Episode 2.3: adulthood and retro TV

I’ve been struggling a little with the new session of this class. It struck me last night what my problem with the new instructor is, and it’s pretty simple: he’s a high school teacher. Of course this isn’t a bad thing, and in fact I have no doubt that he is a fabulous high school teacher. But...well, for last five or six years, I have been loving my forays into the world of adult education. It was something of a revelation to me when I started taking German courses: hey, this isn’t school any more! The best instructors don’t care whether you get the questions right, whether you’ve done the homework, or even whether you show up to class: they assume you’re an adult and have multiple priorities which you can responsibly manage, and if German homework didn’t rise to the top of the list this week, well, it was because something else was in fact more important. And on the flip side, they assume that when you do show up, you want to learn, and structure the class accordingly. They also explicitly value the knowledge and experience each student brings to the class. Group work tends to be far more interesting. And/or messy, as the students come not as a flock of meek sheep ready to be herded through the next exam, but as functioning adults with strongly-held opinions. This all requires a somewhat different kind of teacher, one who has absolute mastery over the subject matter but also the humility and patience to treat even the most clueless students as equals, and a solid dose of facilitation skills to steer things back on course when they get out of hand.

Our current instructor is more of a traditional teacher type: entertaining and certainly experienced, but maybe not entirely convinced that students are going to have anything useful to contribute to a discussion. And in a crazy high school flashback moment: last night we watched videos. Not press-play-on-the-laptop videos, but wheel-in-an-AV-cart-and-insert-videotape videos. The first one was a TV clip from the late 90s. I wish I could find it to show you… First, there’s full screen shot of a terribly proper-looking nun with owly glasses, standing ramrod straight in a starched white habit and introducing today’s topic in crisp, rapid German: “Many progressives speak about bringing church to the people. The Elisabethenkirche in Basel has recently opened its doors as an ecumenical center for culture and spirituality. Last Saturday they even had a disco. DISCO in CHURCH? Is that possible?? Today we interview pastor Felix Felix, leader of the Elisabethenkirche.” Cut to overhead shot of an old church outfitted as a club, with a not particularly full crowd of youngish people doing some quality white-people-dancing. Then to the studio, where a stiff-looking woman and the comparatively more relaxed looking and intriguingly named Felix Felix start a clearly scripted interview. Felix Felix says that life and passion are something that should be part of church, not separate from it, and the interviewer says, “well, let’s have another look at this event from last week.” And there’s a longer clip of people dancing inside the church-as-club to some terrible 90s song, ending with a shot of colored lights mounted above an intricately-carved elevated pulpit. The interviewer asks stiffly, “As you could see at the end of that clip, there were DISCO LIGHTS mounted in the PULPIT. Is that not SACRILIGEOUS?” And Felix Felix says no, it’s pretty much out of fashion these days for a pastor to preach from on high anyway, when we have services we put chairs in a circle in the sanctuary. The interviewer looks like she might pass out…

LOL gotta love a conservative culture. The point of showing this clip in class, apparently, was to introduce us to the idea that church might in fact be a place for life and passion (he wants us to go on a field trip to the Elisabethenkirche in March). We moved on to reading excerpts from the report of the hip-sounding “Synod 72,” which was the regional conference following Vatican II in Switzerland. It proposed a new direction for the Church and declared, for example, that the Church should not retreat into itself, but should work with like-minded political and religious groups towards common goals; that priests and the Church hierarchy should be open to criticism; and that the Church should be accepting even of those who consider themselves Christian but don’t go to church regularly. We were asked to consider whether we agreed with these ideas and whether our churches today reflected them. To which the answers were yes and…sort of. There’s a lot of lip service paid to this stuff, but few have figured out how to really put it into practice. So where do we go from here?

Having laid the groundwork for our discussion of church with the rather provocative topic of Vatican II and its aftermath, the course is now going back to consider the early Christian church. In class last night this was accomplished through another video, the first episode of a TV series called “2000 Jahre Christentum” which apparently came out in the heady days of the turn of the century and is basically a narrated 40-minute montage about the life of Jesus. Oof. Here it is on YouTube if you…need to brush up on your German and/or historical Jesus. Otherwise I’m not sure I’d recommend it. Though to be fair, there are 11 more episodes I haven’t seen... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkWDRdh2OSQ&list=PLQGEaCC7FC8BRP1GCahjwndzqglR_kFPT

BUT this gives me an opportunity to put in a plug for some other YouTube videos which my dear brother recommended, “Sea of Faith,” a BBC series broadcast in the 80s in which pastor and religious philosopher Don Cupitt considers the role of the religion in the modern world. It is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J396Lamxu9I&list=PLVUIaMDAYwqjMlxhXDehb4k8Oqa5n5KAP and though it moves at a snail’s pace by today’s standards and features some truly retro footage (much 80s hair! painful historical reenactments! check out the first three minutes of episode 6!), he does a beautiful job of considering exactly the question I’m interested in, can a thinking person in today’s world really be Christian? His answer is that with our modern privilege and education and knowledge and diversity comes a responsibility to approach religion critically and maturely. That if what we are experiencing is in fact progress, we’ll have to update our concepts of God and Church to keep up. Or as St. Paul said 2000 years ago…

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:11-12)

My favorite episode of Sea of Faith is episode 2, which follows the development of evolutionary theory and then, having dispensed with the need for God in the natural world, switches to the psychological theories of Freud and then Jung. Jung saw religion and myth as ways for humans to access their ancient, unconscious minds. What if religion is in the end no more or less than an expression of our deep desire to know ourselves and be fully known? Does that make it irrelevant? Hardly. I wonder if the Church’s good intentions about being open and accepting stumble because we persist in trying to believe in a God who exists in some objective reality separate from ourselves, rather than as an integral part of each of us. 

In non-class news, I squeaked through my intake interview this week, just barely managing not to break down in tears and run screaming out of the room when the woman in charge of human resources at the church asked me in a mildly accusatory tone, "Well. How IS your German? Surely talking to the mothers in the playgroup will be an important part of this job you're taking?" Yep. That's gonna be a problem. I'm convinced we should talk to each other more, right up to the point when I'm asked to talk to someone... Please just go ahead and put your best tips for making small talk in the comments.