the nearest wound
I’ve spent the past few months job-searching. LinkedIn premium subscription, resume revision #147, cover letters tailored to demonstrate how I’d fit your team just right. When asked to tell a little about myself in interviews, I often found myself responding that I’d spent the past couple of years as a nonprofit professional.
As a “nonprofit professional” for a public education advocacy organization, I used to tell people some version of “public school saved me”
In many ways, this was true: school was a place of relative stability during precarious seasons, after-hours programs provided critical child care options, busses transported me so that my mother could work her 9-5, solid academics helped me become a first-generation four-year college student, caring adults encouraged my curiosity & education.
However, it is just as true to say, “public school almost killed me.”
Those stories are not for this space, but I think most of us have our own stories to tell. Bullying, sexual abuse, harassment, educators who are more ready to police and punish than to love and care, enormous pressures — from peers, from family, from coaches, from CollegeBoard, and violence, both mundane and headlining. Nonprofit professionals speak often of the “school-to-prison” pipeline, but fail to mention that for many students school is the prison.
In a world where our safety nets are systematically cut loose, we ask our schools to do it all. From counselors to cafeteria staff, those that work in our schools are asked to feed, assess, entertain, protect, triage, celebrate, keep peace, all while facilitating the primary task: educate. Many well-meaning people think this is the beauty of public schools. And yet, much like our public libraries which function as day-shelters for the unhoused, our public schools are overburdened: their service illuminates both our failures and our cruelties.
All of this is top of mind because during my job search, I’ve become a substitute teacher. The job is as boring and and hectic and funny and frustrating and invisible and ever-changing as you might imagine. Some days are spent with students largely ignoring me, while other days are spent talking about John Brown, stoichiometry, or Miranda v. Arizona. In my brief 4 hour training to become a sub, we were told, “Remember: the kids aren’t giving you a hard time. They’re having a hard time.” The only constant in any classroom: wounds abound.
In the wake of the Las Vegas 2017 shooting, adrienne maree brown wrote:
“we must, each of us, fix our attention on the nearest wound, conjure within us the smallest parts of ourselves that are still whole, and be healers. […] there’s enough destruction. there’s enough nothingness swallowing the living world. don’t add to it. there’s enough.”
In a world filled with so much darkness — absolute nothingness swallowing the living — this directive to fix our attention on the nearest wound is a startlingly clear and constructive command. There is so, so much to be mended, so attend to that which is closest to you. I do wonder about the bit about “the smallest parts of ourselves that are still whole” though, for two reasons: 1) what, if anything, remains whole inside us while we inhabit a world designed to shatter us? and 2) my faith tradition teaches that it is precisely by wounds that we are healed — a wounded healer reconciles a weary world, the Christmas carolers sing of a quiet, sleeping baby juxtaposed against the revelation “nails, spear shall pierce Him through,” and even in glory, He bears the wounds of His execution.
The command remains. Fix your attention on the nearest wound.
I’m looking forward to sharing with y’all more about my experience in our schools as a substitute in the new year. I have so much to learn, and I’m happy I can document my experience on this little digital journal. So many of y’all are educators, and I hope you’ll share your own experiences and advice with me.
Tonight is Christmas Eve. Unusually cold from the Arctic blast. For those of you who take comfort in the Christmas story, I want to share a few of my favorite things to meditate on during the final hours of our Advent:
Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s 2012 meditation on Mary’s Magnificat
“Mary’s canticle praises God for the kind of salvation that involves concrete transformations.
People in need in every society hear a blessing in this canticle. The battered woman, the single parent without resources, those without food, the homeless family, the young abandoned to their own devices, the old who are discarded—all who are subjected to social contempt are encompassed in the hope Mary proclaims.
The church in Latin America more than any other is responsible for hearing this proclamation of hope in a newly refreshed way. The Magnificat’s message is so subversive that for a period during the 1980s the government of Guatemala banned its public recitation. Seeing the central point of this song to be the assertion of the holiness of God, Peruvian theologian Gustave Gutierrez argues that any reading is fruitless that ‘attempts to tone down what Mary’s song tells us about the preferential love of God for the lowly and the abused, and about the transformation of history that God’s loving will implies.’
This message will not appeal to those who are satisfied with the ways things are or to those who seek to restore intact some past era of culture or religion. Even affluent people of good will have difficulty dealing with its shocking, revolutionary ring.”
mewithoutYou’s “A Stick, A Carrot, A String”
The Horse's hay beneath His head,
our Lord was born to a manger bed,
that all whose wells run dry could drink of His supply.
To keep Him warm the Sheep drew near,
so grateful for His coming here:
”You come with news of grace, come to take my place!”
The Donkey whispered in His ear:
Child, in thirty-some-odd years,
You'll ride someone who looks like me (untriumphantly).
While the Cardinals warbled a joyful song:
He'll make right what man made wrong,
bringing low the hills, that the valleys might be filled!
As a final note, I think we’ve grown numb to Christmas hymns.
In our scorched world of climate disaster, it is incredible to hear while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy: heav’n and nature sing.
Surrounded by growing christo-fascist unrest, we might wonder at these words — truly He taught us to love one another, His law is love and His gospel is peace, chains shall He break for the slave is our brother, & in His name all oppression shall cease
As the rich plunder the nations and workers are robbed of all dignity, we can scarcely imagine: while shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground, an angel of the Lord came down, "Fear not," said he “glad tidings of great joy I bring to you!”
Love y’all. Happy Holidays to all. - F
“More can be mended than you fear. Far more can be mended than you know.”