The Footprints I Follow: A Personal Essay on Why I Teach

I have been working with colleagues for the past year on writing essays about why we do the work that we do.  What follows is a fairly complete draft of that essay (click here for a podcast version):

When I returned to college after Christmas break my freshman year, I told very few people that my 23--year--old, Irish twin brother had committed suicide on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t because I felt shame or guilt; in truth, I don’t know what I felt. I just hated the awkwardness that follows when someone finds out about such tragedy. Most stammer about how sorry they are all the while wishing they never asked and looking for any opportunity to get away. Even more, I just didn’t want to hear people tell me, as they are prone to do at the small Baptist college I attended, that they were praying for me and my family in the hope that God would make everything right again. Inside I would scream, “It'll never be right again no matter how much you pray!” You can’t say that to them, of course, because they mean well. And they wouldn't understand that the God about whom they spoke and to whom they prayed, a God who intervenes in history, who takes away pain and suffering, no longer made sense to me, was no longer a God I could believe in.

One friend, thinking she was doing me a favor, gave me a copy of the poem, “Footprints.”“Read it,” she suggested. “I know it will provide some comfort to you like it did for me when my grandmother died.” So, I read it. Instead of feeling better, I got pissed off. The poem is about a person walking on the beach with God who asks where God was when a tragedy had happened in his life. God’s reply was that, once the tragedy struck him, there was only one set of footprints in the sand because God was carrying him during the tough times. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked. “I'm sure losing your grandmother was painful, but can you honestly stand there and tell me that the pain that my family experienced, that my mother felt deep in her heart, when she heard about the police prying my brother’s hands off the steering wheel after he shot himself in the face could've been worse? Trust me, we looked for God, but God was nowhere to be found. The tears my mother shed that day tell me that she, not God, bore every bit of the pain that came when she lost her son.” I tore the poem up, threw it on the floor, and walked away. She called after me, saying she didn’t mean to upset me. But the anger and frustration I felt at her, at God, as I recalled the image of my mother sitting in her room crying uncontrollably while holding the picture of her dead child was more than I could bear. I kept on walking.

Halfway through the semester, while sitting in my required religion class, the fog surrounding my brother’s death began to lift. We were talking about the crucifixion and how in the moments before his death, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me!” The class was small, only 22 students. Most  were religion majors; it was the largest major on campus. I wasn’t surprised to hear many of them echo the belief they’d heard in their churches that this was all a part of God’s plan for the salvation of the world. That Jesus didn't feel forsaken; he only said it for the sake of those around him.

My professor looked to see how I was reacting to this discussion. Because of several conversations I had with him outside of class, he knew the struggles I was having, the questions I was raising. He also shared with me his own struggles connected with raising a special needs child. He listened patiently to the class before he spoke, but it was clear to me that he was as uncomfortable with the direction the discussion was taking as I was. With tears forming in his eyes, he asked how anyone could believe that a loving God could demand such torture, such suffering. In words that continue to echo in my mind thirty years later, he said, "Don’t you see? The horror Jesus anticipated in the garden of Gethsemane was now a reality. He prayed that God would take the cup from him. But God didn't. Jesus prayed again, but there was no reply. And now the time had come to drink. But where was God? He had lost that sense of presence. He felt alone. He experienced abuse and ridicule throughout his life but God's presence was real. But now, in his hour of need, he was hurting and alone and needed the reassurance of God that everything would turn out all right. But God was absent. He cried out: ‘I gave you my all God. I sacrificed everything. I have been faithful and you have been with me. My God! My God! Why now do you forsake me?’ The darkness that engulfed the land overwhelmed him. There were no signs of hope. God didn't respond. He felt alone, utterly forsaken by the God to whom he had committed his life. And in this darkness he died. I believe as Georgia Harkness wrote: ‘This was his hell - not merely to suffer, but to suffer and seek in vain for God's sustaining presence.’” Many students in the class looked quizzically at one another; their eyes revealed their discomfort. But no one said anything.

