In Memory of Coach: 2 Years Later
One of my all-time favorite poems is “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” by W.H. Auden. It is just hard to beat one of your poetic heroes writing a dirge for another one of your heroes. The poem opens:
“He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.”
This poem was bouncing around my mind all day yesterday, the 2 year anniversary of the passing of Coach Spanjer—the founder and patriarch of Chapel Field Christian Schools. It is poetic, providential, fitting, that a passage from Mark’s gospel was also swirling inside my skull, mixing and commingling with Auden’s masterpiece. I say that it is fitting because the passage many (including his beloved son, William Spanjer IV, A.K.A. Mr. Spanjer) most associate with Coach is also from Mark’s gospel, Mark 8:34-38. Now the passage I was mulling over comes a little before that one.
There is a beautiful scene at the end of Mark 1 where Jesus heals a leper.
“And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.”
Now the crowd, gathered around would certainly be thinking, “Oh no! Don't do that!” He’s got leprosy!” I mean that guy might not be vaccinated! Or maybe worse yet, he's been quadruple boosted and might shed his vaccine on you!
One of the things I love about Jesus, is how he so often is nonplussed, causal, and just moves with such ease across all social, political, and religious boundaries. He moves like he doesn't even see these boundaries, these walls, these camps we have entrenched ourselves in.
Now to touch someone with leprosy—thats a big deal. To get a feel for what this would be like, try to combine in your mind the feeling of the early days of the AIDS epidemic and then sprinkle in a dose of the apex of media-driven panic surrounding the early 2020 Covid situation.
Imagine seeing this AIDS-riddled person, covid positive, hacking up a lung, quarantined isolated, alone. And Jesus walks through the people in hazmat suits, calmly sidesteps through those looking like they are cleaning up after Chernobyl and he embraces the person.
The text says Jesus was moved with pity, but many of the early and reliable Greek manuscripts say that Jesus was filled with “anger.”
Why would he be angry? He isn't angry at the man with leprosy. He is ticked off, angry at evil. He is angry at sin and corruption. He is infuriated by the corruption that has marred and mangled what he created as good.
Sin should make us angry. It made Jesus angry. The corruption of beauty should make us angry and we should respond to this destruction of what was good like Jesus did—by reaching out with a hand of love to try to restore the beauty.
That is a good way to spend your life— attempting to beautify. This might even be especially true when swimming in a sea of things that don’t seem so beautiful anymore.
I read this lovely book called The Christian Imagination a while back. And in it there is an account of a prairie woman who in 1870 wrote in her diary a note about her quilt making:
“I make them warm to keep my family from freezing; I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking...To construct a quilt is to make beauty and meaning out of life’s scrappy leftovers.”
What a quote! To construct a quilt is to make beauty and meaning out of life’s scrappy leftovers.
Thats what every attempt at good writing, faithful painting, and honest poetry is. We swim in a sea, an ocean, of non-artistic trash. When you see the garbage out there it should make you angry. When you see the degradation of the school system, when you see the lack of Biblical truth being taught it should make you angry.
So what do you do? Do you kick and scream and moan? Coach didn’t. He took a bunch of scrappy leftovers and he started to make a quilt. Coach was a Marine. He loved his country and I know it bothered him to see its trajectory. I think it safe to say he was angry. He was angry at evil and although he certainly was no perfect man, Chapel Field’s existence is a testimony to the fact that he responded with love. Thats how men respond to the evil of the world. And if thats not manly enough for you, well, take it up with Jesus.
In many ways Chapel Field is still stitched together out of scrappy leftovers. It is held together by leftover utility vans that serve as busses and barns and trailers that have been quilted into classrooms. It is knitted together by strands of love, by the living and the dead. It is held together by parents quietly serving in the background, by alumni and friends generously donating in secret, by Joseph Maina steadily doing a little bit of everything—always. It is sewn and upheld and built upon the shoulders of so many now gone: Ed Schrader, Cindy Leventis, Cindy Schoch. It has been beautified by administrators from Canada and academically strengthened by faculty from MIT and Hillsdale.
Everyday, slowly and surely, Bill and Kristina, Kristy and Mom, the Spanjers, they make that quilt a little more elegant. One might even be able to call it classical. But it remains a quilt and it is all the more lovey for that. Anyone who was benefitted from Chapel Field, anyone who for a moment has been kept warm under that quilt has Coach to thank for that—whether you knew him or not.
Auden ends his poem with these words:
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Coach may have not farmed many verses—preferring direct, straightforward speaking to nuance—and I’m pretty sure my writing and speaking style would rub him the wrong way! But he farmed a field into a school and he turned a little corner of the globe into a place where many would come to hear of the One who made a vineyard of the curse. His legacy is that in these, the prison of our days, he has created a space where the free man might be taught to praise.
Justin Chiarot serves as a humanities teacher at Chapel Field.
