Gratitude for guidance along the way . . .
Category: spirituality
A discovery of faith and doubt in story and essay.
A Community of Compassion
Where conventional education deals with abstract and impersonal facts and theories, an education shaped by Christian spirituality draws us toward incarnate and personal truth.” — Parker Palmer, To Know As We Are Known, 14
I have always found the phrase, ‘the real world,’ both perplexing and damnable. It is perplexing because of all the worlds we may think we inhabit there is none more real than the one we all live and move and have our being in. And before the phone lines light up—yes, caller, I am aware of metaphors and analogies and similes. Still, the force with which those three words are usually hurled at someone—“Wait until you have to survive in the real world, then you’ll see!”— suggests the hurler believes the reality of this world transcends figures of speech.
The phrase is damnable because it cordons off a group of people, usually students, and then condemns them for being isolated from the world. The students I teach are well acquainted with the real world. Many of them hold two jobs, take a full load of classes, and care for a child. Some of them play sports in and out of state, while maintaining their classes and work. All of them know the depths of disappointment in striving oneself to weariness and still falling short of goals and expectations. So it is not a phrase I use on students in particular nor most people in general.
There’s no question that we are in the world; the real question is how we are to be in the world. For Christian teachers and students this is the central question they must answer every day.
Recently, I’ve had reason to question what the advantages of an Adventist Christian college education might be for a young person over one in a ‘secular’ college or university. This is a recurring question for me, a kind of diagnostic to be run in those times when the church as the body of Christ seems pocked with disease, to say nothing of being blind and lame.
It’s not in the buildings, the landscaping, the amenities, or the sports fields. Most North American Adventist colleges were built near the turn of the 19th century and cannot keep pace with state or even private college campus facilities. On the other hand, I’ve taught on a campus where some buildings pre-date the war—the First World War—and yet students and faculty cheerfully go about their days working around the charm of an infrastructure that was new not long after Oscar Wilde was released from the Reading Gaol.
It’s not in the endowments, the gifts outright, or the scholarships. Nor is it in the tuition rates, the sports teams, the residential halls, or the food service.
It’s not in the research facilities, the government and military contracts that bring in millions, nor in graduate assistantships and grants. Most Adventist college professors are too busy teaching four or five classes each semester, plus working on committees, and engaging in service to the college, the church, and the community, to do any research except that directly related to the teaching of their disciplines.
And it’s not even in the ‘star’ quality of the faculty, although many of the Adventist college professors I know could walk into any college classroom—from community college to Ivy League—and teach as well, if not better, than current professors.
Where it differs, sometimes dramatically, is in what Parker Palmer calls “a living and evolving community of creativity and compassion.” He goes on to say, “Education of this sort means more than teaching the facts and learning the reasons so we can manipulate life toward our ends. It means being drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part (To Know as We Are Known).”
That kind of community, one that draws in students, faculty, staff, and administration, takes time and nurture and care. It develops when the community weathers financial crises together, when difficult decisions about people, programs, and purposes must be made. It can only develop when there is trust and trustworthiness. And if it is formed in the crucible of hard times, it survives because “truth is not a concept that ‘works’ but an incarnation that lives. The ‘Word’ our knowledge seeks is not a verbal construct but a reality in history and the flesh (Palmer, 14).”
A community like that will not lack talent and expertise in its teachers. They are guided every day by the overwhelming desire to see their students become ‘thinkers and not mere reflectors of other men’s thoughts.’
But a community like that is built up over time. It is not the result of data sets, market relevancy, or alignment with fleeting strategies. It comes about when people sacrifice for the purpose, gladly and well, because they know they are in this together.
If, as a leader, you should find yourself fortunate enough to belong to such a community, walk modestly and listen well. It can all be torn away in a day.
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An Education in Transcendence
“An education in transcendence prepares us to see beyond appearances into the hidden realities of life—beyond facts into truth, beyond self-interest into compassion, beyond our flagging energies and nagging despairs into the love required to renew the community of creation.” — Parker Palmer, To Know As We Are Known
That we are alone in this world is a fact which is confirmed by movies, reality shows, advertising, and economic self-help theories. That this is, in fact, false is something we must learn.
