God in Diversions

I just gave one of my students a Bible.

A controversial move for a public school teacher in Seattle, I’m aware.  It wasn’t my intention, when I woke up this morning, to go handing out scripture to my pupils, but honestly these days seldom unfold to line up with my every intention.  More often someone—me or them, a fire drill or assembly or, as with today, a Gideon representative—knocks the plans askew, and we learn more or less, but always different things than I expected.  The best-planned lessons prove to be abstract dead ends; the diversions lead us to vistas of meaning that no one saw coming.

It wasn’t a Bible, entirely, in the sense that it was only a New Testament.  A tiny New Testament, bound in orange faux-leather, stamped with the two-handled jar of Gideons International.  A student handed it to me a moment ago, tossing it with the same gesture that kids sometimes give each other empty candy wrappers as “presents.”

“Here, Ms. D, I’ve got something for you.”  Students are packing up in these last two minutes of class, and I cross the room to collect the proffered item.

“Oh hey, thanks,” I laugh, taking it and walking away.  The atmosphere in the room is a cheery buzz.  No one is listening to me, nor should they be as they write in planners and zip up backpacks.  I open the miniature book, which reminds me of being in high school and the mixture of defensiveness and safety that I used to feel on the days that these “witnesses” came to give God’s word to the students of our school.  I wasn’t embarrassed then, nor am I now.  These aren’t salacious or exploitive tracts, the ones whose worldview have earned Christians—in Seattle at least—a reputation at best of narrow-mindedness, at worst of deep hatred for anyone “outside the camp.”  They are orange New Testaments, tiny but transformative.

“This has the Psalms and the Proverbs,” I exclaim aloud, mostly to myself, as I flip through the pages and marvel aloud at the size of the text.  “This is good stuff.”  I don’t imagine anyone is listening.

This moment—never mind the Bible-giving it precedes—reminds me later of how far I have come as a Christian teacher in a public school.  I spent the first few years of teaching in a state of silent anonymity regarding my own beliefs, feeling that honesty here would be an intrusion or compromise any “relevance” I’d come to have.

I don’t know what changed.  Perhaps a growing desire to be transparent with the students from whom I asked transparency, or the sense that since other staff members spoke freely about their faiths I could do the same.  In any case, though I don’t spend time preaching from my desk, at this point all my students are aware in some sense that their English teacher is “religious.”

A student is watching me read Proverbs to myself at the end of class.  It’s not the eye-rolling watching that I generally receive for doing something decidedly uncool, but a serious and thoughtful stare.  He’s a quiet student I still don’t know as well as I’d like.

“Do you want this?” I ask lightheartedly.

He nods, and in a moment the orange covers are lost in his large hand.

When it comes to legality, to First Amendment issues, I have only a hazy concept of my parameters here.  I know that I don’t teach a Bible class, that I’m required to balance and not to editorialize.  I also know that “religion” as we know it crops up everywhere in English class, like it or not.  I can’t talk about the Islamic Revolution without examining its religious roots, nor can we get terribly far in The Merchant of Venice without explaining the biblical references planted among themes of mercy and justice. 

In a discussion of political rebellion last week, we came to a standstill in one class because students couldn’t explain where human rights originate.

“So, if your government doesn’t give you the freedom of speech, do you still have it?” I asked.

“No,” a few kids shrugged.

“No? Governments are the ones deciding what’s right and wrong?  Governments are always right?  Consider that for a second.”

They consider.

“Well… no,” they sigh.  “That’s not true, but… It’s just right, that’s all.”

Only the students who believe in God, whether Jesus or Allah or Yaweh, can give more specific replies.

“Those things are from God,” one of them states, after a few more rounds of confusion.  “That’s what I believe, anyway.  That it’s God that gives people freedom.”

I never expected the conversation, designed to be innocuously revolutionary, to turn to matters of God or moral law, which ultimately keep us occupied for several minutes.  While I feel compelled towards greater honesty and approachability about faith, at the same I time I respect our differences, remembering the intense discrimination I felt in high school from some of my more “devout” atheist teachers.  Yet here we are.  Truth out in the open, for us to examine together. 

And an orange New Testament from teacher to student.