002.B.5.2 Conflict Resolution articles

http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/clearness-committee

The Clearness Committee

A Communal Approach To Discernment

by Parker J. Palmer

Many of us face a dilemma when trying to deal with a personal problem, question, or decision. On the one hand, we know that the issue is ours alone to resolve and that we have the inner resources to resolve it, but access to our own resources is often blocked by layers of inner "stuff"—confusion, habitual thinking, fear, despair. On the other hand, we know that friends might help us uncover our inner resources and find our way, but by exposing our problem to others, we run the risk of being invaded and overwhelmed by their assumptions, judgments, and advice—a common and alienating experience. As a result, we often privatize these vital questions in our lives: at the very moment when we need all the help we can get, we find ourselves cut off from both our inner resources and the support of a community.

For people who have experienced this dilemma, I want to describe a method invented by the Quakers, a method that protects individual identity and integrity while drawing on the wisdom of other people. It is called a "Clearness Committee." If that name sounds like it is from the sixties, it is—the 1660's! From their beginnings over three hundred years ago, Quakers needed a way to draw on both inner and communal resources to deal with personal problems because they had no clerical leaders to "solve" their problems for them. The Clearness Committee is testimony to the fact that there are no external authorities on life's deepest issues, not clergy or therapists or scholars; there is only the authority that lies within each of us waiting to be heard.

Behind the Clearness Committee is a simple but crucial conviction: each of us has an inner teacher, a voice of truth, that offers the guidance and power we need to deal with our problems. But that inner voice is often garbled by various kinds of inward and outward interference. The function of the Clearness Committee is not to give advice or "fix" people from the outside in but rather to help people remove the interference so that they can discover their own wisdom from the inside out. If we do not believe in the reality of inner wisdom, the Clearness Committee can become an opportunity for manipulation. But if we respect the power of the inner teacher, the Clearness Committee can be a remarkable way to help someone name and claim his or her deepest truth.

The Clearness Committee's work is guided by some simple but crucial rules and understandings. Among them, of course, is the rule that the process is confidential. When it is over, committee members will not speak with others about what was said and, equally important, will not speak with the focus person about the problem unless he or she requests a conversation.

1. Normally, the person who seeks clearness (the "focus person") chooses his or her committee, with five or six trusted people who embrace as much diversity among them as possible in age, background, gender, and so on.
2. The focus person writes up his or her issue in three to five pages and sends this document to members of the committee in advance of the meeting. There are three sections to this write-up: a concise statement of the problem, a recounting of relevant background factors that may bear on the problem, and an exploration of any hunches the focus person may have about what's on the horizon regarding the problem. Most people find that by writing a statement of this sort, they are taking their first step toward inner clarity.
3. The committee meets for three hours—with the understanding that there may be a need for a second and even third meeting at a later date. A clerk (facilitator) and a recording clerk (secretary) should be named, though taping the meeting is a good alternative to the latter. The clerk opens the meeting with a reminder of the rules, closes the meeting on time, and serves as a monitor all along the way, making sure that the rules are followed with care. The recording clerk gives his or her notes to the focus person when the meeting is over.
4. The meeting begins with the clerk calling for a time of centering silence and inviting the focus person to break the silence, when ready, with a brief summary of the issue at hand. Then the committee members may speak—but everything they say is governed by one rule, a simple rule and yet one that most people find difficult and demanding: members are forbidden to speak to the focus person in any way except to ask honest, open questions . This means absolutely no advice and no amateur psychoanalysis. It means no "Why don't you…?" It means no "That happened to me one time, and here's what I did…" It means no "There's a book/therapist/exercise/diet that would help you a lot." Nothing is allowed except real questions, honest and open questions, questions that will help the focus person remove the blocks to his or her inner truth without becoming burdened by the personal agendas of committee members. I may think I know the answer to your problem, and on rare occasions I may be right. But my answer is absolutely no value to you. The only answer that counts is one that arises from your own inner truth. The discipline of the Clearness Committee is to give you greater access to that truth—and to keep the rest of us from defiling or trying to define it.
5. What is an honest, open question? It is important to reflect on this, since we are so skilled at asking questions that are advice oranalysis in disguise: "Have you ever thought that it might be your mother's fault?" The best single mark of an honest, open question is that the questioner could not possibly anticipate the answer to it. "Did you ever feel like this before?" There are other guidelines for good questioning. Ask questions aimed at helping the focus person rather than at satisfying your curiosity. Ask questions that are brief and to the point rather than larding them with background considerations and rationale—which make the question into a speech. Ask questions that go to the person as well as the problem—for example, questions about feelings as well as about facts. Trust your intuition in asking questions, even if your instinct seems off the wall: "What color is your present job, and what color is the one you have been offered?"
6. Normally, the focus person responds to the questions as they are asked, in the presence of the group, and those responses generate more, and deeper, questions. Though the responses should be full, they should not be terribly long—resist the temptation to tell your life story in response to every question! It is important that there be time for more and more questions and responses, thus deepening the process for everyone. The more often a focus person is willing to answer aloud, the more material the person—and the committee—will have to work with. But this should never happen at the expense of the focus person's need to protect vulnerable feelings or to maintain privacy. It is vital that the focus person assume total power to set the limits of the process. So everyone must understand that the focus person at all times has the right not to answer a question . The unanswered question is not necessarily lost—indeed, it may be the question that is so important that it keeps working on the focus person long after the Clearness Committee has ended.
7. The Clearness Committee must not become a grilling or cross-examination. The pace of the questioning is crucial—it should be relaxed, gentle, humane. A machine-gun volley of questions makes reflection impossible and leaves the focus person feeling attacked rather than evoked. Do not be afraid of silence in the group—trust it and treasure it. If silence falls, it does not mean that nothing is happening or that the process has broken down. It may well mean that the most important thing of all is happening: new insights are emerging from within people, from their deepest sources of guidance.
8. From beginning to end of the Clearness Committee, it is important that everyone work hard to remain totally attentive to the focus person and his or her needs. This means suspending the normal rules of social gathering—no chitchat, no responding to other people's questions or to the focus person's answers, no joking to break the tension, no noisy and nervous laughter. We are simply to surround the focus person with quiet, loving space, resisting even the temptation to comfort or reassure or encourage this person, but simply being present with our attention and our questions and our care. If a committee member damages this ambiance with advice, leading questions, or rapid-fire inquisition, other members, including the focus person, should remind the offender of the rules—and the offender is not at liberty to mount a defense or argue the point. The Clearness Committee is for the sake of the focus person, and the rest of us need to tell our egos to recede.
9. The Clearness Committee should run for the full time allotted. Don't end early for fear that the group has "run out of questions"—patient waiting will be rewarded with deeper questions than have yet been asked. About twenty minutes before the end of the meeting, the clerk should ask the focus person if he or she wants to suspend the "questions only" rule and invite committee members to mirror back what they have heard the focus person saying. If the focus person says no, the questions continue, but if he or she says yes, mirroring can begin, along with more questions. Mirroring does not provide an excuse to give advice or fix the person—that sort of invasiveness is still prohibited. Mirroring simply means reflecting the focus person's language—and body language—to see if he or she should have a chance to say, "Yes, that's me" or "No, that's not." In the final five minutes of the meeting, the clerk should invite members to celebrate and affirm the focus person and his or her strengths. This is an important time, since the focus person has just spent a couple of hours being very vulnerable. And there is always much to celebrate, for in the course of a Clearness Committee, people reveal the gifts and graces that characterize human beings at their deepest and best.
10. Remember, the Clearness Committee is not intended to fix the focus person, so there should be no sense of letdown if the focus person does not have his or her problems "solved" when the process ends. A good clearness process does not end —it keeps working within the focus person long after the meeting is over. The rest of us need simply to keep holding that person in the light, trusting the wisdom of his or her inner teacher.

