Tuesday, October 6, 2009
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.
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I couldn't agree with you more about the importance of silence in private meditation and in our outward, daily life, and modern society's minimalization of it. Palmer's advocacy of the inner journey to discover the Self and thereby improve one's teaching pivots on introspection ~ the teacher within.
ReplyDeleteIt is a daunting task, a sobering proposition -- but an immense opportunity to provide another view of the world for today's 'commodified' students. Just like every other person I know, a student has the will to choose life and he/she is alive in at least two worlds -- as has always been the case.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was young I could not appreciate the value of silence. At middle age, I sometimes can't find enough silence! Those words and directions you give to your students are seeds well planted. Hopefully you'll get to see some of what blossoms in their lives because of your influence.
ReplyDeleteWe use Hopkins' God's Grandeur poem on our Kairos senior retreat as a meditation during the silence. Every time I hear/watch it, I am moved deeply. It is filled with stunning imagery. I am captivated by the ending words:
ReplyDelete"And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."
Isn't Kairos amazing? Your post (and the following responses) really got me thinking about how little silence I have in my life. If it isn't co-workers or students chatting or listening to me chat, it's the television, radio, ipod, beloved wife, friends, family, or even random strangers talking it up on the street.
ReplyDeleteI am going to make a concerted effort tomorrow to be more like Anita and go to the beach for a little silent prayer before class.