A Thorough Education

Outings to the cinema, once a common feature of living only a ten-minute walk from the Mecca of Melbourne art-house cinema (now only a ten-minute tram ride), are now rare treats. But the past twenty-four hours have seen me going to the cinema more times than I went during the whole month of July, and the two films make for an interesting comparison, primarily because, despite being from utterly different cultures, each deals in its own way with the question of education and its value.

The first, seen last night at the Indonesian Film Festival, was a film set in Kalimantan, on the border of Indonesia and Malaysia. The second, seen today in the Beanbag cinema of e Melbourne Central, was the new adaptation of "Jane Eyre". The first, appropriately entitled "Batas (Border)", dealt with a driven young woman from Jakarta who is sent by her company to a remote village near the equatorial town of Pontianak ("Vampire", in English) to find out why the local school is not being successful. The girl's experiences in the village transform her, and her presence in the village transforms the education system. She learns from them and they learn from her. An experience hunting wild boar in the jungle shows her the educational value of everyday situations, and she expands the classroom outside the "border" of a schoolhouse, taking education to where the children are, bringing it into their realm. I enjoyed the film, for its visual beauty, and the lovely soundtrack by the legendary Iwan Fals whose music I have recently discovered. Something of the sensory appeal of the film can be found in this trailer, which, regrettably, is in Bahasa with no subtitles. Still, I suppose it shows that, despite the fact that the dialogue wasn't very good (thus, you aren't missing much) the film was still a joy to watch.

Of course, its chief problem, apart from weak dialogue, was its somewhat unrealistic optimism about the human spirit. While touching on the highly sensitive issue of human trafficking in Indonesia, it passed over the problem without looking at its heart. Humans in the film were fundamentally good, if given the right circumstances. This did not explain where the trafficking problem came from. Were the traffickers a mere aberration? Were they subhuman somehow? The film avoided these kinds of questions.

"Jane Eyre" was a film with much more subtlety. It's hard to imagine a two-hour film that could possibly do justice to Charlotte Bronte, but this, I think, came close. It was delicate, moving, passionate and tender all at once, in the way that often only Bronte can be. And, though education was by no means the focus of the film, again there was something said about it, through the comparison between the "thorough education" Jane received at Norwood - a brutal, austere education through beatings and isolation - and the kind, compassionate education Jane later gives her pupil, Adele.

Of course, in Bronte, and in all the great Victorian novels, life is the great Education. Life toughens and transforms all Victorian heroes and heroines, much as Jaleswari, the heroine of "Batas", is toughened and transformed by her time in the remote Kalimantan village.

But does education transform everyone? As a teacher, I have to say I suspect it does not. Was there a process of education thorough enough that it could stop human trafficking? Surely the perpetrators of such a crime know it is wrong; they don't need to be taught that. They need their hearts to be transformed. Could education have kept Bertha Mason from going mad? Possibly, although it would have needed to change the culture that would have confined and beaten her if she had ever been admitted to receive "professional care". Education very nearly broke Jane. Human compassion saved her.

As I sit down to mark a daunting pile of student responses to "A Midsummer Night's Dream", it is with, I hope, a healthy awareness of the limits of education. And what can overcome those limits? In our humility, we should ask the one who made us. If anyone knows the answer, I'm sure it's Him.

Hard questions and elephants in rooms

W.H. Auden once wrote a deliberately obscure little poem about asking hard questions: how easy they are to ask, how infinitely hard to answer. He never names the kinds of questions he is talking about but we can conclude that he means the questions that are asked flippantly, in passing, with little regard for the answer.

Questions, for instance, like "How are you?"

I commented on this a few years ago in a post that I'm linking here not because it was particularly good (it wasn't actually) but because I don't want to feel that I'm repeating myself needlessly. My point back then is similar to my point now: all too often, we ask questions like these with no particular intention of waiting for the answer. Or, more to the point, we find ourselves unable to handle complex answers to what is, in reality, a far more complex question than it seems. What if we aren't okay? Will we stop our questioner in their tracks and make them wait for the answer? Will we make do with an, "Okay," or "Good thanks"? Such answers may be the more socially acceptable, but they kind of expose the futility of the question. We might as well invent a strange gargling noise that can serve the same purpose - a form of acknowledgment that a human we know is present before us. The conversation need go no further than that.

