, funny teachers, terror at dancing classes…etc) which built spaces between the elements of curriculum being taught. I learnt to read and write and add – for that I am grateful. What I was doing for the other five of the six years that I was at Primary I do not know. The man that I am now knows, however, that as I stand in front of students, as I stand in pulpits in various places, whatever it is that I am teaching is only a fragment of what is, and what will be learnt by those who hear me.
For Lewis, this possibility is a paean of freedom, a cry of victory over the oppressors and bullies who called themselves teachers, but who were in fact merely the educational press-gangs of Empire. For me it is a warning shot across the bows of teaching as a profession, and a reminder that it can only ever truly be teaching when it is a vocation. Most of the results of what I do are not in my hands, but in the hands of God, who alone can see the “little free movements” of formation suspended in grace.
Teaching is bread upon the waters: how it returns and in what quantity, needs to be the subject of prayer as well as good planning, attached to a hearty expectation that we will all be surprised when it comes out in the wash. To speak straight into the purposes of God – whether or not we can predict the outcomes – is a privilege beyond words, unless those words are ones of praise to the One who makes freedom out of our binding, blessings out of Sinai, wisdom out of our ignorance.
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Posted by: Peony | October 29, 2008 at 01:46 PM