From Fire by Water by Sohrab Ahmari

Author:Sohrab Ahmari [Ahmari, Sohrab]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781621642022
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2018-12-13T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Borderlands

In a poem of 1577, Saint Teresa of Avila wrote of how the “mansion of thy mind” is Almighty God’s “dwelling-place”. God says he roams the mind’s corridors,

Knocking loud, if e’er I find

In thy thought a closed door.

That held true even for me. I had tried to shut, lock, and bolt every entryway to God and banish him from my mind. But I couldn’t attend to every nook and cranny. Many a secret door remained open to him, if by a crack. On the doors that I had managed to shut, I heard the loud knocks that Saint Teresa wrote about. It would take me some years, though, before I could reckon honestly with the fact that, from time to time, and especially in moments of great shame or degradation, I felt compelled to fling the doors open.

In the meanwhile, taking on adult responsibility as a schoolteacher after graduation did me much good. At the slightest contact with reality, much of the bosh that clouded my mind dissipated, and a clear, crisp new horizon presented itself to me.

* * * * *

As graduation neared, I came across a recruitment flier in my dorm building for an organization called Teach for America. It described the achievement gap between rich and poor children in the United States in starkly statistical terms. Ninety percent of African American students didn’t attain math proficiency by eighth grade. Eighty percent of Latinos couldn’t read at grade level by the same age. Fewer than one in ten children of all races growing up in poor areas finished college.

Half a century since Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the American promise of equal opportunity remained unfulfilled for most children born in the wrong zip codes. This, the flier said, was “the civil rights challenge of our time”. The photo on the flier showed a white guy in a button-down and tie facing a classroom of black children, who all had their hands stretched in the air. They all knew the answer to the teacher’s question.

The message was electrifying: If you wish to end inequality, roll up your sleeves, come to a classroom like this one, and teach for two years. The vaguely leftish rhetoric and imagery flattered my idealism (the organization’s approach to educational reform was, in some ways, deeply conservative). Joining TFA, moreover, promised a new start, in a part of the country that I was otherwise unlikely ever to live in. With no definite plans for the future, I threw my hat in the ring. TFA invited me for an interview and then to deliver a sample lesson, which I naturally devoted to Britain’s militant labor movement. I thought it was a disaster. Yet I was accepted, and within weeks, before I even had my degree in hand, I decamped from Seattle to my assigned city of Brownsville, Texas.

Situated on the southernmost tip of the Texas Panhandle, minutes away from the United States-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville was (and is) one of the neediest cities in the country.

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