Robby Prenkert

Clear; 55

Robby Prenkert
Faculty Retreat 2008
Bethel College
The Intersection of Faith and My Discipline
“our lives as odyssey”

Were this the third day of the semester in World Literature class, I’d be telling be telling you to “jot down some notes about a time when you just really, really wanted to go home. You know, something like it was the fourth day of summer camp and it was still raining, or it was two weeks to spring break, or three weeks into my semester in China…you get the idea. What did you feel, and why did you feel that way, and how did you come to that point of just wanting to go home.”

“Write. Write for a minute,”” I’d say—just enough time to get something on paper.

Were this the third day of World Lit class, I’d encourage my students to volunteer a neighbor and we’d all get to hear a few especially good stories. It’s great fun really. Then I’d do my best impersonation of an English teacher and transition the class like this…

So after we read the first four books of the Odyssey, and we noted that, though he’s mentioned over and over again in those books, Odysseus doesn’t actually make an appearance “on stage” until we get to book five. Those first four books of the Odyssey are about Odysseus’ son Telemachus taking his own “odyssey” to see what he can find out about his long lost dad—who left to fight the Trojan War shortly after Telemachus was born twenty years ago.

If I may digress quickly, those first four books of the Odyssey connect well with my 20 year old students who are all “journeying to make a name for themselves” in the world just like Telemachus; they’re on quests for their own identity, just like Odysseus’ son. Many of them, just like Telemachus, are even making “odysseys” toward their “Father.”

By the way, You do “ “ this a lot as a Literature teacher—anytime you want your students to get that you’re speaking figuratively—that you’ve slipped into metaphor.

Anyhow, the real point of day three in World Lit is this. Having warmed up the class by letting them tell funny stories about times they wanted to go home, I ask them, “so what is Odysseus doing the first time he makes an actual appearance in this poem—in book 5?” And the room grows silent. Finally someone will say… “he’s on that island and he’s on the beach, crying.”

“And why is he crying?”

A shorter silence until someone offers, “because he wants to go home?”

“Right!!! Because he wants to go home.”

The first time we actually see Odysseus in Book 5 of the epic bearing his name he is a captive of the nymph/goddess Calypso (whose name, incidentally, means “I conceal”). She wants to make Odysseus her immortal husband. He has been her prisoner for seven years when we see him for the first time, “weeping… wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish, gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears.”

For whatever else it is, the Odyssey is a story about a guy who really wants to go home. It’s also (among a host of other things) the story of how he got to the point of really wanting to go home, as well as the story of his journey getting there.

“So what?” you say. Well…… You have been there on the beach with Odysseus, yearning for home.

Maybe you didn’t spend 10 years fighting the Trojan war, 3 years adventuring and wandering the seas gathering up riches for a triumphal return to Ithaca from Troy, only to lose all 12 of your ships and all 600 of your men along the way before ending up as Calypso’s prisoner on Ogygia for seven years. But still, the longing for home and all it represents is something we, too, know about.

How did Odyssues get to this point? Has he wanted to go home this badly all along? Well…it doesn’t seem so. Those first three years after the war ended, he wandered a lot—looting and partying and adventuring, much of which seems unnecessary to many readers. Those three years of wandering include a year long stay as the guest of another sorceress-nymph-goddess, Circe—who provides Odysseus and his men with exceptional hospitality, while they seem to forget about the goal of home.

Odysseus’ family, mother, father, wife, and son, sit home wondering what has become of him. After a year with Circe, she finally sends Odysseus to the underworld of the dead to speak with the shade of the prophet Tiresias. He also speaks to the shade of his dead mother there, who tells him that she died of grief, longing for her son’s return. He begins to get it—he needs to get home. (Sometimes, my little lovers of literature, we’re left to descend into the realm of the dead—we “die” (dare I say, to our old selves)—even as we are wake up to the mess we’re making of things for ourselves and others). More than seven years after that, Calypso has Odysseus “concealed”, imprisoned, at the end of his rope—longing for home.

