Globalisation: In The Field

By now it should come as no surprise to anybody that my research area is within that widely-dispersed and contestable phenomenon (or, to the hardcore, 'presumed phenomenon') known as globalisation. It is indeed a fiercely contested phenomenon, because many heavyweights have attempted to define, counter-define, or redefine it; some have sought to rubbish it as just a convenient term to cover many other phenomena that just happen to interact across the globe.

But something from a recent paper by Susan Robertson resonated within me. And, as a former communications specialist, I realised how appropriate that metaphor was.

You see, globalisation is indeed a field. Like the many fields we encounter in physics, defining it is often based on empirical research concerning how it acts upon (or otherwise interacts with) other entities. In the case of a modulated radio-wave field, it induces a variable current in a conductor (or antenna), which we can convert to audible sound waves.

Similarly, globalisation is a field with many components. Some components can be measured by effects on entities (such as 'education sectors' or 'markets') and sub-entities thereof (such as 'schools' or 'businesses'). Some can be measured by less quantitative effects and other debateable phenomena such as human well-being and quality of life.

The lessons we learn from investigating the field of globalisation therefore depend very much on which instruments we use and what entities we observe interacting with that field. Since the primary observers, investigators and participants are all human, globalisation field theory is thus a human science, and can be treated as a multi-disciplinary area of expertise much as complexity theory.

But is globalisation a real phenomenon? Undoubtedly it is. It is real in the sense that it is not ideal, but actual; it is also real in the sense that discussing it as a phenomenon allows us to say it is one, since it is a human phenomenon. After all, we have no doubt that 'love' is a real phenomenon even though some people say it all boils down to oxytocin levels.

Passers-by

It seems like such a long time ago. A quarter-century has passed since I wrote, "Time, pass us by, pick on some other pair of lovers." Last night, watching Captain America, I remembered those lines. Sometimes, two people are meant to only ever be passers-by.

Humility

It is good to stand in sober judgement over one's own self. We are told not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, but to think soberly, according to the measure of faith God has given each of us.

That is not to say that we are not to think highly of ourselves at all, but that we are to think more highly of others. In some ways, that is similar to the idea of loving ourselves; we are not told to not love ourselves, but to love ourselves not more than we love others, and to love that which is of greater spiritual value.

This is a simple idea. You cannot love your neighbour as yourself if you do not love yourself at all. And if you hate yourself, that is a bad thing for all the world, since you must then hate your neighbour too. In this age of globalisation, the thought that everyone is your neighbour is becoming more relevant.

So today then, it being Christmas Day, we have a convenient moment to sit and look at ourselves soberly. How much is the value of a life? How much more are other lives worth? Are we willing to serve others so that we might become less and they might become more?

Here is some advice from the Good Book.

Know those who work above us and among us and with us. Be at peace. Warn those that are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient to all. Do not return evil for evil, but follow that which is good. Rejoice evermore and always. Prayer unceasingly. Give thanks in all things: for this is the will of God.

And have a happy new year too!

Three (Again!)

Recently, I've been meditating on the idea of threeness. The point about three is that it is the minimum number of points that will define a plane; it is the minimum number of points that when connected by straight lines on a plane will give a shape. Two is good, but three is difficult to break.

And so it comes to pass that I think of threeness. I think of faith, hope and love, and how Paul (that arch-crafter of philosophical epistles) manages to squeeze them into the first epistle to the church at Thessalonica: "Remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope..."

Some of this will seem boringly familiar to some of you. Indeed, I've mused about these three virtues before, and even with a reversed perspective of sorts here.

But some of you might be appalled or made uneasy or amused by the fact that some nights, as I sit and sip my Bordeaux (of whatever vintage, some better than others), I think of all the people I've taught and who have taught me. I think of my first teachers — my parents and grandparents, and my last students (and I think, O God, please may I continue to have more).

And as I think of all of these people, I remember what Paul (and his fellow workers Silvanus and Timothy) remembered without ceasing: the work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope that others have shown in exemplary manner. And the night gives way to dawn.

