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How to Respond to Difficult Political Times: Thank You Mr. Larkin

How to Respond to Difficult Political Times: Thank You Mr. Larkin

Last updated on: May 4, 2016 at 6:19 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

How to Respond to Difficult Political Times: Thank You Mr. Larkin 2016-05-04T18:19:18-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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To make good men is to find great teachers.

America faces five months of incredibly negative political campaigning.

Sigh.

We could all dash around and be miserable about politics or we could give up and retreat in despair. I say: “No.” Nothing we can do now will change the next five months (for good), but we can make sure that our grandchildren are in a better position than we are.

We can educate: teach reading, writing, critical thinking, Socratic wisdom, and Christ’s philosophy. If we do, we will produce leaders better than the ones we have in either party.

How do I know? My Christian school made me better than I would have been left alone. My weaknesses were there already, and they remain, but New Covenant nudged, pushed, and questioned me enough that a new trajectory was set for my life.

It was Christian, intellectual honest, and loved asking questions. Here is an example.

Mr. Larkin taught me Ethics in twelfth grade and I just pulled out the notes from this class. Mr. Larkin is not responsible for my ethical failures . . . my notes show he warned me (as a good teacher would) about the failures and wages of those failures before I blew it. He is one of the people responsible for what I have gotten right.

Thank you, Mr. Larkin. I missed the abuses of the religious right because New Covenant taught a better way.

He gave us one handout from T.B. Maston that said: “To be most effective the Christian citizen must not only be intelligent and cultivate a historical perspective, he must also maintain a transcendent orientation or point of reference.”

First, note that this class took for granted the need to be thoughtful and base decisions on a historical perspective. Second, this class made sure we knew that right belief was not enough. We needed right action and a rich emotional life.

What is a “transcendent” point of reference?

It included seven points (on the fading purple ditto*), but the final one is best: “He will seek to retain a constant sense of the eternal; he will make the eternal values supreme in his life.”

Who can get too upset about the Republican nomination for President in 2016, if one has an eternal perspective? Human institutions, including expressions of the church community, can and will fail. God does not fail. “My supreme and final obedience belongs to God and not to the state or the church.”

This sort of thing got into my head, because it was part of the life of my soccer/biology teacher (Mr. DeMent!), my physics class (Mr. Roberts!), my English class (Miss Balentine!), and Social Studies (Mrs. Baker).

I just read the start of an exam answer to a question he asked me in my senior year of high school. Pardon the overblown rhetoric (a problem I haven’t mastered yet) and the (surely) borrowed analogy and prose . . . (exam answers do not lend themselves to originality), but here is what Mr. Larkin had left in my head regarding life and equity:

The schizophrenia of the United States is indicated by the double standard erected by our culture. Our innocent children are eradicated by the million to no apparent end while the building of a huge dam is halted over the fear of slaying the snail darter. Our culture thus emphasizes life. . but only ecological life not human life. Our society in its schizophrenia fears responsibility for the destruction of a fish, as it should, but then rejects any rights to an infant. Is this not an double standard?

This start is . . . over done . . . but note that Mr. Larkin had put two odd ideas in my head. He did not just convince me to be pro-life about babies and put down the value of the snail darter. He made me think about the value of the snail darter and how humankind should be wary of wiping out any creation. The greatest value in class was on considering the data and forming an opinion. He did not propagandize, but had me think. Over time, I would develop more sophisticated pro-life views, but the fact that he had me consider good pro-choice arguments in our readings helped me stay pro-life.

He did not stamp on my soul, but nurtured the growth of my soul.

Thank you, Mr. Larkin.

And so we can react to this political moment with despair or we can educate ourselves and others. Our education must include listening to critics, considering where we might be wrong, and then articulating and acting on our views. We will be bold, but merciful; calm, but entrepreneurial.

We can educate.

To paraphrase my cheesy twelfth grade self:

We must not cease from mental fight, nor let the sword of God’s Word rest in our hands, until we have built a school here in America’s green and pleasant land!

(Want to help a k-college program? Check out The Saint Constantine School.)

P.S.

I met the Fairest Flower in All Christendom, Hope, in high school, but she would not “go out with me” then. She was waiting, I think, to see if our Ethics class finally would take.

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