Living Into the Margins

When people ask me, “Mr. DeSalvo, what do you think about Jesus? Who was he really?” I say that, for me, he was the greatest teacher that ever lived. He was the reason I became a teacher.

Jesus might not be your teacher, but he is mine. In reading Against the Wind, Memoir of a Radical Christian by Dorothee Soelle I found myself agreeing with Soelle about teachers: A teacher is someone we choose. One does not become a teacher because of how smart or wise he or she is. You become a teacher when someone chooses you to be his or her teacher.

I chose Jesus because I was drawn to his style. His parables resonate with how I sense the world should be, how the kingdom of God would be if I ever got there.

One of his parables is about two men who go to the Temple, one an upstanding member of the community (the Pharisee) and the other a marginalized character (the tax collector). Both men offer a prayer that we are allowed to hear. The question Jesus poses is: Which prayer is most earnest and genuine? Which of the two men goes home justified?

Justification is the operative word in this parable from Luke. Where do we use it in our vocabulary? I immediately think about my word processing software which allows me to set up margins that are straight on the left and on the right, at the top and at the bottom.

The root of justification is, of course, justice. Justice is a basic concept. As I understand it, justice is born of reflection about what is right. It is based on ethics, rationality, natural law, fairness, and equity. As a Hindu teacher said to my friends and I recently, we all have it within us to know what is right, and we also have it within us to do what is right.

A colleague of mine says that seeking to know ourselves allows us to collaborate with ourselves. Self-reflection teaches us to confront difficult situations, and to persevere, setting a good example for others, thereby building personal health and strength of character.

Similarly, Jesus' parable from the 18th chapter of Luke challenges us to consider what is healthy verses what is justifiable. The parable is a warning against complacency. The Pharisee does not seek to go beyond the margins, but it is in the margins where the tax collector lives. It is precisely in the margins where the Pharisee might find new opportunities for growth. But he does not seek to grow. Perhaps it is too painful.

I was not alive during World War II, but it’s lessons and stories were fresh in the lessons my teachers taught. The SS guards in the concentration camps did not venture into the margins. They could not. They gassed people during the day and went home and listened to Beethoven in the evening. For them there was no contradiction between the beauty of the music in their homes and the reality of the death camps where millions of others lived and died.

This dichotomy of separation is one of the deepest threats facing our modern culture. Unless we seek to connect, to reconcile, to share what is just, what is better and sometimes painful, we will not realize our full potential, we will not find the peace we are desperately searching for.

In schools like the one where I teach, it is way too easy to imagine that the chaos "out there" is not our problem. Out there are the margins of our safe world. What is out there for us?

I am convinced that if we want to know who was justified in the story from today’s gospel, just read the ending. The tax collector hangs in the back. He is the minority member. Most of his colleagues are scorned by insiders and do not even bother to go to the Temple. He, alone, ventures out of his comfort zone. He whispers “God. I am experimenting with something different here. I am not accustomed to this place and not sure that I even belong. I do not know what to do. Help me. Accept me.”

Jesus says this is enough. Seek. Hope. Expect. It is enough.

The Pharisee, on the other hand, is the insider. He has the power. He has the position. But where is the grace? Where is the welcome? He says, “God, I am thankful that I am not like that guy in the back. I am generous. I am obedient. I am very nearly perfect in every way.”

So whom do you admire?

If you want to know who the justified are in our community, you do not have to look very far. The international students, the students of color, the little children in our community. These are the marginalized. They know what it is like to live as outsiders. All they seek is to belong. Talk to them about their experiences and they will tell you story after story of their gratitude, a thankfulness that most of us are not even aware of. All it takes is a little attention.

They are SO thankful that we are interested in them, that we make a little time to hear about their culture and background. Our attention lets them know that they have a voice, that they belong. More and more, good schools are showing deep interest in and commitment to international students and students of color and their rich histories.

When teachers include various religious views, social reform efforts, civil rights, affirmative action and other forms of multiculturalism into the fabric of the curriculum, it sends a strong and affirming message to the marginalized. They are encouraged to venture out, and as a result we all benefit from new voices and perspectives.

Like the tax collector in our parable, these students are the children of God in today’s world who have entered a community that is not their comfort zone. They are embracing new people, learning to negotiate, accepting what is very different from what they grew up with, and responding in positive ways to a culture that is mostly complacent and satisfied with itself.

Nevertheless, they are truly grateful. Imagine the sacrifice. Imagine the energy it must take to learn a second language and to communicate with people who expect precision. Ask yourself, who is adapting? I accuse myself because I know that I can do better; and, because I am not adapting, because we are not adapting, we are not growing.

