Pictures: “The Ancient of Days - William Blake 1794”
“The Torment of Saint Anthony - Michelangelo 1487"
Passage: Acts 17
Today’s class went better than last week. Our group was the same size but Donny wasn’t there. Instead we had Nick who had come once or twice last year and caused a bit of trouble. I was pleased to see he was more engaged than I expected him to be. Kaitlyn and Catrina both were in the service today but left immediately after and did not stay for Sunday School.
We began with a prayer over our snackfood and a brief introduction. I introduced Fern and Obi to Nick (he and Charlie knew each other from a mission trip last year). I then explained that we would be looking at art and then put the Blake piece on the screen. Today the group quietly looked at the piece though having “seen” they seemed to become far more interested in our snackfood.
When I asked “What’s going on in this picture?” Obi was the first to speak up. He said that a man in the sun was making mountains. I summarized his statement and asked him what made him say “in the sun?” Charlie backed him up by noting the bright yellow. I then asked about the “mountains.” To him, the yellow represented outlines around mountain peaks which the figure was somehow creating. Charlie then noted the straight yellow lines connected to the man’s fingers. He recreated the figure’s hand gesture with his own hand. When summarizing this I accidentally put words in his mouth, however, as I said the yellow lines were “coming out” of his hands. Charlie corrected me however by saying “or at least connected to his hand.” This was good because it brought my attention to the fact that I had let my own interpretation influence how I understood his words.
I asked what else they noticed. “It’s windy.” “What makes you say that?” “His hair’s blowing to the side.” “He looks like Charlie.”
“He’s in the clouds.” “What makes you say that?” “There are clouds all around him.”
“He’s old” “Or he dyes his hair.” “Because his hair is white.” “Or is it blond? It’s hard to tell with all the yellow.”
“Is anyone going to talk about the fact that he’s not wearing any clothes?” “Oh yeah, he’s necked!”
“And he’s in a very uncomfortable position.” again, Charlie recreated the man’s posture to demonstrate how uncomfortable he would be.
With each of these observations I felt my summarizing was done well. Mentioning each student by name and affirming their ideas. What I failed to do, I realize now, is ask things like “Is that correct?” at the end of my summaries. I took it for granted that I was understanding the students in each case (which I still think I did). It would be good to build the habit of having them confirm that I truly understand them.
Our second picture garnered shock, as one of the pictured demons has a face on his rear. I had to remind the students to keep their comments to themselves until after we had all looked at the piece. I also suggested they all take a moment to walk up to the screen and get a closer look at all the details.
Nick jumped in right away and described the scene as an angel being attacked by demons. After summarizing this, I asked what made him think it was an angel. As I was doing this, Charlie seemed bothered because in his mind it was obviously a saint. I was able to have Nick answer the question and explain that he noticed the figure has a hallo. Emphasizing this seemed to satisfy Charlie as to the validity of Nick’s view. He did, however, get a chance to explain his view after that. “It looks like Saint Francis or somebody like that.” I asked him to explain why he thought that. “Because he’s wearing sanity clothes and has a hallo.” I asked him to explain what made the clothes “sanity.” At this point everyone paid special attention to the figure’s outfit, even standing to get a closer look. Nick noted something around his waist, what looked to him like a modern bag of crackers. At nearly the same moment, Obi noted what he called “a pointy tower” in the background. It was hard to know who to focus on. Nick was following a preexisting exploration of the outfit which we hadn’t quite concluded, Obi had not yet contributed anything to the discussion. I decided to wrap up the outfit discussion before attending to the tower, which proved a good choice. As I was summarizing the question of the pouch Nick and Charlie took notice of the boat in the background. As a result I was able to highlight this and Obi’s tower and draw everyone’s attention to the background at once. A new group narrative began to form. The demons wanted what the man had in his bag (crackers?) and so they were abducting him from his boat.
It was around this time that someone finally mentioned the fact that one of the demons had a face on his butt. It felt goofy but I decided to take the observation seriously and therefore allow this noticeable part of the painting to be seen as a serious detail. “The mouth is his butthole.” A little harder to affirm (though accurate). This in turn led several students to get up to see this detail closer (and take a picture or two for memory). Thankfully, far from devolving into chaos, this instead resulted in new attention being paid to the unique designs of each creature. “They're all unique.” Obi noted that several were fish people. Furthermore Nick noted that all but one had aquatic elements (webbed hands, etc.) “Except for this one little furry guy.” This led one more addition to the story, namely that these creatures had come out of the water that the boat was sailing on.