I don’t mean alone in merely a physical or social sense. I once had a colleague, a recent arrival from China, who went to a public gathering on the 4th of July in Baltimore and felt a sense of panic because she was in a crowd numbering only a few thousand. It’s all in what you’re used to apparently.
This kind of aloneness is not that of the weary commuter on the train gazing without seeing as the stations blur past. Not even Philip Seymour Hoffman, dying on the floor of his bathroom, a needle stuck in his arm, was alone in the way we are told is the norm.
This kind of aloneness is deeply American, although other cultures are sensing its allure. It’s a strand of ideological DNA which causes moral palsy in some: the hand outstretched to help twitches, the cup of cold water crashes to the floor.
We are taught to be unique at an early age. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an essay entitled “Self-Reliance,” drummed the message in with eloquence and fervor: “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” And, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” And again: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”
There is something thrilling in these lines, and in many others that Emerson writes. He hated the mob, the unthinking crowd so easily swayed by demagogues and charlatans. He wanted people to think for themselves, to see themselves as individuals.
What the nation needed in 1841, he thought, was a sense of the present, not the past. Europe was the past: for all its intellectual glories it could not be the template for America. The country needed to build itself from the ground up and the way to do it was to boldly go where no nation had gone before. A nation of individuals, each one pursuing his or her course with a sturdy vigor, was the ideal.
But somewhere along the way that centrifugal honesty snapped its line and arced away. What we see now is not Emerson’s neighborly self-reliance, but what Parker Palmer calls an endless power struggle between the self and the world. Each self is convinced it is in a battle for survival, with dominance over the world the only possible goal.
Palmer has been a teacher for decades, a Quaker by choice, and a thoughtful critic of an educational system that trains people for arrogance rather than service.
He suggests that our hunger for knowledge arises from two sources: curiosity and control. Curiosity for its own sake is amoral, a need to know that shrugs off any restraint. Control “is simply another word for power.” Together, curiosity and control can generate knowledge that leads us toward death, not life.
But there is another kind of knowledge that contains just as many facts and theories as the knowledge we now possess, but that springs from something other than mere curiosity and control. “A knowledge born of compassion aims not at exploiting and manipulating creation but at reconciling the world to itself (To Know as We Are Known 8).”
This is not a sentimental warm fuzzy kind of love, he notes, but a tough love—“the connective tissue of reality”—and we find it most often in community.
Palmer talks about “community” a great deal, a word that splays out in so many directions these days that it’s hard to grasp what it means. I can sense that it’s a good thing, though, and as spiritual qualities go, it tops any wish list I could draw up. I’m just not sure how it comes about.
Palmer ties it to transcendence, a word often misunderstood. We need to think of transcendence as not being drawn up and out of life to an eternal realm, but as a sideways impulse, a breaking in of the Spirit which breathes hope and trust into us. That’s the kind of transcendence which happens in community, a practical notion of love with its feet on the ground and its heart aflame with Jesus incarnate—God among us.
I get a much clearer sense of what ‘community’ can mean when Palmer speaks of a “discipline of mutual encouragement and mutual testing, keeping me both hopeful and honest about the love that seeks me, the love I seek to be (To Know as We Are Known 18).”
At Sligo I have found community in the study group I belong to, Believers and Doubters. For years we have prayed together, argued together, studied the Bible and books about it together, laughed and suffered together, and suffered the loss of members together. I would not trade it for anything. It has been an “education in transcendence.”
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Exemplary
“Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement.” — Michael Dirda, Book by Book
I leapt at this phrase when I first read it in Dirda’s spry little ‘commonplace’ notebook. It fit my Puritan work ethic and it assuaged the residual guilt that plagues most teachers. This could be the answer to that recurrent nightmare, the one where we are exposed by our students as imposters, pipelines simply carrying the information, subject to any crank that wants to interrupt the flow with a question.
