Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. This is one of those columns I wrote ages ago and never had the guts to publish. I made a few changes to bring it up to date and sent it in last week because I didn't have time to write a new one. I think I'm going to blasted in the Letters to the Editor section for this week's!
When I ask my young friends what their least favourite subject is, they invariably say “history”. I’m always amazed, because history’s so exciting! But perhaps the problem is not our illustrious and rather violent ancestors, but instead the way schools teach it.
In England, for instance, Vikings were once rightfully depicted as fierce raiders. But not anymore. Since 1994, England’s textbooks have depicted them as farmers who settled in Scandinavia and “expanded” from there (no word about how that expansion was carried out). That’s too bad, because Vikings are great fun to study! There’s blood, gore, pillaging, backstabbing, and all kinds of hair-raising tales. Yet kids will now be forced to learn about how the Vikings wanted to settle in France because of the longer growing season. It’s history without all those nasty bits, which, not uncoincidentally, is history without all the action.
It’s also history without any context. Although almost all students will hear about America’s history with slavery, for instance, fewer will learn that slavery was practised by almost all cultures until relatively recently. Nor will they hear that slavery is still practised in some parts of North Africa, two hundred years after it was abolished in the British empire, largely by the crusade of several Christian politicians, and one hundred and fifty years after it was abolished in the United States by the blood of both black and white. Yet don’t these facts matter if we’re going to try to understand slavery’s causes and legacy?
I don’t know what Canadian textbooks are like, though I had a peek with some geography resources we purchased at a library sale. The University of Toronto published a series of pamphlets covering all the countries in the world. We bought about 80 of them, and while perusing them I came across several interesting “facts”. Did you know that Cuba has complete freedom of religion? It’s too bad those priests and pastors in Castro’s jails haven’t been informed of that. And that after Israel declared independence in May 1948 a civil war broke out? I thought it generally was not called a civil war when five foreign powers invade you (in this case, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq). That’s like calling World War II the French Civil War.
It’s as if the goal is not to teach facts, but to make sure kids have the right opinions. We’ve begun censoring ourselves horribly. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being rewritten, with the infamous “n-word” changed to “slave”. CNN recently apologized for using the word “crosshairs” on its broadcast, since reminding people of Sarah Palin’s supposedly vitriolic rhetoric might inspire violence, forgetting that they themselves recently had a news show called “Crossfire”. We’re so interested in advancing the right opinions that we’re changing history. Yet how can kids—or anyone for that matter—form a coherent opinion without the facts?
I am reminded of a story a professor at NYU once told. On the first day of classes every year, he asks the students, “Who said, ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’?” Usually no one hazards a guess. So one year he gave a hint. “He was German.” An African-American girl offered, “Martin Luther?”, at which point all the students started to snicker. The professor was flabbergasted. Martin Luther was a German, and he did write about religion, so it was actually a good guess. Then he heard one boy whisper, “Don’t you know he was black?” The students assumed she meant Martin Luther King, Jr. What saddened the professor was not that they didn’t know the answer (it’s Karl Marx); it was that they didn’t even understand their own ignorance. I hope we put a stop to this historical revisionism, before ignorance is all we have left.
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My friend Deborah Gyapong is an Anglican/Catholic living in Ottawa who also writes. She's a spitfire, she's wise, and I really enjoy her company.
She had a post a while ago looking at a controversy regarding whether or not Catholic priests and popes can give advice on sex. She goes into the whole controversy in her post, but what I really loved was how she ended:
But the selfless giving and love of a chaste priest is also something that married couples --especially men---need to look at and take as an example. Because a celibate priest sacrifices his sexual love for the sake of His Bride, the Church, the love that he offers does not use the other as an object--that is if the priest is living this out properly. A wife yearns to be loved by her husband for who she is, to be honored and cherished. She hopes her husband might exercise self-sacrifice and willingness to put his sexual desires under discipline for her sake, and not to have him expect her to dance around in some stupid bustier and garter belt, kama sutra-ing around the house for his use and pleasure. Or on the other hand, for a wife to turn her husband into an object or a performer for her gratification and to be self-sacrificing in understanding that it's not all about her either.
