I woke up this morning, even before I remembered, thinking about love, about how teaching is about love, maybe only about love, and how seldom we talk about it.
Today is a fitting day for love. I have mourned my brother
for sixteen years today. Sometimes it seems like yesterday that he was still
here, as though it might yet be possible to pick up the phone and talk to him,
and other times those missing years, the years of missing, are unimaginably
vast. Forever. That inconsolable word. I sometimes consider the ease of
forgetting, yet how important this remembering is. Remembrance not only breaks but
opens hearts; remembrance brings weight and substance to pitiless statistics of
death that toll far from my small circle and turns them into sorrow too deep for tears, into love.
Isn’t this what learning is? This stretching out of our
small circles to love more widely?
Can we teach love? Teach with love? Teach to love?
It seems a small thing to think about, I suppose, in this time
of a global pandemic, of deep divisiveness, of unthinkable inequities, of
endless wars and mounting ecological ruin. We turn our minds to changing the
world through education. Debates rage about what and how to teach to this
not-yet-agreed-upon change and who we want our children to become through any
changes or what they need to know to become agents of this change: we splinter,
divide, tangled in our complex ruminations and expanding theories, expending
our energies to defend our own causes and discount others.
Yet there have been dark days before this.
W. H. Auden, sitting “uncertain and afraid” in “one of the
dives/ On Fifty-second Street” on September 1, 1939, reflects that “no one
exists alone”: thus, “We must love one another or die.” This is echoed decades later
by Martin Luther King, Jr. writing from Birmingham jail in 1963: “We are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly,
affects all indirectly.” We must, thus, he says, become extremists for
love.
Perhaps it is this small, this simple: to teach with love,
for love, to love, as love, so that with the remembrance of the weight
of even one death, an inextinguishable gratitude for the preciousness of living,
of life, for all life blossoms and grows.