“Where is God when you need God?” he continued as he looked directly at me echoing the question my mother and I had asked on that fateful Christmas Eve. “In times of suffering, I'm not sure one can ever adequately answer this question. But I do know that simply saying to those whose suffer and who feel abandoned by God, ‘God is with you, you just don't know it,’ or ‘God will get you through this if you just believe and have faith,’ doesn't do justice to the sense of abandonment and forsakenness people who suffer experience. We shouldn't trivialize those legitimate moments of ‘unbelief’ or ‘unfaith’ that suffering, especially innocent suffering, often bring.”

One student worriedly asked, “But we have always believed that God loves us, especially in those moments. Are you saying we are wrong?” Realizing her concerns were genuine and sensing that others shared her sentiment, he replied, “Not at all. I'm just suggesting that God's love is not demonstrated by protecting us from the pain and tragedy of life, but in helping us to create new possibilities out of such tragedy. Illness, accidents, death are misfortunes that make no distinctions. They happen to all of us at one time or another. Senselessly, perhaps, but they still happen. The good news of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus is not that God protects us from harm's way, but that God suffers with us and will work with us to create new possibilities even out of the most meaningless situations.” With that, he wiped his eyes and dismissed class.

Out in the halls, students were talking about what our professor had said. Some were angered by it. “Who does he think he is telling us that our beliefs are wrong?” Others were confused, not simply by the words but by the emotion he expressed. They had never had seen a professor cry before. Was he teaching or preaching? I responded with tears of my own, not because his words made me sad but because he was the first to speak directly to my experience, to what I was feeling and thinking. The tragedy of my brother’s death was senseless. We never found out why he did it; we could only surmise. But his suicide brought my family together, really together, for the first time in years. Bobby’s death confronted us with the reality of how much we were strangers to one another and how little we knew about each other lives. His death rekindled our sense of what it meant to be a family and the love we felt for one another; a love that continues to this day. This was the meaning we were creating together. Was God a part of that? I didn’t know, but it made more sense about God’s role in our lives than anything else.

I was moved most, however, by my professor’s passion. He cared deeply for the ideas he taught and even more for the students whose lives he touched. He wasn't afraid to challenge us, to push us beyond the narrow confines of our own perspectives so we might embrace the ambiguity that is so much a part of life. But he did it in ways that invited connection and community—with him, with each other, and with the broader world of ideas and people. We spoke frequently about these things for the rest of the semester and he often provided readings—C.S. Lewis’A Grief Observed and Abraham Heschel’s essays on “Divine Pathos”—that helped me to make sense of it all. It was then that I knew what I wanted to do with my life, the path I wanted to follow—to teach, to express the same passion for the ideas, for the people who generate them, and for the students who encounter them that he did. Just as he had reached out to me, I wanted to reach out to students who bring their own stories and experiences to the table, often born of confusion and tragedy.

I changed my major from sociology to a double major in religion and psychology. I went to seminary and earned a Master of Divinity with a focus on pastoral care and counseling, a course of study I felt would provide a foundation not simply for teaching but more importantly for providing the understanding, care, and empathy future students might need. I was able to practice and develop these skills in my years as a hospital chaplain and a community organizer in poor, struggling neighborhoods.

My first teaching jobs while completing my Ph.D. in religion and ethics were in county, state, and federal prisons. In many ways they were some of the best students I have ever encountered. They had a thirst for knowledge, although often without the preparation most college students bring, and they certainly had their stories—stories of physical and emotional abuse, extreme poverty, and tremendous loss not only of loved ones but their personal freedom. Eventually I came to Le Moyne, where for over twenty years I have pushed students to take an active role and responsibility for their learning. I have challenged them to understand and to engage critically the religious and ethical complexities of our increasingly global, religiously-pluralistic world. All in the hope that when they leave they will have a stronger sense of themselves as moral agents in a world that desperately needs women and men standing up for what is right and good. At the same time, following in the footsteps of my professor, I have worked tirelessly to create a classroom environment where their own perspectives and voices can be articulated and heard, while offering a listening ear and a gentle sympathetic presence whenever they relate their own stories of confusion, loss, or tragedy.

