“Love was the ‘big bang,'” I said to a group of seniors as they gazed back at me after a deep-dive conversation about the trinity. I noticed that they were listening to the words coming out of my mouth while I explained that Love created the world. Feverishly making fire with flint, I was totally jazzed as I notice the spark catching, simultaneously aware that pushing too hard may make it die completely.
When students look you dead in the eye during direct instruction it’s usually because a) your fly is down and they are trying desperately not to look, you know, “down there” b) because you are delivering unpleasant news and they are sending smoldering messages with their retinas c) because… minds blown.
That love existed before all of creation by way of the trinity truly is a mind-blowing concept. That love was God’s motivation for creating the world is both rocket science and basic arithmetic. A solid understanding of the Triune God helps here; God as one is lonely (which he is not because he is perfect and lacking nothing) God as two is oppositional and moves toward dualism (which he is not because he represents the wholeness we find in Shalom) but God as three is inherently dancing (God’s nature is moving, acting and generative).
Through the moving, acting and generative love of the trinity, we find ourselves within creation.
<<Mic drop>>
“That’s it for our lesson.”
“Does anyone have any questions?”
“There will be a short quiz on Friday.”
As a product of the secular west, and also as one educated in education, I carry with me an innate propensity for treating my students like “thinking-thingisms” –bodies that house a brain whose job is to scan the horizon for binary messages. In congruence with my western upbringing, I drank the Cool-Aid of Rene Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” I even make it my own: “I teach information, therefore they know.”
Theologically, I know better. But once I get to lesson planning or into “best practices,” I get all rational and empiricist-y. I take the word of God and dice it into bite-sized morsels of easily assessed knowledge.
God refuses to be known but only loved. God refuses to be an object of our thinking. We, made in God’s image, are more than thinking-thingisms, knowing only in our heads and scanning the horizon for new empirical evidence. We humans were designed with a mode of knowing that transcends our minds, personalities, status, ego and IQ. We bring our essence, our “true selves,” into the classroom each day. Why do we settle for merely teaching to the gray matter in the room?
It’s the eternal Christian mystic in me that so desires to lay this practice aside and teach my students like the hearts, bodies, souls and minds that they are. At the risk of sounding fill-in-the-blank, I want to teach to their essence, and here “teach” becomes an unfit word. I no longer aim to “teach” in the classical sense, but to unveil.
Love, creation, trinity, Imago Dei… these truths cannot be objects of thinking alone, they must be unveiled and then experienced to have the power to blow the mind, but ultimately the true self.
Bible teachers: what are some ways you seek to “unveil” truth in your classroom?
Author: Jen Mounday
Fellow image-bearer currently teaching and seeking an experience-based faith in the triune God of the Bible.
Mom, wife, teacher, nature enthusiast. Coffee is my homeboy.