At the end of both discussions I thanked everyone for participating in the discussion. That said, you’ll notice that Fern did not say anything. Today he remained silent again but seemed a lot more comfortable than last week. I am learning more and more the good of communicating directly to him as if he might speak back but not in a way that requires him to. That is, in the past I have let him stay silent with no expectation that he would ever speak. That was good at the time but now that he is more comfortable here I think this new approach is a good one.
Our Bible discussion took some time to get to again as Nick and Fern both needed time to find the book of Acts in a paper Bible (and Fern was having trouble finding the table of contents). Once everyone was set we listened to the full chapter. I was still left with the sense that even a full chapter was too long. The chapter contained three separate incidents in the life of St. Paul which, though connected, could easily have been split into two lessons. When I asked: “What’s going on in this passage?” Obi spoke up and said “They talked about Jesus.” “Who talked about Jesus?” He looked through the text again - “Paul.”
Here I decided to break away from pure VTS. “What else do we know about Paul, either from this or from our outside knowledge?” Silence. Then Charlie spoke up and in a very loose, dare I say hip-hop, style he explained Paul’s story. “He was this guy who was all Jewish and stuff, and he was all like, no no no, and killing people and stuff but then he met Jesus who was like Ayo bro stop it, and he was all like I’m sorry.” Something like that. I affirmed this account and then summarized a little clearer for those who had never heard the story before. “What else can we find?” Silence. Then Charlie gave a more direct summary of the actual events of the story. “Those Athens folks…” “Athenians,” interjected Nick. “The Athen’s folks…” “Athenians!” “Ok, the people from Athens,” I said as a compromise. “The people from Athens had all these idols, and one for an unknown God and Paul said that one was God.”
There was an immediate lull. What else was there to say? The story had been summarized. I posed a few more questions to consider. What does this story have to do with the pictures? What does this story tell us about Jesus? What does it tell us about God? How can we apply it to our lives?
Obi raised his hand, “His conversation ended.” I asked what ended it. He looked in the text again. “When he mentioned the resurrection of the dead.” I asked how they responded when he mentioned the resurrection of the dead. “Some of them followed him.” And? “Some of them didn’t.” Here I decided to guide the conversation more intentionally. “The resurrection is a crisis point. We have to decide, do we really believe that Christ rose from the dead?”
“Yeeeaaa……” said Nick, trailing off as he realized the question was rhetorical. I asked him what he thought. “Yes.” He paused, “Unless he didn’t die.” Charlie balked at this but I tried to help Nick consider the implications of this claim. “If a victim of crucifixion survived, with holes through his feet…” Here I intended to highlight the absurdity of suppose Jesus had somehow survived the crucifixion and been mistaken for a resurrected Lord while walking around. Nick cut me off, however, and added “When you think about it, if Jesus rose from the dead then he never really died.” Again, Charlie balked but I decided to roll with the point this seemed to be bringing up.
“It’s true isn’t it. If Jesus didn’t stay dead then what he gives us is not his death but his act of dying.” This point needed much clarification and thankfully Charlie was willing to push me until I explained my thought in a way that was understandable to him at least. “When we celebrate a soldier dying for a brother in war, the sacrifice is that he gave up his only chance at life for someone else. But if Jesus rose from the dead after three days, his being dead didn’t give us much. The gift has to be something deeper than that. That’s why the resurrection is important. Myths have existed where people die for others, the Greeks in the story would have liked this part of Paul’s speech. The resurrection, however, ruins that story for them. It isn’t nearly as poetic.” Admittedly I was riffing off of a C.S. Lewis article I had been reading the night before and though I felt like I was saying something substantial there was no clear way to see if I was understood (except that Charlie seemed content to leave it there).
Again, I wonder how small a reading has to be before it’s the right size to be discussed thoroughly with the students. Or if I ought to stick to one chapter as it will give me a consistent variable to gauge the impact of VTS on these discussions.