Of course, I'm making it all sound a bit silly when I put it like that, but it really is a topic which I feel deeply about. Recent experiences of melancholy, of a kind that sometimes quite frightens me, has made it all the more important to know when an honest answer is welcome, and how it is appropriate to give it. Poorly timed honest answers can lead to the kind of vast, awkward silences in which one can distinctly hear an elephant walk into the room. Those times are certainly hard.

But here's a situation that's harder. Let's say that you are okay at a particular point in time: you've had a good day, you're talking to a person who makes you feel happy. When asked how you are - if indeed you are asked - you may find it hard to give an answer that will be meaningful. You feel fine then. You feel good, even. So how do you answer? Do you say, "Good thanks", because, for that moment, it's true? Do you then go away and, once alone, feel quite far from okay? Do you find yourself, at that moment, even further in the midst of a sinking, desperate kind of loneliness?

Auden poses no answer to the problem he raises. But he does give us a riddle, a hopeful kind of riddle which leaves us feeling as if therein, perhaps, lies something which is, if not an answer, at least a direction to walk in. Love, he suggests, might hold the solution: both the question that we really want to ask, and the answer we are too frightened to give.

Love and grace will, I pray, help me persevere through awkward silences and overcome elephants wandering into rooms. But I also pray that love may help those who ask these questions, thoughtlessly, in passing, at times and in places where no honest answer could ever be given - I pray that love might help transform those moments of awkwardness into times of true communication.

Inertia and friction

Some weeks, there are many wonderful ideas for blog posts circulating round my head, waiting for the opportune moment to be written. Then, when the time comes and I can sit at my computer to write one of them - blankness. I sit and fiddle with the keyboard, tapping out atonal compositions on the arrow keys, fingers up and down, up and down, nothing formulating, and there is only a numb sense that there must be something meaningful, somewhere, in all of this that deserves recording.

The trouble is that words don't do justice to feelings like this. If I were more clever with words, I might be able to convey it for you, but tonight there isn't much that I can do with words. I wish that I could take a photograph to show how it looks inside my mind tonight, because there might be some who would recognise that appearance and be encouraged by the recognition. But some people might be troubled by how it appeared, or confused, or disturbed. Some may not understand, and we are almost always afraid of what we don't understand. I'm afraid of it myself.

It isn't a night for blogging. Times like these expose the gaping hole in what a blog, or anything with words, can ever do. They are times when the human mind most cries out to be understood, and yet it is at its least coherent, its least expressive. On nights like tonight, I hold out my hand and wait for God to lift me again. On nights like tonight, my greatest comfort is a man crying alone in a garden, his friends asleep and ignorant, his heavenly father hearing every word.

Running for joy

I am considering retitling this blog "Matt's Running Adventures". This will be, I believe, the third post I have written about running in little over a week. It may seem a tad obsessive, until you consider a few things. Discovering a new hobby, at any age or stage of life, is an exciting thing. The older you get, the less common it is to discover a new love. I'm not old by any means, but I'm old enough to be fairly set in my ways, fairly fixed in what I think I like and don't like. It's a nice feeling to have those fixed ideas shaken up.

But there's more to it than that. You see, running has, unexpectedly, brought joy into a life that, for some time now, has not abounded in joy. On Wednesday night, for instance, I came home feeling truly terrible, the worst case of the winter commuter blues that I've had in a while. So what did I do when I got home? I ran. It was late, it was dark, I hadn't had any dinner, but I ran. As I set off down the inner-suburban streets near my house - it was too dark to run along Merri Creek - I wondered why I was doing this. It seemed ridiculous. Shouldn't I be resting? Shouldn't I be recovering from a challenging day? No. I ran. And when I came home, something had changed. It's hard to say what. None of my problems were solved. But the darkness of my head as I had driven home was gone. My head was clear.

