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Listening for God Amid the Clatter

The January 28, 2008, Monday Connection talk by Charles Moody -- an Akins High School teacher who opens college doors for students.

Introduction

Thank you, Mr. Cooper. I’m grateful for and honored by the chance to speak here today.

A couple of months ago I had the privilege of being here to listen to Dr. McHorse speak at this luncheon.
He started by saying that we (the audience) had no idea how far he was outside his comfort zone. I assume he was referring to being unused to public speaking, or perhaps public speaking about topics touching on faith (though you would certainly never have guessed from the eloquent talk he gave).

Well, that certainly applies for me as well, and maybe even with added force. If you’ve known my family over the years you may be able to appreciate that this true. To say that proselytizing is a bit out of our line is to engage in some wild understatement. I mean, if there was ever a family made for the Episcopal Church, we are they.
I know that my mother, for example, deep within her, still regards the passing of the peace during the Sunday service as a dangerous innovation. And she holds out a hope that our church’s 30-odd-year experiment with it will be called off, and dignity and propriety will be restored to the order of worship.

I tease her, and of course I exaggerate, but only a little, and the truth is that I understand and share those feelings. So it really is quite a bit outside my comfort zone to stand here today with the assignment of talking about my faith, or offering advice to others about making the connection between the faith we profess on Sunday and the work we do starting on Monday.
But being outside your comfort zone (as Dr. McHorse put it) is, in fact, what I want to talk about today, so in a sense it’s fitting that I am there today as I speak to you about it.

Outline :

My title is “Listening for God Amid the Clatter” and I’d like to start by explaining my title somewhat and giving a bit of a report from the frontlines of an urban high school about the kinds of clatter that too often immerse the lives of our young people.
Then I’d like to shift to the kinds of clatter that may be less obvious, but are more personally relevant to my life and perhaps to some of yours.
Along the way, I may offer a few theological reflections or bits of personal witness, but I assure you that I will do so only in the oblique, tentative way that my upbringing allows.

[Obvious Kinds of Clatter]

My title may raise the questions “What do you mean by clatter?” and “Why do you choose the word ‘clatter’?”
The answer to the second question is in part just that I like the word. As, in truth, I like all words of im’itative origin: like gurgle, or pop, or hiccup.
I read in the dictionary the other day that some linguists believe the word “slump” belongs in that category also, and I hope it does, because I like to imagine some especially rotund Henry VIII-type being who actually made that sound when slumping down in his chair after a big meal.

“Clatter” literally means “noisy rapid talk” or “a rattling noise,” but I think it’s as good a word as any to stand for the whole category of things that distract us. Distract us from what should be our priorities, and impede the state of mind in which we are receptive to God’s call and alert to the opportunities he places before us in our daily lives.
As a high school teacher, I spend much of my day surrounded by, literally, clatter: boisterous students, ringing bells, intrusive P.A. announcements, the identical intrusive P.A. announcement repeated a minute or two later, for no apparent reason, and so on.
But for me, most days reach a point when the clatter fades a bit. This is when the last bell rings, and my class empties out. Or when I get behind the wheel of my car. Or when I get home and have a moment to sit and unwind. Any of those can offer the chance to breathe, to reflect. I’m eager for that time, and grateful for it when it arrives.

And I worry a lot that the young people I see every day never have that moment in their day to escape the clatter, or at least they don’t take that opportunity if they do have it.

After all, when the last bell rings and my classroom empties out, they join the throng of students in the halls. And whereas I leave school by getting behind the wheel of my car, they (in most cases) will pile onto a bus with 50 other students. And whereas for me, the hours of work are an interlude of anxiety and chaos, from which my home life is a refuge, for them it may be exactly the reverse; what I experience as sort of hectic disorder from 9:00 – 4:15 at Akins High School may be for them, by comparison to their lives at homes, a period of safety and structure.

But when I visit with the students or spend time around them outside of class, I’m struck by the realization that my wish for that clatter-free moment, for myself or for them, has really become quite archaic, and in fact marks a significant generational divide.

