The Monster of the Obvious

Greetings from Ocean City, Maryland. I just had a treatment for my cancer, hopefully one of the last ones I'll need (after two years the doctor says I'm in full remission), and after one of those I always need to feel close to the divine. I must be close to what Aldous Huxley called "the monster of the obvious" -- a marvel, like the ocean, so grand that the only appropriate response is awe of silence.

Growing up I spent a lot of summers at eastern shore of Maryland, about three hours from my home in Washington, D.C. And now I am here to ask God what he wants me to do with my life.

The only thing I felt nervous about driving here from my apartment in Washington, D.C., was the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The Bay Bridge is a colossus, one of the man-made wonders of the world. It's over 4 miles long and 10 stories high. Driving across its majestic expanse you feel like you're entering the City of God. I had crossed it over a hundred times, but in the last year it had sometimes been difficult.

When I was going through my cancer treatment the doctor put me on steroids, and they made me insane. I can't believe someone would endure Nazi panic attacks, constipation and homicidal rages just to win a few football games. The first time I drove myself down to Ocean City, Maryland during my treatment, I had a massive anxiety attack right as I began to cross the bridge. It got so bad I almost stopped the car midway.

Ever since then I was afraid it might happen again, even though now my treatment was pretty much done except for this maintenance regimen I am on every three months. I threw the steroids away months ago.

I also had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I lost a couple years suffering from, then diagnosing, then treating the cancer, but now that I'm better I feel changed. Only two things really appeal to me as a lifestyle. The first is to adjust my pace of life, maybe move to Ocean City and become one of those craggy old hippies you see wandering around on the boardwalk -- the Big Lebowski "dudes" that just kinda hang out and commune with the sun god on the beach.

The other is more ambitious. For the past year I've been taking education classes so that I can get certified to be a teacher. I always wanted to teach high school English -- get kids excited about the books that changed my life: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, A Mencken Chrestomathy, Chesterton's Orthodoxy, etc. I have learned, however, that it takes more than desire and personality.

I always used to hear the same example: Colin Powell could not be a teacher! It's all that red tape! Dump the bureaucrats! There is some truth to that, but the most brilliant person in the world needs some basic tools for handling a classroom -- tools that I learned in the classes I took.

Conversely, there are people out there with masters degree in education who don't belong in a classroom. On our last day of class in "Foundations of Education," our professor, Karen, bluntly told us the truth. "Part of teaching is the right training," she said, "but let's face it: a crucial part is talent and personality. Some people have taken all the right education courses. They read the right books. They are certified. But they stink as teachers. They just don't have it."

I started teaching a couple years ago at St. Teresa's, a Catholic school in Maryland. I had been there when I got diagnosed with cancer, and the principal, Sister Mary, had the entire school praying for me. It had worked. How sad that had it been a public school such action would not have been possible.

The eradication of God from the classroom has left hole in America, both spiritually and intellectually. In his wonderful book Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, Stratford Caldecott explores religion not as the subjective expression of feelings but as a valuable form of knowledge -- that we could come to know and understand God not just through faith but through human reason; that the more we learned about the universe scientifically, the more awesome it seems.

Caldecott insists, convincingly, that there is an unbreakable connection between truth and beauty, and that the theological pursuit of the meaning of that connection is the most important quest in life. He quotes Socrates, who said that the point of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.

Starting with Horace Mann, the father of the American public educational system, and reaching its height with John Dewey, the titan of early 20th century progressivism, western education had cut itself off from God. It often did this in the name of "pragmatism," which was a favorite term of Dewey, who had once been a giant in the field of American education. Dewey had introduced the idea of progressive education, which meant that education should not be about memorization or God or learning history but simply about what worked in an ever-changing society.

Dewey wrote a small library's worth of books and articles. He was refuted in one sentence by G.K. Chesterton, who said that "Pragmatism is a matter of human needs, and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist."

This doesn't mean that you turn public schools into Christian schools. It does mean that teaching the world's religions as philosophies that offer insights into human nature and the universe could have a transformative effect on the schools. It could teach kids to love reason, to love truth, to love what is beautiful.

So what would it be? Teacher or beach bum? For the past three days I've been fantasizing about it being the later. It would be an easy life. It would be nice to sit here on this magnificent beach and just talk to God, and be with Him.

A near-death experience can do that to you. I was drawn into genuine intimacy with the Lord during my illness, and in the end nothing else matters. That was obvious to me when I was at the Bay Bridge on the trip down here. I could feel my adrenaline start to rise, and I didn't have any tranquilizers. I had refused to take any from my doctor. I want to be cancer free and free of any other garbage also.

Instead, I put in a Van Morrison CD. Just hang on, I said to myself. After lymphoma, six months of chemotherapy, and controlling classrooms full of rowdy kids, I wasn't going down because of some dumb ass panic attack.

My car slowly rose over the bay. I held on and my breath grew shallow. For a few minutes there was no sound other than the CD playing low and the da-dump, da-dump of the tires running across the pavement. Then, the halfway point. I was going to make it. I started to breathe again. As the far shore came into view I turned up the volume:

We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won
as we sailed into the mystic