Professor Joe McQueen: “Why I Teach”
Like my colleagues, I teach because I love interacting with students and talking about ideas. But my deepest reasons involve my understanding of God’s nature.
I teach because the Triune God is, as Augustine says, gift: the Father gives himself to the Son, the Son gives himself back to the Father, and that exchange—that eternal reciprocity—is the love of the Spirit. Augustine says that all of creation is merely the overflow of the Trinity’s inner life of gift and reception. Paul, too, asks the Corinthians, “What do you have that hasn’t been given to you?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Even our very personhood is a gift we receive.
If all this sounds a little abstract, go back to Augustine. In his Confessions—a classical text of intellectual history and a great devotional read—he says that even the milk he received as a child was a gift from God. What’s more, because God gave Augustine’s nurses their milk, the very act of feeding the child Augustine became a gift for them. Here Augustine goes back to gifts he has received that he himself can’t even remember receiving. And that’s the point: our whole lives are gifts even before we are conscious of who we are. The gift of my life comes to me before I am even aware of myself.
Learning, for me, is exactly this kind of gift—a gift we receive before we even know who we are. One of my earliest memories is riding in the car with my dad and asking him the meanings of a number of words. I know this must be a fairly early memory, because the words are very simple: “capable,” “opportunity,” and some others. Yet, even to ask about these words, I had to have other words that I don’t remember learning: again, someone taught me, and I learned—even before I was aware of myself.
So, I have nothing that I wasn’t given. Even my words—the tools with which an English professor earns his bread!—were gifts to me. None of them are mine. By teaching, then, I try to give freely what I have freely received. Yet, paradoxically, teaching is itself a gift: like Augustine’s nurses, as soon as I try to give what I have received, I discover yet another gift!
To be caught up in this finite gift exchange is to get a glimpse of that infinite gift exchange of Father, Son, and Spirit. I teach for that glimpse.
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