Wednesday Morning in Austin

In some ways, this feels like the first day of summer to me, partly because it was really hot already when I walked Dylan at 10 and partly because the semester is over, Mary and Eddy occurred, and also it is Wednesday at noon and I'm in Austin rather than in Waco. This is more due to me ending my Wednesday Yoga class than School being out, but actually those two events nicely coincided.

This morning, I got up early to do the Carlos video conferencing. We had an intriguing conversion about the Vedantic doctrine of superimposition. More on that on the philosophy blog, but it was a bit odd thinking about the metaphysical status of the physical world at 7 AM.

After sleeping in for a while after that and walking the dog and doing pranayama, I actually meditated before Carlos, I finally got around to doing some work work around 11:00. Yesterday I finished up reviewing two articles for professional journals and today I turned to finishing up the recommended edits on the Augustine article that will soon appear in Augustinian Studies. Actually, this article is one of my favorite things I've ever written. originally, it included an autobiographical section on reading, which I cut for the length requirements,

but here it is for the blogosphere.

I vividly remember the moment I really learned to read. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, playing with the crumpled edge of my pink and orange plaid bedspread. It was just before bedtime. I was reading out loud from a picture book about pirates. My mother patiently listened as I tried to figure out the difference between the words “this” and the word “that.” Prior to that evening, I’d been doing a lot of guessing about how to sound out words and was even a little hazy what particular letters were. Suddenly, as I watched my little sister climb into the matching twin bed across the room, something clicked in my young mind and I could read. Just like that. From that point on, I have been an avid, even voracious, reader of texts.
When I think back over my reading life, particularly my years of reading before entering college, the books that resonated with me were not what one would term “great literature.” While the intellectual elitist in me would like to say that I loved Madame Bovary, Hard Times, and Moby Dick, I did not. I loved Charlotte’s Web, The Velveteen Rabbit, the entire Nancy Drew Mystery Series, James Mitchner’s Hawaii, Gone with the Wind, and Atlas Shrugged.
Once I enrolled in college at Trinity University, I did start reading and enjoying great texts. Some hooked me almost immediately. Plato’s Apology sparked my enthusiasm for the philosophical life and his Symposium has never let loose its of its erotic grip on my soul. I was also inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and was deeply puzzled by the Tao Te Ching. I would like to say that I loved the Confessions from the moment I read it, but that would be a lie. Truthfully, my relationship with the Confessions has been a bit rocky. I first read the text as a freshman. I read it as an assigned text in a Western Civilization course, the Human Quest. I read the book, passed the quiz, wrote an essay, and promptly planned to forget all about it.
At that point, I thought I could safely leave Augustine in his garden at Milan. However, as I progressed in my philosophy major, I encountered Augustine again, this time in his guise as an analytic philosopher of religion. We read excerpts on free will, the problem of evil, and analyzed all those distinctions between time and eternity in my metaphysics class. But by this time, Plato had captured my heart and I was quite happy to leave Augustine behind just as he left Monica at the seaport when he sailed off to Rome.
My next encounter with Augustine occurred during my second year of graduate school at The Pennsylvania State University. Somewhat dissatisfied with the current course offerings, I approached the late Carl G. Vaught, then the department chair at Penn State, , about doing an independent study on Kierkegaard. He, however, wanted to do a course on the Confessions.
So I felt compelled to sign up and sign up I did. Every Friday afternoon, twelve graduate students drove to his house. He opened his home to us and in this comfortable setting, the text finally opened up to me as well. I still remember what the furniture looked like, where every person sat and much of what every person said about the text. It was my first real experience with intellectual community. Teachers had certainly motivated me before, but I couldn’t remember really feeling like I was a member of the class collective. Vaught reads the Confessions in terms of community, specifically in terms of Augustine’s attempt to find a community that will sustain and nurture the dynamism of his new-found faith. And that class exemplified to me what the text exemplified for him. A community formed around something larger than us. A friend of mine took it the following year. For her, it was just a class. For us, or at least for me, it was mystical.
I taught the Confessions for the first time, my second semester at Baylor and something in that experience began to change me and my attitude about what I do and why I teach. After a few semesters, I taught a graduate seminar on the Confessions. There, I taught the non-autobiographical books, memory time, eternity and creation, which I had always shied away from when, teaching it to undergraduates. And, the oddest thing happened. I felt as if I were caught up in something larger than myself again, larger than all of us. In fact, it seemed like Augustine was carrying us on his contemplative shoulders. With him as our guide, we explored the nature of the cosmos and the meaning of Genesis itself.
Teaching Augustine to this inspirational class let me see teaching as an activity that leads me to think about these issues of community and spiritual reflection in a way that I do not when I am sitting down writing about the nuances of Platonic narrative alone in my study. I discovered that I am a better philosopher and a better reader of texts as a public teacher than as a private writer.
The odd thing about finding a deeper sense of my vocation as a teacher in this work is that Augustine doesn’t seem to particularly like teaching. He finds student rowdy and reckless. He finds the demands of academia onerous and time consuming. But nonetheless, Augustine the student and Augustine the teacher are the main figures of the Confessions. Until his retirement in the middle of Book IX, his role as an educator is a constant presence. It is so tangible, so material. It provides the real everyday life context in which his spiritual life emerges and it allowed me to see teaching as an occasion for spiritual growth. The book has become a part of the cycle of my life. I now see Augustine’s story as my own. His journey has let me travel inward toward deeper self-understanding and outward toward an ever expanding sense of communion with God.