Mark's Letters

So how should we proceed once we have fully embraced wonder and joy as the foundation of knowledge? Our first duty is to identify and avoid whatever kills wonder. Chesterton said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” We must never forsake studying what we love because others think it isn’t cool. Nor should we feign interest in something just because it is trendy. We should treasure the kind of study in which we can lose ourselves, for “losing ourselves” is inherently good and spiritually cleansing. We must balance the need for career training with genuine education for the joy of knowing. This will often mean taking more responsibility for our education and recognizing that what happens apart from classrooms and curriculum is often most important. Chasing after grades, as important as they are, should not crowd out education and should not be allowed to kill our curiosity.

Someone once wrote a book on things he learned while looking up the answer to a completely different question. The joy in learning gives room for digressions, detours, and bunny trails. In his Leaves of Grass, the great American poet Walt Whitman speaks of allowing his soul to loaf. Many English writers like Wordsworth made afternoon walks and conversation a habit.  Sometimes it means standing still. Notice the strangeness of the word “understand”; it suggests we must stand under (not over) something to truly know it. Once while I was walking in the woods with the renowned naturalist Robert Pyle, he instructed our little group to stand perfectly still. Soon we could hear the tapping of a woodpecker, the chirr of a squirrel, and the dripping of dew from the branches. In our stillness we also saw beetles scurrying across the path and the shadow of a hawk soaring overhead. As we stood still under the forest canopy, we began to understand it. Wandering, loafing, and standing under can keep the joy of learning alive.

In other words, we should seek elf magic and not orc magic. Tolkien explained that the magic of elves was based on understanding and nourishing the world around them. They loved trees and studied them until they could wake them. Orcs on the other hand sought knowledge that gave them power over—they refused to “stand under”. One kind of knowledge was motivated by love, the other by the desire to exploit. One approach required patient and humble observation, the other rushed to cut the trees to fire the engines of destruction.

But sometimes God may put it in our heart to go on learning expeditions. For me this often takes the form of a reading binge where I will power through ten or twelve books on a specific topic or by a specific author. I have done this on sustainable agriculture, holocaust rescuers, early church history, fairy tales, William Faulkner, Dostoevsky, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, and Shakespeare. The fun of an expedition is that you get to penetrate to the heart of something. After reading C. S. Lewis intensely, I feel like my brain has been tuned up and my imagination cleaned up. And in all our wanderings and more deliberate expeditions, we often achieve the holy grail of education: synthesis. That is where a truth in Shakespeare connects to something said by C. S. Lewis and is then echoed by Wendell Berry in The Gift of Good Land.

We must also reject the false dichotomy between sacred and secular learning. Although we need not approach every book as Scripture, we should expect the Holy Spirit to actively guide all of our studies. We should be inviting and expecting the Holy Spirit’s commentary on all that we read. Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth, so we can trust God not only to help us discern what is true and false, but to connect one truth with another. As the Holy Spirit guides believers into the wonder of synthesis, they discover that deep calls unto deep—that the truths in one area echo the truths in another. We can discover that no knowledge is useless.

Lastly, we must nourish the spirit of play and recognize play as one of the highest and holiest ways of engaging the world around us. Celebrating, delighting, and basking in the goodness of God’s creation should be the defining character of Christian education. The kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of true knowledge belong to those who enter as children ready to play.

If ever there was a champion of useless knowledge, it was G. K. Chesterton. In the introduction to his book Tremendous Trifles, he urges us to see the wonders around us:

None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see the startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud.

As we read through Tremendous Trifles, we discover that in his essays Chesterton practiced what he preached, especially in “What I Found in My Pocket.” He also asserts that such ocular athleticism may be the key to adventure:

In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.

As Chesterton suggests, simply seeing the world around us is the first step to discovering its secrets.

I learned this in a powerful way when my wife and I moved from the Pacific Northwest to Olathe, Kansas. Compared to the mountains and beaches of the southern coast of Oregon, Kansas was a chigger-filled wasteland. But year after year, with the help of a stack of field guides, I taught myself the names of trees, wildflowers, birds, and mammals. With my ankles bathed in bug spray, I tramped through woods and grasslands learning where I might spot a blue grosbeak or a jack-in-the-pulpit. I learned the seasons when edible greens and hickory nuts could be gathered. My contempt for the land turned to love. That strange place became home. Frequented meadows and streams became friends. I truly learned to see the place. But as Chesterton suggests with his phrase “ocular athletes”, learning to see Kansas was not easy—it was an “ocular marathon”.