In the world of the Odyssey, Home becomes a symbol for the ultimate good—the enduring good, the best of the best in life. It is what Odysseus should desire. But what about us, who read the Odyssey through eyes of faith? HOME might represent the Christ who is our home even as it is the home he is preparing for us one day. We long for it. We pursue it. We still haven’t found what we’re looking for.

Yet it is easy to get lost on our way—and some of us, like Odysseus, take the long way home. Sometimes we need a kind of “terrible grace” to shock us back to reality and awaken our desire for what truly matters.

Based on what they write in later assignments, I can tell that my students get the point. They tell me how they have wandered from home. Some of them tell me how they have come back—reading the Odyssey as a kind of prodigal son pre-telling. Some of them tell me how they are still shacked up with Circe or feel stuck and imprisoned by Calypso. Some feel like they’ve eaten the lotus and forgotten all about home. They get it, I think. They start to read this really old book with new eyes, and they also start to read their lives through brand new lenses as well, alert to the perils along their own journeys and at least aware that there is a home that yearns for them even more than they yearn for it.

I play pop songs and hymns for them that riff on this theme:

“Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling oh sinner come home.”

“Homeward bound… I wish was…. Home where my love lies waiting silently for me.”

“I am a pilgrim and a stranger traveling through this wearisome land, I have home in that yonder city…”

You get the point already. I likely border on beating the point almost dead.

Literature, in more ways than one, is not rocket science. The nearly endless avenues we might travel connecting literature and our Christian faith don’t require rockets either.

The intersection of my faith with my discipline was supposed to be the topic here. I read stories with students. Sadly, too many of them come from experiences with public school teachers who managed to turn reading stories into a trivial exercise.

I assume they will forget who Nausicaa is, and whether Telemachus visited Nestor or Menelaus first on his journey, and they won’t remember that Calypso’s island was called Ogygia. But they won’t forget that the Odyssey is a story about finally waking up and realizing that you really do, very desperately, want to go home, and that you’re willing to suffer any hardship for this great and enduring good.

I find that my students are eager to connect what we read with their lives. Sometimes they need a little help, but that’s the best thing about teaching literature—providing a little nudge that opens them up to read with brand new eyes—eyes that recognize that our Christian lives are a journey home. And not that unlike one of the world’s greatest stories.

DOSAGE: take two tablets every six hours for joint pain.

