Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

June 2, 1996

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.
-- Maria Montessori

I was talking to my younger son Madison the other day about his future, his goals. You know the kind of talk I mean. He has his undergraduate degree and is trying to decide what to do next. He said to me, "You know, Mom, I'm just going to apply to a lot of different schools in different subjects and see who will give me money to go to school. I'm going to stay in school as long as I can. That is my goal."

I can understand that. Like mother like son. I have spent half my years as a full-time student. Along the way I've had many teachers, all of whom affected me in some way or other. Several changed the course of my life.

My first-grade teacher was Miss Cady, a tiny woman with white hair in a bun on her head. Miss Cady took children into the coat closet and paddled them when they were naughty. In the third and fourth grades I went to Holy Name, where I was taught by nuns, swooping black ravens with white circling their faces. They gave me pastels to draw with and listened to me recite my catechism. "Who is God?" "What is the Trinity?"

Then there was my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Crump. She liked the stories I wrote, and she noted on my final report card, "I hope to see some of your stories in print one day." Funny, how some teachers set you to dreaming bigger dreams than you could ever dream alone.

In the sixth grade I was planning to sing in the school choir for our Christmas program. But during rehearsal, Miss Linton, a cadaver-like teacher, stopped in front of me and bent down to listen. She then said to the music teacher, "You're not going to let her sing, are you?" and I was removed from the choir. Just a day or two before the program. A neighbor had just made my choir robe for me. That really hurt my feelings! I can tell you that at this church, we will never tell a child, "You can't sing in the choir." Some teachers tell you you can't, and sometimes you believe them.

High school was something of a black hole for me. I was too tall, too smart, too prudish, and besides had those horrible 1950's glasses, a poodle hair cut, and very bad skin. I loved school. It was my refuge. And reading was a way into a larger world than this little north Louisiana town allowed. There were stories that made me laugh and weep; there were places where people believed in other gods with strange names; there were cities like Paris, where, as Mark Twain said, "Everybody, even the children speak French." So--no football player would ever ask me out. But that was all right. I had hope. I knew this other world was out there, and I would be a part of it one day. My teachers liked me because I loved ideas, loved to learn. That's a crucial thing, for a child to be liked. No wonder I loved school so much.

By this time I was a Southern Baptist and going to Sunday School and Training Union and Youth Choir and Youth Group. I practically lived at the church, as did all of my peers. I think of our youth here at this church, and I want for them the same kind of safe place to come and learn how to be responsible, caring adults. As a teen, my church teachers were there for me. Miss St. Claire, tall and stately, who married a rotund widower when she was in her '40's and had a baby. In the nick of time. She was our choir teacher. Miss Altalene, a saintly woman who took care of her parents and so never married. She taught us scripture and waited on us when we went to White's Dry Goods. Mrs. McKinley, who tried to convince me that Jesus at the wedding feast turned the water into grape juice and not wine. I didn't buy that one! Again, I felt cared about. I had a place. It was largely my teachers, at school and even more particularly at church, who provided that center of warmth and safety which invited me to grow. Roots hold me close, wings set me free. These are my roots, these are my wings. I know it, and I am thankful.

I attended five different colleges, and had many teachers who nurtured me along. I had a few confrontations along the way, like with the teacher who dismissed class so that we could watch Kentucky play a basketball game. And with the teacher who gave the same final exam every year. And with the teacher in seminary who dismissed the comments of his women students. I spoke, I tried to change things. These teachers did not like me.

As I grew older and wiser, I sought out the very finest teachers, not only those who were the most knowledgeable and skilled, but those who respected themselves, for those are the teachers who are free to give to another. The ones who do not like themselves are busy shoring up their flagging egos; unable to see their own beauty, it is impossible for them to see beauty and goodness in another. They'll get you every time.

One of the finest teachers I ever was privileged to study with was Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Wendell is a farmer, and his understandings about the environment and the centrality of community come from his connection with the earth. I first encountered Wendell back in the 1970's when I was a young wife and mother in Lexington, KY. My boys were little, 2 and 3, and I was trying to be a good Southern woman, married to a surgeon. That meant that I didn't work outside the home, and I didn't rock the boat. I gave dinner parties, and smiled a lot. In short, I was going crazy. I decided to take a class at the University of Kentucky. A writing class. I wanted to cash my writing skills in on a few ego chips, since my head had turned to solid granite, and I badly needed to feel adept, to stop swimming upstream, to be valued for merely following my natural inclinations.

I was in for a surprise. I knew little about this teacher Wendell Berry--he was just beginning to be widely known. But as soon as our first class met, I knew he was a force to be contended with. On the surface of things, he was not imposing--tall and lanky, dressed in flannels, speaking with a distinctly Eastern Kentucky accent--and yet there was a remarkable kind of presence. He was his own man, and clearly in service to something larger than himself. Even then, Wendell had the feel of an Old Testament prophet--he spoke the truth, from the center of his being. Others sensed this presence, too, and for some it was frightening--the class rapidly dwindled to half its original number.

For my opening gambit, I reviewed one of his books, The Memory of Old Jack , for the local newspaper--"Ha, take that!" I thought. The first paper I turned in was a long judgmental essay on examinations. The sub-text was, I now realize, "You think you can evaluate me?" When I got my paper back, there was no grade but rather a blanket rejection of my carefully constructed, perfectly punctuated sentences. He said, in effect, "You don't know you're talking about. Where is your authority to make these statements?" I couldn't believe what was happening. I just stood there clutching my paper and cried. A lot. Wendell was uncomfortable, and all I could say was, "I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do." The beginning of wisdom. This experience was not what I would call an ego boost. But then Wendell fancied himself a writing teacher and not the school psychologist.

