Another Word from Our Sponsor(s?)

Instead of reading anything I've written lately, go and listen to this and/or read the G.K. Chesterton essay (not directly related to the sermon to which I just linked, but still one of my favorites) below.

The Methuselahite
(from Chesterton's book All Things Considered, which, I remind you, is [gloriously] in the public domain)

I [s]aw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertaining and deeply philosophical incident. A man was enlisting as a soldier at Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an inquiry about what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial gravity the man wrote down the word "Methuselahite." Whoever looks over such papers must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his time; unless the Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist knowledge he could not "place" Methuselahism among what Bossuet called the variations of Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the tenets and tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it meant. The soldier replied that it was his religion "to live as long as he could."

Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, that answer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads of quarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religious problems and religious books. Every day the daily paper reviews some new philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the whole two thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as or wise as that word "Methuselahite." The whole meaning of literature is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day.

Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their new religions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all the way down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and be able to cut them short with a single inspired word. One of them will begin, "The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy in Nature...." "Methuselahite," I shall say sharply; "good morning." "Human Life," another will say, "Human Life, the only ultimate sanctity, freed from creed and dogma...." "Methuselahite!" I shall yell. "Out you go!" "My religion is the Religion of Joy," a third will explain (a bald old man with a cough and tinted glasses), "the Religion of Physical Pride and Rapture, and my...." "Methuselahite!" I shall cry again, and I shall slap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall down. Then a pale young poet with serpentine hair will come and say to me (as one did only the other day): "Moods and impressions are the only realities, and these are constantly and wholly changing. I could hardly therefore define my religion...." "I can," I should say, somewhat sternly. "Your religion is to live a long time; and if you stop here a moment longer you won't fulfil it."

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends idleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen—it can almost certainly be prophesied—that in this saturnalia of sophistry there will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to idealise cowardice. And when we are once in this unhealthy world of mere wild words, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice! "Is not life a lovely thing and worth saving?" the soldier would say as he ran away. "Should I not prolong the exquisite miracle of consciousness?" the householder would say as he hid under the table. "As long as there are roses and lilies on the earth shall I not remain here?" would come the voice of the citizen from under the bed. It would be quite as easy to defend the coward as a kind of poet and mystic as it has been, in many recent books, to defend the emotionalist as a kind of poet and mystic, or the tyrant as a kind of poet and mystic. When that last grand sophistry and morbidity is preached in a book or on a platform, you may depend upon it there will be a great stir in its favour, that is, a great stir among the little people who live among books and platforms. There will be a new great Religion, the Religion of Methuselahism: with pomps and priests and altars. Its devout crusaders will vow themselves in thousands with a great vow to live long. But there is one comfort: they won't.

For, indeed, the weakness of this worship of mere natural life (which is a common enough creed to-day) is that it ignores the paradox of courage and fails in its own aim. As a matter of fact, no men would be killed quicker than the Methuselahites. The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it. And in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little the theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life. For there is one riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up. If it was the man's religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he enlisting as a soldier?

Diary Day, the First

Today was fast-paced and rather difficult, but worthwhile. Found out that one of the professors I work with seems to have pretty unrealistic standards for her ESL students' grammatical skills. No wonder the ESL students have been grumbling for some weeks now about her; I thought it was just because said instructor isn't clear on assignment directions (that's what I can mainly tell from lab stuff, and of course I have my own personal experience) - but today I saw, for the first time, a graded product. Red pen over every visible error--of which there were many, but of quite varying degrees of seriousness--and comments that weren't meant to be tactless but sometimes read that way. A barely-passing grade at the bottom. An attempt at consolation (after three negative adjectives describing her sentences, something like "but you are IMPROVING"). And all this to a student who's only been writing in English (maybe even speaking English - I don't remember now) for two years and spends more hours in the lab than any other student I can think of. And this isn't even the instructor whose class was designed so poorly (and so far below college-level) that I actually reported it to her dean - this was someone else.

Yikes.

Writing centers usually don't comment on instructors' policies, especially negatively, to students. But after some thought, I deliberately broke that rule. I explained to the student the difference between the standard she was meeting in class and the standard she would actually be held to during portfolio assessment. And I told her that the standard in class was higher than I would set, and that for the amount of time that she had spent working with English, she should be proud of the work she had done.

I did also tell her what the instructor was right about. The student does have a lot of errors that impede meaning, and we did talk about that.

I left her doing an extra-credit assignment that will raise her grade on the red-penned one...if she gets at least a C. When she left the lab today, I didn't feel as though, according to her instructor's usual standard, her odds were very good.

She's going to come back tomorrow. God, please help her - we can't just edit. But at this point, that's about what she'd need.

*

One thing I prayed for, I did receive - and it was a big victory. I had a very productive conversation with a new advisee, who had been flirting with educational choices, for the fall semester, that I considered unwise. By the time she got to me, most of the hard work inside her had been done already - by God, I think, through His use of several things, including her sometimes-difficult creative-writing class. The whole thing, start to finish - talking about aspirations and such, talking about classes, choosing classes, et cetera - took about ninety minutes, but it didn't feel like it. I left the meeting hungry and tired - but excited and grateful. I walked over to another building and (after a bathroom break) bought a hamburger, squeezed on ketchup/a little mustard/a dab of mayo, and spread the condiments together with a plastic knife. I ate it with, of all things, cinnamon-sugar Pringles (brought from home - I think I'd bought them at Job Lot) - a late lunch after a pretty busy day.

A Pentina

Curled up on the couch in the cold,
I press keyboarding fingers listlessly to lettered squares,
thinking of friends on couches, in meetings,
on planes, at work,
everywhere but here.

"Don't abandon the here
and now," people say, cheerfully cold,
diagnosing me: I'm unwilling to work
to turn circles to squares,
to ask God to bring heartfulness out of watery meetings.

Surely true. But I'm tired of new meetings,
of crestfalls after hoping that here
at last are the boring squares,
of the inevitable moment of cold
wet feeling that every fresh beginning is yet more work.

I don't know if I'd even want it to work
to "be intentional," plan earnest meetings,
march down the salt-filmed street like it isn't even cold.
I'm too chest-weighted. I want them here,
All sitting knee-huggingly in Sunday knots and weeknight squares.

The happy girl squares
Her shoulders, then bends to work
In the seedbed lovingly dug for her. But I carve a cavern here.
Stalagmite words and echoing eyes have blue-black meetings,
Watering pin-sprouting pods that curl in the cold.

In cold town squares, we huddle up for meetings.
Everything's more work out here, but we can't talk inside.