So I was unsurprised to hear my sister tell me today that running can help combat mild depression. I'm weary of self-diagnosis, but the term "mild depression" seems to fit my state of the past 12 months or so - sometimes going beyond mild - and running has been one of the best things that I've done to combat it.

The idea is confirmed in this article from BBC News, and a few other places that appeared when I googled "running depression". And what is the reason for this link? Well, at a physiological level running releases endorphins - happy chemicals which our bodies and minds need for our well-being. Sitting in a car in the dark driving from Brunswick to Werribee and back each day, I suspect, releases fewer endorphins than running. I doubt, as a matter of fact, if it releases any. So, looking purely at the chemistry of it, it makes sense that running would make you feel better.

But there are other reasons. Biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert is quoted as crediting running with helping him overcome severe depression because it gives him "time to quietly think". For me, running does nothing of the sort. I hear my heart pounding in my ears; I struggle over each mound; I let the songs streaming into my ears help me up and down each crest and round each corner. The best thing, for me, about running is that I don't think. And that, for a chronic over-thinker like myself, is a very good thing.

I accidentally mistyped "good" as "god", and, while I corrected the mistake, I think it was more meaningful than your average typo. I think that running and not thinking is also a God thing. You see, with His creation on either side of me, His wind blowing into my sweaty face, His strength powering my weak feet (I pray before each run that His strength will sustain me), I feel Him in a way that I never will sitting anxiously behind a steering wheel. I also trust in Him in a way that I never otherwise do. It's a powerful experience, and one that I have trouble explaining. But I think that a quote from the classic film Chariots of Fire goes some way to expressing how it feels. Says Eric Liddell, the great sprinter and Christian missionary:

I believe God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.

I'm not sure He made me quite so fast, but He has shown me a joy when I run that I don't feel at other times. When I run, I too feel His pleasure.

Restitution and Offsetting

How do we assuage our guilt? It's an important question. The Catholic church told us to wallow in our guilt. Self-condemnation, it seemed, was the way to atone for sins we could never undo. The Freudians told us guilt was an immature response to our lives and something we needed to overcome for the sake of psychological health.

These days, we don't seem to know at all. We go for runs to deal with our guilt over eating that extra piece of cake. We offset our carbon emissions to atone for an overseas flight. And then we tell ourselves to not feel bad. It isn't our fault. We're only human. We've all got to live a little.

*

8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:8-10)

Zaccheus could never have done anything to make up for his guilt. He could never have been accepted by a society that resented the crimes he had committed. He could never have broken out of the cycle of guilt and indulgence that trapped him. But Jesus called out to him and said, "Zaccheus, come down from that tree." And thus began a transformed life. The first thing he did was pay back those he had cheated.

*

3 When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. 4 “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”

“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”

5 So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. (Matthew 27:3-5)

Judas saw the best of all men hanging on a tree and knew he had put Him there. He looked at the silver in his hands. He looked at the perfect blood smeared all across it. There was nothing he could do. Giving the money back would never bring back the life he had betrayed. Hanging himself on a tree could never take away his guilt either. But he could see no choice.

*

A man sits at the entrance to Lygon Street. A scrawled note on a piece of cardboard sits in front of an icecream container with a few odd coins sitting in it, the sort of coins I consider a nuisance. The sort I would throw away if I could.

I have no money in my hands, only the books I just bought from Readings. The man blocks my path, and his needs cloud my happy Saturday mood. I glance at his face. I do not know what to do. Maybe I'll beat myself up over it, tell myself I suck, that I'm another Western hypocrite, that I need to be more compassionate, more giving, less selfish. Maybe I'll go home and donate to a charity to offset my guilt. Better than that, maybe I'll fall on my knees before the perfect one who already bled for my every moment of hypocrisy. And what will He say to me, when I kneel there? "I forgive you. Now go and do what you know is right."

He has shown you what is good, O man. And He knows that you will forever fail to do it. Rise every day. Pray that this time you will do what you are called to. Cling to the grace that forgives you every time you fail.