A Letter to Liz, Phil and Dan

Dear Liz, Phil, and Dan,

I’ve been neglecting you. It’s past time I write. The world is beyond rumors of war – the bombs are being hurled. Movements of love are mobilizing. It must seem familiar to you. 

I especially want to talk to you as teachers since I’m struggling out here in that capacity. 

You know, you terrify some of my students and make others laugh as if they’ve finally found something they didn’t even know they were looking for. Some are frightened and exhilarated at the idea of accepting the open hand of your extended lives. You’re almost untranslatable to them, but I suppose that’s my job. “These plowshares people are crazy cool,” Zz said in class, “but I don’t think I could ever do that and also omg.” I get comments like this every time we talk about you, and I wonder what each of you would say to this. 

(Phil, you’re the only one I never met in person and somehow I’m most sure how you’d respond.) 

My students are thinking about the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta and the recent prayer-rising led by the Apache in Oak Flat to combat the mining that’s destroying their land. They’re thinking about Palestine and Ukraine. Some are dipping their toes into the union struggles for hotel and hospitality workers here in Los Angeles with Unite Here. Above all, they’re dreading the ecological catastrophe underway. They want teachers to give them not just historical background or theories but fleshly ways forward that honor the good in them. They’ve been trained to say the right things, but they’re hungering for something more than playing the parrot. They sense in you someone trustworthy. I can’t tell you how precious that is for them, for me. 

I think back to your own formations and ask who moved you towards who you became – this worker priest, that art teacher. How much patience did it take on their part? How big was the gap between what you professed and what you did, and what did they do to shrink the distance? What questions seized your consciences? What trickery or misdirection or bluntness did they need to use? 

In short, will any of my students I despair over land up burning brightly, or already are? Were any of your teachers surprised by you? 

Laikan at LMU observed that you got involved when you were “old.” (It’s all relative when an 18 year-old speaks, I suppose.) “They weren’t breaking shit when they were our age,” she wrote me, “so what stopped them from doing the picket fence act?” 

A lot of my students really want to know this kind of thing. It’s like they’re in a Camus or Dostoyevsky story – as if their lives hinge on it and they know their dependence and your witness are absurd. And they look to you right through me. Some of them know that I’m pointing to you as the actual teachers, that I’m sloughing my work off to you three along with people like Maura Clarke and Malcolm X. “Here,” I’m saying, “I don’t know – talk to them.” 

Liz, did you know that Vanessa has a “fangirl crush” on you? She said she’s so used to seeing men propped up as models of justice seekers that she didn’t realize the pattern until she found you. “It never occurred to me that we could rebel in this way,” she wrote after reading about you balancing motherhood with prison time. She added, “Slay, queen!” 

It’s a Gen Z compliment, trust me.

At some point, all three of you felt comfortable enough teaching people in private and in public. Through university classes, through Jonah House meetings, through prison study groups, through sermons and speeches, through wild actions that still shock young adults today, through the language of love and intolerance for violence. 

As I struggle to accompany the passions & hesitations & fears & hopes of so many students, I wonder how you knew you were ready. I don’t know whether to push people to the conclusions of their views or encourage just another tiny step. I don’t know when I’m going to cause someone to be overwhelmed to the point of paralysis and when I’m going to prod them to a new insight. I don’t know when to hand them over to people like you and Simone Weil and when to agree that we’ll keep the training wheels on. It’s a messy, unscientific business. And while I’ve looked to you as mentors in prayer and community, in action and widening of consciousness, I search you now as educators of those ready and unready. I feel as lost as anyone in this business, and I need your help. 

I’ve heard two of you laugh, felt two of you embrace me. And the other has done the same in vision and imagination. You’re in my bones. I have the whole history of human goodness to pick from, but I keep picking from you. The grace you practiced is being received by people none of you ever met, people driving Teslas and distractedly scrolling their phones while they learn about you. You’re being met by a new generation and I’m fascinated by their fascination. A finance student even perked up when hearing about Catonsville. “It should be illegal to be this cool,” he said. (“It is!” I replied.) 

I want to ask more of you, rudely, but that’s impossible now. I want you to explain how to teach. But you left your trail, and students in your wake. So many of them – Kathy Boylan, Ched Myers, Bill Wylie-Kellermann, Anna Brown, Bud Courtney, too many to name – have taken me under their wing. I am, in a sense, a student of your students while also a mentee of two of you in the flesh but all three of you in spirit at the same time. It’s complicated. But the point is, you gave us – me, my mentors, my students – excess. Sure, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. But what if you’re the moon? I convey to my students that the light-reflecting moon is not the light, but it’s still what we have in a dark night. What disciples presume to sleep in such a garden of witness? 

Too many of us, I think. But in this teaching season of my life I’m drawing from you in a new way, clumsy and awkward as it is. So are my students. On my wall is your depiction of a lighthouse, Liz. An old student saw it and said, “I’m not sure if she’s one of the rocks or the bulb or the light itself.” I think you’ve been all three to her – to me.

Gaza is burning and the caps are melting. You knew this long ago. My students want to be righteous, and you’re among those they look to for guidance. I trust you know what this means to me well enough. America isn’t so hard to find as people with the kind of authenticity my students nod at. That’s one more argument against dread & acceptance of monsters as the only option. My students are all walking around shining like the sun, but you make them say, “Oh! I am. And I can be even more.” And I’m learning from you what to do with that openness. That’s enough, and more. 

All gratitude to your teachers, and theirs.

Peace, y’all. I love you.

Eric the Unsure