Of course, the analogy to the teacher as advertisement is not without its problems. Advertisements are there solely to sell us stuff that we don’t want and certainly don’t need. Advertisements lie—that is their modus operandi—and they are almost always flogging trivial stuff like mouthwash, Doritos, and Lincoln Navigators. Advertisements clog the airwaves, occupy every visible surface, and reduce the wisdom of the world to slogans. Teachers are not advertisements.
But there’s another way to regard this. Years ago cultural critic and media theorist James W. Carey wrote a seminal essay in which he distinguished two historical views on communication. One was the transmission model in which communication functions to loft messages long distances and exercise power over others from afar. It works well when we text message our friends or fire a missile or take out an ad in the Washington Post. It is at work when we channel the textbook in our classes or lecture without regard for where the shells we lob are landing.
The other form of communication is ancient; it predates literacy and springs from the impulse to commune with others. It gathers in rather than disseminates, pulls us into a circle of stories around the fire instead of blasting the masses, and works from the inside to the outside. Symbolic, ritualized, it is the way a society defines, maintains, and sustains itself. It is thought embedded in action, the Word made flesh. The message is not simply carried in the shell of the advertisement: it is rather—to ruffle McLuhan’s hair—the message as the medium.
Thus, when we imagine ourselves professing before our classes, do we see ourselves as these exemplary sages who at the very least convey an enthusiasm for the subject that can enthrall even the back rows? Probably not, and rightly so.
The best teachers among us wear the mantle lightly. They seem innocent of it, as unconscious as breathing. When complimented they may be startled or slightly embarrassed or just a bit uncomfortable. This hints at the idea that teaching well is not a technique (from tekhne, ‘art or craft’) applied from the outside but the result over time of allowing our natural curiosity to partner with our desire for communion with others. When we tell the stories around our particular fires with enthusiasm (from en theos, ‘in god’), we transcend our egos if only for a moment. We lose the weight of being ‘the teacher’ and we truly ‘profess’ what we know and love.
This “innocence” is not something we can strive for, however. It arrives unannounced, a blessed byproduct of knowledge, love for the subject, familiarity with the process, and experience in handling groups of students. In those moments we become the embodiment of what we say, a living word. On a cold Monday morning we can be so lucky.
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Mysterium Tremendum
“ . . . Above and beyond our rational being lies hidden the ultimate and highest part of our nature, which can find no satisfaction in the mere allaying of the needs of our sensuous, psychical, or intellectual impulses and cravings. The mystics called it the basis or ground of the soul.” — Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
When it comes to the history of religion this element of the non-rational, the awe-ful, the mysterious, is bound into the DNA of the whole experience. Rudolf Otto laid down the premise that religion starts with the apprehension of ‘the mysterium tremendum.’ He describes the experience:
“The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship . . . It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”
I’d venture to say that for most of us who worship on a regular basis the mystery’s gone. We are familiar with the rhythm of the worship service, at times comforting, at other times almost nauseating in its repetition and dullness. Mainstream religious groups, noting the absence of youth and young adults, inject informality into the service, along with music that can get people on their feet, clapping and swaying. What they may lack in depth they make up for in enthusiasm and communal spirit. You’re never alone at such a service.
And yet . . . and yet . . . My mysterium tremendum moments, experiences which Otto says mark real religion through the millennia, are rare enough that I can remember most of them. These are moments that pierce, in remembrance, with feelings and impressions that are almost painful, the sort of pain that makes you grateful to be alive. Without exception they occurred unexpectedly, without preparation or forethought, usually when I was alone, but occasionally in the presence of a few intimate friends. They produced what Otto calls ‘a beatitude beyond compare.’ Almost inexpressible, they gave, as he says, “The Peace that passes understanding, and of which the tongue can only stammer brokenly.”