In all my endeavors to become an ocular athlete, I have remained steadfastly and proudly amateur. Unlike dedicated or competitive birds, I have even failed to keep a list of the birds I have seen. The word amateur comes from the Latin root for lover, so the expansion of amateur interests and curiosity requires the enlarging of our hearts to love and marvel at the world around us. Today professions often demand a high degree of specialization, but Christians are called to be generalists at heart because all truth is God’s truth and this truly is our Father’s world.

We should also recognize that in some ways the intense study of anything opens door to everything. Someone’s stamp collection can become a commentary on world history and geography. In a very literal way, the study of the smallest subatomic particles may unlock cosmic mysteries. Tolkien captures this truth in the story of “Leaf by Niggle”. Niggle paints a leaf that becomes a tree, and the tree becomes a forest, and it eventually becomes the land in which he and his neighbor live and work together. One of the best examples of the triumph of amateurism may be Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. These stories began when Tolkien came across the names of some elves and dwarfs in Icelandic literature. He then wondered what kind of language elves might speak and, after teaching himself Finnish, began inventing several dialects of elvish. Tolkien then began thinking about what kind stories elves might tell in this language. One curiosity led to another and resulted in the creation of hobbits, Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings, and in his The Silmarillion a narrative of creation. As suggested by his semi-allegorical story “Leaf by Niggle”, Tolkien was conscious that his elvish hobby had kept him from accomplishing much professional scholarship during his tenure at Oxford, but it is his love of elves and hobbits that has secured him enduring fame. We should also note that although Tolkien seemed to retreat into an imagined world of his own creation, in this world he could comment freely upon all the things more important to this life: perseverance, loyalty, duty, humility, hope, pity, and the battle against evil.

The line between the amateur and the pure scientist is often as thin as a paycheck. If we define pure research as a search for knowledge apart from possible applications, we see that there is little difference between the pure scientist and the amateur. I recently attended a talk on sandy beach ecology that posed several questions about why the population of blood worms fell off dramatically within the wetland tidal zone. One hypothesis was that the predatory sand worm (looking like something from Herbert’s Dune) kept the blood worms in the higher zone. Of course, practical applications of all this wormy scholarship are not immediately obvious. But what was obvious is that the speaker loved this stuff—just like the most passionate amateur. His scholarship was play. And in many ways his Ph. D. was simply a license to play in the area he loved. Even in scholarship, love never fails.

It is significant that as the modern age rejected Christian faith, writers began to describe ennui (or boredom) as part of the misery of the human condition. In fact, at the end of the 19^th century a cultivated boredom with life became a common characteristic of aesthetes and the intelligentsia. When the perceived absence of God became a philosophical dogma in existentialism, boredom became a major philosophical concern. Curiosity, wonder, and adventure are rooted in the conviction that the world is endlessly interesting because the God that created us (and our capacity to know the world) also created all that surrounds us. Our minds and imaginations fit this world and this world yields it secrets to our minds. Therefore everything connects; everything fits. When we consider the lilies of the fields, we really do see something about God’s care for what he loves. The metaphor of rebirth that encompasses us each spring is not just a human fantasy or sentiment; it is a genuine truth about life and about God.

The Christian faith should create in us a joyful curiosity about the world around. Christians should be a tribe of amateurs who find God’s truth in all truth and therefore love all things. We should be intrigued by facts, not afraid of them. Pure science should be, and often has been, great fields of play for Christians. God still invites us to see what he has made, give it a name, and say it is good.

In Genesis we are told that after each act of creation God looked at what he had made and saw that it was good. At the conclusion of the creation narrative, we are told, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31 NASB). We should note that God did not say what it was good for. Nor did God look over all creation and pronounce it, “Useful.” Just as God “saw” and then delighted in what He had made, we are called to see the world and then delight in its goodness. God saw and declared the goodness of creation even before He had created Adam and Eve, so its goodness is not tied to the benefits it offers humans. It is simply good.

God invites Adam to enjoy this goodness by bringing him each of the animals to name. If we imaginatively reconstruct this scene, we see that this is the first example of science. Adam carefully observed each animal and then named it. Today we would call this taxonomy. Of course, we have no idea whether Adam recognized families or any of our present systems of classification, but observing, describing, and naming are still the essence of science.