Love and Neglect

Sometimes, as a younger friend of mine said, you realise there are 1001 things about the opposite sex that you will never understand. As you grow older, you realise two more things: 1) it's closer to a million and one; 2) you don't need to understand it all.

I think that men tend to neglect many of these things. She might say, "Haha, the last time you bought me flowers was on my 21st birthday!" You think, "Haha, yeah, we were all young and silly once." You ought to think, "Errm. Time to visit the florist."

It takes a huge emotional investment to cater to all the little things. Men tend not to have these reserves. The reason is simple: the 'emotional' side, things like flowers and gifts and hugs and quiet moments — they are as much a product of physical and intellectual action as anything else, and just as consuming of the body's attention, energy and physical reserves. But men tend to invest instead in singular tasks, limited foci, specialist areas.

This leads to treating people by formula. Women read books about how diverse and complex things are; how nuanced, how different of meaning things can be. Men read books about x laws of this, y rules of that.

Men cannot keep up. But there are a few things that help. Be random — do random nice things once in a random while. Believe in the other person as the same person but with different daily seasons. Try not to understand in terms of linear logic, but in terms of accepting the many contradictions that a real person can have. Don't hunt the logical contradictions to destruction, but enjoy the different perspectives in each facet.

Above all things, love. Imperfect human love is much more acceptable than neglect, no matter how benign and well-meant. Leaving someone alone to cool down is not as good as leaving someone alone so you can cook a meal for her.

In the Good Book, men are enjoined to love their wives. But wives are not told to reciprocate in quite the same way. A look at the whole Book tells you why: men can only do a few things, but they can do them exceedingly well if they remember to do them at all — this is a key reminder. Women, on the other hand, are made to be 'helpmeets', are able to help with and understand many things, and tend to be critical of male efforts and behaviour (see, for example, Sarah laughing at the idea of Abraham becoming a father, and then later manipulating his efforts).

Women, in other words, need to be tolerant while hoping for the best. Men need to remember to love, with or without understanding it all. It seems to work.

Food Courtship

Sometimes, I just let go. I walk anonymous through the throngs, I look at the curious specimens in their glass cages, and I eat. I love hawkers' centres, I love food courts, I love the winding streets that the truly great cities have, lined with vendors of odd foods.

I like to imagine the minds that first came up with various foods. Who first mashed his rice into noodles? Who decided to roll a sausage in a coat of corn? Who decided to make the plastic dough that can be spun artistically into the prata, that pancake of pancakes? Who first made patties of lamb? Of beef? Of fish? Who first filled tender chicken with molten cheese?

I have been in love with many foods. I taste them still, a chemical romance or the memories of such. I used not to be able to leave a buffet without tasting everything; now I can walk relatively unscathed in the midst of plenty.

I have been with desperate companions, hungry and greedy men; I have been with the most delicate of young ladies, both of experimental and conservative tendencies. All my experiences with food have been interesting.

But I am no snob. The humble hot dog, fried cephalopod, leaf of garden vegetable, root of plant? I eat them all, save for a few enemies which my genes will not tolerate. And I enjoy what I can, for the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing better.

Love in a Time of Choler

The current age of man is neither reflective nor intellectual; since it is not sanguine either, it must be an age of choler — an age, as the ancients might say if exposed to modern jargon, dominated by the yellow bile of intemperate drive and antipathetic task orientation. In such an environment, our concerns become curiously short-sighted. Our priorities become curiously ill-defined and long-term. In short, there is a gap between what concerns us and what has prior claim on our vision.

It is this, I suspect, which makes love so difficult for some people. I've come to that suspicion not only by looking at others, but also at myself. It is easy to say in a vague sort of way that you love someone, that you will miss them when they're gone, and so on. It is harder to be concrete in the medium term.

