My educational background

Canterbury Tales: the prologue in Middle English

I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. My father was a high school teacher, a union man, and a Catholic, who grew up in rural Missouri. My mother grew up in the south (Jacksonville). Her father was Polish Catholic, but lapsed when he married my grandmother, a Bible believing Protestant whose friends spooked her away from Catholicism. My mother catered when I was young, moving from birthday cakes to wedding cakes, and even ran a restaurant in a suburb for a bit. She became Catholic when she married my father, but long had an attraction to Jesus in the Eucharist, and an interest she had inherited from her father.

So, I’m Catholic. But what does that mean? It’s something that goes deeper for me than politics. I was raised in CFM, a group for married couples, which involved considerable sharing of life. My parents had meetings and national conferences, but to me it was sharing events of life. It gave me lots of connections with adults and children, spending time at each other’s houses, and grand family campouts in the summer. You could describe it as center left in politics. I remember hearing a couple of women at a book table chatting about birth control and reporting that for some of their friends it was a matter of “I had to suffer this, so young people should also.” But the great value of CFM was that the family did not suffer in solitude but was supported by a greater community. When I struggled in school, my parent’s friends supported them. I remember that one year CFM-ers had a paint party to help my parents paint our living room.

I enjoyed going to the parish school, but it was not good for me. Teachers isolated me and put me in the lower reading group when I’ve always been a strong reader. Teachers also encouraged my fellow students to bully me. One teacher had me stand by the door and told my peers to punch me on the way out. At a recent grade school reunion, a childhood bully apologized that he and my best friend had thrown tomatoes at me— an incident I had forgotten. A bright spot in my childhood was Boy Scouts. Since it wasn’t at my home parish, it was a safer place than school. The best part of Scouts for me was frankly not leadership or learning things, but camping out every month.

In 5th grade I started going to public school, which I continued through high school (although I did a semester at high school seminary). In 5th & 6th grade I was in the majority white gifted program, where I did subjects that I liked and skipped things that I didn’t like. I mostly read stories. Going to public school, I learned the deficits of my parochial education. I sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing." I read Black history comics, and I learned about Crispus Attucks, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, and Garrett Morgan. It must have been around this time that I took on another extra-curricular activity, singing with a diocesan choir which did traditional hymns and motets.

In high school, I fell out of gifted classes due to low grades, but I did love choir, art, and programming classes. A high point was Mr. Hutton’s Black Literature class. He would teach in daishikis and flour sacks, talked about the history of the AME church, and we read and listened to recordings of Black American literature. As it turned out, a lot of the gifted students signed up for the class but they all were gone after a few weeks. During high school, I also read Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing, and read a lot of Meister Eckhart especially. I got burned out on Fox after reading his sources and comparing them to his superficial treatment.

I started college at University of Missouri Kansas City in computer programming, but was overwhelmed by the math and the study skills needed to thrive. Realizing that I couldn’t learn self-discipline for my own sake, I knew I could learn it if others needed it from me. I ended up in L’Arche, Washington DC, which was a great community. When I arrived I had two books: Meditations on the Tarot and Lost in the Cosmos. I read Meditations many times, burning myself out, and I threw away Lost in the Cosmos after a few weeks as being unserious. I bought it again to see if I could understand what he meant by re-entry. On my days off, I would walk between ice cream shops and bookstores. I read the Divine Comedy under a tree in the local drug park. A friend had me read the fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, while I discovered de Lubac and Balthasar. De Lubac had a brilliant synthesis of social justice and theology called Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. Balthasar gave me more people to read: Hopkins, John of the Cross, Augustine, Irenaeus, Dionysius, Pascal, Dante, Peguy. I also was a big reader of his short books written for a general audience. Around this time, a co-worker started pushing National Review at me, which I read for a while.

Balthasar also gave me a focus for my education: literature. It was another case of an intellectual inspiring me to read fiction instead. After a year in community college to get my grades up, I finished up at Rockhurst University, the Jesuit university of Kansas City. I also did grad school in English at Fordham, the Jesuit university of New York City. While I loved reading, being a professor was not for me. I also found that teaching high school was not for me either, when right after graduating I taught English in the Bronx (sadly, that didn’t stop me from getting certified to teach secondary English years later and then trying to teach as a parish school).

Whew, that’s a lot! Looking back over the first 30 years of my life I feel that I had a privileged education. Politically, I identify with Chaucer the pilgrim of the Canterbury Tales the most. He was a person who could meet all the diverse people in the world and in the church, take them in with all their contradictions, but not take their parochial views as decisive for everything else.