The Clearness Committee is not a cure-all. It is not for extremely fragile people or for extremely delicate problems. But for the right person, with the right issue, it is a powerful way to rally the strength of community around a struggling soul, to draw deeply from the wisdom within all of us. It teaches us to abandon the pretense that we know what is best for another person and instead to ask those honest and open questions that can help that person find his or her own answers. It teaches us to give up the arrogant assumption that we are obliged to "save" each other and learn, through simple listening, to create the conditions that allow a person to find his or her wholeness within. If the spiritual discipline behind the Clearness Committee is understood and practiced, the process can become a way to renew community in our individualist times, a way to free people from their isolation without threatening their integrity, a way to counteract the excesses of technique in caring, a way to create space for the spirit to move among us with healing and with power.

 NOTE: People who wish to make significant use of the Clearness Committee process are urged to read Chapter VIII, “Living the Questions,” in Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2009). There you will find detailed, step-by-step guidance, as well as a DVD with footage of the author teaching the process to a group. The Clearness Committee is a powerful method that is both simple and demanding. Done well, it is a positive experience for everyone involved. But done poorly, it can cause hurt and even harm. So a deep understanding of its principles and practices is essential to using it responsibly. People who want an experiential immersion in the process — which is, of course, the best way to learn how it works and how to offer it to others — should peruse our retreat calendar and learn more about our programs, many of which offer the Clearness Committee experience

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http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/community-conflict

Community, Conflict, and Ways of Knowing

Ways to Deepen our Educational Agenda

by Parker J. Palmer

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Twelve years ago, my own yearning for community in education led me out of the mainstream of higher education to a small place called Pendle Hill, a 55-year-old Quaker living/learning community near Philadelphia. It is a place where everyone from teachers to cooks to administrators receives the same base salary as a witness to community. At Pendle Hill, rigorous study of philosophy, nonviolent social change, and other subjects, goes right alongside washing the dishes each day, making decisions by consensus, and taking care of each other, as well as reaching out to the world.

Out of that long, intense experience, what might I share that would somehow be hopeful and encouraging? I learned, of course, that community is vital and important, but it is also terribly difficult work for which we are not well prepared; at least I was not. I learned that the degree to which a person yearns for community is directly related to the dimming of memory of his or her last experience of it.

I came up with my own definition of community after a year at Pendle Hill: Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives. At the end of my second year, I came up with a corollary. When that person moves away, someone else arises immediately to take his or her place.

But the question I want to address is this: How should we be thinking about the nature of community in the modern college and university? I think that question puts the issue where it belongs. We need a way of thinking about community in higher education that relates it to the central mission of the academy the generation and transmission of knowledge. The way we think about community in settings of higher learning, in other words: must be different from the way we think about community in other settings, like the civil society, the neighborhood, the church, or the workplace. Within the academy, we need to think about community in ways that deepen the educational agenda.

We need a way of thinking about community in higher education that relates it to the central mission of the academy—the generation and transmission of knowledge.

As I listen to the current conversation about the place of community in the academy, it seems to go something like this. First, there has been a collapse of civic virtue in the society around us, a collapse into expressive and competitive individualism, and a loss of integrated vision. This view was articulated for us most recently by the work of Robert Bellah and his colleagues in Habits of the Heart.

Second, the argument runs, higher education can and should respond to this collapse by becoming a model of community in at least two ways. One is to develop new- cooperative social forms for campus life (i.e., in dormatory classroom life, where habits can be formed). Second, higher education should reorganize curricula toward a more integrated vision of the world offer more interdisciplinary studies, and do more ethical and value-oriented work.

There is value in this line of argument, but I think much of it parallels the way we think about renewing the civil society itself, where we argue that we must build structures and teach the content of civic virtue to bind the community together. The argument is valuable, but it does not respond to the unique heart-and-core mission of higher education.

So I would like to press the question of community in education a step further. I want to go beyond altering the social forms of education, as valuable as that may be, go beyond altering the topical content of courses, as valuable as that my be, and try to reach into the underlying nature of our knowledge itself. I want to reach for the relation of community to the very mode of knowing dominant in the academy.

To put it in philosophical terms, I want to try to connect concepts of community to questions of epistemology, which I believe are the central questions for any institution engaged in a mission of knowing, teaching, and learning. How do we know? How do we learn? Under what conditions and with what validity?

I believe that it is here at the epistemological core of our knowledge and our processes of knowing that our powers for forming or deforming human consciousness are to be found. I believe that it is here, in our modes of knowing, that we shape souls by the shape of our knowledge. It is here that the idea of community must ultimately take root and have impact if it is to reshape the doing of higher education.

My thesis is a very simple one: I do not believe that epistemology is a bloodless abstraction; the way we know has powerful implications for the way we live. I argue that every epistemology tends to become an ethic and that every way of knowing tends to become a way of living. I argue that the relation established between the knower and the known, between the student and the subject tends to become the relation of the living person to the world itself. I argue that every model of knowing contains its own moral trajectory, its own ethical direction and outcomes.

Let me try to demonstrate this thesis, this link between epistemology and life. The mode of knowing that dominates higher education I call objectivism. I has three traits with which we are all familiar.

The first of these traits is that the academy will be objective. This means that it holds everything it knows at arm s length. It distances the knower from the world for a very specific purpose; that is, to keep its knowledge from contamination by subjective prejudice and bias. But even as it does this distancing, it divorces that knowledge a part of the world from our personal life. It creates a world "out there" of which we are only spectators and in which we do not live. That is the first outcome of the objectivist way of knowing.

Secondly, objectivism is analytic. Once you have made something into an object (in my own discipline that something can be a person), you can then chop that object up into pieces to see what makes it tick. You can dissect it, you can cut it apart, you can analyze it, even unto death. And that is the second habit formed by the objectivist mode of knowing.

Third, this mode of knowing is experimental. And I mean this in a broad and metaphoric sense, not laboratory operations per se. I mean by experimental that we are now free with these dissected objects to move the pieces around to reshape the world in an image more pleasing to us, to see what would happen if we did. It is this "power over the world" motif that I am reaching for when I say "experimentalism" in the epistemology called objectivism.

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http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/reflections-on-a-program

Reflections on a Program for "The Formation of Teachers"

An occasional paper of the Fetzer Institute
by Parker J. Palmer, Ph.D.

Teacher Formation and the Spirituality of Education

At the end of our conversation of November 19 (a fruitful day for me), you asked if I would take another day in December to write you a long memo on the spirituality of education. Specifically, you asked me to reflect on the conceptual foundations (rather than the programmatic details) of a long-term project Fetzer is designing to aid in "the formation of teachers."