Certainly some degree of stability and security about one’s basic needs (food, shelter) is practically essential for a student to succeed. I see a lot of students who don’t have that, and it’s heart-rending. But for the ones who do, the ones who have at least a decent home life, the last thing in the world they would see as missing is moments of tranquility. The 16 or 17-year-old of today is no more harboring a wish that they could have a moment of calm and reflection in their day than they are secretly wishing they could look cool like Mr. Moody in his loafers and button –down shirt. Indeed, to generalize, I would say that today’s teenager, if threatened with a moment of peace like that, will almost reflexively flee from it. (again, much as they would if someone threatened to dress them like their 41-year-teacher).

The normal state for many teenagers today is what I think is very euphemistically described as “multi-tasking”: that is, talking on the phone while doing homework, checking e-mail, listening to music, and text-messaging. This state of activity is not a necessity driven by added demands on them, and I can tell you unequivocally it is not some vast leap forward in productivity that our teens have made in the last 8-10 years. Instead, it is quite simply a preference. Teenagers will say that unless they’re doing more than one thing at once, they feel jittery.

When the bell rings at the end of a class, I see 20 cell phones and 15 I-Pod’s instantly withdrawn from the pockets where (if I’m lucky) they’ve been stowed. Students walking down the hall, or waiting in the cafeteria line, in a group of 4 friends will all four be talking or texting on their phones. Which makes me wonder, what’s wrong with the friends you’re actually in line with? why not communicate with them, and let the people you’re sending messages to communicate with the people they’re with? But that’s not how it’s done now.

The Washington Post had an article last year about a family who was rather chagrined to get their wireless phone bill and find that their 17-year-old daughter Sofia had sent 6807 text messages the previous month. As the family’s plan provided for 100 free text messages a month, and Sofia was sending somewhat in excess of 200 per day, some substantialcharges were incurred. Said Sofia : “It’s whatever pops into my head. There’s no stopping it. Sometimes I’ll be on the phone with someone and I get texted, and then I’m having two conversations at once.” Sofia ’s mother reports that she’s seen Sofia and her friends text each other while in the same room.

The article quoted several other parents who likewise got blindsided by their teenagers, and in each case they said something along the lines of, “Well, one month of that was enough. And we put a stop to that, believe you me. We switched to an unlimited texting plan. And we now make our son/daughter pay for it.” And I couldn’t help but thinking “so when so you say ‘you put a stop to it,’ what you mean is, you didn’t put a stop to it.” What they saw as the problem and put a stop to was paying their wireless company per text message. But I think as a parent I might have some concerns that went beyond that. Such as: What else was going on while those 6807 messages were being sent? If you conservatively estimate 30 seconds for each of those messages, that’s close to two hours a day, just to write them (not to read the 6807 replies). What other things didn’t get done, or didn’t get done well, during those two hours, or four hours?

Sofia , of course, is an extreme example, but she’s not an aberration; she’s the avatar of a worldwide phenomenon. According to the Wireless Association 158 billion (with a b) text messages were sent in the U.S. in 2006. This was double the previous year, and it may well have doubled again for all I know. But just to get to that 2006 number, every single one of the people aged 10-30 in our country would have to send 2000 text messages over the course of the year.

Some people take a nonchalant view of this, and say teen behavior is pretty constant, it just changes in form. In my day, it would have been a teenager on the phone for 2 hours, now they’re messaging, what’s the difference? Wringing your hands over it makes about as much sense as parents in the 1950’s getting worked up because their children were listening to Elvis instead of Bing Crosby. Others even go further and find some encouraging signs. For example, they point out that a telephone conversation is just between two people, but kids usually text message to an entire group of friends, so it’s part of how kids establish connection to and camaraderie with a group.