One took place when I was 17, camping with friends in Yosemite, high above the valley floor and within sight of North Dome. Early in the morning, before the others awoke, I clambered up on a rock the size of a house to watch the dawning. While I felt horizontally alone—my friends were asleep a hundred yards downslope—I seemed vertically caught up to the heavens and enveloped in the vast and gentle acceptance of Nature. My eyes were drawn to the rim of the mountains opposite where the first light of morning would break. I waited, and as I did I thought I saw motion in the air far below me, but it could only be perceived indirectly, in a sidelong glance at the edge of vision. Gradually it took form so that in a few moments it could be seen as a vast cloud of black birds, shifting and swooping, moving together soundlessly. It drew nearer and I could hear a rustle that grew to a sound like the wind and I could make out individual birds among the hundreds and as I got to my feet they rushed overhead, around me and over me, just as the sun burst up and over the mountains and lit them and me with a fiery flame. In a moment they were gone, and I let out my breath and I brushed away the tears as I whooped.
A second experience was in Winchester Cathedral. I had hitchhiked down from the college I was attending and arrived before noon. The cathedral, wreathed in mist, seemed almost to float. It was larger than I had imagined and yet more delicate somehow. I pulled open a side door and slipped in. I found myself in a vast, open space under a soaring ceiling, everything dominated by the enormous stained-glass window of the West facade. Something about a cathedral raises the spirit and lowers the voice; footsteps echoed and I could hear voices somewhere, but no one was in sight. I walked quietly up the center aisle and knelt in a row of seats below the altar. While prayer with words has always been difficult for me, I have found peace in simply listening with an open heart. The heavens did not open nor did I see angels ascending and descending, but I was on holy ground nevertheless. Cathedrals were designed to impress, instruct, and uplift the thousands who crowded into them for worship and on festival days. Alone within that cool, echoing space I could give myself over to the stone beneath my knees, the fine, close grain of the wood of the chair against which I leaned, the light pouring in from windows high overhead.
I knelt there as long as I needed to, finally standing only when it seemed there was no more that could be expressed or received. It was a cessation, not a parting.
A more recent experience took place within a small circle of friends I have known for over twenty years. We gather weekly to study, to pray, to discuss and argue over matters of the spirit and the state of the world. There is nothing we can’t say to each other. Still, it came as a shock when, near the end of our discussion, one of our group leaned forward and said with a smile on her face, “I just want you to know I have cancer.”
In the silence that followed for a few heartbeats my first thought, incongruously, was of thankfulness. “Now it’s out there,” I thought. “We can talk about it. We can go through this with her. This is a beginning we will not regret.” We don’t know what the outcome will be. But it’s fair to say that act of courage freed us all to bear whatever burdens we can together.
These moments rise above the norm. They are what Otto calls the ‘overplus’ of experience. When we have them they remind us of forces beyond our control and of our smallness in this universe. They will not fit neatly into a rational schema nor can they be fully understood. But they can be accepted when offered. Experience is a kind of knowing that reveals as we retell.
“The Numinous.”Created by Barry Casey with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad
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A Way of Living Toward Death
A WAY OF LIVING TOWARD DEATH
3 November, 2013
Homily for Roland Gray
“Death has come up into our windows, it has entered our palaces . . .” — Jeremiah 9:21 – NRSV.
No matter how prepared we are for death, it is too soon, too stealthy, too final.
Today I want to tell you three stories about death.
AUGUSTINE
The first is about St. Augustine. Simon Critchley writes about Augustine’s paralyzing fear of death in his Book of Dead Philosophers. Augustine, whose book Confessions, is the first and longest open prayer to God, pours out his heart about the death of his best friend, unnamed to us.
“Well it was said of a friend that he is the soul’s other half. My soul and his I considered one soul in two bodies—so my life was unbearable, to live with only half of our soul, but my death was terrifying, perhaps to see his remaining half of soul die in me whom I so much loved.”
Augustine fears death, not so much for himself, as for the extinction, finally, of his friend. Half a life is better than none at all. But that was when Augustine was a pagan.
