In 1986, controversy over the subject of origins led to my husband’s ejection from the Mennonite school where he’d taught for eleven years. My account appeared in the anthology What Mennonites Are Thinking 1998 (Good Books) and was reprinted in the December 1999 issue of Mennonite Life.
Back when Paulson was taking his physics, botany, biochemistry, microbiology, mammalogy, genetics, and physiology courses at Penn State, I managed to remain clueless about science. I could maybe spell some of the terminology and knew what mammals were and perhaps amphibians and reptiles, and that geology had to do with rocks, but I never thought in terms of phylum, genus, species. I was aware at one point that he was trapping shrews, of all things, and storing them in our freezer for a class requirement.
“An Apple Tree, or Mango” by Shirley Kurtz
Back when Paulson was taking his physics, botany, biochemistry, microbiology, mammalogy, genetics, and physiology courses at Penn State, I managed to remain clueless about science. I could maybe spell some of the terminology and knew what mammals were and perhaps amphibians and reptiles, and that geology had to do with rocks, but I never thought in terms of phylum, genus, species. I was aware at one point that he was trapping shrews, of all things, and storing them in our freezer for a class requirement.
Perhaps it seems odd that a wife could be so ignorant about her husband’s studies; on the other hand, the husband buried in his work wasn’t thinking about Hamlet and Macbeth, Spoon River Anthology, Our Town—the kind of material I loved and was teaching to high schoolers. So in a way it was tit-for-tat.
Then Paulson began teaching junior highers at Kraybill School. Now he was dispensing all his facts about atoms and molecules and protozoans and DNA, brewing chemicals atop Bunsen burners, taking the students to a nearby farm pond to scoop out slimy creatures, or to the farm breeders’ cooperative at Lancaster to see the bulls used for artificial insemination (another place they went, calf embryos were being surgically implanted in cows—it wasn’t just the birds and bees they were talking about in school). Still I failed to take much in. Oh, his stories were funny enough. Crawling through Mummau’s cave with students, he’d nearly gotten stuck in a tight passageway and panicked, he told me afterwards, but I was more worried about how to get the mud off his pants.
Busy at home being the mommy, and predisposed to literary matters, words in and of themselves, I had our children feasting on the lore of the ages (well, maybe this is stretching it): Harry and the Terrible Whatzit, Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel, Blueberries for Sal, The Biggest Bear, Paddle-to-the-Sea, In the Night Kitchen—whatever treasures I could find at the public library and cart home. I wasn’t overly fond of Mother Goose—the rhymes’ nonsensicalness—but obviously a good story didn’t have to be outright true. I crafted my own tales, too, when I could, in snatched moments. The stuff in Paulson’s books, though, anything science related, held no appeal. His blather about mutation, photosynthesis, symbiosis, homeostasis, and whatever else went in my one ear and out the other. Disinclined toward nature, by nature, I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t really listening.
As Paulson later explained, he usually skipped the chapter on evolution in the seventh-grade textbook because there wasn’t time for everything, but occasionally in morning devotions with those students he held forth on the subject.
Of course, I wasn’t sitting in on this.
“We have the accounts in Genesis,” said the teacher, propped against the blackboard, slowly twirling his chalk. “Michael, please don’t lean back like that in your chair. You all know the stories. ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’ Then firmament, and dry land and seas, vegetation, the heavenly bodies, fish and birds, creeping crawling things and legged beasts, and people—and it was very good.
“Those creation stories,” the teacher continued, pacing now, restless, “were a kind of poetry passing down from generation to generation; they satisfied the curiosity of primitive peoples. Today though, scientists aren’t content with a few verses in Genesis.” His arms began to flap and Stacy and Marcella in the front seats closest to his desk exchanged wary looks. “They study all the little bits of natural evidence and develop theories based on the evidence. Scientists are saying now that long ago there was a Big Bang, and afterwards chaos, and then the clumping of planets and stars.
“But it was just hazy light, in the beginning,” the teacher explained. “Please, Michael—your chair. The sunshine was diffused by all the swirling matter coming together in clumps. Gradually land separated from atmosphere on our planet and life emerged—first sea life and then land forms of life.
“And this is what I find so intriguing.” Here the teacher came to an abrupt halt, but his arms still flailed at the air. “If you compare evolutionary theory and the biblical stories, you’ll notice some interesting parallels. The fossil records and the scriptures indicate a similar sequence in development. Light, and then sun, moon, and stars. Water creatures first, and then land creatures. It’s almost as if modern science is corroborating those ancient accounts!”
The teacher’s chalk suddenly escaped his clutch and sailed across the room. “We really don’t know how God created the universe, but maybe we’re nearer to cracking the riddle.”
No, I wasn’t there myself, hanging onto his every word.
Early in his eleventh year at the Mennonite school, Paulson mentioned his plans for a presentation at an upcoming PTA meeting. I was suddenly attentive. “Oh no!” I said. “You’ll get yourself in trouble.”
“Nah,” he said. “I’m not worried. I’ve already checked with the principal. It’ll be okay. I’ll be speaking to just the parents of the seventh graders, in my classroom.” In isolated cases in the past, where mothers—a total of two or three—had worriedly approached him because their children had come home talking about evolution, he’d sat down and explained things, which seemed to mollify the mothers. He thought now that he could prevent further trouble. He would offer this presentation. He honestly believed that if he distributed his charts and pointed out the various analogies, and people understood . . .
So of course, afterwards I blamed him.
What an uproar! Upset patrons telephoned school board members to complain (the teaching of evolution in a Christian school, buzz, buzz). The school board scheduled special sessions and grilled Paulson. “This is the Inquisition,” I hissed, privately.