You indicated that you are interested in all levels of education; that you hope to involve students and administrators as well as teachers; and that you would like to influence educational systems (Including the public school system), as well as individual educators. Your vision also includes the development of your own retreat and conference center so that the work of "formation" could happen on-site, as well as around the country.

As we talked about this assignment, we agreed to focus on the formation of teachers—rather than on "teacher training"—for good reason. Formation is a concept from the spiritual traditions, and it involves a concern for personal wholeness. Where training asks if the person has the right knowledge and technique, formation asks after the state of the person's soul. Where training offers the person new data and methods, formation offers the person help in discerning his or her identity and integrity.

This focus on teacher formation is important for at least three reasons:

• First, it is consistent with Fetzer's larger goal in education: to develop capacities in students and teachers that will help them live healthy lives. This includes the capacity for wonder, for reverence, for life-giving attitudes toward themselves and other people.
• Second, the emphasis on the formation of teachers is consistent with my own deepest conviction about the nature of good teaching: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique. Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.
• Third, this is the kind of support teachers yearn for. Teachers often feel insulted, even abused, by "in-services" that stress gimmicks and by superiors who want only to know what the test scores look like. A program that focuses on the state of the teacher's soul will be received with real gratitude.

Identity Is More Important than Technique

For the past 25 years, our national discourse about teaching has been obsessed with questions of techniques. But now, the limitations of that approach are becoming evident; witness a letter I received recently from a professor who has spent the past few years trying to help his colleagues grow as teachers: "My work in faculty development is fast becoming a mere puppeting of technique—a song-and-dance dummy for 'student-centered, interactive learning.' The workshops and projects we have developed over the past two to three years are quickly deteriorating into the shell of a new orthodoxy. We act as if real learning is simply a matter of adjusting the ways we teach instead of the ways we are."

I do not mean that new techniques for teaching have no legitimate place in the work Fetzer will do with teachers. But I do mean that the question of methodology needs to take a distant second to helping teachers explore the primary question of who they are and how they are. No matter how plain or fancy our teaching methods may be, we tend to teach ourselves first, last, and always. We will find methods that work for us only as we become clearer and clearer about our own personal identities about what is within our integrity to do.

There is no need to adduce reams of research to prove this point. We only need to ask students, our colleagues, our friends, and ourselves to tell stories about the great and good teachers they and we have known. As one listens to these stories, it quickly becomes clear that there is no consistency of technique; some great teachers lecture a lot, some ask a lot of questions, and others play roles somewhere in-between. The consistencies have to do with qualities of being: great teachers have presence, passion, personal identification with their subjects, concern for students, a certain largeness of mind and heart. They are, in a word, "whole" people—though the very fact of their wholeness may make them appear eccentric in a society where wholeness is hardly the norm!

How can we move from this conviction about the soul-sources of good teaching into a program for the formation of teachers? The missing link is a perceptive diagnosis of how and why teachers lose their souls. What are the factors that obscure or distort the identity and integrity of the teacher so that he or she s not teaching from personal wholeness and, therefore, cannot possibly teach toward personal wholeness?

The Centrality of Fear

There are many specific answers to this question, and at least two generic questions: the obscuring/distorting forces lie outside the teacher (i.e., in the structures of schools and of professional life), or they lie inside the teacher (i.e., in certain features of the human condition). As the Fetzer program evolves, you will probably want, and need, to deal with both inner and outer factors. But I strongly urge that the primary emphasis of the Fetzer program be on the internal factors that obscure or distort our identity. My rationale is simple: many, many programs are trying to effect educational reform from the outside in, but the greatest immediate power we have is to work for reform from the inside out. Ultimately, human wholeness does not come from changes in our institutions (as much as we need to work for such change); it comes from the re-formation of our hearts.

As I explore the inward factors that obscure or distort our identity and integrity as teachers, I keep returning to a single word: fear. The teaching-and-learning enterprise in our society is riddled with fear. Fear, not ignorance, is the enemy of learning, and it is fear that gives ignorance its power. Indeed, fear is the counterpoint of every great and good human virtue: fear, not doubt, is the counterpoint of faith; fear, not hate is the counterpoint of love; fear, not greed, is the counterpoint of generosity; fear, not betrayal, is the counterpoint of trust. It is fear that deforms our lives; it is fear that saps all the great virtues of their power to reform our lives.

If we are to deal with the formation of teachers from the standpoint of fear, it is important to understand that fear is not just a personal emotion (which is how we normally use the word), but a central feature of the culture that surrounds us as well. Fear is clearly at work in our civic culture, where the politicians too often try to win votes by playing on our fear of diversity, fear of material loss, fear of the future. Fear is clearly at work in our religious culture, where the churches too often try to recruit and retain members by playing on our fear of judgment and of death.

Fear is clearly at work in our educational culture as well. My own examination of fear in education suggests that it is rooted in at least three places—in our dominant way of knowing, in the lives of our students, and in our own hearts as adult professionals. To give you a sense of the kind of "teacher formation" that Fetzer might offer, I want to explore, briefly, the deformations created by fear in each of these three places.

The Fear in Our Way of Knowing

"Objectivism" is the name I give to our dominant way of knowing; it permeates education at every level—including the field of teacher training. Objectivism is the primary intellectual commitment of Western culture. It is a commitment to the notion that we cannot know anything truly and well unless we know it from such a distance that the "object" of knowledge remains uncontaminated by our own subjectivity (whether that "object" be a piece of literature, nature, history, or human nature).

This arm's length approach to truth has been presented with such confidence, even arrogance, that it is hard to see the fear that drives it. But objectivism is full of fear—the fear of subjectivity, the fear of relationship, the fear of being challenged and changed by that which we know.

Of course, there is good reason to fear unfettered subjectivity. I have no desire to return to an age when subjective whim reigned supreme, an age when (according to some historians) six million women were killed as witches because someone's subjective hunch said "You're evil." But when the cultural pendulum swings to unfettered objectivism, the results are no less cruel: witness the Gulf War in which killing becomes acceptable because it is done at arm's length (and this is only the most recent sign of the cruelty of an objectivist society). We need to be re-formed in a way of knowing that embraces the paradox of subjective and objective truth, a way of knowing that does not collapse into either inward or outward illusions, but one that brings us into a living dialogical relationship with the world that our knowledge gives us.

By holding us at arm's length from the world, objectivism aims at giving us power over things—and our need for such power is directly related to our fear of living in the world. We need a way of knowing that makes us not masters but partners, cocreators. I am not a romantic: we need a way of knowing that gives us the power to survive in the world. But we also need a way of knowing that gives the world the power to survive us by transforming our lives. We need a way of knowing that brings us into a living relationship with all we know so that our knowledge itself will be a source of community rather than control. This way of knowing will emerge only as we address the fear that lies behind our commitment of objectivism.

This can be said more precisely: our need is not to "invent" a new way of knowing (an impossible task even if it were needed!). Our need is to develop concepts and images that more faithfully reflect the actual way we know. Objectivism, with its emphasis on cold facts and logic, gives a very unreal picture of how humans know their world (see the work of Michael Polanyi or Evelyn Fox Keller); and the objectivist conceit that human beings can own and operate the world by knowing it is nothing more than an egocentric, self-serving fantasy, one that is now dissolving around us.

