Nuns With Rulers
The Wrong Way to Teach an Inner Child
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No student ever learned the love of Christ from a nun with a ruler.
For those of you unfamiliar with the tradition, sometimes nuns in Catholic schools have been known to enforce grammatical discipline by whacking students’ knuckles with rulers when they fall short of perfection. The stereotypical nun is in the same archetypal family as the severe adoptive mother of Anne of Green Gables or Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
I became a nun with a ruler the other day to teach a nun with a ruler to stop being a nun with a ruler. A gentleman impolitely pointed out a theological mistake in one of my alternate savior stories. I could have explained kindly how the whole point of an alternate savior story is to get the theology a little wrong. Instead, I rolled a sarcastic flash-bang into his notifications. Rather than understanding it, he responded with just the right scripture to convince me of my unworthiness. I doubled down, thanking him for teaching me with words and suggesting that, in the future, he teach me with silence. In other words, “Go bother your friends on Facebook.”
Beating him up was nasty, but I refuse to beat myself up over it. The best teachers have whacked people with worse rulers. Confucius once rapped a sick old man on the shins with a stick for not knowing when to die. Socrates slapped Athenians with so many painful questions, they made him drink hemlock.
In my quest for spiritual improvement, I struggle with the notion of perfection. Should I aim for it? Who has achieved it? Does it look like the pitting of a son against his father and a daughter against her mother? What does perfect faith look like? What system of belief has escaped all contradictions? If the ubiquity of change, untethered by an eternal anchor, is an eternal principle… You get the idea.
The ideal state may feel comfortable when you get there, but the road to paradise will challenge, not comfort, you. Like the journey of a toddler who falls many times, the path to flawlessness requires flaws.
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.
Nuns with rulers, in a crusade to protect the perfect grammar of a meaningful life, will succeed only in preserving a dead language, whether it’s the incomprehensible Latin mass of yesteryear or the literary straightjacket of Sinhalese diglossia. Foolishly, I am a nun with a ruler toward certain friends when I congratulate them for knowing more about climate than climatologists, just like they know more about brain surgery than brain surgeons. Trying to convince opponents they suffer from contemptibly stupid ideas is a contemptibly stupid idea.
If you are truly wise, when a person hurts you, what you learn is to not hurt others. We typically learn the opposite. My first crush was my first-grade teacher; she was so pretty, so brilliant, and so in-charge. She angrily pulled my head back by the hair one time while chastizing me for improper use of an eraser. My inner Oedipus had been slain by his mother, his lover. The only fork I saw in the road was unworthiness versus revenge. Little Tommy pulled some naughty stunts in the days that followed.
We must forgive our inner children for acting out. Are we not all spiritual children who act out? Even if we are old souls — even if we have limited ourselves through Platonic anamnesis to a childlike spiritual level — a return to spiritual adulthood may lie far in the future. If, on the other hand, we are evolving from scratch, maturity will be a fresh experience. Either way, imperfection must be part of the plan, so dealing with it severely would be foolish. Surely, part of our hoped-for maturity will be to reverse the nuns’ preemption of our joy.
