95 North. . . The Newspaper

I posted this in my room this year. I'm encouraging each student (I'm fortunate to have no more than 4 at a time) to "pick one" for the week. Why not? The longer I've been working in education, the more and more I've felt that building positivity and community is the 1st priority. Of course, I should adjust/made a modified version of this list for my life outside of school. I just haven't gotten to it yet. I'll fully admit that I have a tendency towards cynicism and pessimism. However, it is little positive actions like those listed above that help push me out of those shells and out into the world of engagement, a world that stands on a higher ground. What's  happening on the higher ground? Everything is clearer. The regrets of the past and the anxieties of the future aren't weighing you down enough to drown out the present. Sounds good to me!

One day, after you've lived for years in another state, you'll pull down the street of your childhood home. Only after a significant time of living away are you able to perceive, for the first time, that street so clearly. You will finally make some sense out of that street. You will make sense out of something you once never thought needed to make sense of, something you just accepted, and at once point, probably criticized and belittled. The poet T.S. Eliot put this idea in a poem in a more efficient manner than I: "At the end of all our exploration/ We will arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time" ( Little Gidding ). Replace your childhood street with your childhood religion, and you get G.K. Chesterton's great account of the Christian faith, entitled "Orthodoxy". I don't know much about G.K. Chesterton, other than he was a journalist in late Victorian era England and was sort of a generalist. He wrote plenty about ...

For the theologically minded, some quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel: On Biblical Literalism: "The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long distance telephone. The error or literal mindedness is in assuming that things and words have only one meaning. " Judaism & the Everyday: “This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.”  Lastly: As always, I feel like it is important to paraphrase Rabbi Harold Kushner when thinking about God: God is an abstract idea, not a person or a thing or a singular entity. If we ask when is God, not where is God, then we are asking the right question.