Maybe – I hope they’re right. But I find it tough to be quite as sanguine. To me the multiplicity of conversations means that you’re not really having any conversation in a true sense. The nature of the communication is devoid of some fairly significant social cues, like eye contact or voice tone. A psychology professor at the University of Alabama has started studying the effects of this medium on conversation and has concluded (what is no surprise at all to me) that when text messaging people tend to focus much more on themselves and are less likely to focus clearly on what the other person has to say. (Calling text-messaging a medium reminds me that we may now need to update the quip that comedian Ernie Kovacs made years ago about TV. He said that television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well-done. The same is definitely true of texting.)

The nature of a text-message conversation is such that you have a lot of control: you can ignore a comment without consequence in ways that it’s difficult to do in a face-to-face or a phone conversation). An unwelcome intrusion can be deleted by pressing a button.

So I worry more generally that, in these teenagers’ intentionally clatter-filled existence, it’s tough for any troubling thought to get a very thorough hearing. I trust we’ve all had the sensation of a nagging doubt or disquieting recognition gradually gnaw at us and over the course of several hours or days intrude its way into the forefront of our mind. But I am very much afraid that I have students who may never have had that experience.

It may be a cliché for those of us who are teachers to think of our underperforming or difficult-to-educate students as having empty heads, but the truth is they are full. So full that the prospect of giving sustained attention and focus to something to add to their knowledge seems senseless or even impossible. That really is the difference that I see between our successful students and our unsuccessful ones – the ability to focus and give sustained attention or effort to a task.

In his book Last Child in the Woods , columnist Richard Louv describes how a bewildered mother reported to him watching her children on the ski slopes when took a vacation to Colorado . It was picture-perfect day, and the kids were skiing down the beautiful slopes with their family, all wearing their headphones. So the sensory input that that experience offered (snow, scenery, speed, and rushing air) was not enough, and had to be augmented. It’s sad because being surrounded by the majesty of Colorado mountains is exactly the kind of setting in which one feels humbled and reflective, in which one is forced into a different perspective on oneself, in which the clatter has died down and one is especially receptive to insight and inspiration. And it’s troubling to think that perhaps that’s exactly why that music was needed, and why students describe feeling jittery when they don’t have several things going on at once.

Former Dartmouth College president James Freedman I think had something similar in mind when he said: “Everywhere we look, the world urges us to turn on the radio or TV, make a phone call, see a movie. Many of us, I fear, worry that, if left alone with our thoughts and feelings, we may discover that we do not make very good company for ourselves.”

[Less Obvious Types of Clatter]

OK, that ends my jeremiad against cell phones and text messaging, and may leave you wonder what exactly is the lesson you’re supposed to take from this? Not to send 6800 text messages a month, and to avoid texting and downloading music when you’re supposed to be doing homework? No, not really. I suspect that everyone here does pretty well on those scores.

But it’s a way of leading into a bit more of a personal history for me, and explaining why paradoxically, leaving a career in the law to immerse myself in the clatter-filled existence of these teenagers so at odds with my temperament and tastes, has actually been a way of escaping clatter in my life.
I’m speaking here of a less obvious kind of clatter, but one that may be of greater relevance to all age groups and to the Monday Connection crowd.

You’ll recall that I defined “clatter’ back at the start as all the things that impede the state of mind in which we are receptive to God’s call and alert to the opportunities He places before us. And the less obvious type of clatter I’m speaking of now is our need to be in control. Our very natural tendency to keep our lives in the comfortable grooves in which we feel competent. And our seeking out of those situations in which we know that our knowledge and expertise will be acknowledged and can be brought to bear to influence the situation in the right direction.

I’m not sure that actually describes anything in my brief time as a lawyer, but I’m confident that it does for many lawyers and for accomplished professionals of other types. Indeed, I think that’s what the law in the bigger sense is: it takes the messy disorder of life and channels it into recognized forms and pleadings that can be handled and addressed according to rules. This is a magnificent thing; it’s a big part of what separates us from societies torn apart by violence, chaos, and corruption.