SIDE EFFECTS: This drug may cause joint pain, nausea, head-ache, or shortness of breath. You may also experience muscle aches, rapid heartbeat, and ringing in the ears. If you feel faint, call your doctor. Do not consume alcohol while taking this pill; likewise, avoid red meat, shellfish, and vegetables. O.K. foods: flounder. Under no circumstances eat yak. Men can expect painful urination while sitting, especially if the penis is caught between the toilet seat and the bowl. Projectile vomiting is common in thirty per cent of users-sorry, fifty per cent. If you undergo disorienting nausea accompanied by migraine and raspy breathing, double the dosage. Leg cramps are to be expected; one knee-buckler per day is normal. Bowel movements may become frequent-in fact, every ten minutes. If bowel movements become greater than twelve per hour, consult your doctor, or any doctor, or just anyone who will speak to you. You may find yourself becoming lost or vague; this would be a good time to write a screenplay. Do not pilot a plane, unless you are among the ten per cent of users who experience “spontaneous test-pilot knowledge.” If your hair begins to smell like burning tires, move away from any buildings or populated areas, and apply tincture of iodine to the head until you no longer hear what could be taken for a “countdown.” May cause stigmata in Mexicans. If a fungus starts to grow between your eyebrows, call the Guinness Book of World Records. May induce a tendency to compulsively repeat the phrase “no can do.” This drug may cause visions of the Virgin Mary to appear in treetops. If this happens, open a souvenir shop. There may be an overwhelming impulse to shout out during a Catholic Mass, “I’m gonna w*p you wid da ugly stick!” You may feel a powerful sense of impending doom; this is because you are about to die. Men may experience impotence, but only during intercourse. Otherwise, a powerful erection will accompany your daily “walking-around time.” Do not take this product if you are uneasy with lockjaw. Do not be near a ringing telephone that works at 900 MHz or you will be very dead, very fast. We are assuming you have had chicken pox. You also may experience a growing dissatisfaction with life along with a deep sense of melancholy-join the club! Do not be concerned if you arouse a few ticks from a Geiger counter. You might want to get a one-month trial subscription to Extreme Fighting. The hook shape of the pill will often cause it to become caught in the larynx. To remove, jam a finger down your throat while a friend holds your nose to prevent the pill from lodging in a nasal passage. Then throw yourself stomach first on the back portion of a chair. The expulsion of air should eject the pill out of the mouth, unless it goes into a sinus cavity, or the brain. WARNING: This drug may shorten your intestines by twenty-one feet. Has been known to cause birth defects in the user retroactively. Passing in front of TV may cause the screen to moiré. Women often feel a loss of libido, including a whole octave lowering of the voice, an increase in ankle hair, and perhaps the lowering of a testicle. If this happens, women should write a detailed description of their last three sexual encounters and mail it to me, Bob, Trailer Six, Fancyland Trailer Park, Encino, CA. Or E-mail me at hot-guy.com. Discontinue use immediately if you feel that your teeth are receiving radio broadcasts. You may experience “lumpy back” syndrome, but we are actively seeking a cure. Bloated fingertips on the heart-side hand are common. When finished with the dosage, be sure to allow plenty of “quiet time” in order to retrain the eye to move off stationary objects. Flotation devices at sea will become pointless, as the user of this drug will develop a stone-like body density; therefore, if thrown overboard, contact your doctor. (This product may contain one or more of the following: bungee cord, plankton, rubber, crack cocaine, pork bladders, aromatic oils, gunpowder, corn husk, glue, bee pollen, dung, English muffin, poached eggs, ham, Hollandaise sauce, crushed saxophone reeds.) Sensations of levitation are illusory, as is the sensation of having a “phantom” third arm. Users may experience certain inversions of language. Acceptable: “Hi, are how you?” Unacceptable: “The rain in Sprain slays blainly on the phsssst.” Twenty minutes after taking the pills, you will feel an insatiable craving to take another dose. AVOID THIS WITH ALL YOUR POWER. It is advisable to have a friend handcuff you to a large kitchen appliance, ESPECIALLY ONE THAT WILL NOT FIT THROUGH THE DOORWAY TO WHERE THE PILLS ARE. You should also be out of reach of any weapon-like utensil with which you could threaten friends or family, who should also be briefed to not give you the pills, no matter how much you sweet-talk them.

Have you heard the news? Taylor University decided this week to close its Fort Wayne campus. http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/14/taylor


Here’s my top five reasons TUFW students should transfer to Bethel. (Do I have to remind you that top five or top ten lists of this sort are composed “tongue in cheek”?)

1. We recently acquired and bulldozed an old trailer park where you’d be welcome to pitch a tent. Good squirrel and duck hunting; clean water source nearby.

2. Let’s face it; it should’ve been Bethel-Fort Wayne in the first place. Taylor cheated us on the coin flip.

3. Spend your lunch hour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays watching your professors put on a dazzling display of basketball wizardry.

4. We hate Taylor, yes we do; we hate Taylor, how about you? Welcome to the club.

5. We have a really good school song.

Seriously, though, it’s a sad and traumatic time for Taylor-Ft. Wayne students. Come one, come all. We’d love to have you!

For me, the first seven weeks of the fall semester always goes by faster than any other seven week period of the year. I don’t know why. I don’t even wish to speculate as to why time flies sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t.

But here I sit, with only one full day remaining in the first half of the first semester, wondering how it can possibly be time for a mid-semester break already. I don’t mind the break at all. I’ll enjoy two days at home with Sydney and Morgan (the daughter and the dog). We’ll play in the yard and enjoy the color. We’ll take a nap each day. We’ll read books and watch Barney. We’ll eat popcorn and ice cream.

