“Spirit of Teaching” Conference
Keynote
Address: U.S.M. Russell Chair Lecture
“Spirit
of Teaching” Conference
April 8, 2000
Abstract:
In a
letter written to a favorite teacher with whom he studied in the early 1970’s,
the author struggles to understand the meaning of the spirit of teaching. In the end, he realizes, its essence lies not
so much in theory or technique but rather in character and relationship.
A Grateful
Student Writes To His Spirited Teacher
As you know from our lunch together in
But I also naively thought that the subject of spirit and teaching would
be a relatively easy one for me to make a speech about - this “lecture” being
the one formal obligation that came with the Russell Chair. Afterall, I’ve been a college teacher for
more than 20 years and before that had numerous experiences with other
interesting and engaging teaching roles.
At least I had this solid experiential basis from which to draw. I have read rather widely on the art and
science of teaching, so I thought I would be helped there. And you know, from our long history together,
of my interest in spirit and spirituality.
So I believed myself to be well-covered for the purposes of writing my
talk. How wrong can a man be?
The first thing I ran up against as I had begun reading specifically for
this task was a line from one of Emerson’s essays: “Of that ineffable essence which we call
Spirit, he that thinks most will say
least.” So there I was, caught in a
trap. What could I dare say about
“Spirit” that wouldn’t indict me as a fraud?
And then, not two weeks later, while reading a book about the
spirituality of imperfection (in which I also have a strong basis in personal
experience), I ran across this little story:
The disciples
were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-Tzu’s
dictum: Those
who know do not say; Those who say do
not know.
When the Master entered, they asked him what
the words
meant. The Master said, “Which of you
knows
the fragrance of
a rose? “All of them knew. Then he said,
“Put it into
words.” And all of them were silent.
What is the Spirit? To provide an
answer may very well mean one has
misunderstood the question.
Perhaps the best response, or at least the most honest one, is to follow
the example of those disciples and remain silent. But then there would be no opening talk . .
. and no conference . . . and no book following these events. Speech or silence? Truthfulness or deceit? A conundrum that philosophers and teachers
frequently face, I suppose, and have since at least the time of Socrates.
I shall take the risk and speak to you, Joe, my friend and teacher. And hope that you will listen, as you always
have, to the words I say as well as the
words I choose not to say. For
perhaps, like Meister Eckhart suggested
almost a millennium ago, truth lies not
in words themselves or the silences which surround words, but in that sacred and mysterious place where
the two meet.
I choose to write to you to work out my thoughts and feelings about the
spirit of teaching because I see you as one of the best teachers, and most
spirited, I’ve ever known. I don’t know
if you realize that despite more than 30 years of knowing each other with our
endless and endlessly engaging conversations, exchanges of letters and more
recently e-mails, and sharing each others writings, I had you as a classroom
teacher only once. That was your
course in poetry taught as an elective in the
The first thing I remember about your class was that we sat in a
circle. Not the rows of neatly organized
chairs that had dominated my classroom experience up to that point in graduate
school, and before that in college and 12 years of public schools. We students weren’t looking into the backs of
other students’ heads. We looked into
each others’ faces and eyes. Yes eyes -
which are so appropriate because the eye, as Emerson wrote, is the first circle
and a shape which is repeated in nature without end.
Years later I recall our having an animated conversation about John
Neihardt’s book, Black Elk Speaks. One of my favorite parts of that book is
where the Lakota Elder and Holy Man, Black Elk, reflects on the power of
circles. “You have noticed everything
an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World
always works in circles . . . birds make
their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours . . . the sun comes forth and goes down again in a
circle. The moon does the same, and both
are round . . . the world always works in circles and
everything tries to be round . . . “
Everything, that is, except the world of
education as I had known it - with its rows of students and boxes called
classrooms and straight lines of thought poured from the full heads of teachers
into the empty ones of learners. Until
I met you. We sat in our circle and you
questioned the presumed fullness in your head much as you asked us to question
the presumed emptiness in our own. Our
poetry class was considered to be on the margins of the curriculum by the
erstwhile heady theologians who constituted the core faculty at the seminary –
those former students of even headier European theological giants like Karl
Rahner, Hans Kung, and Edward Schillebeecx.
But in my view your class was not in the least marginal. It stood in the very center of learning and
meaning-making in what was soon to become a luminous and transformational
period in my life.
We read poems and talked about them.
