The powers and principalities would hold less sway over our lives if we refused to collaborate with them. But refusal is risky, so we deny our own truth, take up lives of “self-impersonation,” and betray our identities.2.
Teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see I have a chance to gain self knowledge and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self knowledge.
Today education has become a training ground for competition.
During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called “soldier’s heart.”8 The violence that results in soldier’s heart shatters a person’s sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another’s integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions.
In the presence of a newly minted human being, I am reminded of what wholeness looks like. And I am sometimes moved to wonder, “Whatever became of me?
Bill Moyers has said, “The antidote, the only antidote, to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people.”10.
A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light onto some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there. A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.
When we allow emotions to trump the intellect, we swallow “facts” that are demonstrably untrue, letting them fly around unchallenged in a mockery of civic discourse, supporting public figures who promote fictions to further their own cause.
We are cursed with the blessing of consciousness and choice, a two-edged sword that both divides us and can help us become whole. But choosing wholeness, which sounds like a good thing, turns out to be risky business, making us vulnerable in ways we would prefer to avoid.
Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one’s mind and one’s feelings.
By attaching our identity to things only a few can have, we ignore the intrinsic preciousness of all human life.
One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality-including one’s own-is divine, to be not defied but honored.
Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. “Why do people want to adopt another culture?” she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching and into life. “Because there’s something in their own they don’t like, that doesn’t name them.”5.
I no longer ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to hang on to?” Instead I ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to give myself to?” The desire to “hang on” comes from a sense of scarcity and fear. The desire to “give myself” comes from a sense of abundance and generosity. That’s the kind of truth I want to wither into.
When the heart is supple, it can be “broken open” into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world’s pain: it happens every day. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them.
As a white, male American who has always been well-off – the kind of person for whom this nation has always worked best – the gift of full citizenship, unquestioned and unchallenged, came to me as an accident of birth. Today I realize the magnitude of that gift. But for years I was an unconscious and ungrateful recipient because attaining citizenship required no effort from me.
Community can teach us that our grip on truth is fragile and incomplete, that we need many ears to hear the fullness of God’s word for our lives.
Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand – the ground of my own truth, my own nature, with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light.
What happened to “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”?
It seems ironic to suggest that some of us may be called to build community in our churches, for the church as it was meant to be is a historical archetype of community.