Matching Tracksuits

Month: September 2021

Reading

Thursday 30 September 2021

I knew taking the picture might break the spell: an at-risk student who, of her own accord without any prompting or suggestion, chose to read a book during free time after lunch might not be thrilled about having her picture taken. But on the other hand, it’s a picture of success, and when it’s a kid you’ve already grown to love in a way, a kid you’re already pulling your hair out over and cheering on and fussing at with a smile — you go ahead and take that chance.

Sure enough — “Mr. S! Don’t!” And the spell was broken. But unlike many magical moments, this one has evidence to back it.

PKO Rotunda

Wednesday 29 September 2021

I was looking at the photographs of British/Polish photographer Chris Niedenthal when I saw an image of PKO Rotunda in Warsaw. Suddenly, I was back in Poland in 1996, experiencing the country for the first time, with a vivid memory of the first time I saw the building.

Warsaw 1970s Poland

A friend took several of us to see Warsaw for the first time, and as we walked out of Warszawa Centralna and long Jerusalem Avenue, the impressively Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science on our left, we approached a most peculiar building.

“That’s where we’re headed,” said A as we descended the stairs to pass under Marszałkowska. We weren’t headed to the round bank building itself, though. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I never even entered the building.

It was, in fact, the building just behind the PKO Rotunda that interested us: “There’s a Taco Bell there,” our guide explained. “It’s okay if you like cabbage on your tacos instead of lettuce.”

It was one of the signs of the growing Westernization of Poland that, in 1996, was still relatively new. We were all interested in the Taco Bell for that reason: not because we were necessarily craving substandard “Mexican” fast food but because we wanted to see what Polish Taco Bell looked like, tasted like — to get the local spin on one of the restaurants that provided us with cheap eats during college. With everything so new and unknown, it was fascinating to see things I’d always known in that setting.

Recently, developers demolished the original building and replaced it with a nearly-identical building.

The same spirit, but a different building.

So many of those old, communist-era buildings have been demolished or so completely remodeled as to be unrecognizable in the last twenty years. It’s understandable, I guess: only from a sentimental point of view are those buildings of any aesthetic value at all, and for many, there’s no question of sentimentality about the oppressive past they represent. For me, the sentimentality arises strictly from the novelty of such buildings when I first lived in Poland twenty-five years ago.

The Last Great Day

Tuesday 28 September 2021

They woke up this morning with a sense of excitement and dread, thrilled with their sense of foreboding and relief. Today, Jesus was returning. No one knew the hour, that is certain, but it would certainly happen today.

Unless it didn’t. It wasn’t the first time their leader had predicted Jesus’s return. It wasn’t even the second time he’d foretold the day. It wasn’t the third or fourth time. Many members of the group had lost track of how many times their leader had made this exact prediction with the same fervent confidence.  Just a year before, their leader had suggested that during this same fall festival Jesus would return.

“You won’t be returning to your houses!” He’d confidently assured everyone. He’d suggested that members might be talking to the resurrected Abraham — the Abraham of the Bible — within days. Even the original leader of their group, Herbert Armstrong, would have risen from the dead within that week and members would be able to “ask him yourselves” about various prophetic timing he seemed to get a little wrong.

So when they wake this morning and recalled their leader’s words from earlier in the week-long festival they were celebrating when he’d assured them Jesus would come back by Tuesday, they were hopeful that he might finally be right and worried that once again the prescribed day would come and go just like every other day before it.

Why do these people, members of the Restored Church of God under the autocratic leadership of Dave Pack, stick around and continue to support Pack’s delusions? The man sees himself as the most hated man on Earth. He has said about his importance in coming events that, from the perspective of the powers of evil seeking to wreck God’s plan, “I must be stopped at all costs!” Why do they continue to support him when year after year he has made the same false prophecy about the return of Jesus? It’s simple: the sunken cost fallacy. They’ve invested so much time and money into the prospect already that they cannot bring themselves to cut free. After all, there’s still the hope that he is God’s only apostle and his exclusive spokesman on Earth. If they leave now and then Jesus returns, they’ve forfeited their crown, literally: they believe they will become gods, part of the so-called “God family” that Pack and other heretics teach is the explanation of the passage in Genesis, “Let US make man in OUR image.” Abandoning the plan now means giving up god-hood if Pack ever does get it right. And since they thought for so long that eventually, he would get it right, they can’t bring themselves to admit that while he might be wrong now, he might eventually be right.

