Weaving together belief and behavior
For many of us the college years are an especially formative time, shaping who we become as people and pointing us in the direction of a career. That is, at least theoretically. Each of us have different kinds of college experiences, of course, shaped by our own choices and priorities as well as by factors beyond our control.
I started college in the fall of 2001 at a state university as a business major because I thought that was as good a way as any to ensure I’d have a job when I graduated. And I chose the management concentration because as an eighteen year old I thought managing people sounded better than being managed. Halfway through my freshman year I’d come to hate it and had terrible grades, so I switched over to the major with the fewest math requirements.
Somehow it hasn’t all turned out terribly, which I attribute solely to God's grace, but I do wonder how my college years would have been different had I made life-altering decisions based on even better questions than how to avoid math requirements -- for instance, questions about the nature of the world, and God’s relationship to it and to me and to everyone else, and how a college education may actually be a gift to be stewarded for God’s glory and to be used for loving our neighbors.
I hadn’t heard of Steven Garber yet, but I wish I had. His book The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior (IVP) came highly recommended, and now I see why. Garber currently leads The Washington Institute in DC, "a place to explore common grace for the common good."
In working with students over many years, Garber noticed that the university setting is often an environment that allows room for private beliefs and opinions, but it isn’t comfortable with affirmations of public truths, especially ones clearly connected to private, and deeply held, beliefs. Therefore, those students seeking integration of their deepest beliefs with the realities of the world around them are often frustrated, and at times they face a crisis of identity or even a crisis of faith. When integration is thwarted, dis-integrated cynics are born.
Garber’s work has been an effort to give students a vision, as the subtitle puts it, for weaving belief and behavior together into a fabric of faithfulness. Higher education isn’t to be used simply as a ticket to privilege, but, rooted in our deepest beliefs, a means of serving others, of seeking the common good.
How does one come through college prepared for a life with belief and behavior woven together?
He has found three crucial factors:
Over the course of hours of listening to people who still believe in the vision of a coherent faith, one that meaningfully connects personal disciplines with public duties, again and again I saw that they were people (1) who had formed a worldview sufficient for the challenges of the modern world, (2) who had found a teacher who incarnated that worldview and (3) who had forged friendships with folk whose common life was embedded in that worldview. There were no exceptions.
I think the wisdom in prioritizing those three things speaks for itself, but Garber illustrates it much more fully in the book, and he does so largely through different people’s vocational stories and by asking the big questions that only we can answer for ourselves.
Garber includes a quote from Jacques Ellul, the French philosopher and theologian, on the importance of working these things out while we’re young, before it’s too late:
You must take sides earlier -- when you can actually make choices, when you have many paths opening at your feet, before the weight of necessity overwhelms you.
Though I wish I’d known about this book during college, I’m glad to know about it now, on the other side of both college and grad school, still working on figuring out the particulars of my vocation and how I could best steward it to serve the common good. Needless to say I highly recommend the book for everyone, but especially for those in their college years, or for those who interact with college students, whether as parents, siblings, teachers, pastors, or friends.
Weaving together belief and behavior is an ongoing process as we seek to be faithful in all areas of life, and Garber has given us some clues to point us in the right direction.
Develop a worldview. Find a mentor. Be in community.
[Photo credit: luna13.com; this is a Guatemalan woman weaving a traditional piece of fabric, which I think serves as a beautiful picture of what this sort of "fabric of faithfulness" represents. Check out WeavingWomen.org, an organization the photographer founded "in partnership with indigenous Mayan women to preserve traditional, sustainable weaving arts in Guatemala."]
Building capacity, one dance move at a time
It has been an interesting transition. Less than two weeks ago I was an intern with the largest Christian development organization in the history of the universe, out of an office in the capital of the world's largest superpower. Now I'm working with a small, exciting, chaotic start-up NGO in a town most people have never heard of, out of an office in a basement of a house on the side of a volcano. There are pros and cons with both, of course, but there's definitely something to be said for the chance to help teach English via Cha Cha Slide (disclaimer: I only dance at weddings and in Latin America).
In the weeks before I arrived, ADE staff completed a census of everyone in San Rafael, gathering key data about all sorts of things. One of the most striking findings was that 98% of the population had only a sixth grade education or less. This in a middle-income country in an increasingly globalized - and educated - world.