The fear that is in our images of knowing is the first fear to be confronted and healed in a program of teacher formation; until these images change, our fearful ways of teaching will remain the same. Our one-dimensional, power-oriented pedagogy simply reflects an epistemology that has these same traits. To deal effectively with teacher formation, Fetzer must help teachers develop an epistemology that respects the complexity of human knowing, one that does not approach the world as a combat zone but as a viable place of grace.

The Fear in Our Students

The Fetzer program must also help teachers develop an alternative understanding of the condition of our students, in whose lives we find the second locus of the fear that deforms education.

Students have a bad reputation these days. Too many teachers, when asked to name the major obstacle to good teaching, will say, "My students." They will describe their students as either passive and disengaged from the learning process (even brain-dead) or actively hostile to it. If you press these teachers to explain how students got this way, you often hear the same diagnoses that are popular in the mass media: public education fails to teach youngsters the basics; TV creates people with short attention spans who want to be entertained rather than taught; family breakdown leaves children without a readiness to learn and without basic values; etc. Too many teachers view their charges with thinly veiled hostility—and too many of them want to blame their problems on factors that are external to education or are located somewhere "upstream."

Doubtless there is some truth to all of these explanations of why students act as if they would rather not be in class. But there are two reasons why these explanations are ultimately unacceptable. First, because they place the blame somewhere else, they give us little or no insight into what we might do to make the classroom a place where students can come more fully into their own. Second, none of these explanations gets inside the experience of young people in this society, so none of them touches the real reason why children develop a distaste for learning—which is, after all, an essential and enjoyable part of what it means to be human.

A deeper diagnosis of the student condition begins with the fact that students are marginal people in our society. Not only does our society fail to put positive value on the lives of the young; many young people feel that the society constantly puts them down: "You have no experience of any consequence, no knowledge of any value, no voice worth hearing." How do people respond when they are marginalized by a society? We need only look at the history of other marginal groups (blacks and women, for example) for an answer. Marginal people withdraw. They become passive (and sometimes passive-aggressive), and they fall into silence—at least in the face of power.

In the presence of power, marginal people seek safety in silence. Our students are silent and even sullen, not because they are brain-dead but because they are filled with the same fear that has always haunted marginal people. It is the fear of having one's voice denied once again, the fear of speaking one's truth only to hear it called false, the deep-down fear that perhaps it is true that one has "nothing of value to say."

It should not surprise us that fear plays such a central role in our students' lives. After all, schools have always played on fear to enforce their educational norms—especially the fear of failure. If we are going to deal seriously with "the formation of teachers," we must help teachers become people who have no need to control others by playing on their fears. More than that, we must help them become people who have the inner strength to help heal the fears of their students and (in the words of Nelle Morton) help "hear them into speech."

If we are to become teachers of this sort, our first need is not for new techniques, although there are methods of active listening that are worth learning. But our first need is for a more generous diagnosis of our students' concerns, a diagnosis that will help us understand why our pedagogy needs to be less judgmental and punitive, and more compassionate and evocative.

The Fear in the Teacher's Heart

If teachers are to become healers for their students, they must first work to heal themselves. Our great need as adult professionals is to acknowledge and reveal the fears that permeate our own lives so that we can stop feeding the fear in the world and start relieving it.

Of course, one of the givens of professional life is that one never reveals one's fears! But everyone who teaches knows that fear abounds in the profession—from the fear of not knowing the answer, to the fear of losing control, to the fear of never knowing whether one's work has made a difference. All these fears are worth exploring, and some of them reach deeply into our souls. But there is one fear that most teachers feel, though few ever name, a fear that reaches more deeply into our adult lives than any of the others. It is our fear of the judgment of the young.

The daily experiences of many teachers is to stand before a sea of faces younger than one's own, faces that too often seem bored, sullen, even hostile. Even when one knows that these visages merely mask the fear in many students' hearts, it is still disheartening to stare into so much apparent disconfirmation day after day after day. The message from the younger generation that many teachers take home each night runs something like this: "We do not care about you and your values…You have been left in the dust by a culture whose words and music you don't even understand…You and your generation are on the way out, so why not just step aside and give us room to grow?" It is a difficult message to bear—especially in a profession where one grows old at a geometric rate, while one's charges remain young, year in and year out!

The psychiatrist Erik Erickson has postulated that in middle age (and all teachers are middle-aged), one faces a critical choice between "generativity" and "stagnation." Generativity is a more precise term than creativity. It is the capacity to turn to the new life that is emerging in the wake of one's own aging, as it were, and to help that new life come into its own—thus renewing one's self as well. (This "new life" could be one's children, one's students, new ideas, a new culture.) Stagnation sets in when those who are aging perceive the new life as holding more threat than promise, and react to the threat by building barriers of self-protection—thereby protecting themselves against the threat but cutting themselves off from the chance for self-renewal as well.

Stagnation is the major occupational hazard of teaching. For evidence, look at the number of teachers who seek refuge in the cynicism against the perceived onslaughts of the younger generation. Cynicism is a way of saying to young people, "Who needs you? I am an adult with a degree, a job, an income, and power over your lives: your opinions make no difference to me at all. I will suffer your presence because my job requires it, but I will not enter into any sort of relationship with you that requires me to take you seriously."

Cynicism may offer protection against minor cuts and abrasions, but only at the price of a mortal, self-inflicted wound to one's heart: cynicism cuts one off from the great cycle of renewal that goes on between the generations. A program of "teacher formation" will take this issue very seriously. It will help teachers see that our vocation offers extraordinary opportunities for entering daily into this cycle of renewal. It will help us understand that "generativity" has even more benefits for the teacher than it does for the young who we teach.

A Reflective Postscript

What I have tried to do in these notes is to illustrate a conceptual approach to a program on the spiritual formation of teachers. There are other concepts one might work with, but I have found the concept of "fear" to be a major doorway into the subject. That is, I believe that the problem of fear is a (perhaps "the") fundamental spiritual problem, and that a deep-reaching exploration of fear will take us into the ultimate spiritual questions: "Do I have ground on which to stand?"

Throughout this memo, My hidden agenda was to explore the "spirituality of education" with minimal use of traditional spiritual images, and of the word "spiritual": I am convinced that in many of the settings where Fetzer would like to work with teachers, that word and those images will close more doors than they will open. They will close doors not only because of church-state issues, not only because some people are either embarrassed or dogmatic about religion, but also because "New Age" rhetoric has alienated many people from spiritual discourse with its false optimism about how everything from cancer to war will disappear once we get our attitudes straight.

Instead of focusing on spiritual concepts like faith and trust and grace, my focus has been on the human problem of fear. My educational strategy is (1) to deal with a problem that nearly everyone knows is real, and (2) to deal with it so deeply that people are forced to start thinking about fear's antidotes. The antidotes, of course, are things like faith and trust and grace! But by compelling people to come up with their own language for such things, and their own experiences of them, we create a far deeper-reaching program of teacher formation than we get when we write the spiritual prescription.