For example, it's easy to say something like, "Today I'll give X a treat," or, "Today (or tomorrow), we'll go to Destination Y and do Z." It's easy to think of birthday presents and even the writing of a poem or two. It is also easy to say, "I'll be waiting for you after you finish university; it's only four years more," or, "Someday, we'll look back and think about all the times we've spent together."

But what are our concrete plans for developing the thick layer of affection between the seed of passion and the skin of compatibility? What are the things we work towards together? If we can have 5-year plans for schools that are never carried out, yet call this progress, is there hope for 5-year plans for human relationships that are carried out and are the true workings of a conscious and deliberate love?

Yes, I realise that some people do shy away from linking 'conscious' and 'deliberate' to 'love'. But 'love' is not just a noun, a thing, an emotion; 'love' is also a verb, an act, a process.

In my experience, to treat love purely as an emotion is to dilute its power and its impact, to make it vague and somehow thematic but not concrete. It makes the question of whether you love someone one of whether you feel that you love someone. And that makes it easier to confuse or deceive yourself.

It's not that we don't love the people we say we love; rather, it makes it harder because our emotions change with time, temperature, distance and the concentration of caffeine in our bodies. But things done are done; things to be done are things that you can objectively see will be (or won't be) done.

That's not to say, either, that you must measure love only in terms of things done and objectives attained, plans carried out and 'areas for improvement' improved. That would make it something like one of those schools-run-like-a-business.

What I think love is, to borrow the analogy of the four temperaments again, is that it has to have the short-term enthusiasm of the sanguine, the short-term focus of the choleric, the long-term persistence of the phlegmatic, and the long-term introspection of the melancholic. But it can't be four separate things, because the medium-term gap appears. It has to be an integrated programme.

This means that the enthusiasm and focus must be stretched, while the persistence and introspection must be anchored to the near future. Think about the next year, the next two years. Look back at the last year or so. And learn to enjoy every bit of it, without anxiety for the next day or the next ten years.

If you're in love, love will abide. But it also needs some deliberate positive cultivation, not just the deliberate negative avoidance of bad things. And somehow, your relationship will stretch to bridge the gap; before you know it, you will have loved someone for a year, two years, five years, ten years, twenty years and more. But that's as far as I've got.

Paper Trail

After many months of digging slowly and carefully through the accumulated debris of years, I finally came to a place of beginning and ending. There are only two short years in what some might call senior high and others might call junior college; for many of us, it's a period in which the child bows out to the uncertainty of adulthood.

I found the little archive in which I'd packed the notes and letters of old friends from that time. They are pre-adult, adolescent, post-childhood things. Having kept them over the years as mementos of my youth has ensured that I retain perspective. I've never laughed mockingly at teenage crushes and the other minor affairs of the heart that my students experience; I've been to that kind of place in life before.

I remember it all, and when I forget, I remember again, looking at the green ink one person used, the paper, the cards, the decorated envelopes and the innocent photographs. Which ones loved, and were loved? Which ones loved, and went away? The emotions are long buried, but like a summer in the south of France, can be evoked, ghostly, in the dim light or the deep red wine.

It's only paper. It ought to be discarded. But it is still there, and every time I return, I know what I have lost, and what I have gained.

The Road Not Taken

I have a cloister here. The honey-coloured wood panelling frames me in a distant cradle of light and shadow, like the petals of some enormous blossom. I am cradled to sleep in it sometimes, I hear the diffused echoes of the distant possibilities thunder faintly through my cloister walls. On rare cold nights, I know she knows, and she knows it too – that we are all human and think of what might have been and what might not.

And so, innocent of deliberate intent or malignancy, I remember the other one. It is on the edge of the penumbra, the interface between daydream and nightdream, that I see her barely unforgotten face, white and grey against the velvet backdrop of sleep.

She was a dancer. I told her she was like a gazelle. Some people are always uncomfortable with long limbs, and yet show nothing to be uncomfortable about. We shared few meals, few moments, and our distances were greater than our proximities. And one fine evening, we suddenly realised that we had stepped completely through the minefield of our overlapping fires and into the safe zone.