On a relational level, observing and naming the animals was an invitation to share in God’s own delight of what He made. We can almost imagine God turning to Adam and saying, “Wait until you see this next one; you will really like it!” God must have delighted in Adam’s surprise and joy at each new creature.

All this delight in creation has very little to do with its usefulness. All Adam and Eve needed for food was supplied by the fruit trees God had planted in the garden. We are never told that God intended Adam and Eve to put any of the animals to work. When Adam was looking at the animals, he wasn’t seeing a way to pull a plow, or steaks and pork chops. God and Adam, perhaps sitting together on a hill while animals trotted by, were engaging in a kind of play.

When a child delights in the smoothness of a rock, the coolness of a stream on a hot summer day, or delights in the happy bounce of a dog let off the leash, he or she is replaying Eden. Our first response to the world should be, “It is good, it is very good.” Our celebration of the goodness of what God has made often takes the form of play, which in many ways is the most godly (God-like) and highest expression of education.

This learning and knowing simply for the joy of knowing is godly in several ways. First, it is not egocentric. Often when we ask what something is good for, we are really asking what good can it do me—how can I use it. Too often our eye and attention skips over that which offers no obvious benefit. There’s something holy about delighting in something simply for the wonder of what it is. Second, simple delight in the goodness of things frees us from the control of what others think. It is sad to watch a child give up building sandcastles because some friend says, “That’s dumb.” Education founded on joy and wonder frees us from the corrupting quest for status and acclaim. Delight is usually a more trustworthy guide to what we should learn.

The paradox here is that the more childlike our pursuit of knowledge is, the more like God we are. The maturity pragmatism offers is false because it invites us to view all we learn in terms of its personal benefit to us. And despite the title of this piece, the real point is that no knowledge is useless because God has created all things. But like many biblical paradoxes, the usefulness of knowledge is often found only if it is not sought. All delight in creation are expressions of worship and communion with God—the creator. Worship and communion, however, are not usually high on our list of pragmatic values even though it is that for which we were created.

Lest anyone think I am making too much of these passages from Genesis, let me point out that Solomon “spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even the hyssop that grows on the wall; he spoke of animals and birds and creeping things and fish.” The cedar trees were certainly a useful building material, but hyssop was essentially a weed that sprung up everywhere even in walls. In Genesis, God pronounced creeping things good, and here they are included in Solomon’s discourses. Today we would say Solomon was a botanist, ornithologist, zoologist, and entomologist. Many of the Proverbs are presented as wise observations on the nature of life, man, and even the natural world. Christ urged his disciples to “consider the lilies of field” and entrust themselves to God’s care. The foundation of education—especially Christian education should be observation and delight.

[Note: This is the first of several blogs presenting ideas I shared at the 2012 OYAN Summer  Writing Workshop in a talk titled “Of Mice and Miracles”]

We are now living under the tyranny of America’s only home-grown philosophy, pragmatism. The worse the economy becomes and the higher the price for college gets, the more we all want an education that gets us a job. There is even a movement to force colleges to offer students full disclosure of how much money they can make with each major and degree. In my classes I often have full attendance only when a quiz is scheduled. I regularly hear, “Will that be on the test?” And in the halls of every college that has general education requirements, one hears students grumbling, “I don’t know when I will every use this junk!”

Vocational and technical colleges have even launched advertising campaigns claiming that unlike other colleges, they will only teach you stuff you can use. In the quest for education that leads to careers, Americans are a lot like tots playing soccer—a little mob of kids chasing the ball all over the field. Colleges notice that baby-boomers are retiring, so they train a lot of nurses. But by the time the students get trained there is a surplus of nurses so the college runs to the next big thing—computer programming. And then the “tech bubble” bursts.

As a parent I too want good jobs for my kids. And if a person is going to go deeply in debt for college, it just makes sense that the graduate needs to make enough to pay off the loans. I get this. However, even though training for a job is wise, it should not be confused with education. In fact, education may have very little to do with career training. The heart of real education will often be what students discover and pursue on our own.

The beginning point isn’t a certain curriculum or methodology; it is embracing a biblical approach to education. Unfortunately many Christian parents and educators have been infected with the spirit of pragmatism and have strayed from truly biblical values. As we will see, the biblical focus of education is not utilitity but rather joy and wonder.