I was not asked to detail the pedagogy for such a program; that might be the focus of our next consultation. But here are some pedagogical keys to a course on the spiritual formation of teachers, as I see them:

• Insist on taking enough time for people to build trust and learn to speak from their hearts rather than accepting conventional images of "how busy we all are" (e.g., make Friday evening through Sunday noon the minimum length of a formation program).
• Provide constant opportunities for teachers to articulate and explore their own experience as teachers (rather than telling them what it is or should be).
• Offer insightful ways of "reframing" their experience so they can understand and respond to it more deeply (e.g., not as problems of technique but as questions of identity and integrity).
• Allow any discussion of methods to arise from their collective experience and from brainstorming (rather than deducing methods from someone's theory of spiritual development).
• Make sure that the program's design and leadership model the thing being talked about, rather than just talking about it (e.g., the facilitator needs to be able to expose his or her fears).
• Let the program's "spirituality" be more evident in the ethos and process of the program itself (i.e., in the way it builds trust and draws upon the wisdom of participants) than in its rhetoric.

Ultimately, it is important that you be able to take teacher formation "on the road" where the maximum number of teachers can have access to it. But the program should begin onsite at the Fetzer Institute, where you can invite selected teachers, under controlled conditions, into a critical experiment with program design. Then it can be taken into the field, where you can deal with variations in context and teacher readiness once you have a design that is tried and true.

I hope these notes will help things along; if I can help with the next steps in this important experiment, I will be glad to.

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http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/grace-great-things

The Grace of Great Things

Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning

by Parker J. Palmer

We all know that what will transform education is not another theory or another book or another formula but a transformed way of being in the world. In the midst of the familiar trappings of education—competition, intellectual combat, obsession with a narrow range of facts, credentials—we seek a life illumined by spirit and infused with soul. This is not romanticism, as John Cobb (President of the Naropa Institute and host of the Spirituality in Education conference) has properly cautioned us.

I saw the other day a remarkable documentary called The Transformation of Allen School. Allen School is an inner-city school in Dayton, Ohio. It was for many years at the bottom of the list in that city by all measures. There were fifth graders who had parole officers. The dropout rate was incredible and saddening. The failure of those students in every aspect of their lives sickened the heart. And along came a new principal, a principal who—it's relevant to note—came from the Philippines, a culture which has an inherent respect for things spiritual in a way American culture does not. And he brought the teachers together and said to them, in substance, as his very first proclamation as principal, that:

We have to start to understand that the young people we are working with have nothing of external substance or support. They have dangerous neighborhoods. They have poor places to live. They have little food to eat. They have parents who are on the ropes and barely able to pay attention to them. The externals with which American education is obsessed will not work in this situation.

But these students have one thing that no one can take away from them. They have their souls. And from this day forth in this school, we are going to lift those souls up. We are going to make those souls visible to the young people themselves and to their parents and to the community. We are going to celebrate their souls, and we are going to reground their lives in the power of their souls. And that will require this faculty recovering the power of their own souls, remembering that we, too, are soul-driven, soul-animated creatures.

 

And in a five-year period, that school, the Allen School in Dayton, Ohio, rose to the top of every dimension on which it had been at the bottom, through hard work, through disciplined work, but through attentiveness to the inward factors that we are here to explore. This is not romanticism. This is the real world. And this is what is desperately needed in so many sectors of American education.

As we go into these five days together, let us remember one thing about the soul. It is like a wild animal: tough, self-sufficient, resilient, but also exceedingly shy. Let us remember that if we go crashing through the woods, screaming and yelling for the soul to come out, it will evade us all day and all night. We cannot beat the bushes and yell at each other if we expect this precious inwardness to emerge. But if you are willing to go into the woods, and sit quietly at the base of a tree, that wild animal will, after a few hours, reveal itself to you. And out of the corner of your eye, you will glimpse something of the wild preciousness that this conference is looking for.

I ask guidance for myself and, as Quakers say, hold this entire conference in the light, to be here, to be present to each other in the right spirit, speaking our truth gently and simply, listening respectfully and attentively to the truth of others, grounded in our own experience and expanded by experiences that are not yet ours, compassionate toward that which we do not yet understand, not only as a kindness to others but for the sake of our growth and our students and the transformation of education. Amen.

In preparing these remarks, I've asked myself what are we trying to do here? We know it's about spirituality and education, but what does that mean? For whatever it's worth, these are the images that have come to me as I've tried to put a larger frame of personal meaning around this conference.

I think we are here to seek life-giving forces and sources in the midst of an enterprise which is too often death-dealing—education. It may seem harsh to call education death-dealing, but I think that we all have our experience of that.

I am always astonished and saddened by the fact that this country, which has the most widespread public education system in the world, has so many people who walk around feeling stupid because they feel that they are the losers in a competitive system of teaching and learning. It is a system that dissects life and distances us from the world because it is rooted in fear.

Everyone here has had his or her own encounter with the forces of death: racism, sexism, justice denied. In my life, one of my face-to-face encounters with the forces of death was in two prolonged experiences of clinical depression, passages through the dark woods that I made when I was in my 40s, devastating experiences when it was not clear from one day to the next whether I wished to be alive, or even was still alive—the darkness, face-to-face, immersed in it, hardly a spark of life.

It was a depression partly due to my schooling, partly due to the way I was formed in the educational systems of this country to live out of the top inch and a half of the human self, to live only with cognitive rationality and with the powers of the intellect, out of touch with anything that lay below that top inch and a half: body, intuition, feeling, emotion, relationship.

I remember one time a therapist and spiritual guide saying words that were eventually salvific for me. He said, "You seem to keep imaging your depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Why don't you try imaging it as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it is safe to stand?" And that image has always stayed with me of this movement from the world of abstraction, the hot-air balloon that education so falsely represents as the good life, down to the ground—in my tradition, the "ground of being"—on which it's not only safe to stand but safe to fall, and you can get back up.

Well, at some point in that journey with depression, I was given by a friend some words from that extraordinary novel by T.H. White , The Once and Future King. This is a passage in which the young Arthur, king to be, in his depression, his dark night of the soul has sought counsel from Merlin, the magician, who was his mentor. And I want to read these wonderful words which created a spark of light for me in the midst of that death-dealing episode of my life. Speaking to the young Arthur, Merlin says:

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies. You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins. You may miss your only love. You may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it, then: To learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.

"Learning is the thing for you." I read those words, and I began to understand that in the midst of death, there is life in learning. I could not do much in the darkness of my depression. I couldn't work. I couldn't connect with other people. But I could start to learn what was in there. I could grope around in the darkness and learn what and who was there. And, of course, those of you who have been on that journey know that part of what I found and learned about there was what Thomas Merton calls true self.

What Merlin knows, as he advises the young Arthur, is that education at its best—these profound human transactions called knowing, teaching, and learning—are not just about information, and they're not just about getting jobs. They are about healing. They are about wholeness. They are about empowerment, liberation, transcendence. They are about reclaiming the vitality of life.

The question that we must wrestle with, I think, is why there is so little life-giving power in our culture when we use the words education, teaching, learning. Why are those words and the things they point to in our culture so flat, so dull, so banal compared to Merlin's understanding?