I do find these breaks a bit scary. In some of my classes I’m thinking, “how can this be… we haven’t gotten anywhere yet.”

I also try to put myself in the shoes of my students. While this is my seventeenth fall break (4 as a student, 3 as an R.D., 10 as a professor), for many of them, it is their first. First of four. Some of them are now 1/4 of the way through their freshmen year. That’s 1/16 of the way through college. Seven weeks.

I’m mystified by this thing: seven weeks seems like nothing, like such a small period of time in the grand scheme of things. A blink of an eye. And yet for some of my students, a lot has changed. Some found a major. Others found a new major. Some have found new friends that will last a lifetime. Some have begun to truly find themselves. Some may, without realizing it yet, have even found a future spouse. Some have begun to realize that college is probably not for them–at least right now. Some have found that they should have paid more attention in high school. Some have found God, for the first time in their lives. Some have grown–physically (you’ve heard of the freshman 15; some might be 1/4 of the way there already). Some have found the more interactive environment of college classroom to be liberating and have re-learned their love of learning. At least I hope.

Seven weeks is nothing, really. Especially when you compare it to a lifetime or to eternity. On the other hand, when life-shaping stuff is happening like happens in the first seven weeks of college, seven weeks is everything. Especially when you consider eternity.

“Your education, experiences, and credentials are impeccable. We have been moved by your amazing life story. Clearly you are a person of compassion. It is evident from what you have told us that you have sensed the call of God upon your life to serve His Kingdom through full time ministry."

He pauses, as the the committee members shuffle papers or stare at their hands, awkwardly.

“There’s just one thing."

“Oh,” replied the candidate. “Is there a problem?"

“Well, it’s like this. We think you lack one essential tool for serving in this position. But we were hoping we were wrong."

Wide eyed, the candidate interrupts the awkward silence. “Uh… I see. What is it?"

“Er… um… well, out with I guess. Do you have a penis, Miss Smith? After all, you realize, don’t you, that a Senior Pastor must have one.”

At the church I used to attend, the pastor insisted that you have one in order to serve as an elder. At present, the leaders of my denomination appear to think you need one to be a senior pastor. The Roman Catholic church has inisted that priests have one.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I can’t figure out why that body part is so essential to particular kinds of ministry.

Below, N.T. Wright explains far better than I ever could why I have long thought (as you can tell by the sardonic title of this post) such a position is nonsense and cannot be supported from scripture.

http://www.cbeinternational.org/new/pdf_files/wright_biblical_basis.pdf

I wear a plastic guard on my teeth ($400 something at your local dentist if you can imagine that) when I sleep because my dentist thinks I clench my teeth, cracking them. This little device, he says, is a “deprogrammer.” Jeanie has always made fun of me for sleeping with my mouth open. I’m content to live with these contradictory truths.

I’m reminded of cartoon figures who clench their teeth so fiercely in rage that they shatter in a heep on the ground.

Hell is the place where you get what you want only and always. Only and always getting what you want is not freedom but slavery. We can be a slave to self and remain a slave (to sin, to our own impulses), or choose to become a slave to God and be set free. There is no third option. In Romans 6 Paul puts it very clearly—we have a choice between slaveries. The first option is death that results in nothing but Death. The other is a death that leads to Life.

“Every trip is a quest,” he tells them. “And the real purpose of every quest? Self-knowledge."

After class he walks to the locker, disrobes, dons sneakers and sweat socks, a mesh reversable jersey, baggy shorts. His purpose? Play basketball and win. Which he does, with less skill each passing day. This day, his teams win two and lose two. One game he scores 15 of his team’s 21 points.

Returning to his office, he curses himself for growing old.

Almost everything here can be found somewhere else.

Except for this.

Yesterday (29 September) was Miguel de Cervantes’s birthday. I’m sure you’re still recovering from the huge party you held celebrating the life of the author of what many people have called the “greatest novel ever written.” The rest of you are wondering, so who is Cervantes?

Incidentally, I can be a little sarcastic from time to time. I’m allowed. I’m an English professor.

