Becoming Our Future Selves, by Dr. Mark A. Hicks, Jan. 31, 2010

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Becoming Our Future Selves

by Dr. Mark A. Hicks, Jan. 31, 2010

Reading from the Velveteen Rabbit:

“Becoming Real doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

        I have a special fondness for the inquisitiveness of the Velveteen Rabbit, mostly because it provides an evocative vision for what for what it means to “become” or, said differently, to morph into a fuller conception of what it means to be fully human, to know that we’re alive, and that we matter in this world.

        When I look back over the experiences that have shaped how I view myself and how I engage with the world, it is pretty clear that it’s always been a process of becoming. Maxine Greene, a philosopher at Columbia University, often talked about such a journey as one of “becoming who I am not yet.” This idea fascinates me because it recognizes that our process of growth and development – our very selves – is always in-the-making, that what we know to be true today, may be quite different tomorrow. It is as if every breath I take is pregnant with possibility of what might be next. We are always in the process of becoming.

        Yet, this notion of becoming is quite counter-cultural, especially when you think about all the forces that are aligned to ensure that you don’t become who you really are. Sociologists of education have meshed their wisdom with developmental psychologist and offer that from our earliest moments in life, we are “socialized” into a system of beliefs of what is good, what is right, what is fair and equitable. I think of the line by the poet, e.e. cummings, who says, “to be yourself in a world that is doing its best to make you just like everyone else, is to fight the toughest battle there ever was, or ever will be.”

        The forces that invade our subconscious minds are incredibly powerful. I sometimes do an exercise with my graduate students that encourages them to recognize the seemingly innocent ways in which we pass along judgments about what is “right” or “wrong.” When thinking about gender identification, for example, we rarely say to little boys, “boy that sure is a handsome shirt you have on”, yet there’s a stronger tendency to complement little girls on their “pretty dresses.” Or, consider how the Girl and Boy Scout oaths give a subtle, yet real message that girls “try” and boys “will do”.

            For Boy Scouts: On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the scout law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

            Girl Scot Motto: On my honor, I will try to serve God and my country, to help people at all times, and to live by the Girl Scout Law.

        I say all of this to underscore the fact that sometimes, particularly as Unitarian Universalists, we find ourselves in recovery from many of the patterns of socialization that we find to be inappropriate in our lives. We tend to struggle with the signals that society said we were to accept, often without condition. The perpetuators ranged from our parents, the teachers or preachers in our lives; to schoolrooms, the media, and the bullies on the block. For many of us, our process of becoming was – and is – a journey of figuring out how to love – how to have a generous view of the world - in the context of hate, and fear, and domination and certainty.

        This phenomenon was crystallized in my mind in 2004 when I had a conversation with Peggy McIntosh, an important feminist scholar who, as a white woman, who did ground-breaking research on “unearned White privilege.” In our conversation, Peggy shared a painful lesson she learned as she left home to attend Radcliff College on the campus of Harvard. Just about to leave for Cambridge, she stops by her Grandmother’s house to say goodbye. After getting the requisite hugs and good wishes from her Grandmother, she saw the African American domestic worker that had only shown kindness to her since she was a little girl. So, Peggy goes into the kitchen, gives the woman a big hug, and leans over and gives her a farewell kiss on the cheek. Peggy then leaves the kitchen, and on the way out the doors, pauses give her Grandmother a final kiss. Extending her body forward, her Grandmother recoils in horror and reprimands her: “ How dare you try to kiss me with the same lips you used to kiss that woman.” Stunned. Rebuked. Dazed. Peggy leaves her Grandmother’s house, wondering how to untangle a web of love that is tied up in the context of hate. In that moment, Peggy recognized that she had been socialized in a climate where love and hate were intermixed. Indeed, this story was an early and seminal point on her journey of trying to figure out why and how powerful influences of identity can shape, contort, bend, mystify, befuddle, stretch, crunch-up and, ultimately, haunt the contours of the soul.

        Indeed, Peggy’s story is our story.

        I hear echoes of the Skin Horse and the Rabbit: what does it mean to “be real”? Being real doesn’t happen all at once. You become. And it takes a long, long time.

        As Rev. Linda has noted, I’m an educator whose work is deeply nested in the discipline of philosophy, sociology of education, and also in the mechanics of adult growth and development. So when thinking about these sorts of matters, I find myself reflecting on questions such as “how it is that life experiences shape the way we grow over time?; and “how do events of both an internal and external nature shape our soul work?; and why it is that children, youth and adults get stuck in the mindset or point of view that can’t seem to change?”