We are friends, and that is all; even though I sometimes wonder as I reach into the darkness with the last of my thoughts, I know I will not grasp anything but that. It is awkward for the young to think of affection without desire; it is impossible for one to exist without some form of the other. But it is entirely possible for two people one day to have the first without the second.

I know this to be true.

Along The Shelves

If the book is Mao
Then it is red
If the book is read
Then it is done
If the book is Donne
Then poetry.

If the thought is kind
Then it is young
If the thought is Jung
Then it is typed
If it is typed
Then document.

If you love some one
Then two or more
If you love some More
Then seasons all
Blur into one
Poetic intent.

And there I leave you
With my cold coffee
And a dish of roses.

Spreadsheets In Love

This is a part of my life that sometimes seems silly, a little bit unreal, a little bit odd even to me now. But sometimes you learn things that nobody believes. And so this post is one I make knowing that it will not be believed, and that really, I am free.

It concerns the process and practice of loving, and learning what is not love, and what is. It concerns the making of bonds, and the discovery that whatever bond was formed in ages past, it no longer exists. And perhaps, it is about discernment and the use of computers.

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I was once eighteen and full of it. It's something sublethal that happens to most boys. For it is true (although we don't learn how true till we are twice that age) that our physical and mental powers are in full bloom at that age. You will never eat so much again, you will never recover so quickly from injury, as when you are in that magical zone from about 17 to 23. And the peak of it all is 18.

I had been dating (well, those social engagements fraught with peril and silliness that we called 'dates' were part of it) since I was fourteen. And one day, it was more than four years later, and I sat down with an old computer named 'Ancient Eric' and tried to work out, with a spreadsheet and about 256k of memory, what it was that made some of my relationships last longer and some last a lot shorter.

No surprises. I used many parameters, but only a few seemed statistically significant at all. And here, to my everlasting regret and consternation (mixed with a little personal triumph and perverse happiness), are the empirical results.

The most important predictor seems to be socioeconomic compatibility. That seems mercenary, materialistic even. But it turns out to be true for various reasons: people with the same SES live in similar areas, come from similar backgrounds, talk about similar things and know the same people. I had relationships which were far more stable when the SES was within about one standard deviation of mine. It's important to remember that religion is sometimes part of SE compatibility too.

The next most important predictor is time spent in communication. I used to log all my phonecalls, my face-to-face talk and walk time, stuff like that. It's obviously true that time spent together, in which actual communication occurs, helps a relationship develop (whether for good or bad). In fact, the act of recording these things makes you more aware of them. That's always good. It's a habit I maintained deep into married life.

And the third, and least significant of the most significant, is the number of times a week that you say nice things to each other which are specific and meaningful and... randomly distributed, I think. It helps, but it isn't as powerful as the first two. But it's good to make a habit of it.

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At this point, a number of you will say, "All this is common sense, we don't need you to tell us that, and besides, God's will prevails (or something like that)." I guess my point is that I was gathering empirical data. God does tend to pick winners, and the winners have some correlations somewhere. Where He picks really odd couples, we notice because they are unusual and don't fit the normal correlations. They're outliers, and special cases. They don't perturb the data much.

I collected 43 sets of data. I got my friends to give me more input. I started on sociological research when I was pretty young, I think. And human nature remains (more or less) constant over the generations. Some day I will tell you more about that. But for now, this is all I have to say.

And of course, I am sure no one will believe me anyway. Heh.

Keepers Of The Dream

The other day I was having breakfast and listening to the godchild. Godchild was telling me about the last days of Pompeii and the fall of the Roman Empire, all rolled into one, but on a slightly smaller and more human scale. I sympathised, and while I was listening, I felt distant echoes of the same pain.

The dreams of the godchildren are the precious dreams that God has given them, made into exquisitely detailed and fragile miniatures. Some of them will become templates for huge blueprints of grand futures; some will merely be kept hidden in lockets, treasures never to see the direct light of the sun again. But behind them, sometimes in the shadows and sometimes offstage, some of us stand our vigil, our watch against the fall of night.