Cervantes wrote a book you probably have heard about but have never read cover to cover. The reason you probably never read it cover to cover is because its 940 pages long (at least the best translation by Edith Grossman is), and your high school English teacher knew that if she assigned it you wouldn’t get anything else done that semester. Don Quixote is a really long book. But you should read it cover to cover anyhow. Not because it’s good for us to read great literature or because educated people have read the great books or because it would be something to brag about on a college entrance essay, but because it’s a really entertaining story. And funny. Even sad.

Incidentally, I like to use sentence fragments. I’m allowed. I’m an English professor.

I’m also allowed to recommend good books, and in fact, I’m probably expected to. So I’m recommending Don Quixote today, the day after we celebrate Cervantes’s 461st birthday. Because it’s entertaining, funny, and even sad.

Let me know what you think of it.

http://www.bethelcollege.edu/blogs/?p=1202

(Disclaimer: the names of parties involved in the non-fictional version non-fictional version of this situation have been changed in this fictional version to protect both the pathetically petty and the innocent. All local government officials, living and dead, are purely coincidental)


Dear Mr. Del “Woodly” Edmons,

We understand that your name was inadvertantly left off of the invitation list to our recent dedication ceremony for the newly installed toilet seat in third stall of the men’s restroom (aministrative office building) on our campus. Our sincerest apologies.

On a happier note, we would like to invite you to a very special event on the campus of Beffle College. Actually, it’s so especially good that some among us religiously observe this high and holy event three times a week during the noon hour. Would you be willing to grace us with your enormously dignified presence some noontime for a vigorous game of pick-up basketball? Please bring both a dark and a light shirt.

Professor Smit does have one important message for you, however. He says, “lace em up tight and don’t bring no weak stuff."

Sincerely,

The Lunchtime Hoops Association of Beffle College

Congratulations are in order to F. Irene Keb of South Bend, Indiana for her grand achievement this week. Though competition was stiff, she managed to write this week’s most idiotic letter to the editor of the South Bend Tribune. While many of her competitors were equally bombastic or irrelevant or moronic or even mildly incoherent, none of them was able to match Ms. Keb’s mastery of all of these (and then some) in less than a hundred words. Her letter is printed here in full for the edification of all.

Offended

I am offended that Spanish is plastered on my television screen. This is America, last I heard, and English is our language.

There is a remote and an on/off switch. I use both of them. Refusing to watch programs and certainly not buying sponsor’s products who allow this insult to continue.

Definitely a case of “if you don’t like it, don’t watch” and I do not.

1. Loss. The narrator of this story has lost his very best friend in the world, and this has altered the color of everything. Tragedy weaves its way through this narrative.
2. Redemption. Sometimes things come together for good. R believes that the redemptive work of God has woven itself into the very fabric of the universe; he has discovered glimpses of the redemptive in some seemingly strange places, like in books by those who claim they don’t believe in such things.
3. Mentoring. R gets by with a little help from his friends, some of which are books, some of which are not. Though this loving tribute is not exhaustive, one would have to be asleep while reading to miss that the central theme of this work is the impact that book mentors and other mentors have had upon his life.
4. Reading. It goes without saying that R likes to read. As his advisor, I know that he finds writing about what he has read an enormous chore, and yet through this chore he comes to conclude with some of his book mentors (Lewis, Tolstoy, the Christian mystics) that it is the “fire of suffering which will bring forth the gold of godliness.”[2] We suffer unto wisdom. R does, however, thoroughly enjoy reading and refashioning what he has composed. You will probably get the impression, as I have, that writing this thing was hard work. But, as he told me once in an e-mail, reading his own attempts at early drafts of its parts or of whole chapters or even the first draft of the whole began to give him more and more pleasure, especially as those drafts improved. He said he would much rather read what he has written than actually write it in the first place.
5. Rebellion. R has a love/hate relationship with his past. In part, he rebels against it; but in part, he also rebels against those who have rebelled against it, which leads him back to embrace it. He once told me that he woke up to Bob Marley’s “Soul Rebel”[3] virtually every morning while writing this dissertation.
6. Mysticism. R has confessed to me that he is a wannabe mystic, and that one of his narrators is a much more adept contemplative than he is. That is the voice you’ll hear when you read the “Letters by a Post-modern Mystic.”
7. Sports. R actually is an athlete, though I sense he feels something like regret that he is more athletic than mystical. I suppose we might as well add regret to the list of themes, as well.
8. The painfully obvious post-modernist device of the self-conscious or self-reflexive narrative. This work is narrated both in the first person and the third person. Hint: notice the use of italics. Those italicized sections are my favorites, I think, because he is at his most honest and transparent in them.
9. The unreliable narrator. Not many dissertations are written using this device, but let’s face it: all narrators are unreliable. It’s not so much that every teller of a tale always intends to be unreliable or misleading, but everyone is. Every sentence ever uttered leaves out a million other sentences needed to qualify the previous sentence’s intended meaning. There just isn’t enough time to clarify everything we mean to say. And so, our narrations end up being unreliable. That doesn’t mean they can’t also be true. But they are not the whole truth.
10. Hope. R never sheds his tendency toward optimism. When he expressed some worry to me about his work being so hopeful that it might be dismissed as “hokey,” I asked him where his optimism came from. He told me a story about playing in a college basketball game in which his team was losing 48-19 with about ten minutes left in the first half. And then they came all the way back and won the game. And then he said, “Did we win the game because my teammates and I possessed exceptional levels of hope, or did I come to have an extraordinarily hopeful outlook because we came back and won that game and more than a few others like it?”[4]
    