And yet they’ve heard it all before. They likely view their doubts as temptations of the devil, an attempt to get them to give up their crown — the ultimate victory for the devil.

In the midst of all this, I look at this little group that splintered away from the group I grew up in — I used to believe many of the absurd things the Restored Church of God teaches — and think about those members who are watching these last hours of the promised day slip away, and I feel for them.

Review: The World in Flames

Monday 27 September 2021

I was drawn to this book for one reason: I grew up in the same cult as Walker, Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God (WCG). Hence, as I read the book, I felt an eerie similarity with many of Walker’s experiences. His sense of otherness while at school was the same as my sense of otherness. His sense of impending doom while looking at peers in school was my sense of impending doom.

My embarrassment about these beliefs, however, was absent. He seems to have talked freely about the strange things he believed, even going so far as to try to convert his best friend Paul. I, on the other hand, never said a word about my beliefs. Looking back on this, I think it’s because I never really believed. I could imagine someone asking me, “ Do you really believe that?” after I’d explained this or that strange belief, and my only imagined response to their reaction to “Oh that’s weird” would be to agree. That was my fear. This deep abiding embarrassment about what my church believed was central to my religion’s worldview. It was strangely lacking in Walker’s.

There’s a more fundamental sense in which I cannot relate to this book: Walker is African-American, and I am white. This is notable because the WCG’s theology was inherently one of white supremacy. This is not to say that the church was comprised of racists, nor is it to suggest that there were openly racist sentiments expressed in weekly services, but its theology had definite racist shades that appeared in select passages in Armstrong’s writing. He would insist he was not racist, but it’s difficult to argue that when part of the theology was that in the kingdom of God, which we colloquially knew as the World Tomorrow (which was the same name as Armstrong’s weekly religious broadcast), everyone will be sent back to where they “belong.” Armstrong phased it thus in his 1966 book The Wonderful World Tomorrow: What It Will Be Like, which he copied directly into his final book, Mystery of the Ages:

In Noah’s day, the chief cause of the violence and chaos of world conditions was racial hatreds, interracial marriages, and racial violence caused by man’s efforts toward integration and amalgamation of races, contrary to God’s laws. God had set the boundary lines for the nations and the races at the beginning (Deuteronomy 32:8-9; Acts 17:26). But men had refused to remain in the lands to which God had assigned them. That was the cause of the corruption and violence that ended that world. For 100 years Noah had preached God’s ways to the people—but they didn’t heed.

At that time, even as today, that world faced a population explosion. It was when “men began to multiply on the face of the earth” (Genesis 6:1). Jesus said, of our time, right now, “But as the days of Noe [Noah] were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matthew 24:37)—or, as in Luke 17:26, “And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” That is, the days just before Christ returns. Today race wars, race hatreds, race riots and race problems are among the world’s greatest social troubles.

Noah merely preached to people in his human lifetime. But Noah, in the resurrection, immortal, in power and glory, will be given the power to enforce God’s ways in regard to race. It seems evident that the resurrected Noah will head a vast project of the relocation of the races and nations, within the boundaries God has set, for their own best good, happiness and richest blessings. This will be a tremendous operation. It will require great and vast organization, reinforced with power to move whole nations and races. This time, peoples and nations will move where God has planned for them, and no defiance will be tolerated.

Leaving aside the blindly stupid and racist assertion that “men had refused to remain in the lands to which God had assigned them” when considering the fact that the presence of African Americans in modern America is due almost entirely to the enslavement of Africans rather than people refusing “to remain in the lands to which God had assigned them,” the proposition that there will be “a fast project of the relocation of the races and nations” is essentially the assertion that God is a segregationist. The Kingdom of God runs on Jim Crow laws, it seems.