Sure, you had plenty to say as our teacher, although you often spoke
with a sense of doubt, deference, and even humility. Questions were more important to you than
answers. E.M. Cioran, the Romanian
philosopher and poet, once wrote “The fewer the solutions, the livelier the
thought.” Our class was lively indeed
with thought. I remember you once saying
that you mistrusted those who always seemed so certain of their ideas because
your experience had suggested that, more often than not, “certainty” only meant
being wrong at the top of one’s voice.
The roundness of our learning experience included your belief that we
not lock knowledge into separate disciplinary boxes but rather that each of us
open ourselves to the possibility that many fields of scholarship could help us
learn poetry. So you encouraged us to
think broadly by painting lucid and lovely contexts in biography, mythology,
history, and whatever other field of knowledge would facilitate our
understanding, our standing-under the poems and their authors’ intent.
I still have our course text, an anthology of 20th Century American
poetry entitled The Voice That Is Great
Within Us. Through that book my
classmates and I entered more deeply into the thought of writers whom I had at
least heard of prior to 1972 - Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings,
William Carlos Williams. And those into
whose oceans of art I had not ventured even a single toe - Anne Sexton,
Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, and Elizabeth Bishop. And I’m thinking now what sublime irony it is
that this book we studied together, one of the few titles I remember from the
scores I read in graduate school, is indicative of perhaps the single most
important mission I see myself having as a teacher, that is, helping my
students discover and articulate the voice that is great within each of them.
While I recall you sharing ideas and stories about these writers and
their work, I also remember that we students got to talk in class, too. A lot.
We didn’t just speak in response to a question you posed for which you
already had the answer. That game was
played elsewhere, but not in your
class. You invited real thought and real
response to questions that you, too, were exploring in your own thinking. In addition to ideas, you invited us to share
our feelings about the poems we were reading and discussing. Sometimes we read the poems aloud and they
were so beautiful I would feel the hairs on my arms standing to attention. I learned some years later while reading a
biography of Emily Dickinson that she, too, would experience a physical
sensation when she read a good poem. In
fact, recognizing her body’s response to the words was her signal that what she
had just encountered was indeed a poem and not some lesser form of
writing. The hairs on my arms standing
to attention were my signal that a poet’s words, as I sat in our circle, had
brushed against my life. It’s a feeling
I’ve sought again and again these past 28 years.
It was later in my career as a student, in fact two graduate programs
down the road from my degree in theology that I learned about democracy in
education. Exploring the works of John
Dewey, Eduard Lindeman, and Paulo Freire, I began to appreciate the enormity of the
stakes at hand when a teacher empowers learners to think for themselves, to bring their personal experiences into the
classroom as “a living textbook,” and to
have a voice. I would work hard in my
own career as a teacher trying to develop skills to follow these great
educational leaders’ vision for good teaching.
But it was in your poetry class that I experienced them first and
first-hand. T.S. Eliot once wrote that
as we become older, the past takes on a different pattern and ceases to be mere
sequence. We had the experience but
missed the meaning. The meaning of your
approach to teaching only came clearer to me a decade or so later when I
struggled to formulate my own educational philosophy.
I spoke of the hairs on my arms standing to attention. But you always seemed to be at attention,
that is, attending to the small details in a poem and the little things in life
that, when examined closely and for what they are, can reveal so much meaning
and beauty. The former Library of
Congress Poetry Consultant, Josephine Jacobsen, wrote a review of one of your
collections of poems in which she noted your extraordinary powers of
perception. And, I would add,
compassion. Not only do you see things
that most people miss, but you seem to care about them as well. I love, for example, your poem about the old
broom you once saw at work in the hands of a custodian:
Like a tattered regiment,
loyal to the last,
the straws of this old broom
strive to serve, and strain.
Left and right
shot straws fall.
Right and left
the failing remnant
sweep their fallen comrades
dead away.
And the magic of
the detail you were able to perceive in old brooms, or a wayside mailbox, or
balloons at a circus was magnified when it came to your students. You saw each of us bringing a gift to our
poetry class, something in our personality or intelligence or abilities to see
and talk about the world. For some of my
classmates this special gift was their ability to link ideas together into a
chain of logic; for others it was a quirky sense of humor; still others were
seen as bringing the gift of passion.
You graciously accepted these offerings that some of us didn’t even know
we had until you pointed out our own gifts to us. By perceiving our individual strengths and
paying attention to them - to us - you
provided your students with a safe place to learn. Your class became a garden in which I felt I
could set roots and grow. Perhaps you
had known about but had not told us of that beautiful and haunting line from
the Talmud that many years later the African-American writer, Sapphire,
chose as the epigram to introduce her novel, Push: “Every blade of grass has an angel
standing over it whispering ‘Grow, Grow
. . . “
You whispered, and we grew.