There is something extremely beautiful about an obviously heterosexual man who could easily have experienced the goods of a beautiful wife and many loving children who sacrifices that good for the sake of the Church. And the Church, in her earthly institutional form often seems a critical, nagging, rebellious, unthankful and unattractive spouse for these men at times, I imagine. Yet for those men who are able to cultivate serenity and express the love of Christ because they see the image of God in the disguises of the sinners in their midst, well, that love transforms lives.
That kind of priest I would think might have a great deal to say about human sexuality, but it would never devolve to positions or techniques. Instead it would focus on Jesus and a call to holiness and to loving the way Christ loves us. Most wives would be so grateful to have their husbands love them that way. Christ's love puts everything in its proper place and always puts the dignity of the whole human person at the forefront.
I do not come from a tradition of celibate ministers, so it's not something that I immediately identify with. But at the same time, I do think there is a beauty and a purity in what Deborah is saying.
I think, as Protestants, we too lightly denigrate the Catholic church and forget some of the wonderful richness of theology that is there, especially about the body. In fact, some of what the last Pope wrote on the body was far more insightful than much of what I've seen coming out of our own tradition.
My husband and I started watching the mini-series The Tudors recently, and had to stop because it was just too sexually graphic, though I thought it was extremely well done. But the whole thing left me sad. Catholics and Protestants both had their valid points, and both were also wrong. The Catholic church was corrupt at the time; the Protestants should not have persecuted Catholics the way they did, though (nor should Catholics have persecuted Protestants). It's just a stain on both of our houses, I believe.
But I still think there is something admirable in the idea of a celibate priesthood, for exactly the reasons Deborah stated. To make it mandatory, it seems to me, leads to the kind of corruption we saw in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and partly (but not entirely) to some of the abuse scandals more recently (there are other reasons for that, but I won't go into that here). Yet this idea of being wedded to Jesus is a beautiful one. And maybe, if we understood the beauty of celibacy more, we'd understand the real point of pure sexuality and loving someone, gracefully, body and soul. Instead we see it too often as a selfish thing, as a purely physical thing, as a solely gratifying thing. And that truly is a shame.
While homeschooling my oldest daughter recently, I came across a Grammar Lesson that caught me by surprise. We use an old 1920 Ontario textbook for grammar, largely because they sure understood how to teach basic skills back then. This particular assignment asked children to plan a five paragraph story, and then to write it, on one of the four following subjects: David and Goliath; Daniel and the Lions; Ruth and Naomi; or the Prodigal Son.
What was surprising to me was not just that a public school textbook, even one that is 84 years old, would ask children to write Bible stories. It was that the textbook assumed the children could. You see, the Bible was not just part of Canada’s faith story back then; it was part of their whole culture. Whether or not people believed it, everybody knew it.
Philosopher and physician John Patrick likes to tell a story that illustrates this to an even greater extreme. The scene is the disastrous Canadian landing at Dieppe, in France in 1942. The Canadians had no air or sea support, they were outnumbered, and it was a lost cause perhaps before it even began. In the midst of the battle, the English headquarters sent a message across the Channel, asking how the soldiers were faring. They received a three word answer in response. “But if not.”
Do you get it yet? Few of us would. Yet those three words were not only understood by those who sent them; they were understood by those who received them. And the sender knew this would be the case. But if not.
For those of you who are still scratching your heads, “But if not” is from the story of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, better known as Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego, or to my children as Rack, Shack and Benny. When facing being thrown into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to an image of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, these three men told the king, “If our God is able to deliver us, let him. But if not, we will not bend the knee.” But if not, we will not bend the knee. That is the message the Canadians sent back to London. It was read, and it was understood.