Note that I never once heard this from the pulpit. I never heard a single discussion about this, and I think that a fair number of people were unaware of this passage and the handful of others scattered in his writing. When I read that passage to a friend who’d also grown up in the church, she was dumbfounded and angry that she’d never noticed it. It was not a central element of the theology: the notion that we’d all become gods was more prominent.

In light of all that passage, though, it’s fascinating to me to think of the African-American constituency in WCG congregations. What was it about Armstrongism that attracted minorities even though it was clear from the theology that Armstrong’s god somehow viewed them as inferior? I was hoping Walker would write more about this than he did because he only deals with it directly a couple of times and obliquely a few more times. Still, it gave a compelling picture, and I cheered when his family finally left the cult.

Homecoming 2021

Sunday 26 September 2021

Last night was homecoming. Instead of a date, she took her best friend.

International Festival 2021

Saturday 25 September 2021

The Polish tent was a hit, selling out of almost everything and raising over $2,000.

Comfort

Friday 24 September 2021

Christianity gives comfort — that’s what its apologists claim. That comfort, though, is a comfort from a fear that Christianity itself creates. It creates the disease and then sells the cure.

“I know my sins are forgiven by the blood of Jesus!” they’ll proclaim, but the whole notion of sin and the need for blood atonement via a perfect sacrifice — that whole idea comes from Christianity itself. But even if that irony escapes them (the savior is also the one twisting the thumbscrews), there should be enough discomfort in the idea of hell to give anyone second thoughts. Note the following exchange:

Here we have people tying themselves into ethical and emotional knots, tearing themselves apart because they can’t reconcile two things:

  1. Their church teaches that children are born with the “stain of Original Sin” and are thus damned to hell unless they’re baptized.
  2. There are lots of children who die unbaptized, and the thought of them being tortured in hell is, well, hellish.

How do you reconcile it?

In the midst of all these horrible losses, children still-born or dying shortly after birth, there’s the secondary pain that because their children weren’t baptized, they’re worried that maybe, just maybe, their god, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, is not letting them suffer as they, being stained with Original Sin, in fact, should.

They find a way to explain it, even though the church taught for ages that unbaptized babies went to hell. Limbo becomes something of a compromise, and now, if these posts are to be believed, intent seems to be enough. So these parents can rest easy: their children are probably not writhing in agony. They will be reunited in heaven.

Yet within even this is comfort there hides another discomforting fact: once these people get to heaven, they’ll discover that someone they love dearly is not in heaven. They’ll know that their brother or their aunt or their grandfather is in hell, in torment, in agony. How could you live in heaven knowing your loved one is in hell?

We could expand this beyond familial bonds: how could anyone enjoy heaven knowing that any person — with a few monstrous exceptions — is in hell? And while they’re living on earth, that knowledge must drive them crazy if they think about it. It must drive them to do one of two things:

  1. Redouble their efforts to make sure everyone they love is at least baptized. (Of course, once we get into the Protestant tangle, it could be any number of things required to make sure you’re not going to hell, so it could be more complicated than that.)
  2. Not think about it.

I would wager most choose option two.

Really, I suppose there’s another option: rationalization. Catholics especially are good at this. The Bible says Jesus had a brother James. The Catholic church says Mary was a perpetual virgin, so any siblings would be impossible. How to get out of this? Simple — Aramaic, in the language Jesus would have been speaking, there is no separate word for “brother” and “cousin,” so James was just the cousin of Jesus. Done. (There is, of course, one small problem with this line of reasoning: no matter what language Jesus spoke, the Gospels were written in Greek, which does have different words for “brother” and “cousin.” But it’s best not to think about that too much — it will lead to an unraveling of that seamless garment of Catholic faith.)

I guess they do what they have to in order to maintain the faith.

Discovery

Thursday 23 September 2021

We started working on poetry this week. I always begin with the same poem:

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

It’s a perfect start-of-the-poetry-unit poem because it has so much in it that makes poetry great. There’s enough ambiguity to necessitate a little digging. There’s a title doing all the work a good poem title should do — integral to the poem yet still standing a little aloof. There’s parallelism and patterns. There’s such an economy of language.