Some years later Augustine has a different reaction to the death of his mother, Monica. She had been praying and weeping and beseeching for his conversion for years. When it occurs, as Augustine dramatically describes in The Confessions, her life’s work seems complete. Some days later she falls under a high fever and within nine days is dead. Augustine, in private, loosens the tears he had held in, “resting softly on my sobs at ease.”
He writes, somewhat defensively, “whoever wishes can read me and, as he wishes, decide whether I mourned my mother excessively, by this or that part of an hour, but not deride me for it.” He is asking us not to judge him too harshly for weeping over his mother’s death, even though his weeping was for less than an hour! His grief is doubled, he says, by the fact that he is grieving. Apparently, for a Christian, such grief is unbecoming. In his own eyes Augustine is condemned for not having enough reliance on God to tough it out without giving way to his emotions.
And yet later, when his own precocious son, Adeodatus, a fine young man of seventeen, his son by a long-time mistress, is suddenly struck down, Augustine is at peace, for both of them—father and son—had been baptized on the same day. He does not weep nor break stride as he goes about his duties. His son is with God. As he looks toward the Resurrection, Augustine foresees a Mother and Child Reunion—an event greatly to be anticipated.
For Christians, Augustine’s actions tell us, our fear of death diminishes the nearer we are to God.
MICHEL MONTAIGNE
But not everyone has seen it quite that way. Our second story concerns Michel Montaigne (1533-1592), Renaissance statesman, philosopher, part of the nobility in France at that time, and the father of the modern essay. When Montaigne was thirty-six, he had a near-death experience. He was riding in the forest with three or four companions, servants in his household, musing over something intriguing to him, when suddenly he took a tremendous blow to his back, was flung from his horse, and landed ten yards away, unconscious. It seems that one of his men, a burly fellow, had spurred his horse to full gallop to impress his friends, and had misjudged the distance between himself and his master, inadvertently knocking Montaigne and his little horse off the path.
Sara Bakewell tells the story in her book, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne. At the time, Montaigne felt himself to be drifting peacefully toward eternal sleep, although he was actually retching up blood and tearing at his belly as though to claw it open for release. For days he lay in bed recovering, full of aches and grievous pains, marveling at the experience he’d had and trying to recall every moment of it. It changed his life, which, until then, had been dedicated to learning how to die with equanimity and grace.
In an essay on death, written some years after the incident, Montaigne rather offhandedly sums up the lesson, “If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry. Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”
Bakewell notes that this became Montaigne’s answer to the question of how to live. In fact, not worrying about death made it possible to really live. In an era in which a man of thirty-six could, by the limits of those times, see himself on the verge of getting old, the contemplation of death had been refined to a high art. Montaigne picked this up from his voluminous study of the Greek and Roman classics, his admiration for the Stoics, like Seneca, and the Roman orator, statesman and philosopher, Cicero, who famously wrote, “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”
Death was an obsession for Montaigne when he was in his twenties and early thirties. In succession, his best friend died of the plague in 1563, his father died in 1568, and in 1569 his younger brother died in a freak sporting accident. In that same year Montaigne got married; his first child, born that same year lived only two months. Montaigne lost four more children, only one of six living to adulthood. Yet, in spite of all that early sorrowful practice, he had grown no easier with death.
It wasn’t until his near-fatal accident that he began to understand how little his own death need affect his life. His memory of it was one of peaceful release; he had almost kissed Death on the lips. From that experience he gradually migrated from the fear of dying to the love of life.
Sometimes, we may be so concerned with dying that we forget the point is to live.
BONO AND U2
Our third story takes places in an era far less sure of itself with relation to God than those of Augustine and Montaigne. It is about our time and it concerns the Irish band U2 and its lead singer, Bono. Throughout its more than 30-year career U2 has addressed subjects usually dodged by rock n’ roll. ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ is about heaven; ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ is about faith and doubt; ‘Stuck in a Moment’ about the suicide of a friend, and ‘Grace’ is about, well, grace. The band’s spiritual roots go back to a religious revival they experienced as teenagers in Mt. Temple School in Dublin. Their catalogue of songs is a tapestry of a pilgrim’s progress and regress, turnaround and redemption.
