Palmer pp. 169-Afterword

Go Palmer: "only in the face of...opposition has significant social change been achieved" (p. 170)!! Divided no more! Communities of congruence!! Going public!!! Alternative rewards!!!! Yes man!

Oh this leaves me yearning for the redder than red days of my post neo marxist youth. If I had a hammer! Sing on Pete, sing out Woody! Oh activist! Savio stirs the soul! Oh Debbs and Goldman, Horkheimer and Adorno, Lukacs and Benjamin, Trotsky and Gramsci show me the way! The material relations of production are deterministic but false and unstable--built on oppression! Yet fleeting is my dream recipe for systemic social change--Tantalus can stretch out only so far to the rising stream of water! Am I hopeless? a cynic? No, I hold to conversion, grace, and mystery. Though u-topia is "no place" we must have the ideal held out before our eyes. But of what shall it consist? Was Thomas More a hopeless cynic? NO! Nor Palmer. I'm not claiming realism in the face of lofty ideas. And Lord knows I shrink from cynicism masquerading as realism. Life is not so dark an affair--no matter what Altman might script. Yet forgive me if I balk at formula for programmatic cultural change, I hold for a different ideal: "where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more," (Rom 5:20) which alone can change hearts. And indulge a bit of critical engagement...

1. But wait, lo! Palmer offers the first step: individual choice to live an undivided--crescendo--life! But what--diminuendo--does that have to do with "finding a center for [my] life outside of institiutions" (p. 172)? Nary a benevolent institution on God's green earth?
Wait. "[go] beyond the institution to become self-critical" (p. 176)! Yes man, this is precisely it. WE MUST "Bethink ourselves!" in the words of Tolstoy. Theologians say "metanoia." And no change will come to pass without first delving into our heart where lives God. What (apart from conscience) will help us to know when we are acting in violation of our own integrity?

2. Give me folding chairs, a meeting hall, and folks that care and want to talk about ideas! I am delighted that Palmer acknowledges the need for exploring concepts, language, et cetera (p. 179). How about catacombs and clandestine worship--there's a community of congruence!

3. Go public indeed--write that Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Call out the white clergy. Bring into the fold but don't compromise the vision!

4. "the diverse rewards offered in this final stage...are reflections of the same elemental reward--the reward that comes from living an undivided life" (p. 188). Wholeness and integrity namely. It sounds like life in the Spirit, or the Reign of God. Consonance between God's will for the self, the world, relationships, and behaviors...not Utopia, but the Reign of God. And Jesus said it is at hand.

Palmer pp. 145-167

Focusing on the positive, I really liked reading The Once and Future King. I was told that it was the fruit of a friendly competition which produced LOTR and Chronicles of Narnia. Am I right Rick, Don? And story is such a lovely way to capture the spirit of the age and package neat little life lessons.

De todos modos, I think Palmer in this chapter makes some nice contributions. First, community itself seems to be a helpful tool for honing craft and forming teachers. The "clearness committee" is a fine idea. And we should make time (which would be one big limiting factor) to gather wisdom figures for focused conversation about what we're doing in the classroom, in the profession. Is there a critical mass of good will, hope, and sense of responsibility at your school? I would think yes.

I like where he was going in "moments" and "metaphors" pp. 150-155, but again, a bit anecdote heavy whereas, the audience (me) was ripe for some conceptual exploration. Like I said above, story is a good way to communicate, but it can't be the only way to communicate, especially when our author has also been introducing concepts-a-plenty.

I very much like the creation of a structure for getting at the interior or the "inner teacher," and I feel like PP has given us something to hang our inner landscape hat upon: a sort of peer-counseling, wisdom-seeking, anam cara gathering. Very cool. Here we have a structure to facilitate reflection on teaching. The structure values not only the teacher's experience but also the teacher's feelings--BTW which is where God often chooses to speak. I love the language of the focus person speaking (and the committee hearing) truth. And that deep listening and questioning can lead us directly to our truest self where dwells the inner light (to borrow a Quaker theology). This stuff could easily transform teaching and even lives.

Palmer pp. 117-144

Does PP lose the thread a bit here? This chapter is called "Teaching in Community: a Subject-Centered Education" but I didn't read much exposition in this regard. Fine anecdotes yes, but I am left wanting more talk of how to build "open space," how we find and determine our "microcosm," more than a story of "concept formation." Give me those famous ideas to chew on, the living great things in this chapter are left half-buried. (Love the teacher that builds community of truth by conversing with the dead!)

I think there is an obvious link between Durka's "imagination" and Palmer's "open space." In an earlier blog, I suggested that this is the platform for grace, the playground of the Spirit. Truest teaching-learning is itself an action of the Spirit. Last week, I wanted us to consider what happens when Christ becomes the center, the subject, the great thing (in Palmerese) and how RADICALLY that will transform education.

The Kingdom of God is real...