We work through it slowly. First, we find some of the ambiguities: who is the “you”? It’s not the reader. What is that “they” in the final line? They flew, so we think at first it might be the sparrows, but they also seem to have fallen at some point — birds don’t usually fall. “It’s the snow!” someone realizes.

We tackle the ambiguity of the word “tell.” “It’s not ‘tell’ like ‘to tell a lie’, is it?” I ask. We determine that “discern” might be a synonym. Or just “tell the difference between.” “Between what?” I probe a little further. They realize that it’s telling the difference between snow and rain, and that that is what’s going on in that final stanza: whoever is watching the birds is experiencing a moment when the rain is turning to snow and more specifically, experiencing that liminal moment when we can’t quite tell what it is.

We work on the title a bit. “It begins with ‘Because,'” I point out. “What does that signify?” They soon realize that before that must have been a “Why” question. “So talk to your seat partner — what is the understood question?” Eventually, we get it: “Why did you write this poem and give it to me?” Finally, we unpack the whole title: at some point, someone asked the poet, “What is the line between prose and poetry?” He left the question unanswered and returned at some point with a poem, which he gave to the interrogator. Confused, she asks, “Why did you give me this?” And the class says in unison: “Because you asked about the line between prose and poetry!”

“So he gives her a poem about birds and rain and snow?!?” I ask. “What kind of crazy answer is that?” They talk a little. I give them a hint: “Look for patterns. Look for repetitions.” Then they see it. Two things in the poem: rain and snow; two things in the title: prose and poetry. It’s time to put the bow on it.

I write on the board.

__________ : rain :: __________ : snow

“Let’s finish the syllogism,” I invite, and together they say, “Prose is to rain as poetry is to snow.” Or we could have done it differently: “Rain is to snow as prose is to poetry.” We get the same results. Snow and rain are made of water; poetry and prose are made of words.

“So what’s the poem’s answer to the question? What’s the line between prose and poetry?”

“Not much.”

Not much, indeed, and yet so much. So much difference and so many glowing faces as the poem that just a while ago made no sense to them at all suddenly is this beautiful and pithy exploration of the nature of written language.

Filters

Wednesday 22 September 2021

We see what we want to see. Social media offers the best example of that in the contemporary world, but sometimes, it’s not just evident in a macro-view but in individual postings.

One of the religion groups I follow posted a story about a meteor “demolishing an ancient Middle Eastern city” and speculated that it could have inspired the story of Sodom and Gemorrah. The individual sharing the article added the comment, “Always interesting when science catches up to The Bible.”

“Science catches up to the Bible?!” I laughed. The Bible that includes a talking snake, an apple curse, a talking donkey, and a man surviving in a whale’s stomach for days? The Bible that includes the story of a flood that inundated the whole world despite the fact that there’s nowhere near enough water in existence on the Earth to do that? The Bible that says the heavens are a bowl-shaped divider that keeps the water of the upper firmament out (that is where all the water comes from, I guess)? The Bible that has epileptics misdiagnosed as victims of demonic possession? The Bible that says a sky wizard created the world in six days, including creating light before there was no light source? The Bible that purports many men lived literally centuries, with several living close to a millennium? In short, the Bible that is so scientifically backward that apologists have to contort themselves into knots or declare troubling passages as merely metaphorical is in any sense ahead of modern science?

I, of course, couldn’t leave well enough alone, responding “Science caught [sic] to the Bible and left it behind long ago.” Given the context of what I just wrote, it’s clear what I meant: the Bible is backward and dated, especially when compared to modern science.

That’s not what they read, though. One young man replied,

tell it to scientist [sic] 50 years ago, they also thought they know everything, in terms that we’re developed at their time… eyes opened yet? 🙂
Cell phones? Radio waves? What, we know only as much as we know, and every decade some people think we know it all, ‘its called science!’ 😄😄 God Bless

It is, naturally, to be expected that someone posting on a pro-Christian board would have pro-Christian views, and my comment was somewhat vague — intentionally so. Still, I didn’t expect everyone to see it that way. It’s a perfect example of confirmation bias.