For every dream which is born to waking needs a midwife and a guarantor, a person willing to stand in the gap and share the burden. Not every bearer of a dream will stand the test. But the colours of the day that each dreamer wears, the blues and reds and golds of morning, shine against the coming of twilight. They are our future. Though we too are weak and mortal, we have to try and help the children who are the hope of that future, polish their armour and guard them in their vulnerable moments.

One day they shall be great in the land. Though some may fail, and lose heart, some will rise to the height of their God-given powers. We pray for these, our godchildren, that even where we fail, God will sustain them and keep enough of us around that their dreams will live.

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Listening to the godchild reminded me of an old song. And here it is.


Münchener Freiheit – Keeping The Dream Alive

Full of memories of people and places
And while the past is calling
In my fantasy I remember their faces

The hopes we had were much too high
Way out of reach but we had to try
The game will never be over
Because we're keeping the dream alive

I hear myself recalling
Things you said to me
The night it all started
And still the rain is falling
Makes me feel the way
I felt when we parted

The hopes we had were much too high
Way out of reach but we have to try
No need to hide no need to run
'Cause all the answers come one by one
The game will never be over
Because we're keeping the dream alive

I need you
I love you

The game will never be over
Because we're keeping the dream alive

The hopes we had were much too high
Way out of reach but we had to try
No need to hide no need to run
'Cause all the answers come one by one

The hopes we had were much too high
Way out of reach but we had to try
No need to hide no need to run
'Cause all the answers come one by one

The game will never be over
Because we're keeping the dream alive

The game will never be over
Because we're keeping the dream alive

The game will never be over...

Fear Is The Key

One of the most interesting verses in the Bible, in the context of fear (and in particular, the fear of God), is Psalm 130:4. It says that God is feared because there is forgiveness with Him.

That's interesting because of what is implied. In almost all texts of that era, gods are feared because they are mighty, vengeful, violent and final in their judgement. There are parts of the Bible which say such things about the God of Israel as well. But this particular chapter stands out because of its novel description of fear. The chapter is all about redemption and hope in the promise of unfailing love. And therefore are You feared.

My father often says, if there's a therefore, ask yourself what it is there for.

It is there because the writer feels that some kind of logic (theologic?) makes fear consistent with the idea that God is forgiving and unfailing in His ability to love. At first glance, this seems rather unlikely to us. Most of us think of love and forgiveness as things which no normal person would fear. But I think I have an answer.

My answer to the riddle is this: people fear what they do not understand, people fear absolutes, people fear things greater than they are in any respect. Take something as mundane as a classical singer. A person who finds himself standing next to a world-class tenor would feel apprehensive about singing anything, even in a karaoke lounge. And it need not be such a large gap in proficiency, competency, acuity, capacity, or virtue. Even a small gap, perceived as large enough, causes apprehension. What more an infinitely large gap?

A God who can forgive anything should He so desire shows such a gap in one aspect. That one aspect alone is enough to inspire fear in a person who can apprehend the existence of such a gap. It is equivalent to an ant recognizing in a sudden enlightening moment how much bigger a rhino is, and how easy it is for that rhino to accidentally or deliberately crush any number of ants.

It was in such a moment that I realised how much a person who is not afraid of being vulnerable can paradoxically be a threat to another person. People who have no fear are feared by those who rely on fear; as Nimzovich said, "The threat of execution is more powerful than the execution of threat." And the odd thing is that if you love someone very much, or if you are loved very much, there will (since we are all human and imperfect) be some episodes of intense fear. Yes, perfect love casts out fear, but in all of common humanity there is no such thing to be found.

Fear is the key. It is not death that is the final frontier, but fear.

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There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T S Eliot, The Waste Land, 25-30

Voices

Vox populis, vox Dei say the old texts, and it is at the most unnerving times that we might believe it. It is always so seductive to hear that the voice of the people is the voice of God, especially when you are a member of a mob of thousands streaming down the Appian Way to destroy the heresies of the senators.