This finding confirmed the importance of one of ADE's main projects: opening a secondary school in which students from the community have the opportunity to receive a world-class education that fits into the broader goal of local capacity building. Take this week as a snapshot of what that might look like.
On Monday ADE students and staff headed over to the local elementary school to weatherize their classrooms. After the earthquake damaged their building and rendered it useless, they moved into temporary wooden structures meant for emergency housing. More than a year later permanent solutions have remained frustratingly elusive, and when it rains, water comes in through the doors and windows.
So, using a donated sheet of clear plastic and pieces of scrap wood from a neighbor, we weatherized the classrooms with these simple ingredients in such a way that when it's sunny, they can be rolled back to let in fresh air. Today, despite driving diagonal rain, the classrooms stayed dry.
On Tuesday, we set out in our 12-passenger van along the road through the earthquake-affected area, stopping along the way with digital photo and video cameras, which students used to document reconstruction efforts.
This was an opportunity for students to learn more about what is happening in their community and to ask questions they may have never been invited to ask before, such as: Will bags filled with dirt really work to hold a road in place if/when another earthquake comes? Would I want to live in the valley below that sort of structure? Did this construction company ask anyone who lives here before making their decisions?
These are just preliminary questions; the beginning of a new way of thinking in which everyone - even a seventh grader - is a key community stakeholder.
All of this is in keeping with the belief that any sort of healthy and sustainable development (or redevelopment, in this case) must involve local capacity building, and that few endeavors build capacity quite like an innovative and interactive education - whether within or without the classroom, using pens, pencils, books, hammers, nails, cameras, and killer dance moves.
What About Us?
The following is the transcript of the speech I gave at the commissioning ceremony for the cohorts graduating from the Eastern University School of Leadership and Development on June 12, 2009.
WHAT ABOUT US?
A commissioning speech containing humor, theology, economics inside jokes, and all the wisdom a twenty six year old dude can possibly offer his peers (and in some cases his superiors)
Occasionally throughout the past year in class I’ve referenced my time in Cambodia and I’m pretty sure my deep insights from that experience are what earned me my spot at this microphone here tonight. So I want to tell a story from that time in my life. I was out in Seattle for a family reunion a few weeks before leaving for Cambodia when I saw in a bookstore a book that caught my eye. It was a Penguin paperback, which I am a sucker for, and it had a mostly white cover with a bright green plant reaching up towards Bono’s endorsement. I admit that I judge a book by its cover so as soon as I got home I ordered it on Amazon.
Those of you who’ve been to Asia know that the trip over there takes about a week, so during that time I read a big chunk of this book, which was basically about economics, which I had never cared about before. But I could hardly put it down because the writer was making the case that it was completely possible to eliminate extreme poverty by 2025, and he was explaining how. This struck me as exciting, important news.
Things like economics are simple when you base everything you know on just one book, so when my brother came to visit me in Cambodia a couple of months later, I was telling him all about this book called The End of Poverty by this amazing economist named Jeffrey Sachs and how poverty would be history if we just pumped more money into the structures already in place. My brother is sometimes frustrating because he’s a computer engineer who had a GPA of about seven and knows stuff about everything. So when he suggested I read a book called White Man’s Burden I shrugged it off, and mostly forgot about it because even though I had come to live on the other side of the world with a Cambodian family in a Buddhist country and was eating fried tarantulas and doing interviews with micro-entrepreneurs and AIDS patients, I wasn’t interested in broadening my perspectives in this way. After all, as far as I was concerned, a computer engineer who lives in New York shouldn’t know more about poverty than me, the guy working with the development organization among the poor.
Fast forward a couple of years and of course I wish I would’ve taken him up on that book suggestion sooner. I could have come into this program with a bit more nuanced perspective on global economics, and who knows what else. But we learn life lessons through experiences like these, and I think it’s safe to say that this year, for all the learning we did, taught us just how much we have yet to learn.
