faculty retreat

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.