Recently I had this interesting opportunity to go “back to school” shopping with my 11-year old granddaughter. She was buying stuff to decorate her school locker. Not just a magnetic mirror that she bought but also a chandelier to hang from the top! For my junior high locker, I only bought a combination lock.
Millions of people are going back to school in the US. When I attended a Boston public school in the 1950s, my teachers were unfamiliar with names like “Ng.” With no vowel, they didn’t know how to pronounce it. In Webster’s, “N.G.” meant “no good.” When desks and chairs were bolted on the floor and pupils were told to write down their last name and first initial on little white location cards, my teacher shouted out when she came to mine and said, “Is this a no good desk?” I felt no good.
My Baptist colleague Rev. Zina Jacque introduced me to what a gerund is. Gerund is a part of speech that makes a verb into a noun by adding “ing.” “Learn-ing” is always becoming, always in process, always already and not yet.
Going back to school is becoming the person God made you to be. It’s a lifelong process that is both the already and the still to become. We truly should never stop learning.
The national crisis we are currently facing is in a large part due to a lack of education. White supremacists and their various shades of gray have yet to learn that Jesus said, “For the least among all of you is the greatest.” (Luke 9:48b) Nationalists and neo-Nazis have yet to learn that their ancestors came from another land. Misogynistic men have yet to learn that “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27) Homophobic people have yet to learn that God made all of us including LGBTQ persons just a little lower than angels. (Psalms 8:5) Racists have yet to learn that denigration of other people is evil and a sin. And I pray that more and more students who are starting school this year with unfamiliar names like Ng will be honored and respected and not made to feel “no good.” Teachers can still learn too.
I propose that our political leaders at all levels of government go back to school to learn what they have yet to learn to lead the US in becoming a just, compassionate and civil nation. As a gerund “Ng” who is still becoming, still learning, I pray that you would too.