Yes - we grew
from your whispering, but perhaps even more from your listening. As one who himself has been teaching now for
some 20 years, I have come to know how powerful, important, and potentially
transformative listening is. And also
how rare and difficult. In an essay I
wrote some years ago on the subject of education and mysticism, I commented how we educators celebrate too
much the importance of speech - whether
expressed in lectures, discussions, symposia, workshops, dialogues, or seminars - and celebrate too little the art of listening
and the spirit of quietude and silence that listening requires. Sam Keen once suggested that every university
should offer a course entitled “Silence, Wonder and the Art of Surrender.” The course’s aim? “It will aid students to develop an inner
silence, to cultivate the ability to let things happen, to welcome, to listen,
to allow, to be at ease in situations in which surrender rather than striving
for control is appropriate.”
By way of a novel I’ve recently read which was introduced to me by two
former Russell Chair Holders - Will Callender and Jerry Conway - I have come to
a new awareness about the power of listening.
The novel is Momo written by
the German author, Michael Ende. It’s
about a little girl who, among other estimable talents, offers to her friends
and acquaintances the gift of being an extraordinary listener. Here is one of my favorite passages:
She listened in a way that made
slow-witted people have
flashes of inspiration. It wasn’t that she actually said
anything or asked questions
that put such ideas into
their heads. She simply sat there and listened with the
utmost attention and sympathy,
fixing them with her big
dark eyes, and they suddenly
became aware of ideas
whose existence they had never
suspected.
Momo could listen in such a way
that . . . shy people
felt suddenly confident and at
ease, or downhearted
people felt happy and
hopeful. And if someone felt
that his life had been a
failure, and that he himself was
only one among millions of wholly
unimportant people
who could be replaced as easily
as broken windowpains,
he would go and pour out his
heart to Momo, and, even
as he spoke, he would come to
realize by some mysterious
means that he was absolutely
wrong; that there was only
one person like himself in the
whole world, and that,
consequently, he mattered to the
world in his own
particular way. Such was Momo’s talent for listening.
Listening is a way of attending.
It is also a way of accepting.
According to M. Scott Peck, listening is something we must do actively
and requires hard work. Many people do
not realize this or are not willing to do the work (and often I’m afraid I must
place myself in this group). “When we
extend ourselves by attempting to listen well,” Peck writes, “we take an extra
step and walk an extra mile. We do so in
opposition to the inertia of laziness or the resistance of fear.”
Because it both attends and accepts listening is one of the most
important ways in which we may care for and love one another. We listen with our ears, of course. But there are other ways. I recall reading about Johan Sebastian Bach’s
second wife, Anna Magdalena, commenting on her husband’s eyes. “They were listening eyes,” she said.
And deep listening, as you know Joe, and have practiced with me and
countless others, also happens with the heart.
Not long ago I saw the metaphor, “a listening heart,” in an essay by one
of my favorite contemporary authors, Kathleen Norris. During our senior adult education seminar
last semester, I asked my graduate students to think about this metaphor with
me by way of a concept map. Words that
branched across the white board as descriptors of a listening heart included
compassionate, humane, nurturing, kind, tender, collaborative, authentic,
respectful, empathic, loving. I have to
think that these traits would greatly enhance any job description for a
profession which depends upon the art of listening - musician, counselor,
minister,
social worker . . . and yes,
teacher.
One outcome of your listening heart as a teacher was to encourage me to
write. As a member of your poetry class
I wrote brief papers intended to be personal reflections and
interpretations. Because you were more
concerned with creativity than criticism, my papers didn’t come back marked all
over in red ink like they did from other teachers over the years. You went out of your way to remind me of my
successes, as small as they may have been at times. Your encouragement nurtured courage on my
part to take risks - a bolder statement
here, a transgression of grammatical
norms there, even a venture into the
creation of my own verse.
I would later learn that many people, even those deep into their adult
years, are afraid to write because somebody - in many cases a teacher - had
once told them that they did not write well.
So this important part of their human voice went silent. It makes me so angry to hear this story of
strangled writing repeated student after student, semester after semester. I say to myself, and to them: “Who gave your teachers this right to say
these deadly things to you? To lance
your spirit with the point of a pen?” I
remember what you told me once about making such judgments: “There are two kinds of people in the world –
the righteous and the unrighteous. And
the righteous make the categories!”