Wendell kept sending my papers back, all that semester. I knew he was right, but I wasn't ready to articulate the change, to do what he was pushing me to do--to give something of myself. It was easier to present that detached, ordered intellectualizing that was the formula for success in the usual school paper. I starting visiting with him in his office, and every time I went, some tenderness in me felt exposed. I would talk about myself, and often cry, and he listened with interest, always. I got the feeling that he thought I was worth something. I kept writing.

My other teachers had all told me how good I was. Wendell was the only one who told me how bad I was. And he is the only one who taught me anything about writing. You tell the truth about what you know. That's all. And that's the most difficult thing in the world.

Finally the last day of class came. It was December, and there was snow on the ground. I had been up all night, literally, in a last-ditch effort to write something that was honest. I finished typing at 8:00 a.m., with Kash, my elder son, sitting on my lap. Then the baby sitter failed to show. What to do? Something inside told me I had to be in class that day, so I dressed the two boys in their warm jackets and put them in the back seat of the red Volvo. Fire engine red. I took them to the hospital, parked in the emergency spot, and went up to the fourth floor, to surgery. I gave the boys to the nurses and said, "Dr. Sewell needs to take care of his sons this morning," and left. Now I don't want you to think I did things like this all the time--in fact, I never do things like this: I am generally nauseatingly responsible. But I knew I had to be in class on that particular day.

We sat around a table, in a circle. I always sat just to Wendell's left. He went around the circle, asking each in turn if anyone wanted to read. Everybody refused, including me. I hadn't even had time to proofread what I had written, and I had no confidence that it was any good. I only knew that I had tried my best to tell the truth about myself.

On the second go-round, I tentatively agreed to read, and the floor was mine by default. I read about my failure as a teacher in Liverpool, about my depression, about friends who tried to help but couldn't, about a husband who loved me from a distance, about my pregnancy, about giving birth. As I remember, I cried during the whole reading of this 20-page paper, and I did not once take my eyes from the paper. When I finished, I threw the paper across the table at Wendell and said, "Here, that's what you wanted."

Then I looked up uneasily to see how the other members of the class were reacting. To my surprise, I found that many of them were crying, too. There was not the usual period of analysis and criticism; rather, after a few quiet moments, people said goodbye to one another, and almost everyone had a warm word or a hug for me. I had touched these individuals, I knew, by simply revealing who I was. They were drawn to me, not because I was confident, strong, or intelligent--but because I was honest, for the first time. I was strong, vulnerable, joyful, desperate, hopeful, mean, generous, naive, determined, angry, and loving. I was all of these great contradictions and more--and I was acceptable.

I turned to go, and looked at Wendell. Did I see tears there, too? I think so. He handed me the manuscript and said, "Don't let yourself think of this as finished." And of course it will never be, for I write more of this story every time I put words to paper. Just tell the truth about what you know. It was a moment of grace that opened in me a way for loving. That year was the first year I saw spring come. "Oh, is this how it had been all along?" I asked myself, in wonder. I was 33 years old, and I had let myself see spring at last.

Says Isaiah, ". . . he who teaches you shall no longer be hidden out of sight, but with your own eyes you shall see him always. If you stray from the road to right or left you shall hear with your own ears a voice behind you saying, "This is the way; follow it." (Isaiah 30:20-22) I learned from Wendell what I can never forget--not technique or correctness, but to trust my own voice. I learned courage and faith. And I began to learn to love myself, opening the way for me to love others.

From poet Diane Ackerman:

Sir, if you love me, hold me to life as to a promise,
Sir, if you love me, teach me to collect my galloping hopes;
how to jam work's merciful fabric
into each hollow of a routine month;
how to greet life blazing like the pillars of Troy
and not char to rubble, not turn sour;
how to trot out and lunge the stabled heart
on riderless calms in the deathwatch of winter.
Sir, if you love me, teach me to thrive without you,
to be my own genesis.

[Diane Ackerman, "Entreaty," collected in Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, Vintage Books, 1993, p. 173.]

Many months later, when I tried to thank him, to give him credit for my rebirth, Wendell would hear nothing of it. He said, "I just encouraged you to use words well." As a matter of fact, he would accept nothing less than all I had, all I could put on the altar. To educate means to draw out. That is what a great teacher does: beckons forth the sacred from within you, lights the fire of love, makes a way for you to give your gifts.

Our greatest teachers inevitably teach through who they are, teach from their being. Their integrity calls for the same in you; their passion, the same; their tenderness and love, the same. You become not what they want you to be, because they have no such vision of that. You must have your own vision, and they say yes to you, yes, over and over again, yes, yes, yes until you hear it. They will not have half-measures, the shoddy, the good enough. They know your soul is a treasure, and they insist that you share it.

I have often heard that when your heart is ready, your teacher will appear, and I believe the truth of that. It has been that way over and over again in my own life. I had to be a little desperate to find Wendell. Just watch and wait. Struggle internally. Feel a little hopeless. Allow yourself to not know. "I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do." And then open your eyes. In due time, your teacher will appear. To lead you out to where you can live.

So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.