The beginning of each fall semester and the advent of Christmas will always remind me of my brother and all those who suffer some affliction self-imposed or imposed by society, many of whom continue to sit in my classes year after year—like the father whose 9-year old daughter died of leukemia, the young man who buried his mother after her long, unsuccessful battle with cancer, and the countless young women who continue to struggle with the emotional pain of being raped by male classmates they thought loved them. I hope I will continue to feel the same empathy for them as my professor did for me, and offer to be present with them and provide some comfort. And, when the time is right, help them to find meaning even in the midst of the senseless, the tragic, and the ambiguous—meaning that often arises only in the context of renewed relationships with family, friends, and faith. To do this is an essential part of my vocation, my calling as a teacher and a person.

I'd Prefer Not To: Ethical sensibilities in the workplace

Recently, freshmen students at Le Moyne College were required to read Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener.  They were even given t-shirts with the iconic statement of Bartleby every time he was asked to do a particular task:  “I’d prefer not to.”  For some students, that statement matched their own feelings about the reading of Bartleby (or for many, any academic reading that was not a part of their major).  For others, it illustrated the reason they were in college and seeking to become professionals in their own right where theycould resist work they would rather not do (and are probably doing to pay their tuition bills).

For those unfamiliar with the story, the work Bartleby was engaged in as a scrivener was to copy legal documents by hand and then spend time reading them over aloud with others to insure their accuracy.  Let’s face it: the work was rather mundane, repetitive, and boring.  (Personally, I would go stark-raving mad if this was the only work I could find.)  Of course, we can psychoanalyze Bartleby and suggest that his underlying, undiagnosed problem was some sort of depression brought on by his extreme loneliness or homelessness.  These are certainly issues with which we should be concerned, especially since in some instances they result in violent outbursts in the workplace


As an ethicist, however, I would prefer not to go down that road (pun intended).  Rather, I would prefer to talk about the frustration that I think the Bartlebys of the world are voicing with their refusal to continue in this type of work (which some suggest is exactly what the author Melville intends).  After all, ethics is the discipline that deals with preferences! 

What Bartleby is declaring is that he prefers not to engage in a world of work that, while it may sometimes be necessary (especially in a litigious society), is pure drudgery and dehumanizing.  Of course in a time of high unemployment many people would proclaim that workers should be happy to have a job and should take any job they could find.  All I can do in response is to quote Albert Camus, “Without work, all life goes rotten.  But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”  (Marx was also a critic of this kind of soulless work that alienates workers from the product of their labor where workers have little control over the nature and direction of their work, which is what happens when one is simply the appendage to a machine, a task, a desk, or an internet server.)

I would contend that there are many instances today where people are standing up to work places and declaring, I’d prefer not to.  For example, fast food workers who are taking to the streets to argue for living wages of ten to fifteen dollars per hour are saying they prefer not to work for wages that, while they provide many a quick, cheap meal, prohibit the workers’ ability to feed their families or to live in dignity.  I would contend that the Occupy Wall Street movement was (is?) in part proclaiming that as the 99%, they would prefer not to continue an economic system that continues to generate extremes of economic and social inequality even rewarding people with bonuses for unethical even if not illegal behavior (although some think laws were broken).

The establishment of a minimum wage (I would prefer living wages) and recent attempts by legislatures to increase it are a statement to the economic structure of our society that contends we, collectively, would prefer not to allow people to work below a decent level of income, especially when work and the money it procures are what sociologist Lee Rainwater argues are the fundamental means of membership and participation in our consumption-oriented society.  The generation of workplace safety regulations declares that we would prefer not to let employees work in unsafe conditions even if they are costly.  The implementation of workplace discrimination laws suggests that we would prefer not to allow employers to discriminate against workers on the basis of age, ethnicity, gender, or disability.   

What all of these laws and policies embody are our collective ethical preferences when it comes to work and the economy.  Are they sufficient?  Not at all.  Too much work will continue to be demeaning and soulless, too many workers will continue to have little voice or say in the nature of their work, too many employees will continue to be sacrificed to the economic gods of efficiency and profitability.  But they do at least state to the captains of industry the moral preferences that we as a community share.