But for me, I think embarking on a legal career fit dangerously well into some aspects of my personality that were not especially ones that needed to be cultivated. From the first I had a great affinity for the study of law, because it was sort of how I preferred to relate to people anyway – formally and correctly, with some things being allowed and others out of bounds. And here was a whole discipline and profession that let me embrace those kinds of rules all day long.

And also, for me, it offered a pathway into adult life that would let me stay in some comfortable, familiar grooves of my life: I went to work in my father’s law firm, with people I had known and admired since I was young (and still know and admire today). And I was close by to, living a very parallel life to my oldest Austin friends, who I’d had since I was about 4 or younger.
And there’s nothing wrong with any of this, unless it becomes kind of an organizing principle in your life, and I felt a decade or so ago that I was running that risk. That I was structuring my life in such a way that there would always be rules to guide my response, and that I would come to almost any situation armed with my training in those rules.
It’s a powerful temptation, or at least it is for me, and I’m still very much subject to it. I feel that if I can just make this new situation fit into the pattern that I know, that I have had success with, that I understand and can deal with, then I can act and shape things, and I can know that reassurance of feeling myself to be consequential. It can become a pretty loud voice in your head, especially when new and uncomfortable circumstances arise, and thus may be a kind of clatter that can interfere with having a mind open to God’s call.
This instinct, which I suspect we’re all are subject to in some degree, is captured well (and I think maybe even with a little latent humor) in the Gospel story of the Transfiguration. Jesus goes to the mountaintop, where his visage and garments are transformed into radiance like the sun, and Moses and Elijah appear beside him. And Peter hops up and says, in effect: “This is great. This is one of those situations that people commemorate with a monument or a shrine, so why don’t I build three booths here for the three of you.” (Very sympathetic to Peter, because I can sure see myself doing something like that.) But the Father’s voice thunders down from above and says, in effect: “Peter, stop. This is not any kind of situation. It is like nothing in your range of experience, it is not something you understand, and you should just listen.”

In the first chapter of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when the ghost of Jacob Marley appears, he arrives amid a tremendous . . .clatter . . . he’s dragging chains, and explains to Ebenezer Scrooge that he is wearing the chain he forged in life. Marley’s ghost says: “It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.” So I reached a point, about a decade ago, where I concluded that I was not walking abroad among my fellow man and, given my order-seeking personality, was likely not to without a change in my life. And I decided I’d better start now, while I was alive, rather than having to do it after I was dead like Marley, because I sure wasn’t going to be any good at that.

So I left practicing law in Austin in 1996 and joined an organization called Teach for America, and through that organization was placed – a short 3-4 months later -- in a history classroom in Elsa, Texas, a small town in the Rio Grande Valley about 20 miles from the border. And I don’t if my rationale for making this change was sound or not, but it unquestionable did make the change I intended. B y training and temperament I was accustomed to interacting with adults logically, and here I was in charge of a classroom of 15-16 year-olds, where logic is pretty close to useless.

I tell you, that concentrates the mind wonderfully. You pretty quickly realize that nothing you bring into that classroom (no credentials or knowledge) is going to be any kind of guarantee of success, and if you’re going to have success it’s going to have to be based on a relationship built within that classroom. So for me that meant having to give attention to and tap into things that were not and are not exactly my fortes – spontaneity, creativity, flexibility. And it certainly meant focusing less on what I knew, and more on these kids in my class, what they wanted, and what they would respond to. I’ve got to believe that that feeling of powerlessness (which I think is really an awareness of powerlessness) has some spiritual benefit to it, because if nothing else I was highly receptive to anything, divine or otherwise, that might help me.

[In my American history class, we try as much as possible to get outside the textbook and to study history through the primary documents so that the people we’re studying about are actually speaking to us. And in the early part of the course, when we’re studying the Massachusetts settlers, who came here for religious reasons, and established communities based upon their religious beliefs, that leads us into some of their religious writings. Two of them are John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity and Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

You probably all read those sermons at some point along the way in school, but in case they’ve slipped from your minds, I’ll just summarize them briefly. (They’ve undoubtedly slipped from my students’ minds, even though we read them only a few months ago.)