        So, for me, education is a manifestation of stepping out on your faith.

        To learn is to open oneself to opportunities to encounter the strange and figure out how to make it familiar. To learn is to affirm the inherent capacity of human beings to be more than social rules and constructions. It is to deny the power of hard-line stereotypes and dualisms’ ability to control our lives. To educate is to live into our capacity to thrive in the midst of contradictions, and erase hard-line assertions that suggest we must be either “this” or “that.” It is in the context of learning that we re-member the visceral knowledge that is embedded in our bodies. It is here that we know, deeply, that we are not alone, that there is always a community of some type that will hold us when we find ourselves teetering on the edge of a cliff, growing, becoming. Of becoming who we are not yet.

        So, for me, Religious Education is a beautiful container, wrapped and filled with faith and grace. It is a sacred space where we can learn how to become our better selves. bell hooks said it this way when thinking about where and how learning happened in her life:

          I loved learning. School was the place where I could forget someone else’s image of who and what I should be… I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

        So, when I think of religious education, I conceptualize it as being an experience that spans across our whole lives, wherein with every encounter with another person or idea, there is the possibility of re-inventing ourselves. It is the place where we encounter new frames of reference that can that expands the framework for how we make sense of ourselves, which, in turn, makes us more fully human. Whether it is the child learning how to bury his pet frog, or the adult learning how to unpack notions of ethnic supremacy in her thinking; Religious Education provides an opportunity to come together as a community of learners – not as individualized atoms – to help each other fill in the gaps of interpersonal understanding. Here, we can discover and explore how have we been mutually shaped by the world; how to move beyond our own partial understandings of things; how to find a way out, when no way out seems possible.

        I have a story to tell which might help us understand not only the importance of Religious Education in our lives, but its potential help us move into our future skins – to become who we are not yet – even as generations unfold.

        Allow me to share a story. Sophia Fahs and Angus MacLean are two of our most celebrated and prolific ancestors in Religious Education. I often think of them as our intellectual redwoods that have stood the test of time. Both of them studied and taught in New York City at Columbia University’s Teachers College. During the Industrial Era at the turn of the 20th Century, Teachers College was ground-zero for progressive educators attempting to disprove the theory that a factory-model for education was best for our children, both in public schools and in religious education. Teaching strategies of that era, largely, saw pupils as empty vessels that needed to be filled by an authoritative voice, and also as objects to be controlled by well-meaning people and systems wiser than students. Fahs as a Unitarian and MacLean as a Universalist were central figures in debunking these forms of intellectual and social oppression wherever they could find it.

        And, somehow, like a stream of water that always finds its way, these transgressive ideas made their way from New York City to nascent landscape and vibrations of Oklahoma, which had recently become a state in 1907. If you’re not aware, during the Jim Crow-era of segregated Oklahoma, Black teachers only had one choice for higher education, the historically black college, Langston University.

        Teachers College understood these disparities of segregated systems of higher education, and sent chartered buses through the South and Southwest to bring students to New York City in order to expand and supplement their graduate education. Fahs and Angus MacLean were students and teachers at Columbia during this time. And, as it turns out, some of my own childhood teachers and mentors were on those buses to New York City. In that climate, attending to the powerful idea that future selves needed support in order to become, my Unitarian and Universalist ancestors created a climate where, literally, my Negro ancestors could make that journey.

        One of my dear friends and colleagues Dr. Jennifer Berger, a scholar of developmental theory, talks about how educational experiences can pull the learner away from a stance of certainty and, in that moment of puzzlement, entertain alternative possibilities for seeing the world differently. It is there, when people don’t see themselves as being omnipotent, that they are most likely to find to consider another perspective and, likely, most capable of knowing what is most Holy in their lives, and in the world.

        Religious education should be that space in our congregations that brings us to the edge of what we know, whether we are seven years old or 70. In those carefully constructed containers, we should be learning how to articulate to ourselves what matters in our lives, and learn to hear what matters in the lives of other people.

        In those spaces, we should be learning how to figure out the contradictions of our lives that befuddle us, that make us lose our hair, and grow shabby, and weak in the joints. In that kind of space, we should be re-learning new ways to reverse the cycle of socialization and, in turn, create a cycle of liberation, were we learn how to be in community with each other. Where we learn, literally, how to become our future self.

             “What is real? Asked the rabbit of the Skin Horse one day.

             “Real isn’t how you are made,” When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.

             “Does it hurt? ”

             “Sometimes. Becoming Real doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time.

         Blessed Be and Amen.