Crucifixation

A letter to the editor in last week's Ledger proposed that students at Mascenic High School should study the Bible instead of modern works like Allen Ginsberg's poem  "Howl." It reminded me of something that happened  in my Modern Literature class a couple of weeks ago. In an essay on symbolism, one of my students, intending to use the word "crucifixion," actually wrote "crucifixation."

It gave me a laugh and a useful new word: according to some of my students, "crucifixation" is the English Teacher's Disease. "You see religious symbolism in everything!" they accuse me.

Guilty. In 1999, when I was a brand-new teacher, my freshman English class was reading The House on Mango Street, a book by Sandra Cisneros about a young Latina girl named Esperanza. One of the chapters is called "The Monkey Garden," and I mentioned that any time a garden comes up in a work of literature, a careful reader should consider whether it is an allusion to the Garden of Eden.

The response was 25 blank stares. I paused. "How many of you know what the Garden of Eden is?"

Five tentative hands went up. I tried again. "How many of you have heard of Adam and Eve?"

Three  more hands went up. Upon closer questioning, I determined that two of those students thought Adam and Eve was a fruit drink.

"All right," I said. "I guess before we go any further with this book, I need to teach you a little about the Bible."

A dozen hands shot up, and the owner of one of them declared, "You can't teach us religion, Mr. Clark. It's against the Constitution."

"I'm not teaching you religion," I told the young lawyer. "I'm teaching you about your cultural heritage." Then I went on to describe what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and how that related to the way Esperanza lost her innocence in the Monkey Garden.

I wasn't trying to convert anyone. I was preaching the Gospel of Literature. That little lesson was useful to their understanding of The House on Mango Street and, later on, Romeo and Juliet (who first declared their fatal love in an orchard), and Little Women (whose idyllic home was called Orchard House).

Since then, I have handed students copies of a passage from the New Testament, in which Jesus calls on his disciples to be "fishers of men," so that they would recognize the allusion in Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  I have pointed out Christ symbolism in Melville's Billy Budd and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.  We've dug for Biblical nuggets in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

The irony of what's going on at Mascenic right now is that studying modern novels and poems is a good way to get young people interested in the Bible. It is the source of the mighty river of English literature. It has provided plots, characters, cadences, and profound moral questions to writers from Shakespeare to Allen Ginsberg, and they, in turn, have reinterpreted and reinvigorated its ancient stories for each succeeding age.

Study the Bible? We can't avoid it. But beware of crucifixation.