I trust this memo does not spoil all the magic of discovering these themes all by yourself as you read. If you are feeling right now like I have done what should be left up to you as the reader, just remember this little proverbial wisdom from Angela Carter which R scribbled on a little sticky note attached to a draft of a chapter he sent me early on in the process. “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. . . .You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”[5] I agree.
R has described a lot of the “re-writing” he has done in the pages that follow. Now I guess it’s your turn, Dean Pleasures.

My perfect reader of this blog…
his name is my name, too.
Whenever he logs out,
you will likely hear me shout;
“There goes an artist without peer.”

http://www.xanga.com/robbyprenkert

Nearly a month ago he remembered the time when the rasta-looking old man offered him “good-for-the-dingles” pineapple one day on a north-coast beach in Jamaica. When he remembers something like that, he writes it down in a cheap spiral notebook he keeps in the canvas book bag that accompanies him everywhere. The day he wrote that in his notebook he managed to misplace that bag somewhere and to this day he has not been able to find it.

He did, however, stumble upon a blog entry entitled “Pineapple” which managed to quote his own journal verbatim. What other secrets and lies will the thief of his spiral notebook reveal to the world?

He wears a wool cap of black and gold, red and green covering his dreadlocks, smiling, toothless. We make eye-contact; he pauses, displays the two whole pineapples he carries in a gunny sack, and offers the little baggy of freshly cut fruit for my approval.

“Pinapple, mon."

“Looks good,” I tell him. “But no thanks."

“Pinepple. Good for the dingles."

On the beach in Ocho Rios, long before there was Viagra, there was pineapple.

Memo

TO: Prof. Pranker

FROM: Dean Stimp

RE: Faculty Development Funds

cc: Prof. Paperclip; Dean Zerosinski

Your request for faculty development funds to cover your travel expenses to the North American Fast-pitch Association World Series in Iowa this August, while one of the most unique requests I’ve ever gotten, is probably outside what I would deem a reasonable use for such funds. I can understand what good playing a sport you love at a very high level does in terms of your morale as a faculty person, and we are proud that your play at shortstop and leading off for one of the favored teams in this tournament will represent our college well, but you are going to have to go with our blessing and not our financial support. This blessing is a significant one, considering you will be missing the final session of faculty retreat to travel to the tournament.

Lust_Control_-_The_BigM.mp3

He had forgotten all about this delightul little punk/thrash band and this happy little number until by some strange coincidence he read THIS and found himself searching for the song. Such nuance. Such subtlety. This, he thinks, is art.