Selling

Monday 20 September 2021

The Boy has been selling popcorn for his scout troop. We decided to make a poster tonight for me to put in the teachers’ mailroom (pending approval) inviting teachers to indulge their popcorn cravings. A few of the shots in for the poster…

Conestee Walk

Sunday 19 September 2021

It’s been a while since we went out for a walk in our favorite local part. Months, even. L is sick at home — an awful sinus infection — but we made the most of it as three.

The Sacrifice

Friday 17 September 2021

Another post on social media about Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, this time as a comedy:

I would think that such an event would cause near-trauma in the mother: any other reaction seems unhealthy. I would hope that if I came home with one of our children and told K that I’d almost killed the child because I was sure God had told me to sacrifice the child but thankfully an angel stepped in and stopped the whole thing that she’d gather the children and get away from me as fast as possible until I got substantial counseling.

As for the child, I would think it would be more than just a mere reluctance to go into the woods with the father.

 

School Volleyball 2021

Wednesday 15 September 2021

I went to a volleyball game for our school team tonight — in part to take pictures, in part because I have to attend a given number of school events, but mainly because several of my sweet new students play on the volleyball team. It was a tough match against Mauldin, the middle school L would have attended if she hadn’t gone to a charter school. Our girls were out in front at the beginning, but soon fell behind. And then fell further behind. And then lost 10-25. The second set looked better, but they still went down 19-25. The third set was much like the first: 11-25.

I still haven’t attended one of L’s high school games, so all my associations with school volleyball are with last year’s perfect season: not a single set lost. I sat watching and thinking: L’s team from last year would beat Mauldin like Mauldin beat Hughes tonight. And versus Hughes? It would be brutal.

It was a good reminder of how much our L has improved.

Football Glory and Critical Thinking

Tuesday 14 September 2021

When we lived in Asheville, I worked for one year at a day treatment facility for kids who’d been expelled from alternative school. It was a tough bunch of mainly fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. At one point, though, two boys who’d known each other “on the outside” (as they’d referred to it) were in the program at the same time. At lunch they’d revel in their former football glory, recalling magnificent plays they’d been a part of and sharing in the sorrow of those losses that had stung so badly. At one point, one of the boys mentioned having a recording of one of those games.

“Really!?” The program director was incredulous, but he managed to talk the boy into bringing in the video.

A couple of days later, during afternoon free time, the kid put the video cassette into the VHS player and pressed play. Soon, the director was howling in laughter as he watched a little league game in full chaotic, cute glory.

“Man, I thought you were talking about games you’d played in middle school or something,” he laughed. “I didn’t realize you were talking about second grade!” He was just good-naturedly ribbing the kids, and they took it fairly well.

Soccer practice under a half-moon

Looking back on it this evening as I jogged laps in a parking lot while the Boy had soccer practice, it suddenly took on a newly instructive dimension for me. Had any of us really thought about it, we would have known it could not have been middle school football the boys were talking about. They’d experienced little success in middle school, showing out enough to be removed from the setting altogether. Even the most gifted player is going to have to meet certain standards — administrators might bend some requirements for such a boy, but there are at least some requirements. These boys couldn’t even make it through alternative school let alone the less structured setting of a typical middle school classroom, so there was no way we adults should have assumed they were talking about playing organized football in the last several years.

We made those assumptions, though, because they neatly and immediately fit our assumptions. When a fourteen-year-old boy is reveling in past glory, we don’t expect it to be from early elementary school but from the recent past. It’s an immediate and logical assumption that we make without even being aware that we’ve made such an assumption. The thing is, we make these kinds of assumptions constantly throughout the day. We couldn’t function, I’d argue, if we were to give extended critical thought to each and every decision we make and every thought that flits through our mind. The trick is being aware enough of our thoughts to have as a conscious option the ability to switch on our critical thinking and go, “Now, hold on there.”

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching literature to middle schoolers. It’s just those “Now, hold on there” moments that critical reading encourages.

