Our Impress on the Earth

Teaching teachers has many days of gratification when your students or advisees tell you in so many words. “I want to make a difference.” Actually you can “make a difference” in most professions, but teaching is one you can not claim to be “doing it for the money.”  You can claim, however, to make an impact on young people or explain something in a way that suddenly makes sense to a struggling learner.

But the words “making a difference” have lost their currency. It sounds naive coming from the mouth of an adult. People who claim to “make a difference” are often discredited for all the ways they have failed. For every student who goes on to college or graduate school, there may be an equal number who become dropouts or stumble into a dead-end career.  Our culture wants to undercut those who are “making a difference,”  because those differences are not measurable, enduring, or incorruptible.

But what if you are a “jihadist”? The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria actively recruits young people who want to make a difference, whether by violence, terror or forced conversion. What the recruiting videos demonstrate is that ISIS is making a difference in heart of the Middle East and has the resolve to change society by uncompromising force. They promise that on Day One you will participate in a movement that is not only teaching a religion, but enforcing it.  This has undeniable attraction to young recruits in the United States and Europe, where reform is always fraught with opposition and non-compliance.

“May our impress on the earth be kindly and creative,” states the creed from the New Zealand Prayer Book. If we adopt this resolve we abandon methods of jihad while aspiring to “make a difference.” We want to “impress” the earth, which suggests changing it, but we want to be “kindly” and “creative,” which suggests restraint and indirect influence. This is probably not the right pitch to lure the would-be jihadist.

It is curious that one meaning of “impress” is ” to take by force for public service, as men or goods, especially as formerly done by the British navy”.  Closer to the meaning implied by the creed might be ” a mark made by or as by pressure” (Random House).  All the options employed by the jihadist and the community organizer are enclosed in one word. The word itself is fraught with conflict.

But if we take a more humane view of “impress,” how can we do it with kindness and creativity? Can evangelism be kindly and creative? Can we expect with kindness and creativity to make a restorative impression? Is creativity linked to ineffectual change? What kind of “impress” should satisfy us?

These are my questions as I recite the creed weekly in church. There is a part of me that wishes for the impact of a jihadist, sending teachers into the world on a ruthless mission to change education. Yet I know they enter a profession with a steep learning curve ahead of them.  They can protest the short-sighted goals of their school or district, but they have not yet proven they can manage a classroom, motivate students or expand their literacy. Their “impress” must be creative in the sense that students are achieving academic as well as social goals.  So they are compelled to learn teaching while reforming it. Like rebuilding the airplane while flying it.

We “impress the earth” as we learn how to impress with kindness and creativity. We “make a difference” in ourselves, while we make a difference in others. We have the focus of a jihadist, but we are kind to ourselves as we are kind to others.  The only certainty is that we will have an impress, whether for success or failure. Our choice is to respond to success or failure with creativity or with manipulation. And that response is also our impress on the earth.

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