What I would see
mid all the stress and tension of these days
what I would see beyond my pain and, seeing, praise
is how life works its way upon
our thick, opaque obduracy
presses down and pulls us out
to tissue-thin transparency:
yes, praise.
I would not choose to stretch this way.
Unwillingly I find myself drawn membrane-thin
so others can see through and in.
I would prefer to hold my dark
to guard my secrets safe behind
a studied public face –
but stretched reveal a larger life
admit a light beyond my own
and letting through these stronger, brighter rays
I praise.
Tag: Parker Palmer
Mentoring
The power of our mentors is not necessarily in the models of good teaching they gave us … Their power is in their capacity to awaken a truth within us, a truth we can reclaim years later by recalling their impact on our lives.
In workshops I often ask people to introduce themselves by talking about a teacher who made a difference in their lives. …
Then I ask the question that opens to the deeper purpose of this exercise: not “what made your mentor great?” but “What is it about you that allowed great mentoring to happen?”
Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right student. In this encounter, not only are the qualities of the mentor revealed, but the qualities of the student are drawn out in a way that is equally revealing.
Parker Palmer (1998) The Courage to Teach. p21.
Integrity and teaching
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| “A complex web of connections” Organic Growth from the Internet Mapping Project posted by jurveston |
These lines from May Sarton indicate something of the integrity of the “good” minister, teacher or human being:
Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
worn other people’s faces … (the rest of the poem is here)
I have worn other people’s faces because it’s safe to be in the crowd. I have worn other people’s faces but they have never fit. I have tried to be clever. I have tried to be funny. I have even tried to be effective. But these faces never fit. We live in a world where standards are imposed and where we are trained from the outside in to conform to certain standards. When Jesus breathed new life into his disciples (John 20:19-23) he seemed to be giving them a very different inside-out spiritual direction for their lives. Parker Palmer, who quotes the above lines from May Sarton, talks about the divided self and the undivided self. A self divided is a self dis-membered and lacking integrity. For Palmer “good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.” They “join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.”
Palmer goes on to say that good teachers are “able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. … The connections made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts – meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self.”
When I reflect on the good teachers I have had I find that they are people who refused “other people’s faces”, who committed time to me and gave me their undivided attention. I also reflect that they have been a rather rare breed, but then I may not have been the right student to help great teaching happen with all the others I have known. The good teachers, though. have been more than enough – thank God.
Wearing other people’s faces
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Parker Palmer has a lot of sensible things to say about vocation in Let your life speak. The book has the strapline – “Listening for the Voice of Vocation”.
Palmer refers to vocation not “as a goal to be achieved”, but as a “gift to be received”. It is about understanding the selfhood given to us by God at birth. Palmer refers to Rabbi Zusya, who as an old man said “In the coming world, they will not ask: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?'”
As we grow we are trained into acceptability and finish up “wearing other people’s faces”. The deepest vocational question becomes not “what ought I to do with my life?” but “who am I? What is my nature?” The misunderstanding of vocation arises around the confusion between doing and being. Dave Walker’s cartoon on the hierarchy of vocation illustrates (and mocks) the “doing” – though unfortunately that remains the pre-occupation (a good word for this context!).
Palmer highlights the definition of vocation by Frederick Buechner. He describes vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets with the world’s deep need.” When vocation is just masquerading as that great damage is caused. Another quote – this time from Rumi: “If you are here unfaithfully with us you’re causing terrible damage.”
Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces …
Now I become myself by May Sarton from Collected Poems
Ethics of education
“When we deal with ethics in education (and often we ignore it altogether), we approach it as a matter of helping individuals develop standards for personal behaviour. Not only do we stress personal at the expense of communal ethics: deeper still, we ignore the fact that the presence, or absence of communal imagery at every level of teaching and learning can form, or deform, students for life in the world. We underestimate the hidden curriculum of ethics that is being taught in classrooms even – and perhaps especially – when ethics is not the formal topic.”
Grits and Grains 