Until I was about thirty-eight I thought that faith was about ascending a spiritual ladder like going to college and graduate school. I wouldn’t have called it that, but in retrospect that is what I thought it was. My life was changed when I flunked out of a spiritual experience, a failure at a spiritual community. But that is not what this story is about.
More than a decade after my “spiritual failure” I was a leader in the Summer Institute, maybe my third or fourth such institute since I had come to Eastern Michigan University. National Writing Project Summer Invitational Institutes have been among the most rewarding experiences of my high school and college teaching careers. It had been my dream to lead such an institute, and my appointment as a professor of literacy education at EMU made it happen.
The first challenge in the Summer Institute is to establish a safe environment for the graduate students (who are also K-12 English teachers) to share their writing. One way is for the leaders, including me, to share their own writing during the Institute. Here is what I wrote about sharing in the institute:
More likely we (especially the males) are all hoping the writing does not get too personal, and the discussion stays on the cognitive level. But writing may sweep over rational boundaries. In 1998 I felt compelled to write a poem about the troubled home run king, Roger Maris, and in the middle of reading it out loud, began inexplicably to bawl. Beyond the humiliation of crying about a baseball player long dead, I was also a co-leader of the Institute, and had demonstrated my fragility to colleagues I had only known for perhaps two weeks. If I learned anything from it, it was that such outbursts should not be dreaded, but in fact welcomed for their palliative effect. I came, I cried, I survived.
When teachers who had attended the Institute recalled that summer, the first thing they would remember is how I cried over Roger Maris. This is embarrassing on so many levels. First: I was in charge of the institute. Second: I was among only three males in a group of 15-20 teachers. Third I had succumbed while reading my story of Roger Maris, a boyhood hero, but one of the more hostile and ornery New York Yankees in 1961, the year he broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. Fourth: From my point of view I had more inspiring teaching moments that summer.
On the other hand, what is more meaningful to a writer than to capture a vulnerable moment of his life? I actually had a breakthrough to realize that I identified with one of the least popular Yankees. I would have preferred to write about Mickey Mantle, a beloved Hall-of-Fame, beloved outfielder, but instead I identified with the sullen Roger Maris. My story revealed that I identified with the outcast, the misunderstood one. Even now I realize that I was always more like Maris than Mantle.
Spiritual growth may come from a descent down the ladder of education, social status, or professional growth. I saw that I could expose a fragile part of myself without losing my status as an educator. Many others shared their stories of vulnerability during that summer and learned that their group status remained intact and their writing still vivid and eloquent. They learned to do that, in part, from seeing their leader crumble and survive.
The way down is the way up the spiritual ladder. Really “the way up” is a myth. There is no spiritual ladder. That is what I learned in the summer of 1998.