Jesus was teaching a lesson by telling this parable, a lesson about the kingdom of heaven: Be not complacent. Do not seek to be justified by living within the narrow confines of a closed and rigid system no matter how perfectly justified those margins seem to be. Rather, reach into the unknown space. Make some notes there. Push yourself to accept what is different, what is difficult and what is painful. There we will encounter self-awareness, new growth, and opportunity. To get better, we need to be vulnerable and we need to be brave. We need to ask ourselves, “What am I missing? What am I knowingly, or unknowingly, overlooking, not seeing?” And then ask for God’s help. O God, give me the strength to open my eyes, to open my mind, and to open my heart.

Becoming an Adult

A few weeks ago a colleague of mine gave a talk to teenagers on the topic of adulthood. At his own expense, he began with a story from childhood in which he remembered having spoken to an elder about how the “kids” in his family were innocently attracted to the new cartoon channels being offered on Cable TV (also new), while he, being older and wiser, preferred the news, in particular news of the New York Mets. To the best of his recollection, he was eight-going-on-nine at the time.

At the wise age of twelve, my son Richard had an admission interview at the private school where I teach. It is a pretty good school, and his mom and I were not at all sure he would be accepted. During the interview, he was asked how he and the school would fit together. He replied, confidently, that since he and Dr. H, a veteran teacher in his late 50s, were friends, he thought the fit would be fine. I wondered, when the story was told to me later by the admissions officer: Does accompanying dad and Dr. H on a trip to Wendy’s for a hamburger secure the fit?

We’ve all met that unusual child who is “three-going-on-thirty”. You attempt to engage him or her with a riddle or a curious trick, but it does not work. The child sees through you, and wants you to know it.

When talking to adults about right living, Jesus said, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” I take this to mean that children have a certain innocence about them that they should never lose. They can be wise as serpents and at the same time innocent as doves.

Many years ago, my wife Mary and a friend were wandering around their suburban neighborhood. They were a couple of bored adolescents looking for something to do and decided to release the emergency break on a neighbor’s car so that it rolled down the driveway and into a ditch. As it rolled, the girls ran away, filled with fear and elation.

Children can be innocent, kind, and loving. They can also be selfish and destructive. My mother used to say to my brother and I, “What you are to be, you are now becoming.” Although I did not understand it then, I see now that my mother was warning me against building adult foundations on selfish and thoughtless choices.

So how, we ask, do we do as adults are supposed to do, and still be, as Jesus says, like children?

I was once invited to a Halloween party at the house of my childhood schoolmate Debbie. We were in second grade at the time and the party was in the evening. My mother did not want me to go to this party because it was on a school night and would last until after my bedtime. Reluctantly, she gave in when I informed her that “all the other kids were going.” Dressed in my cherished Popeye costume, complete with plastic mask, I, Popeye-the-Sailor-Man, walked to the door of Debbie’s house, waved to my mom to let her know that I would be fine on my own, and rang the bell. Debbie opened the door, and, much to my shock and embarrassment, I looked beyond Deborah to the big-girl and big-boy Halloween party that was in full swing. I knew right away that I was not ready for it. Nobody wore a costume. The girls had on dresses and leather shoes. They boys were in slacks and loafers. There were soft drinks, pretzels and napkins on the table. A top-40 hit rang out from the hi-fi, and I could see that the furniture had been pushed back for dancing. I realized that I had not read the invitation carefully. Deborah, however, was cool about it. She guided me to the den and told me to leave my costume on the chair and join the party. But Popeye panicked. Underneath, he had on pale blue pajamas.

That seven-year-old boy aged ten years that evening. He never put on the Popeye costume again. It would have been childish.

Several years ago, Mary took our son Andrew and one of his friends to a movie in our small town. Both were about six at the time. Our son was so happy to be at this movie with his friend that without thinking he put his arm around him and said, “You are my best friend. I love you.” Mary and I thought this was a sweet and genuine act of friendship. And she was right. But Andrew continued to wear his feelings on his arm over the next few years, while little by little, the culture of his middle school and high school taught him some stinging lessons of adulthood. Among these were: be careful about sharing your emotions; sometimes it is best to hide your feelings.

On a certain level, I believe that Jesus was countering such life lessons by reminding us that God is not impressed by sophistication or status. Rather, God would have us speak the truth in love, and acknowledge that in order to be fully human, we need to build honest relationships with others.

At the end of Shakespeare’s play King Lear, a set of values emerges that changes how human beings view the human condition. An all too trusting Edgar, a character who has been innocently stripped of most of the things that he valued, concludes:

"The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long."

There is much in our culture that teaches children to become adults by suggesting what they ought to do instead of what they know is right. As my colleague continued his speech, he revealed what he called a secret about adults: they don’t always know what is right, and, even when they try to make careful decisions, they often make mistakes.

All of us make mistakes, and we will continue to make mistakes because none of us, child nor adult, is perfect. The older we get, the more convinced we are that our decisions are the ones we ought to make at the expense of our childlike impulse to speak what we feel.

Perhaps the best we can do, as we strive to live life to its fullest possible measure, is reason through issues and problems to the best of our intellectual abilities, but to always remember that there is a child within us who loves us without shame or doubt and who would have us love others the same way.