Have you ever seen the mist of the Holy Spirit descend upon a high school classroom? This week I did.
How did it happen?
Let me take you back: Friday afternoon, two weeks ago. I just had been through what, to that point, had been my most challenging class of the school year. The class contained, in the same corner of the room, three maestros of mischief, each deft at stirring up, mid-class, dust storms of distraction, comedy and disruption. In the first 4 weeks of school, they managed to enlist the participation of about 90% of this class in their schemes. They were pushing this new teacher (I mean me) into choppy waters.
I had a daily decision to make: do I get mad? Do I give detentions to the whole class? Do I assign extra homework?
I did a dance with each of these options then chose the middle ground. I mixed up the seating chart, separating the ring leaders into separate corners of the room (their last names – E, F and G – had originally landed them all near each other). Then I called – that Monday – a parent teacher conference with one child who I thought could benefit from it. I wrote up a special homework assignment with an extra hard quiz to go with it. I let the kids know that this assignment and quiz awaited them if we had another class like that terrible Friday (a class that would live in infamy in my brief memory as a teacher).
Then I dive, with a brisk head of steam, into the material. I work on creating a new culture for the class. Serious but not too serious, leaving some flex for laughter, room for chit chat – so long as it didn’t create a headwind for class learning. A class with gravitas, you could say, but with space for warmth and levity.
It works. The new seating chart definitely helps. And the consequences to misbehavior (now a more present danger) provide guardrails against excess in-class antics. As a result, classroom management issues start to recede into the rearview mirror. And the stories – David’s persecution by Saul, his fall with Bathsheba, his ambition to build a Temple, Solomon’s beautiful prayer for Wisdom – begin to generate some appeal. Not such a bad thing to have to learn, they begin to think.
Now fast forward to two days ago. Step into my classroom; grab a seat in one of the student desks and gaze around the room.
If the Spirit were a morning mist and the classroom a riverbed, you would see here the loveliest nesting of divine clouds now hovering above the waters. Something is happening and her origins are not natural. The class comes in, sits down, opens their notebooks and Bibles. Their pens in hand, their ears open, their lips zipped. For 90 minutes, the students sit there: listening, taking notes, responding to questions with the most marvelous docility I have seen from any of my classes all year. I am witnessing something supernatural. Something reverent, holy, still and expectant. Like a liturgy of Compline at a mountain-top monastery: the surrounding hills, receding in stillness, as far as the eye can see. The give and take that day was so perfect – so angelic, I recounted to a friend – that I made it through my prepared material with something like 8 or 9 minutes to spare. So I gave the class the time back. They thought that was pretty cool.
Two days later – it’s Friday now, the day I write this post – the same class rolls in. It’s the day of homecoming. We have a Pep Rally at the end of the day. The mood is more spirited. I decide to strike my preferred teaching balance for the day. A blend of gravity and humor: room for laughter here, chit chat there, while preserving clear moments in which silence and focus can take center stage.
The kids ease right into this rhythm. I present the lesson. It’s from the Book of Tobit, a marvelous book that is in the Catholic Bible but not the Protestant. We move from Tobit’s experience of personal anguish and his Elijah-like trial (which pushes him to cry: ‘Take my life Lord!’) to the journey his son, Tobiah, will make with the marvelously disguised angel, Raphael.
We’ll be reading chapter 6. A long chapter, much longer than I would normally have the kids read. But the book of Tobit is full of humanity and beauty and marriage and family life; full of hardship and triumph; demons and intrigue; human nobility and the closeness of God. I was determined to cover the broad swath of the book in three lectures (gulp); that meant having three big chunks that the kids would read.
I ask for readers – “Who will read today?” – and then scan the room for volunteers. I’m thinking 3 readers, in 3 chunks.
“I’ll read it,” says C.
This is the gifted, beloved, yet unpredictable C; one of my Three Musketeers of Mischief whom I needed to separate in the new class seating chart. Was it the earnest C speaking? Or was it the C seeking a stage for his next comedy routine?
I decide to take the risk. I take him up on his offer, hoping the earnest C will answer. I give him a field to run on.
“C, this is a long reading. It’s a whole chapter. The other classes have split this into three parts. But if you want to do it, I’ll give you extra credit if you do it and take it seriously.”
“I’ll do that!” says C. No hesitation. He hops up. An enthusiastic bounce in his step.
He comes to the podium from which I lecture, my Bible there, already open. My podium is a perch I readily cede to a child who wishes to read from it. With C in position, I step aside, extra Bible in hand, so I can follow along.
