The Power of Our Profession
(please excuse the personal nature of this post, but it is the ‘teaching addendum’ to an essay I just had published on the death of my firstborn son and how it shaped my scholarship. This is one way – of many – Elijah’s saga has also influenced my teaching imagination)
When Elijah got sick, he needed doctors – lots of them. I wasn’t the right kind of doctor, but I tried the arts he knew. As a scholar of religion in history, we prayed for healing. If Jesus could heal all those people in Israel two thousand years ago, why not now in San Diego. Of course, it hadn’t dawned on me that most of the ancient crowd were not made well. Those healed were the exception, not the rule. I tried the power of positive thinking (I teach the mid twentieth century; I’ve read Norman Vincent Peale). In our case, it was the power of positive breathing. We laid beside Elijah, hooked up to all those machines, and took full breaths. “This is how we breath, Elijah; easy in, easy out.” Maybe the spirit would come in the wind as it did for the biblical Elijah (of course, I forgot that not long after God came in the whisper of the wind, as the story goes, Elijah was taken away).
From my particular research, I looked to an old friend, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois. I have written extensively about him in three different books. He’s even a huge figure in the book I was writing as Elijah got sick and died. But now I say to him contritely, “I’m sorry.” I failed when I wrote about your religion in your life and times, because I overlooked the wrenching story of your son’s death and how, I think, it transformed you and you transformed it into a symbol.
“I hate them, Oh!
I hate them well,
I hate them, Christ!
As I hate hell!
If I were God,
I’d sound their knell
This day!”
For what Du Bois’s family and mine share, our experiences show marked differences. Even from my pain, I cannot plumb the depths of his. I marvel even more at Du Bois’s courage to fight. He, as I, prayed “why not I?” but then Du Bois worked sixty more years for justice. He even crafted stories of executed black Christ figures in America. Were those creative renderings of Burghardt as a man? I didn’t sense it then; now I think it may have been the case, because Burghardt had already been crucified outside that church – not in body, but in the soul of your memory.
As a scholar, I committed in my prior work the wrong that I now fear most – the time when people will no longer ask about my son and no longer include him in stories about me. I cannot imagine a time when Elijah won’t be behind every word I write and speak in the classroom. But as most things, Dr. Du Bois seemed able not only to grit it out, but to grow in soul. The whites of your world challenged your manhood; I now hope to be half the human you were in my life and work.
But this is the joy of our profession – for those who still breath. We have more chances. Now I can recount Burghardt’s life when I discuss Du Bois’s. Now I can incorporate Elijah into my lectures on religion and science and on the technological wonders of modern America. And finally, I can imagine, because our profession encourages us to imagine, Burghardt and Elijah playing together beyond the veil.
(The Color of Christ is dedicated to Elijah, as he inspired so much of it. Proceeds from it will go toward the Elijah James Blum Memorial Award, and winners of that award will receive a financial award and copy of The Color of Christ)
Beautiful stuff, Ed. I am constantly amazed at how my own expanding experiences invites me to empathize with a greater breadth of my subjects, a broader swath of those I study. Some experiences, of course, are more painful than others, but the power of expanded empathy and sympathy grows nonetheless–with a degree, with a marriage or divorce, with kids, with love and with loss. Yes, imagination is a key to our work, and some say our imaginations shrink as we get older. But I can’t help but think they also expand into new arenas, into areas we haven’t been able to grasp or even recognize previously.