Knowing

I Want to Know...


...why I'm craving Pho.


...when I will be the successful one in the family.


...why there is still injustice
I want to know it like a bee sting so it will wake me up.


...if there really is a God & Heaven.


...why is the sky blue when there's soo many other colors.


...if you are beautiful inside and out.


...why they make us tune into your screen
Tell us we're ugly and how to fix it with Maybelline.


...what I'm intending to do with this game with no extra lives.


...what love is.
Not that crazy out-there love,
but that controlled and sometimes
complicated
love.


...how big space is and why I can't travel
across it.


I want to know it.




Sitting in Diva Espresso on a Monday afternoon, I'm reading poetry.  Reading, not grading, because every once in a while I give an assignment so broad yet personal, that I can't grade it.  The feeling that I'm grading someone's confessions and desires for grammar or--even more arbitrary--poetic quality, leaves me irritable and cold.  So I'm simply reading them, turning page after page on this rainy afternoon, meeting each one like it's a letter from a friend.


I'd asked them what they want to know.  I had no idea what to expect.  I know what I want to know, but what great heights of knowledge are just out of reach for fifteen-year-olds?  Recent experience with them tells me that they know it all, and lack no information.  Certainly they know more than me, more than their parents, more than any adult anywhere.  When I wrote the question, I half expected them to shrug their shoulders, look up at the ceiling and mutter, "Nothing."


I couldn't have been more wrong.  The classroom was silent all day Friday, as they poured their questions onto paper.   Now I'm reading them, hearing voices I've come to know by heart.  Some are about the present--who likes me? who doesn't? will I ever graduate?--but most are bigger picture than that.  They ask about cruelty, injustice, love and God, and I hear my own unspoken questions echoing back in my students' words.  For a moment I wonder if they got the questions from me in the first place, until I remember that I asked them too in ninth grade.


As I read over the poems, the words of my students who want to know so much, I am struck with the realization that we never stop asking, even when someone tells us the answer.  At the end of 2009, I shared an epiphany in a letter to my students: We never stop learning.  I am grateful for that.  Grateful that I've only begun to know, and that knowing fully is years down the road.  In the eleven years that separates me from my students, I've learned some of their answers by heart.  Answers about suffering and friendships and where we've come from and are going.  I've stumbled into discoveries about God, times when I felt that I knew Him.  And yet knowing...


I still want to know more.


"...then I will know fully, even as I am fully known." I Corinthians 13:11