Rules, Desires, Literacy, and Goodness

Broad, leaky title for a blog, I know. But this one is easily captured in something that happened on Facebook recently (does anything really “happen” on Facebook?) and boiled down to that second term, “desire.”

A friend had posted a provocative statistical map on his Facebook page showing how few high school and college graduates continue to read after graduation. The statistics are abysmal, and as a teacher, my friend expressed concern with getting his students reading.

As an occasional poster on his page (and even more rarely, an occasional “wit”), I joined the fray. I wrote, “We need to teach our students to be ‘life-long’ readers for pleasure.” As soon as I posted this, I added, “…or we pass a law requiring all Americans to read at least two books a year.”

Alongside the IRS we could institute the BRS, or Bureau of Reader Services, and for reporting purposes, all citizens could make use of the old “book report” genre they had forced on them in grade school.

And then, dull wit expressed, I sat back and realized that the either/or dilemma I’d captured here equally applied to other issues than reading—certainly religion and dieting as well.

Many people, after all, say they want to read more. They say this, anyway, though it is usually because they think reading will be good for them in some vague sense—not so much because they seek a dialogue with different or greater minds than their own. They say they want to read more like I say I want to lose weight. What we get instead, when we don’t find the desire to read or eat right and exercise, is the rules.

Rules and Desire

The intention behind any rule, of course, is not ever oppression, though that’s how it sounds at first. The bullies at the pool are told to stop pushing younger kids into the water. One usually hopes that continued conformity will teach love for the law, but let’s be real.

As for me and my new proposed literacy law, I’m fine with it, of course. I’ve usually read my second book by the tenth of January. I like to read, find it pleasurable in a way I imagine great saints find pleasure in God. No rules are needed to force my nose to the text.

The rules are there for people who lack desire or to check desires that run in other directions.

This—the ruled state—is the state I imagine is found in most churches, synagogues, mosques, and high school and college classrooms. As the Misfit says of the grandmother at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s story, “She’d of been a good woman had there been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This isn’t really about killing ourselves to be good. It’s about desire, about finding pleasure in what is good. People of faith refer to this as being given a "new heart." Most of the time, we don’t find this sort of grace, and so it takes some kind of faith on our part to consider that though we can’t see it at the moment, putting others before ourselves now might actually lead to feelings we’ve never had before.

In literacy terms, it's having faith that in finishing the book, we’ll find something worthwhile we couldn’t have imagined on choking down those first few pages.