If we want to grow as teachers – we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives – risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.
Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now – in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.
As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.
The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.
Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.
The ancient human question ‘Who am I?’ leads inevitably to the equally important question ‘Whose am I?’ – for there is no self outside of relationship.
I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations – projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves- and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.
Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.
Good teaching comes from good people.
Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of a new life, what might I be called upon to do?
How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential – in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth – when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.
Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.
We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.
What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.
The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.
We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.
The power for authentic leadership is found not in external arrangements, but in the human heart.
We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.
Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.
Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one’s inwardness.