Of course, there are many answers to that question: the industrial model of schooling that is still with us from the 19 th century, the diminishing effects of professionalism in teacher training, the way education devolved into political rhetoric and serves the purposes of power.

But the answer I want to explore is a different one. I want to propose that education is dull because we have driven the sacred out of it. Merlin, the magician, understood the sacredness at the heart of all things, and learning was a natural derivative of that. I want to explore what it might mean to reclaim the sacred at the heart of knowing, teaching, and learning; to reclaim it from this essentially depressive mode of knowing which honors only data, logic, analysis, and a systematic disconnection of self from he world, self from others.

As I launch into this inquiry, I want to remind us all that the marriage of education and the sacred has not always been a happy one. It has not always produced creative offspring. Ask Galileo. Ask a Muslim child subjected to American school prayer. Ask anyone whose family or history was touched by the Nazis' murderous attachment of the sacred to blood, soil, and race.

There are real dangers in this enterprise when the sacred gets attached to the wrong things. There are real dangers when the sacred get institutionalized and imposed on people as one more weapon in the objectifying forces of this or any other society.

But we need to have the courage to jump into the midst of that mess. The Nazi story, the murderousness of the Third Reich, is not only about the attachment of the sacred to the wrong things by a political system of power; it's also about German higher education refusing to get involved with those kinds of issues, distancing itself, clinging to logic and data and objectivism as a way of staying disengaged from the social reality of its time.

We can no longer afford a system of education that refuses to get engaged with the mess. We must be willing to join life where people live it. And they live it at this complicated intersection of the sacred and the secular. So with that acknowledgment of the mess on whose edge we stand, let me move ahead.

What do I mean by the sacred? I was laughing to myself in preparing this talk, remembering my first yearning for the sacred, which was only a word for me when I was young. I had merely heard it in church, and I wanted an experience of it.

In college I ran across a book by Rudolph Otto called The Idea of the Holy . Otto has a remarkable description of the sacred in which he uses phrases like numinocity and mysterium tremendum . It was my first Latin, and I was so proud of it.

What I was laughing about when I was preparing these remarks was the title of the book, The Idea of the Holy. I could only have an idea of it because I didn't have an experience of it. And over the years, I've struggled to move from the level of idea to the embodied life.

I remember a night in the middle of one of those devastating depressions when I heard a voice I've never heard before or since. The voice simply said, "I love you, Parker." It was not a psychological phenomenon, because my psyche was crushed; it was the numinous. It was mysterium tremendum. But it came to me in the simplest and most human way: "I love you, Parker."

That experience has opened me to the definition of sacred that I want to explore. It is a very simple definition that says that the sacred is that which is worthy of respect. As soon as we see that, the sacred is everywhere. There is nothing, when rightly understood, that it is not worthy of respect.

I have had a rare experience of the numinous, and I treasure it. But I do not have a steady flow of that experience. And I cannot count on it to be my sustaining reminder of the sacredness of life. But I can practice respect on a minute-by-minute basis, especially towards those things that somehow arouse my anger, my ire, my jealousy, some strong ego reaction that reminds me to reach deep for respect.

How it would transform academic life if we could practice simple respect! I don't think there are many places where people feel less respect than they do on university campuses. The university is a place that has learned to grant respect to only a few things: to the text, to the expert, to those who win in competition.

But we do not grant respect to students, to stumbling and failing. We do not grant respect to tentative and heartfelt ways of being in the world where the person can't quite think of the right word or can't think of any word at all. We don't grant respect to silence and wonder. We don't grant it to voices outside our tight little circle, let alone to the voiceless things of the world.

Why? Because in academic culture, we are afraid. It is a culture of fear. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of hearing something that would challenge and change us. The great German poet Rilke has this amazing line in which he says, There is no place at all that is not looking at you. You must change your life." There is no place at all that is not talking to me. I must change my life.

But I don't want to hear those voices because I am afraid of change. And so in academic culture, I am carefully buffered, carefully walled off, through systematic disrespect, from all of those things that might challenge me, break me, open me, and change me. It is a fearful culture.

One of the things we have to do is to remember the counsel at the heart of every great spiritual tradition: Be not afraid. Be not afraid. Interesting words. The words do not say you're not supposed to have fear. I have fear. I have fear as I stand here before you. How am I doing? Do they like me? Am I delivering on all the preparation I've put into this talk?

I'm fearful. I have fear. But I don't need to be here in my fear. I don't have to speak to you from my fear. I can choose a different place in me, a place of fellow feeling, of feeling traveling, of journeying together in some mystery that I know we share. I can "be not afraid" even while I have fear.

If we could reclaim the sacred—simple respect—in education, how would it transform our knowing, teaching, and learning? I would like to suggest several answers, but I want to preface them by telling a story, not from the world of religion, not from the world of education, but from the world of science, because I think there is much for us to learn from the world of science about the very things that we care about. Science is not the enemy, not great science.

I want to tell you about a great scientist whom some of you will know. Her name was Barbara McClintock. Barbara McClintock died a few years ago in her early 90s. Her obituary was on the front page of The Hew York Times in the place usually reserved for heads of state. She was the greatest American biologist of the 20 th century and, arguably, the greatest American scientist of the 20 th century.

In her obituary, she was eulogized by one of her colleagues, a geneticist from the University of Chicago, as "a mystic who knew where the mysteries lie but who do not mystify." I like that very much. To be mystics who know where the mysteries lie but who do not mystify—I presume that's part of our task.

Barbara McClintock, as a young woman, became fascinated with genetic transposition. She wanted to know how genes moved, carried their messages from one place to another. In her day, there were none of the instruments and chemical procedures that my biologist son works with as he words with DNA. There were only hunches, hypotheses, clues, and the powers of human imagination—the mystical capacity to identify with the other and still respect its otherness.

Barbara McClintock exercised the mystical capacities at the heart of her work in genetic science, but the price she paid for that was to be marginalized by her profession. Her work was scoffed at. Her work was distrusted. She could not get grants. She could not get articles published. She could not get laboratory space—until she won a Nobel Prize in science, and then her dance ticket started getting filled.

Another scientist named Evelyn Fox Keller came along when McClintock was in her early 80s and said, "I would like to write your intellectual biography, your story as a scientist. Tell me," she said, "How do you do great science?"

Barbara McClintock, who was one of the most precise empirical observers and one of the most analytic logical thinkers that we have ever had in American science, thought for a moment and said, "About the only thing I can tell you about the doing of science is that you somehow have to have a feeling for the organism."

Then Keller asked her question again. "Tell me, how do you do great science?"

McClintock, who was at that age when all that's left is to tell the truth, thought for a moment about these ears of corn that she had worked with all her life, because they were cheap and plentiful, and she said, "Really, all I can tell you about doing great science is that you somehow have to learn to lean into the kernel."

At that point in the book, Evelyn Fox Keller, herself a physical chemist, writes a sentence that I regard as brilliant and luminous. She says, "Barbara McClintock, in her relation with ears of corn, practiced the highest form of love, which is the intimacy that does not annihilate difference."