But we must always be careful to make sure we aren't hearing voices – or if we are hearing voices, we should at least know where they come from. Sometimes, the single voice of a messenger in the night can make hay of the kingdoms of men. Sometimes, the voice crying in the wilderness can raise up a vision of eternity that is mightily compelling.

Yet it isn't the vox populi I'm thinking of here, in that ancient Roman sense. I'm thinking of the voices of those I know, who are dear to my heart in their various ways. I have been blessed with a terrible memory for names, but with an acute one for faces and patterns. My friends, and those of you who think of yourself as mere acquaintances but who share with me a friendly amity, please forgive my selective anomia in the knowledge that you are closely remembered. Words you have said will be with me for a very long time - and if you have spoken your name to me with intent for me to remember it, I will link face to voice in memory.

I treasure each one of you. And I treasure each kind of time I have spent with each of you - a range which includes mutual moments of many types: morning fellow-blurness and irascibility, noontide respite from the heat of the day and the hour and the tyranny of time, evening decline and exhausted disinclination, midnight subversiveness and wicked laughter. And I just had to say this against the day when one of us is beyond hearing or speaking or the continuing knowledge of humanity, in the hope that none of us will be beyond the love of God.

Faith, Hope, Love & Anchors

I've always had this uneasy relationship with I Corinthians 13:13. It is of course that famous verse which says, "And now these three remain (or abide): faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Why 'uneasy'? What could be more beautiful than a line like this; what cause for uneasiness could there possibly be?

I guess that over the years, like many of the people of my generation, I developed a tolerant dislike of ranking. And yet here, in this verse buried in the words of Paul the apostle of Christ, is an obvious example of ranking. And ranking of virtues, no less! How could one possibly rank virtues? By what criteria? And to what end? I have not yet entered the familiar physical realm of uncertainties, errors, precision and accuracy. Indeed, we are still in the metaphysical realm.

Of course, the argument for 'the most excellent way' has just been made, in the verses preceding this. By this point, the reader has been invited to consider the consequences of doing things without love. But a cursory inspection of chapters 12 and 13 shows little to do with the consequences of doing things without faith or hope - thus leading one to consider the possibility of some sort of 'straw man' argument.

But the whole book of Romans deals with the issue of faith and faithlessness; faith is the beginning of the argument, the root of our belief in eternal things. And the consequence of faithlessness is ignorance, as Paul colourfully describes from chapter 1 of that epistle onwards; it manifests in eagerness to exchange the certain knowledge and glory of God for odd and inferior things. Indeed, Paul leaves no space for even philosophical doubt - rather, to him faithlessness is inexcusable. Belief in God is not a kind of knowledge gained by reason, but a self-evident reality that needs none. It is all very frustrating to the scientist, and meaningless folly to the likes of Bertrand Russell.

And worse to the logical positivists, faith is 'the surety of things hoped for; the certainty of things unseen'. It is all a vexation of spirit to the philosophers of the age.

What then of hope? Does the Bible ascribe greater horrors to hopelessness than to faithlessness? Oh yes, without hope we are the most pitiful of men, says Paul. Whether Paul wrote the epistle to the Hebrews or not is debateable, but that epistle shows hope as the anchor of the soul, without which we would surely drift and be lost in despair.

More scholarly people than I have searched and researched for the ultimate verity behind faith and hope. But I think that the reason why love surpasses them both (although all three abide) is that love is the one virtue that must continue to act. It cannot exist without acting. Faith will not listen to reason, and is shown as implicit in the things one does; hope is an enduring state of mind which seems optimistic and complicit with faith. Love, completely differently, requires that one does something for someone else, and is shown by its absence in the greatest deeds that one might otherwise do.