I know that’s been the case for me. It was a few weeks ago and we were on break during one of our microfinance classes when I was first told there was a “grassroots movement� underway to elect me as our cohort’s speaker for tonight’s commissioning. This took me by surprise, when I considered the sorts of brilliant and passionate people I’ve been in class with and how much better everyone else would have been for this role than me. But when the votes were counted and I was informed that I’d been chosen, I just had to remind myself that while the planner in me didn’t fully understand their rationale, at the same time I didn’t want to get in the way of a bottom-up solution to a problem as important as choosing a speaker. But I will just say that as the only Caucasian male in our cohort, I’m thinking that “white man’s burden� might be taking on a whole new meaning.
Anyway, I tell that story from Cambodia because the lesson I learned is one that I think all of us need to be learning and re-learning for the rest of our lives. We really don’t know everything, and we’ll always have plenty to learn from those around us, even when it seems to them or us that our credentials, being MAs and MBAs and all, are more impressive than theirs. For one thing, the world is changing so rapidly that there’s no way anyone can keep up with it all so we need all the help we can get from as many sources as possible. It is encouraging to me that while this group of us here is just a tiny sliver of the pie in terms of those who are committing their lives to “walking with the poor� as an expression of the love of Christ, there are so many gifts, talents, experiences, and passions represented here. No two of us will end up doing exactly the same sort of work in the Kingdom, and that should be seen as a good thing. I believe that God has a niche for each of us and if we’re committed to doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with him, God will take care of the details.
There are three great people I know of with the first name Frederick. The first is Frederick David Bronkema, who has been such an amazing teacher and director of this program, and no matter how crazy his schedule gets he always seems to have time for us, and never ends a personal meeting without prayer. The second is Frederick Douglass, who Wikipedia describes as an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer, and whose autobiography is sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to eventually read once I have time again. But for now, I can’t really say much about him. The third Frederick I know about is a novelist and pastor, named Frederick Buechner. After coming back from Cambodia I read one of his books and went on to read about ten more that year. Since then one of his quotes in particular has been a compass as I, like you, try to make sense of my calling in life, which has always been a pretty nebulous concept for me. He says that the place God calls you to is the place where the world’s deep hunger and your own deep gladness meet. I want to focus on that idea a little bit.
It’s not just a matter of figuring out some way to spend your life that makes you happy, as so many try to do. But it’s not necessarily about finding the most depressing place in the world and pouring yourself out there, with some sort of a martyr complex, either. It’s about taking the best of both, without the pitfalls of either. If you just follow your heart and pursue happiness at all costs, you might gain the whole world but lose your soul. On the other hand, if you just pour yourself out but try to do so without the fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace - you’re not going to last and eventually you’ll end up self-absorbed and miserable.
Because of the culture we live in, we’re all at risk of just seeking pleasure and happiness without considering the long-term cost. And pursuing a career in international development with the immensity of the challenges we’ll encounter, we also run the risk of burning out and getting pretty disillusioned. But it doesn’t have to be that way for any of us, I don’t think. I entered this program last year, and I enter the “real world� once again now, banking on the belief that there really is a place where the world’s deep hunger and my deep gladness meet, and that God, in his faithfulness and love, will reveal it to me one step at a time as I follow him. I believe the same is true of each of you.
But I also want to come back to what I mentioned earlier about being open to learning things from others, because in addition to those we’ll work with directly wherever we end up, I think that friendships were formed this year and bonds were established even in our deep and sometimes heated classroom discussions that we’d be foolish to throw away. As we all scatter in the weeks and months to come in search of the place God is calling us to, I hope we find ways to stay connected, to keep learning from each other, to keep challenging each other, to keep encouraging each other, to keep cracking Easterly-Sachs jokes or whatever jokes we discover down the road.
I want to thank all of you in the international cohort, as well as our MBA and urban peeps, for a great year. There have been a few times this year that I just had to stop and thank God for blessing me with the privilege of knowing all of you and being part of this group at this time. We laughed together, we cried together, and we ate taco salad together. I look forward to seeing what the future holds for all of us.
When we were in Costa Rica a month ago, up at the volcano overlooking the crater lake having our group devotional, we closed our time with a reading of the Prayer of St Francis. It would be equally fitting for right now, but I am going to resist the urge to be redundant and instead I want to close with a Franciscan Benediction, which could have been written for precisely this occasion:
May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that we may live deep within our hearts.
May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.
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