What can we now know about ourselves and our students?

Who have we and our students become?

Why and what do we hope?

Why and what do we teach?

What do we now see?

How are relationships transformed?

Palmer pp. 91-116

I feel like Palmer has entered new territory with this chapter. Or, perhaps it's just more to my taste. Be that as it may, I really like a lot of what he offers in these pages. With some noteable exceptions...

Take or leave (mostly leave) the discussion of community types, the definition of reality (p. 97), the definition of truth (p. 106), the synthesis of all things trending toward community. PP is ranging a bit beyond the borders of his expertise here. And it's a bit "60's Berkeley" to wax poetic over the "great web of being on which all things depend," in the pseudo-mystical sense only (ecologically, nothing could be more true, and I know also that nature triggers our true transcendental yearnings--but PP's language hints of pantheism which is out for me) or again, that our inner stardust helps us to have a mystical link to knowledge I doubt. No biggie.

For my money, he really gets going when signaling knowledge as relational, or community as our most powerful social form, or the primal attraction of ideas/knowledge, and the peril of a "desacralized world," and the caution against the poles of relativism and absolutism.

But the reification piece leaves me wondering...granting ontological status, subjectivity, and agency to ideas is a little creepy. It makes me think of the day when machines become self-aware. Run for your lives! Sentience is for God to grant. And PP is not arguing sentience (I think), but it is certainly not too much further down his "Merry Prankster" line of reasoning. What type of relationship can we enter into with a thing, even if it is somehow transcendent as PP claims? I mean, I love to hug trees, and sit with them, smell them, and on occasion talk to them, but I don't expect to be enjoying the Beatific Vision with my Quercus agrifolia .

Actually, upon reflection, I think he might be a heretic and an idolater ;)

More seriously, I do think that ideas can have a sacredness and a power about them which can lead us to new thoughts, new knowledge. But this power derives from and is to be found in the Maker rather than the idea or thing. Grace is of God alone; not things, no matter how great. It is perhaps that the "great things" even all things stand in relationship to God and therefore have the power to awaken in the knowledge and truth of our living souls. Yes, as Ignatius' First Principle and Foundation remind us, things have value inasmuch as they serve as vehicles of grace and then to bring us closer to God.

Palmer pp. 63-90

In truth, I don't at all think it meaningless. I just think our guru misses the mark a bit. I do like Palmer's paradoxes, though I don't think that they are really true paradoxes. Nor do I think paradox lies at our core (that we have simultaneously a need for silence/solitude and social interaction reflects complexity, not contradiction). Rather, I think that when the apparent opposites are considered in their fullness we see that they are not opposite or contradictory at all. They are appropriate to authentic human relationship, healthy interactions and stimulating of learning. Viz. Christian anthropology and the true self. They are reminders of the complex nature of teaching and its consequent challenges--that we have simultaneous responsibilities at the macro and micro levels. The term procrustean comes to mind. I don't think 1-6 (pp. 76-77) fit paradox, and that there are richer lenses, theoretical frames, etc.

Palmer pp. 35-60

Here again Palmer offers many great insights not just into the dynamics of teaching, but also into our psyche, the spirit, the constitutions of our inner selves. This section reads almost like a spiritual self-help manual. Good advice, wise counsel abound in Palmer: "self is a capacity to be enlarged," "the myth that the outer world is more powerful than the inner," "multi-layered fear discourages an encounter with the other," and finally that the spiritual path is the path that will set us free to be authentice selves in all relationship.
However! I have misgivings about spiritual work that fails to invoke grace. I take exception at the comment about "religions of fear that exploit..." I do not think that "otherness taken seriously invites transformation" in all cases. I would argue that mere existence does not qualify a thing for legitimacy. In other words, "the other" that we encounter might not always produce a positive transformation. Also, I don't think that recognition of pluralism in any way necessarily precludes one way, one truth, one life. Lastly, I strongly disagree that all religious and spiritual traditions have at their center "Be not afraid." This is Christ's assurance! And other great religions have no such conception at all.

Palmer pp. 9-34

Palmer is full of professional wisdom. I agree strongly with several of his observations. He writes, "In our culture...reality and power reside in the external world of objects and events and in the sciences that study that world, while the inner realm of the heart is a romantic fantasy..." (p. 20). How right he is. I am constantly having to plead with my students to try and see God, hear God, know God. I urge them to open their hearts, to turn to Him, to listen in silence, to believe! Nohing can be more plain than the truth of God all around us, infusing our life, our world and yet we have lost the sense that the world, as Hopkins S.J. puts it, "...is charged with the grandeur of God." He also later wonders why it is that "men now do not reck his rod?" And I agree with Palmer that we might look to our uncritical relationship to technology. And I would say our culture has created in us an aversion to silence, has fractured community relations from the family to the neighborhood to the town to the nation to the world. Look to commodification and the profit motive writ large upon the American psyche and social fabric.