John Winthrop delivered A Model of the Christian Charity in 1630 aboard the flagship Arbella on the way to the new world to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His sermon is best remembered for his phrasing of his aspiration that their settlement would become a “city upon a hill” for the rest of the world to emulate. But it also contains beautiful language about how the people aboard the ship being in covenant with God and how they could fulfill it. He urges them “to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.” “We must delight in each other, make others’ condition our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together.” His sermon offers the hope of God giving them enormous transformative power if they do uphold that covenant.

Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, delivered in 1741, is quite different in tone. He tells his listeners that “God holds them over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.” And it is nothing but His hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. He then launches into a rather extended, detailed description of what an eternity in hell will be like.
Jonathan Edwards’ imagery is a bit out of vogue in the pulpits today – Episcopalian or otherwise. The fires of hell don’t get much play nowadays, and comparing your parishioners to insects also may be a bit impolitic, especially if you’re in the middle of a stewardship campaign.
But I’m a big fan of this sermon, and not just because it’s a great attention-grabber in the classroom. I like it because it, especially in combination with A Model of Christian Charity, it raises some good discussions. I ask my students what’s changed.
What’s changed is the audience and their circumstances. The people in John Winthrop’s audience are outcasts from England as religious dissenters, engaged in a hazardous voyage to an unknown wilderness that they think is likely to be even more hostile. When he said, in effect, OK, listen up, this is what God wants of us if we’re going to survive, I’m pretty sure he had their attention.
Edwards is talking 111 years later, to their great-great-grandchildren – prosperous merchants, people of reputation and standing in their community. Also people who in the intervening decades have begun to be reached by Enlightenment ideas starting to seep over from Europe, telling them that the universe is not quite as mysterious and forbidding as we’ve always thought – instead, it operates according to very regular principles which mankind was making leaps forward in understanding.
Edwards has to convince his people how much of those types of control that we perceive that we have over our lives are an illusion. Spiritually, they’re an illusion. And if we could see ourselves as we truly are in relation to God, we are in a relationship of utter dependence like an insect being dangled.]

Edwards’ style may be one that we dismiss today, but I think his project in that sermon is still needed in our lives, and the underlying message is not one that we should dismiss casually. We all create a lot of defenses, mechanisms for ordering our lives. Letting them drop, or putting ourselves in situations where they are useless, may be when we hear God more clearly.

I hope that in a small way my move to the classroom has helped me take a step or two in this direction – that doing something that is not comfortable and natural for me brings me a little closer to that daily recognition of helplessness. It may be preposterous to try to claim a sense of incapability to meet your daily responsibilities as some sign of virtue, but I hope it is, because by that standard I hit the mark a lot of days.

[Report from Akins]

What have I learned by being in a situation where I’m forced into listening and watching?
One thing is that practically everything for these students is relationship-based: they aren’t going to do something based on a rational calculation of their self-interest as often as they will because someone they know and trust is doing it, or asks them to.
This is the obstacle that sinks a lot of the efforts to bring information about college to the students: the information is not going to have any importance to the student unless it comes from someone of importance to the student.
So that recognition has led at Akins to the launching of an initiative called Project Paradigm. The premise behind it is that – especially for students who lack the relationships at home that so many of us we blessed with, that pushed us to higher education – we need to invest in and cultivate those relationships at school. And they may not be the ones that the school organizational structure expects them to be, such as counselor-student. We may need to rely more on teacher-student relationships and (especially) student – student relationships.
The last two years, we’ve taken a group of our top 11 th graders on a college trip during spring break, making with them the deal that the expertise they acquire about college and college admissions is to be shared with their classmates. That their job as seniors is help counselors guide and mentor their classmates through the process. And that they also need to be spokespersons to the lower grades about college and how to prepare. Each Paradigm group is also expected to decide upon and implement a project that will leave Akins with some resource for college-bound students that wasn’t there before.