He takes center stage. Clears his voice. Sets down a bottle of water beside him: he is prepared for the long haul. He reads about Tobiah and Raphael passing the Tigris River, the fish that leaps at Tobiah’s foot, now snagged, now slashed open by Tobiah for its medicinal qualities. Raphael paints the picture of Sarah, Tobiah’s future wife; speaks with unparalleled eloquence on the mystery of marriage as seen from the courts of heaven, and then urges Tobiah onward in this grand adventure in love; a love that ascends, as though by spiraling staircase, from earth to heaven by ever increasing bounds.
All this C narrates, with purpose and gravitas, interrupted by at least 4 different sips of water.
“C, come on do you really need more water?” the class cries at the 4rd sip. They are eager for the next sentence. He reads on. I watch the class. All have fallen into that wondrous stillness they showed me in the last class. If I could have stopped the scene right there, I would have: caught up, as I was, in a moment of marvel that this class could have come so far in two weeks.
And we weren’t done.
On Fridays, I have 90-minute classes. This gives me time for survey discussions of material we don’t have time to read out loud and then two deep dives into my chosen texts. Our next text for today is Tobit 11. I zip the class through Tobit Chapters 6-10, so they are primed and ready for our second close reading of the day.
I need another reader. This time I eschew the idea of volunteers; I choose D. D is another one of my original Three Musketeers. He is gifted in tomfoolery, chit chat and spirited displays and he once single-handedly derailed an earlier class with the most exquisite aplomb. He, along with C, now hold a special place in the new seating chart. But I know, I sense, I believe, D holds within him a genuine heart for the good.
“D, will you read Chapter 11, like Cam did?”
He squirms. I allow a pregnant pause, then double down.
“If you can do it, if you lead the class in a serious reading, I will give you and the entire class a + 1.” My lingo for an extra credit point.
D hesitates, then assents, easing sheepishly out of his desk. He walks to the podium, no water bottle in hand, so sign of mischievous intent. And there, in all intentness of purpose, he reads – for what I assume is the first time in his life – an entire chapter from the Bible (Tobit 11) before an ekklesia of peers who sit in rapt attention. It is like George Herbert’s “church bells beyond the stars heard;” it is Church outside the Church walls; it is a version of what I have long sought: worship in spirit and truth. It is God’s breath passing from inspired Word to 15-year-old voice to 15-year-old ears, all beneath the gaze of a 53-year-old teacher who hasn’t been teaching long enough to merit such a miracle.
D returns to his seat; the room remains in a holy silence; and I decide the moment has arrived for a mini lesson.
“Why are you doing this?” I say.
No response. Puzzled faces.
“Why do you listen with such attention when the Bible is being read?”
“Reverence,” one boy responds. “Respect,” says another.
“I appreciate that,” I say. “I notice that every time the Bible is being read in this class you all show great respect. That’s a good thing.”
I continue, nearing my point. “Who knows who St. Paul is?”
A few hands go up. Less than I had hoped for.
“St. Paul was one of the early leaders of the Christian Church,” I continue. “He wrote a number of letters in the New Testament. There he said something marvelous. He said that all Scripture is ‘God-breathed.’ You could say “inspired by God,” but the literal translation of θεοπνευστος is ‘God-breathed.’ As in, God breathed his Spirit into the letters and pages of this book, like He breathed the breath of life into Adam in the garden. When we listen to these words, then, when we take them in, we take into ourselves something of God himself. The first step is to listen, to take it in. And you are doing that. Thank you for that.”
They took in this teacher’s aside in the way a dehydrated athlete tilts back a water bottle. I could tell it hit home. I decided one more word – also not on today’s agenda – was in order.
“Well, that’s a wrap, I continue. Great class. Great listening. Great attention. Great responses. Class is over, but I have one more thing I’d like to say to you.”
I feel it’s time to tell them something I have not said to any of my classes yet.
I pause. “This is a hard thing.”
I pause again. I look out at them. All eyes are on me.
“It’s something I have wanted to say for a long time. But I didn’t think you would believe me if I told you sooner.”
Puzzled looks. A further pause.
“I love you guys. I am teaching here because I love you. I loved you a long time ago. I still do. I’m happy to be your teacher.”
I wish I could remember the exact response. Wish I could have video’d it. There were several responses. There was a shuffling of things. “There was a ‘We love you too.’” There was a putting away notebooks and a pulling out phones for the allowed break-time I give at the end of a good class. In truth, their response was an experience of the bird-on-a-branch-then-sudden-departure-into-flight kind of attention span that kids have. But I wasn’t really expecting a response. I wasn’t planning on saying this today to this class. I could never have imagined doing so two weeks ago.
But I’m glad I did. It was time.
I think I will tell my other classes on Monday.