When I read that, tears came to my eyes. I thought, McClintock had a relation with ears of corn that I yearn to have with other people. And she knew it was possible to have that kind of relationship with all creatures and all forms of being. Sacredness. Simple respect. Intimacy that does not annihilate difference. A mystic who did not mystify but who knew where the mysteries lie. Here was a scientist—Nobel Prize winning, responsible for the genetic breakthroughs which we now live with, in the late 20 th century, a heroine of her own arena—who practiced the highest form of love in the doing of science itself.

Well, I think the story stands on its own, but let me just mention a few things out of it that would transform education if we could embody in our knowing, teaching, and learning, this simple sense of the sacred that Barbara McClintock brought to her work and science.

First, if we could recover a sense of the sacred in knowing, teaching, and learning, we would recover our sense of the otherness of the things of the world, the precious otherness of the things of the world.

One of the greatest sins in education is reductionism, the destruction of that precious otherness by cramming everything into categories that we find comfortable, ignoring data, ignoring writers, ignoring voices, ignoring information, ignoring simple facts that don't fit into our shoebox, because we don't have a respect for otherness. We have a fear of otherness that comes from having flattened the terrain and desacralized it. A people who know the sacred know otherness, and we don't know that anymore.

When we teach about third-world cultures in ways that confine them, make them measure up to our standards of what greatness or excellence is supposed to be like, we ignore their powerful richness. These cultures have more to teach us than we have yet to understand or imagine about real values, about community, about respect, about the sacred, yet they come out, by our measures, as shabby, dirty, dusty, lacking in merit. Too many students have learned, through that reductionist model, a disrespect for the otherness of the things of the world.

We do it with great literature too. This is done not only on the right; it's done on the left as well. We do it with great literature where the story itself may convey powerful messages about the human condition, but because its author does not measure up to current tests of rightness or credibility, the text gets dismissed. A writer named David Denby has said, "What a convenient way of making the professor and students superior to the text," by not respecting the otherness of that voice and engaging it on its own terms. So the first thing that a people who know the sacred would know in education is the precious otherness of the things in the world.

But the second thing that such a people would know is the precious inwardness of the things of the world.

Barbara McClintock respected ears of corn in their integrity as an alien nation, as an otherness that she needed to respect if she was to do good science. But at the same time, she believed that an ear of corn had an inwardness to it, had a mind. She once said, "I learned to think like corn." The corn thought, and you could learn to think like it. And her great science didn't mystify that. It built on that and used her intuitive capacities to enter the mind of corn in a way that led to breakthrough scientific discoveries.

We don't respect the inwardness of the things we study, and we therefore do not respect the inward learnings that those things have for us.

I have thought often and painfully about the education about the murderous history of the Third Reich that I got in some of the best colleges in this country. I was taught its history by good historians, some of whom were award-winning. But I was taught the history of Nazi Germany in a way—and I've never known how to say this—that made me feel that somehow all of that murderousness had happened to another species on another planet.

My teachers were not revisionists. They weren't saying it didn't happen. It happened. They taught the statistics and the facts and the theories behind the facts, but they presented them at such objective arm's length—just the facts and only the facts—that it never connected with the inwardness of my life, because the inwardness of those events was never revealed to me. All was objectified, all was externalized, and I ended up morally and spiritually deformed as a consequence of that objectification.

There are two things that I failed to learn from the history courses that I took on Nazi Germany that I should have learned and learned painfully only in later years. One was that the very community I grew up in on the North Shore of Chicago had its own fascist anti-Semitic tendencies. I grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, and if you were a Jew who lived in that area, you didn't live in Wilmette and you didn't live in Evanston and you didn't live in Kenilworth. You lived in Glencoe, because a fascism was at work which said, "We don't want to live with you."

I should have been taught that. My little story and the inwardness of my life should have been connected with the inward dynamics of that history in a way that would have helped me understand my own time, my own place, and my own involvement in the same evil, because without that, there was no way for me to grow morally.

And, of course, the second thing I didn't learn which takes me even more deeply inward, is that I did not learn that there is within me, in the shadow of my own soul, a little Hitler, a force of evil, that when the difference between me and thee gets too great, I will find some way to kill you off. I won't do it with a bullet or a gas chamber, but I'll do it with a category, a dismissal, a word of some sort that renders you irrelevant to my universe and to my life: "Oh, you're just a _________." It is a dismissal that we do with such facility in academic life to render each other and each other's truth irrelevant to who we are.

I taught not long ago for a year at Berea College in Kentucky. Some of you will know this remarkable institution devoted to the young people of Appalachia. They charge no tuition because these kids have no money. I taught a course in which I attempted to parallel the big story that I was teaching with the little stories of their lives, and not only to parallel the big story with the little story but to connect and interweave the two.

As part of that second objective, I asked my students to write autobiographical essays connected with the ideas of the big story we were considering. I wanted them to see that the big story was their story. And I wanted their little stories to correct the way the authors of this particular text had written the big story, because the whole Appalachian experience had been omitted from this text on American life.

At the end of the first session, a young man came up to me, and he said, "Dr. Palmer, in these autobiographical papers that you want us to write, is it okay to use the word 'I'?" I said, "Of course, it is. I invite you to use that word. I don't know how you would be able to fulfill the assignment if you didn't. But help me understand why you needed to ask the question." And he said, "Because I'm a _________major, and every time I use the word 'I' in a paper, I'm downgraded one full grade."

This goes on all the time in education. Recovering the sacred might be one path towards recovering the inwardness without which education does not happen.

Third, by recovering the sacred, we could recover our sense of community with each other and with all of creation, the community that Thomas Merton named so wonderfully as the "hidden wholeness." I have become increasingly convinced that this recovery of community is absolutely at the heart of good teaching.

I'm amazed by the fact that good teachers use a million different techniques. Good teaching isn't about technique. I've asked students around the country to describe their good teachers to me. Some of them describe people who lecture all the time, some of them describe people who do little other than group process, others describe everything in between.

But all of them talk about people who have some sort of connective capacity, who somehow connect the students and the subject being studied and the students to each other.

One young woman told me she couldn't possibly describe her good teachers because they were all so different from each other, but she could easily describe her bad teachers because they were all the same.

I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "With my bad teachers, their words float somewhere in front of their faces like the balloon speech in cartoons."

I thought this was an extraordinary image, and I said, "Do you mean that somehow with bad teaching, there is a disconnect between the stuff being taught and the self who is teaching it?" And she said, "Absolutely."

There is a distance, a coldness, a lack of community because in a secularized academy, we don't have the connective tissue of the sacred to hold this apparent fragmentation and chaos together. Merton is right. It's a wholeness, but it's a hidden wholeness. It's so easy to look on the surface of things and say there is no community here at all. But if you go deep, the way you go when you seek that which is sacred, you find the hidden wholeness. You find the community that a good teacher evokes and invites students into, that somehow weaves and reweaves life together.

Community goes far beyond our face-to-face relationship with each other as human beings. In education especially, this community connects us with what the poet Rilke called the great things of the world and with the grace of great things.