There's another story from that same period that speaks to me. An Allied POW camp (I awesome it was air force or some such, because they were held for a number of years, so it must have been before D-Day), managed to recreate pretty much the entire book of Matthew (there were only a few holes) just from people's memories. I can't find a reference for that now, but I think that's pretty inspiring. They wanted Scripture to keep them going, so they called everyone together, and everyone brainstormed, wrote out the verses they knew, and then tried to put them in the proper order. The chaplain kept what they wrote, and he compared it to the actual Bible when they were released. They got remarkably close. I can't picture that happening today.
Not all of those people were Christian, in either story. And yet they knew the Word. Probably better than we do. Have any of you ever read Tom Sawyer? Mark Twain writes brilliantly and hysterically about the Bible verse drills all these kids went through, but that was late in the nineteenth century.
Do we memorize anymore? Do we really know our Bibles? Do our kids? I think we need to get back to knowing the Word.
I know we can't turn back the clock, and likely the rest of society won't follow us as they did when we were still a Bible-based culture, but we need to at least be well versed in Scripture. In fact, we need to be more well-versed because we no longer hear Scripture or allusions to Scripture in normal life.
I'm thinking about starting "Memory Verse Monday", when we all learn a verse every week together. We could even have contests for it. You could make it into a family activity at dinner time!
That's what Jewish parents had to do across Europe in World War II. I truly can't imagine it. It's too heartbreaking to contemplate. You know you're likely not going to make it out alive, so you hand your child over to someone working on the underground, praying that your child will at least have a future. And then, even if you survive, will you ever find that child again?
We are so blessed that we don't have to contemplate these things.
I've been thinking about them lately, though, for two reasons. We're studying the founding of the state of Israel in our homeschool, and I'm debating whether or not to have Rebecca read the Zion Chronicles series (or is it Covenant?). Anyway, it's the one where Israel becomes a state and Old Jerusalem is invaded. Brock and Bodie Thoene wrote the books, and they are excellent. But they are sad. And I don't know if they'd be too much for a 13-year-old. I read a lot of this stuff as a young teenager and I still get nightmares about it. I'm just not sure. What do you think?
The second reason I've been thinking about it is an obituary I read of a 98-year-old Polish heroine by the name of Irena Sendler. She died last week, and her story should be much better known. She rescued 2,500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto, and was actually tortured herself after she was captured, though she survived. It's a great story. You really need to read it. Here's a bit:
She soon learned that one sanitation company was still allowed into the ghetto. Sendler got the Polish director of the service to employ her and 10 friends so they could continue helping Jews.
For the next two years, dressed as nurses, Sendler and her friends carried food, money, and medicine hidden in their dresses to ghetto residents. As conditions deteriorated, and the liquidation of ghetto began, Sendler came to the realization that the only chance for the children to survive was to escape.
In 1942, she joined the Polish underground movement, "Zegota," and, with the help of a dozen friends, initiated a large-scale clandestine campaign to save Jewish children. "You know the people, we have the money," the president of the organization told her, she recalled.
Acting on information provided by two Jewish policemen in the ghetto, Sendler and her friends went to Jewish homes in areas that were to be liquidated first and offered to save the children.
"We would go into the houses slated for deportation, and would tell the family members we can't help everybody, but we will help the children," she said.
When asked by the families what guarantee she could give that the children would survive, Sendler could only tell them that she was not even sure that she and the children would get out of the ghetto alive.
Sendler and her friends managed to save 2,500 children.
The children, who ranged in age from six months to 12 years, were taken from the ghetto in one of four ways: with bags of garbage; through the city court whose usually locked back doors were located on the ghetto's edge; hidden under the benches of the city tram, whose parking lot was just inside the ghetto walls; or through the cellars of houses that were adjacent to the ghetto.
To muffle the cries of the children from the Nazi guards as they were taken out with the garbage, the driver of Sendler's cart was always accompanied by a dog. When they approached the Nazis, the driver stepped on the dog to make it bark, drowning out the cries of the children.
Read the rest here. And say a prayer for those around the world who are still facing genocide even today.
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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