The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [28]
Some teachers still require children to copy bad nineteenth-century verse as a handwriting exercise. And in most classrooms I’ve been in, the teacher assumes that she is “teaching” the students the ordinary tools of language that are in fact the basis of human intelligence. Once, in a fourth-grade classroom, after I’d talked about metaphor, made up some silly examples on the board, and also read and discussed several deeply metaphorical poems, I asked the students to come up with metaphors of their own. The teacher warned me, “This isn’t a subject they’ve studied,” but I replied, “They’ll know how to do it, they just don’t know the word for it yet.” She and I had our own epiphanies that day, and that class turned out to be one of the best I ever worked with.
As children grow older and are asked to analyze poetry, they are taught that separating out the elements in the poem—images, similes, metaphors—is the only way to “appreciate” it. As if the poem is somehow less than the whole of its parts, a frog students must dissect in order to make it live; as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class. The metaphorical intelligence that has pulled disparate elements together to make the poem is of no consequence. Clearly it has not been taught, in most classrooms I’ve visited, as one of the more intriguing elements of the human imagination.
And do we do any better when it comes to the teaching of religion? The liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw makes a valuable distinction between theology and liturgy: theology is prose, she says, but liturgy is poetry. “If faith is about facts,” she writes, “then we line up the children and make them memorize questions and answers . . . But if we are dealing with poetry instead of prose . . . then we do not teach answers to questions. We memorize not answers but the chants of the ordinary; we explain liturgical action . . . we immerse people in worship so that they, too, become part of the metaphoric exchange.”
Metaphor has been so degraded in our culture that it may be difficult for people to conceive of worship as a “metaphoric exchange.” But as a poet I am willing to explore the implications. How would it change our understanding of worship if, from the time they were small, children were taught to value and explore the possibilities of Keats’s “negative capability” in themselves? They might better understand faith as a process, and church tradition as not only relevant but strikingly alive.
The ancient understanding of Christian worship is that, in the words of the liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh, it “gives rise to theological reflection, and not the other way around.” We can see the obvious truth of this by shifting our attention to poetry, and entertaining the notion that one might grow into faith much as one writes a poem. It takes time, patience, discipline, a listening heart. There is precious little certainty, and often great struggling, but also joy in our discoveries. This joy we experience, however, is not visible or quantifiable; we have only the words and form of the poem, the results of our exploration. Later, the thinkers and definers come along and treat these results as the whole—Let’s see; here she’s used a metaphor, and look, she’s made up a rhyme scheme. Let’s stick with it. Let’s teach it. Let’s make it a rule. What began as an experiment, a form of play, an attempt to engage in dialogue with mystery, is now a dogma, set in stone. It is something that can be taught in school.
Let’s return to our classroom