But there is one song in particular that confronts head on the death of a loved one—a child, a father, a friend—a song simply called ‘Kite.’
Bono, the band’s lead singer, was spending some precious time at home with two of his kids, down on Kilkenny Beach, below their house in Dublin. They were trying to fly a kite, and as a Daddy-time venture it ended pretty quickly. The kite went up, the kite came down, plunk, in the sand and that was end of that. ‘Daddy, can we go home and play on the Play Station now?’ But the idea for a song was born, a song about mortality and fatherhood and being a son to a father and being a man who is no longer a child. ‘Kite’ was dedicated by Bono to his father, Bob Hewson, as it became clear that Bob’s health was failing.
Every night on the European leg of their ‘Elevation’ tour in the summer of 2001, Bono would fly back to Dublin after the concert to be at his father’s bedside. Their relationship had been strained after Bono’s mother had died when he was fourteen.They didn’t see eye to eye about much of anything. The home had become a house with two teenage boys and a silent father. Maybe it was the fact that all the band members had passed the liminal age of forty, maybe it was that most of them were fathers now too, maybe it was that friends seemed to be dropping dead all around them, but the song emerges as the clearest statement of the band’s view of life and death so far.
I’m not afraid to die
I’m not afraid to live
And when I’m flat on my back
I hope to feel like I did
And then midway through the song Bono sings powerfully,
I’m a man, I’m not a child
A man who sees
The shadow behind your eyes
With maturity comes the recognition that death must be faced. As Paul says,
When I was a child,
I spoke like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child;
When I became an adult,
I put an end to childish ways (I Cor. 13.11)
Growing up means understanding that the world does not conform to our wishes. Becoming mature means we don’t hold that against the world.
Who’s to say where the wind will take you
Who’s to know what it is will break you
I don’t know which way the wind will blow
All our great ideas about longevity, about prolonging our days, become like chaff in the wind. We just do not know which way the wind will blow. The kite will soar on the wind but eventually it will fall.
‘Kite’ ends with self-reflection:
Did I waste it?
Not so much I couldn’t taste it
Life should be fragrant
Roof top to the basement
Did we waste our lives? Would we know if we did? This is the question of life which God will ask of us one day. ‘I gave you life, show me what you did with it.’ Won’t we want to make of it the very best that we can in the time we have?
And in this life we recognize that we’re not going to get it right every time. But those glorious moments when we feel as one, when we know as we are known, when we truly have communion with others—those are the moments when we can taste it!
Roland brought many such moments to us. After a heated discussion in Believers and Doubters would eventually flicker and die down, Roland would quietly offer some insight. It might be from history—he was a man who knew the meaning of world events—or it might be from Scripture — he ran with ease up and down the paths from the prophets to the Gospels. Wherever it came from he would deliver it with grace and dignity. And then he’d smile, his eyes crinkling up with his laughter.
Life should be fragrant
Roof top to the basement
Since 1985 our class has met under the name of Believers and Doubters. A couple of times in those years I’ve asked the class if they have an inclination to change the name. No, they’ve always said, ‘that is what we are and shall remain.’ We’ve always thought of doubt as the left hand of faith, companion on the journey, always an ally, never an enemy. So in sickness and in health, in belief and in doubt, in good times and in bad, til death us do part, we are still together on the journey.
Thank you, Lord, that we were blessed to have Roland for part of the journey.
— Barry L. Casey
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Let Me Have Your Attention
“My mind to me a kingdom is,/Such present joys therein I find/That it excels all other bliss/That earth affords or grows by kind. . . .” Sir Edward Dyer (1550? – 1607).