“We won’t quibble about a literal six-day creation,” board members said. “And animals and plants evolving—that’s no big deal. But man was definitely created special, in the image of God.”
“Why, yes,” agreed Paulson. “But we don’t know all the details. The Bible isn’t a science text.”
How I smarted at the gossip and suspicions and accusations—and he’d started all this! He’d brought up the subject! From somewhere or other, maybe an anthology up on our bookshelf, I found a poem for the children to learn:
If Wisdom’s ways you wisely seek,
Five things observe with care:
Of whom you speak,
To whom you speak
And how, and when, and where.
Perhaps my literary instincts were running amok, for I also put the children to memorizing scripture: “Happy are you when people hate you, reject you . . .”
Paulson maintained that people had every right to act according to their convictions and to protect their children from error. Indeed, he had a point, but long after he was formally dismissed from his job and we moved to West Virginia, I raged.
One thing, though, I didn’t much care to admit. Like all the good folks we’d left behind in Pennsylvania, I’d grown up on the Genesis accounts. Garden, snake, fig leaves—the images were embedded in my soul. While it hardly seemed likely, anymore, that God actually knelt along a river and patted out a mud man and then gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to start him breathing, the other possibility—our having descended from outright animals or those hunched, loping, slanty-headed monsters in books—was deeply unsettling. “Day” for “age” in the beginning verses—that made sense enough. But hideous Cro-Magnons!
However, I couldn’t believe I’d married a heretic.
Well, it was a much too complex and involved issue. I would focus on other things. Maybe I could think up more stories.
Her husband taught in a public school, now, but the woman still barely glanced at the piles of notebooks and tests he hauled home to grade. Any mention of protoplasm, black holes, ecosystems, energy, matter, and so on, she heard only dimly, preoccupied as she was with her reading and story writing and agonizing revisions. One evening at the supper table he told about an experiment in class: he’d had a kid named Jason—who changed first into old clothes—jump into a fifty-gallon drum half filled with water. The point was to measure his volume. Other students had drawn the high-water mark with Jason submerged, and then after he’d climbed out they’d poured in jugful after jugful of water, keeping track of how many jugs it took to bring the water level up to the mark. Jason’s volume was 40 gallons—or maybe 80. Well, she could see how her husband was a mighty fine teacher. But the woman herself remained woefully ignorant, despite his best efforts. The time he tried valiantly to explain the difference between weight and mass, she went all limp inside and hopeless—it was just too complicated.
Clearly, she would remain, forever and ever, unscientific beyond description.
“Todd!” she’d screech on school mornings—only the youngest of the children was still at home. Even he understood about mass and other weighty scientific terms. “You’ll be late for your bus!” she’d yell. Soon the house went entirely silent and she could mull and stew in peace. Seven-thirty a.m. was too early to actually attack a manuscript—she was still too foggy—so first she’d finish her Bible reading, plus maybe that piece in Newsweek she’d gotten only halfway through last night, and then she’d do a little dusting, something active to get her blood running and her brain in gear for plotting and weaving and contriving lots of juicy little details.
One morning in late winter, with the fog already dissipating somewhat (because she’d gotten her dusting out of the way first, for a change), she pored over the beginning chapters in Genesis. The steady coursing of red sea through vein fired the imagination, for she could almost hear the ancient storyteller’s chanting: “There was evening, and there was morning—the first day. . . There was evening, and there was morning—the second day. . . There was evening, and there was morning—the third day. . . And God saw that it was good.”
The tribal elder reciting would have been bony and gnarled, she decided, and as he rocked on his haunches, his voice rose and fell in singsong tones: “When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”
“Gabuudhie gabuudhi, ayeeeeeee,” the listeners circling close chorused in agreement (for some reason the whole scene popped up African in her head instead of Mesopotamian, with everybody’s necks encased tightly in beads, and their bellies girdled with clankety coins strung on lengths of frayed rope). Each line, in its turn, served as metaphor for truth beyond comprehension.
The storyteller, coming to this next part, lowered his voice. His audience hushed. “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
Funny, how as a child she’d pictured these as real trees bearing, oh, say, apples or pears (she hadn’t known about kiwi, papayas, mangoes). She’d thought Eve had handed Adam a literal piece of fruit with seeds in it, off a tree called knowledge—
Oh, my word!
In the absolute silence of her house, the woman gasped.
She didn’t bring up the matter till after supper. Todd had wolfed his dessert and left the kitchen, but her husband was only now unhooking his feet from the rungs of his chair. She turned toward him eagerly. “That one tree in the Garden of Eden, you know? The knowledge of good and evil? Was this maybe the acquiring of intellect? Cro-Magnon or—”
“Crow who? Oh. Cro-Magnon.”
Her husband blinked several times and studied her gravely. “That never occurred to me,” he said at last.
“‘How Cro-Magnon Got His Brain.’ You know, like ‘How the Elephant Got His Trunk.’ You read that one to Todd—you said you wanted to do the reading, for once. ‘In the High and Far-Off times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side, but he couldn’t pick up things with it . . .’”
“‘Led go! You are hurtig be!’” Her husband chuckled, remembering. “Todd begged me to read it again. And then he wondered how far up nose holes go.”
Her husband was going on now about sphenoidal sinuses and sphenoethnoidal recesses and nasopalatine nerves, textbook stuff he still retained from his physiology course at Penn State, but the woman only smiled. Already tuning out, she pushed back her chair and collected a few dirty plates to carry to the sink. She couldn’t wait to get back to that story she’d worked on all day. She would take it up as soon as the fog lifted tomorrow morning.
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