Perhaps, considering the metaphor of hope as an anchor that keeps the soul steady, faith must be the idea that something at the bottom of it all holds the anchor steady; love, however, must be shown in the things one does as if assuming the anchor will hold. Love is the capacity to take people on board, to give them one's full service and to do your best by them - without listening to the million niggling prejudices one inevitably has. Love is something we sometimes find greatest in paradox as well as in power - love defeats all things and yet is vulnerable to all; love is perfect in weakness and inflicts vulnerability upon the heart - but it gives invulnerability to the soul.

In the end, faith, hope and love; these three things abide. But the greatest of these is love.

Education Board

Someday, all my students will graduate. But they will still have been my students, and here is where I must reveal a dreadful secret. One of the aims of education is that it must subvert. Let me elaborate.

All students (whether they know it or not) enter with a specific mindset, a worldview, a frame of reference or of references. It follows then that education, which seeks to add, change, adjust and reframe, must do these things to an established state of being. This, if not involving outright coercion, must involve either conspiracy or subversion. We might call it collaborative or interactive, but this does not change the fact that the teacher wields the power of a privileged position because of societal norms - kratos, if you like.

The problem then is whether you can persuade without overuse of kratos - whether you can carry out the modification process without resorting to positional authority. And here is where there are two rather uncomfortable options, at least as intermediate states: bia - the use of force, brutality, coercion, oppression; and dünamis - the use of personal power, spiritual force, and the power of personality. These aren't necessarily modes we adopt, but they are languages of power and modes of effective operation for many people in many disciplines and vocations.

In fact, the option which makes least use of any of these uncomfortable alternatives is that of subversion - the careful planting of subtext, supertext and context. It is all about nurturing the seeds until the individual matures, and it would be an awful, cowardly, treacherous thing to do - if not for the attitude in which it must be done. For that attitude, as Paul says, is 'a better way'. You can ask students be partners in what is an exercise, really, of love.

This isn't sentimental or narcissistic; this is a respectful grace to be tendered to all because we were loved first. If you believe there is a God, and His nature is to enlighten, to illuminate, and to improve upon - you must love in a way that does these things (or at the very least, attempts to do these things) for others. That is what the core of education is all about.

One of the things I pray for is that my students will realise that they are the board of education, that they have the power to determine how they should and are educated; just as in politics, where the electorate gets the politicians they deserve, so too do students get the teachers they deserve. It is sad, but true. That too is what education entails.

It is this last hurdle that is often the wall of failure. If this board of education fails, those who are bored of education fail. O God, grant that we who are in this world of learning will find enlightenment, store and make light in ourselves, and reflect light into dark corners, all the days of our lives. Amen.

History Stole My Date

It's the day after Valentine's Day. And I, as often happens at this time of year, am drawn to remember two very specific Valentine's Days.

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1977. I am a curious and energetic little ten-year-old kid. I am running around outside school, a little steamed from playing football in dangerous places. Then... I bump into my grandfather, who is coming out of Bible House on Armenian Street. He has an odd expression on his face, and a big bright smile.

"Hi, Grandpop!"

"Hi, young man. Your mum's doing well in hospital. Guess whether it's a boy or a girl?"

At ten, one tends to guess 'boy' just to spite the other sex. I was wrong. And that is the story of how Valentine's Day first became important to me - it was my sister's birthday.

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1986. I am a curiously energetic infantry recruit. I am stuck in camp. I am hoping like mad to get out of camp to spend some time with the girl who is at that time the love of my life. I don't know it yet, but it is going to be a very long time before I have another happy Valentine's day again. A very very very long time, indeed.

I spend the next two years writing poetry for money. Most of it is for fellow servicemen trying to impress their girlfriends. I have become mercenary about love and other human affections and affectations. I'm good. I can charge $2 a line. It gives me a kind of... perverse joy. At about $10 per verse, or more.

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And in between, there are agonizing and embarrassing ones, and those that are sweet and quiet, and those that are tiring and exuberant. At this point in my life, all of them are fond memories, and I thank all those who made such memories possible and indelible. God bless you all, wherever you are.