Projects (last 2 years)

college binder – binder of materials about standardized tests, scholarships, financial aid, etc. created for each of 500 seniors to help them organize their college process
students staffing the school’s College and Career Center before and after school and during lunch
Shadow Day – about forty 9 th and 10 th graders, most of whom would be the first in their family to go to college, will spend a day following an Akins alum (at UT, St. Edward’s, or Texas State) through the routine of college life (classes, studying, work, etc.)

Successes?

For the Paradigm students themselves, and for the set of their peers aiming for college, it’s been a definite success in terms of the confidence with which they approach the process, and their college aspirations for themselves. Akins students are applying to and being admitted to schools that a couple of years ago no one at Akins was even considering: Rice, University of Pennsylvania , Stanford, University of Chicago , Vanderbilt, George Washington University , American University , Boston College .
A student who didn’t even go on the trip but was intrigued and inspired by what she heard about it applied to NYU, and is now a freshman there.
Also, when you empower students with the idea that making the school better is their job, you get some surprising results that would be very tough to legislate top-down:

students lobbying successfully for AP Art History course
students holding new AP teacher accountable by telling her that she needed to assign more homework

[Conclusion]

Am I better off spiritually for having made the shift? I really don’t know. But I do more frequently have days when I feel that I am no longer the prosperous merchant or comfortable farmer needing the jolt of Jonathan Edwards’ fire and brimstone, but the huddled, frightened outcast aboard the Arbella listening for John Winthrop’s words of hope.

In that vulnerability, in that dependence, in that enduring sense of incapability that accompanies my job, my hope is be more constantly in a state of recognition of my dependence on God, and readiness to hear His call. So my hope is that God may not need to thunder quite as loud to make himself heard over the clatter.

On Saturday, I had the great pleasure of being at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Houston for the ordination of my good friend Carissa Baldwin, stepdaughter of Nancy Springer-Baldwin, director of development here at the seminary. The last page of the service leaflet from the ceremony contained a wonderful passage from the theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman. I think it makes an apt quote to conclude with today as a final thought to leave you with about escaping the clatter to listen for the call of God.
In this passage, he is describing the sense of being in a fortress that he himself has built to hold out the invasion of the love of God. He writes:

“But I have stayed here long enough.

There is light over the barriers. O my God—

The darkness of my house forgive

And overtake my soul.

I relax the barriers.

I abandon all that I think I am,

All that I hope to be,

All that I believe I possess.

I let go of the past,

I withdraw my grasping hand from the future,

And in the great silence of this moment,

I alertly . . . rest my soul.”

Thank you.

Biography of Charles Moody

Building on what he witnessed while teaching in the Rio Grande Valley , Charles Moody launched Project Paradigm at Akins High School two years ago. The aim of the innovative project is to “expose kids to opportunities beyond the familiar,” says Akins principal Mary Alice Delke.

About half the students at Akins in South Austin are considered economically disadvantaged. Less than half its graduates went on to college during the school’s first two years. Graduates who did go to college enrolled primarily in Texas universities. Moody, who teaches history and government, had a better idea for students he taught in advanced placement courses. Why not apply to elite universities throughout the country who offer substantial financial aid to qualified students so they can diversify their enrollments?

Moody took ten students on a 2006 Spring Break tour of eight prestigious colleges in the Northeastern states. The group sat in on classes, took tours and talked with college students. Back at Akins HS, they became peer to peer mentors by sharing their experiences with fellow classmates and another Spring Break tour happened last March.

Moody, an Austin native who graduated from Stanford and the UT Law School, left the legal profession at age 30 to find something new. He joined Teach for America , a highly selective corps of teachers who work in low-income schools, and taught at Elsa High School in the Valley for four years. A fellow teacher took Elsa students on a college trip that became the model for Project Paradigm at Akins. Moody, a member of St. David’s Episcopal Church, is now in his fifth year at Akins.