We are in community with all of it: the genes and ecosystems of biology (as Barbara McClintock knew herself to be), the symbols and reference of philosophy and theology, the archetypes of betrayal and forgiveness and loving and loss that are the stuff of literature, the artifacts and lineages of anthropology, the materials of engineering with their limits and potentials, the logic of systems and management, the shapes and colors of music and art, the novelties and patterns of history, the elusive idea of justice under the\ law. We are in community with all of these great things. Great teaching is about knowing that community and feeling that community and sensing that community and drawing your students into it.

I had a teacher at Carleton College who changed my life, but he lectured nonstop. We would raise our hands and try to get a word in edgewise, and he would say, "Wait a minute. I'll get to that at the end of the hour." He wouldn't have gotten to it at the end of the week, the month, the year. Thirty years later, my hand is still up! He's dead, unfortunately, but I'm still engaged with what he said.

I wondered what was this magic that made me feel so deeply related to the world of social thought that he was teaching, even though he, himself, was basically a shy and awkward person who didn't know how to connect with me on the social level.

He would make a vigorous Marxist statement, a puzzled look would come over his face, and he would step over here and argue with himself from a Hegelian viewpoint. It wasn't an act. He was really confused.

And I realized years later what the deal was. He didn't need us to be in community! Who needs 18-year-olds from the North Shore of Chicago when you're hanging out with Marx and Hegel and Troeltsch and other really interesting people? But he opened a door to me that had never been opened before, a world of imagination and thought that I had no idea existed, and it was an enormously gracious act. He was an amazing man who carried a community within himself, a community of people long gone.

(This is a mildly political comment, but I'm amazed at this controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton and her conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt. After all, the heart of the liberal arts is the ability to talk to dead people. People pay $25,000 a year to learn how to have conversations with the dead. It's called being liberally educated!)

Fourth, if we recovered a sense of the sacred, we would recover the humility that makes teaching and learning possible.

Everyone in academia knows what Freeman Dyson meant when he said, about the development of the nuclear weaponry that threatened to destroy the earth, "It is almost irresistible, the arrogance that comes over us when we see what we can do with our minds." So much arrogance that we will keep turning the crank until we destroy the earth itself. It is only with humility, the humility that comes from being in the presence of sacred things and knowing the simple quality called respect, that real knowing, teaching, and learning are possible.

A couple of years ago, Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the DNA molecule, celebrated the 40 th anniversary of that discovery. Those of you who have read the book, Double Helix , know that it's about all of the anti-virtues of academic life: competitiveness, ego, greed, power, and money.

But when they were interviewed on the 40 th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, James Watson said, "The molecule is so beautiful. Its glory was reflected on Francis and me. I guess the rest of my life has been spent trying to prove that I was almost equal to being associated with DNA, which was a hard task."

Then Francis Crick—of whom Watson once said, "I have never seen him in a modest mood"—replied, "We were upstaged by a molecule."

Finally, if we recovered a sense of the sacred, we would recover our capacity for wonder and surprise, an absolutely essential quality in education. I know what happens when we get surprised in an academic context. We reach for the nearest weapon and try to kill the surprise as quickly as we can, because we are scared to death.

I will never be able to comprehend why people so devoutly believe that competition is the best way to generate new ideas, because I know from experience what happens in competition. In competition you do not reach for a new idea, because a new idea is risky. You don't know how to use it. You don't know where it's going to take you. You don't know what flank it may leave open. In competition, you reach for an old idea that you know how to wield as a weapon, and you smite the untruth as quickly as you can.

We have flattened our landscape. My image of this objectivist landscape in higher education is that it is so flat, so lacking in variety, so utterly banal that anything that pops up and takes us by surprise is instantly defined as a threat. Where did it come from? Where did it come from? It must be from underground. It must be the work of the devil.

The sacred landscape has hills and valleys, mountains and streams, forests and deserts, and is a place where surprise is our constant companion—and surprise is an intellectual virtue beyond all telling. Those are some things I think we might bring back if we pursued the themes of this conference in our lives and education.

I want to say one final word about the journey toward recovering the sacred, about getting from here to there. I do not believe that we can rightly ask or hopefully ask our institutions to manifest the qualities of the sacred that I have been talking about. I don't think institutions are well suited to carry the sacred. I think distortion happens when the sacred gets vested in an institutional context or framework.

I think institutions have their utility. They have jobs to do. We all have important vocational decisions about whether to be inside or outside institutions and how to do that dance because we all know their power of co-optation. But I don't believe that what we're talking about here is going to be carried by the Roman Catholic Church or the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends or the University of Colorado at Boulder or even the Naropa Institute. I believe these are things we carry in our hearts into the world in solitude and in community.

I have been doing a small study of social movements that have transformed the landscape: the women's movement, the black liberation movement, the gay and lesbian identity movement, the movement for freedom in Eastern Europe and in South Africa. I will not trouble you with all of the details of how movements evolve. I just want to say a word about the starting point of social movements as I understand it.

I believe that movements start when individuals who feel very isolated and very alone in the midst of an alien culture, come in touch with something life-giving in the midst of a death-dealing situation. They make one of the most basic decisions a human being can make, which I have come to call the decision to live "divided no more," the decision to no longer act differently on the outside than one knows one's truth to be on the inside.

I call it the Rosa Parks decision, because she is emblematic for me and for many people I know of the historic potentials of a decision that can feel very lonely and very isolated. Rosa Parks was prepared for that day on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, December 1, 1955. She was prepared in many ways. She had gone to the Highlander Folk School where Martin Luther King also learned nonviolence. She was the secretary of the NAACP in her community.

But we all know that the day—the moment—she sat down, she had no assurances that the theory would work, that the strategy would succeed, not even assurances that people who said they were her friends would be there for her in the aftermath of that action. It was a lonely decision made in isolation, but a decision emblematic of that being made by many other individuals in that place and time, for which she has risen to be the exemplar. It was a decision that changed the lay and the law of the land.

I've often asked myself where people find the courage to make a decision like that when they know that the power of the institution is going to come down on their heads? How do they find the courage to make a decision like that when they know it could easily lead to loss of status, loss of reputation, loss of income, loss of job, loss of friends, and, perhaps, loss of meaning?

The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the Vaclav Havels and the Nelson Mandelas and the Dorothy Days of this world. These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside.

And as soon as we made that decision, amazing things happen. For one thing, the enemy stops being the enemy. When Rosa Parks sat down that day, it was partly an acknowledgment that by conspiring with racism, she had helped create racism. By conspiring with death-dealing education, we help to create death-dealing education. But by deciding to live divided no more, we help change all of that.

When the police came on the bus that day, they said to Rosa Parks, "You know if you continue to sit there, we're going to have to throw you in jail." And her answer is historic. She said, "You may do that." An enormously polite way of saying, "What could your jail possibly mean compared to the imprisonment I've had myself in for the last 43 years, which I break out of today?"

I don't know where you are on your journey. My journey is constantly toward trying to understand what it means to live divided no more. And I think if we come out of this conference understanding that decision better in the context of education, we will have done something well worth doing.

The article is an adaptation of the keynote address delivered at the conference on Spirituality in Education, sponsored by the Naropa Institute May 30-June 3, 1997. Audiotapes of the Conference are available from Sounds True, P.O. Box 8010 , Boulder CO 80306.