In April, 1931, George Orwell wrote a short piece entitled “The Spike” for a magazine called Adelphi. In it he describes time he spent as a tramp. He became a tramp, a homeless person, partly of necessity and partly because he wished to understand the particular forms of suffering that tramps go through. One virulent irritation was boredom. Orwell came to think that boredom was the worst of a tramp’s burdens, worse than hunger and worse than the feeling of social disgrace. “It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel,” he said. “Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds.”
Today, Orwell would be accused of elitism and would be made to tweet an apology to all his followers. But Orwell was nothing if not honest, and having lived the life on the street could speak with authority. One need only pass through any metropolitan area to see the homeless on benches, median strips, near metro stations, or on corners, many of them slumped against a wall, sleeping huddled against the cold or in a quiet corner of a coffee shop. Their days unwind with agonizing slowness, each minute trudging after the next. In this essay, Orwell recounts how he was saved from the ten hours of daylight boredom in the spike (homeless shelter) by the blessed reprieve of working in the kitchen. Even so, one suspects that with his powers of observation and his interests in literature, politics, and history, Orwell would not likely suffocate in boredom.
There are two elements at work here: memory and attention. Memory, because we are hardly human without it, and attention because it is necessary to learning. William James devotes a chapter of his seminal work, Psychology, to attention, describing it of two kinds. There is the effortless, involuntary and passive kind, and there is the active and voluntary kind. Involuntary attention occurs when we follow a train of thought that is interesting as a means to an end or when the mere association with the thought burnishes us with a sense of satisfaction.
Active, voluntary attention is that which we make a determined effort to accomplish by bending our minds to it. James remarks that it is a feeling which everyone knows, but which is indescribable. We sense it when we try to discriminate between sensory experiences, or attend to one voice near us against a babble of other voices. It is an effort whose accomplishment slips through our fingers like water. James says, “There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time (his emphasis).” James describes a process that sounds like the building, layer upon layer, of a pearl around a grain of sand. The mind, finding something interesting, comes back to it, turns it over and over until the novelty wears off, then drifts away, only to return for the feeling of both familiarity and the stimulation of finding something new. And here is the sentence that lit up for me like a Jumbotron: “No one can possibly attend continuously to an object that does not change.”
So, to focus the attention of students or audiences we must come back to an idea from as many angles as possible, first through a discussion, then perhaps a demonstration, now a clip from a film, and then the solving of a problem together with a partner. These are techniques intended to remedy our weaknesses, but what of the genius who can apparently sit alone for hours, deaf to the world and completely absorbed with the ideas streaming through her head? James says that its her genius that makes her attentive, not her attentiveness that makes her a genius. The difference between her and the rest of us is that she has a method of hooking one idea to another to make a train of thought, while we, poor inchoate butterflies that we are, simply flit about from one delightful flower to the next. The good news is, however, that “whether the attention come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has.”
The practice of this in the classroom is simple and effective: find common ground between that which the student knows and the new concept, and ask the student to express his thoughts, first in written form and then verbally.
To put it in writing, creating a structure intended for clarity, is the first step. The student as a demanding reader of her own work consistently asks: is this word, this paragraph, this message, appropriate to my purpose? And the purpose, as Jacques Barzun says, “is always the same: it is to be understood aright.”*
The second step, presenting the written in verbal form, accomplishes two purposes. It first requires the student to recognize the difference between the written and the spoken word—reading an essay out loud is not at all the same as writing to be heard. And then the student will see that putting one’s ideas into another medium wondrously concentrates the attention.
This brings us back to Orwell and his terminally bored compatriots. An educated mind has something to play with: memories, images, associations, ideas not yet fully formed, questions, hopes. Waiting in a doctor’s office, loathe to thumb through a celebrity rag, we may yet travel through infinite and intimate spaces as we attend to our new and present sensations, relate them to the old and familiar, and say ‘What if?. . .’
Blake offered us “infinity in a grain of sand.” It’s there, if we but pay attention.
*Jacques Barzun (2001), Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers.
Photo: Redd Angelo, Unsplash.com
Dante's Woods 