Monday Night Moon

Monday 13 September 2021

After desert, when K pretended she was about to eat E’s while he ran inside for a moment, we went to the front yard to get a little family exercise. L, having stayed home today because of sinus issues, passed the volleyball to me. Later, the Boy and I worked on his defensive skills in soccer.

As the Girl and I played, I noticed that, over her shoulder, the waxing moon was almost a half-moon. A waxing moon in the autumn was always a harbinger of the greatest week of the year, hands down, year after year. It was in the fall that our heterodox sect took a week off of work and school to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles in a strange attempt to follow the pattern of Old Testament holy days that we were taught were still required.

When I was L’s age, the sight of such a moon in September would edge me toward near-giddiness as I thought about all the adventures that awaited after the obligatory, daily, and often boring church service (yes, daily church — a two-hour service, no less, with a sermon that lasted anywhere from sixty to ninety ass- and mind-numbing minutes). Surely I’d meet new friends. Maybe we’d see some great attractions. But most enticing was the promise of what everyone called a feast-fling: a week-long adolescent romance that ended with addresses and phone numbers exchanged along with promises and more promises, a romance that was lucky to reach Christmas break. “Maybe we’ll go to the same feast site next year!” was the excitement.

It never worked, of course, because adolescent romances are just that — flings. But that excitement along with the excitement of all the other amazing experiences we’d certainly have hung in the glow around waxing autumnal moons.

My children know none of these things. The specifics of my religious upbringing are a complete mystery to them. I’m content to let them assume what they will. I’ve hesitated to tell them anything about it because it doesn’t seem all that relevant to their lives, and quite honestly, I didn’t want to shade how they saw Nana and Papa. That of course assumes that it would color how they see them, which is likely a projection: through almost all of my adult life, I have looked at the beliefs they inculcated into me, beliefs they held with complete conviction but were without a shred of logic even within a strictly Christian theological context, and wondered how in the world they could have fallen for such silliness. I know they came to view their own beliefs similarly, returning eventually to a more orthodox Protestant faith, but somehow I still hesitated.

“I hesitated,” I say as if it’s something that’s occupied a large part of my conscious thoughts. In truth, it has, but only in a theoretical, theological sense. My thoughts have only turned to that theology while mowing or having a cigar and scotch on a Saturday night. Unless I happen to see a waxing autumnal moon…

Sunday Evening

Sunday 12 September 2021

What we accomplished this weekend and what I have documentation for are two different things. I spent some time this afternoon scraping paint from the ramp that leads into Papa’s room (it will likely always be Papa’s room). When will we repaint it? Who knows. But I wanted to accomplish something today other than schoolwork.

Halina

Saturday 11 September 2021

February. There’s ice everywhere from snow packed on the road, snow compressed on the sidewalks, early melts in the fields that have refrozen. I am walking to the post office that’s in the serve-all commercial building in the village center of Lipnica Wielka.

The building houses a large public (as in government-owned) store downstairs, a large hall for wedding celebrations upstairs, and the post office upstairs in the wing to the right. Below it — who knows? Like many public buildings in Poland in the 1990’s, there’s a lot of empty space. In my hand, a pile of letters to family and friends. As I begin up the outer steps, I meet the director the rehabilitation center at the top of the village, just under Babia Gora, the mountain that looks over the whole village.

It’s a center the Duchess of York has established for children recovering from the chemicals and radiation used to treat cancer. I’ve been going up to spend time with the kids from time to time since the first weeks of my arrival. I always leave feeling depressed and heartened. Children have always been a joy to me, but so many withered children, boys with no hair, girls covering their bald heads with kerchiefs leave me emotionally drained.

Halina is one of the residents, a girl of seventeen who is trying to complete her first year of high school in Lipnica. She’s tried twice before, but her cancer and its treatment have made it impossible. She sits in my first-year class, clearly older, clearly more mature than the other students, and she often looks at me with an expression that seems to say, “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” A first year teacher, I really don’t.

Just before Christmas break, Halina disappeared. When I meet the director of the center, we make small talk for a few moments before he abruptly tells me, “Halina died.”

I stand there for a moment, silent. What do I say? What can I say? Everything feels so trite, so silly, so empty.