What most of us need along the way as learners of writing (or of
anything else that is great and difficult) is a teacher whose faith in our
capabilities exceeds our own. Somebody to be our cheerleader. Somebody who places himself beside us rather
than above us - a “guide on the side rather than a sage on stage,” as the
aphorism goes. Somebody who is also
continuing to learn and struggling to open new horizons of thought and
expression in his own work. Teachers
are first and foremost learners. If we
ever forget that we can quickly slide the slippery slope toward becoming fixed,
certain, and eventually arrogant. The world needs little more of that kind of
spirit of smugness, especially among its teachers.
One of the ways you and I have stayed in touch over the years is through
sharing each others’ writing. I love the
way, for example, you mail to me an
occasional newspaper op-ed piece you had written for The Baltimore Sun and perhaps toss into the envelope several new
poems. And in a note penned into the
corner you’ll ask about my work and family and invite me to send you some of
the writing I’ve been doing.
I want you to know how impressed I am about the learning project you
engaged in celebration of your 70th year. To read every play and every poem written by
William Shakespeare! And then, not
being content to merely read the great bard, you wrote an interpretation of his
sonnets - all 154 of them. And several years before that project you
undertook the study of another immortal writer and his work. If I remember correctly, you even took
classes in Italian so you could read Dante’s The Divine Comedy not only in its various English translations, but
also in the author’s vernacular.
With such an impressive learning agenda which has continued well into
your retirement years, I’ve long felt you have managed to keep your priorities
straight. And I can still hear you
quoting Franz Rosensweig’s pithy statement about priorities: “It’s better to write than to read; it’s
better to write poetry than to write; it’s better to live than to write
poetry.”
It is your actions as a priest, writer, and human being of deep
conviction that speak to me most about the spirit of teaching. For one is less the authentic teacher if he
says one thing and does another, if he
avows beliefs yet fails to act upon them,
if his talk goes one way and his walk another.
I remember situations
earlier in your career when you ended up paying a heavy price for acting upon
your deepest conviction. As a young
priest you were on a fast-track to power.
You were assigned to work in the central office, “the chancery,” in the
oldest and one of the most influential Archdioceses in the
Then came 1966 and you were
increasingly troubled by
And then, around this same
period, you took a strong editorial stance against a Gubernatorial candidate in
From this time on, no
longer working for the Catholic paper and other ecclesiastical bridges burned,
you made your living as a kind of teaching and writing vagabond. Courses here and there at St. Mary’s Seminary
and
In recent weeks and months,
while planning this conference and writing this “talking letter keynote,” I’ve
been reading quite a bit of the contemporary educational guru, Parker J.
Palmer. He has published two books
within the past 18 months, both about teaching.
In one Palmer ruminates on what I think is a beautifully crafted
definition of the concept of
vocation: “The place where your
deep gladness and the world’s great hunger meet.” Some 30 years ago Joe, the gladness of your
teaching spirit met the hunger of a young man searching for his own voice and
place in the world.
In his other book, Parker
Palmer suggests that teaching, at its core, is like nature’s profligate
seedings: “If we want to save our lives,
we cannot cling to them but must spend them with abandon.” When I read this I recalled a line from the
poet William Stafford, to whom you introduced me in 1972. “Our life,” he wrote, “We should give it away,
this breath, and another, as easy as it came to us.”
This grateful student
thanks you for all that you have given away - to me, to the world, to the
spirit of teaching itself.
For
Further
Blakney, R.B. (1941). Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation.
Bode, C. and Cowley, M. (Eds.)
(1977). The Portable Emerson.
Carruth, H. (Ed.)
(1970). The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth
Century.
Cioran, E.M. (1995). Tears and Saints.
Dewey, J.
Eliot, T.S. (1963). Collected Poems 1909 – 1962.
Ende, M.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Gallagher, J. (1983).
The Pain and the Privilege: Diary
of a City Priest.
Gallagher, J. (1998). Statements at the Scene.
Johnson, T.H. (Ed.).
(1951). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Keen, S. (1970). To a Dancing God.
Lindeman, E.
Kurtz, E. and Ketcham, K. (1992).
The Spirituality of Imperfection.
Neihardt, J.G. (1961). Black Elk Speaks.
Norris, K. (1996). The
Cloister Walk.
Norris, K. (1998). Amazing
Grace.
Palmer, P. (1998). The Courage to Teach.
Palmer, P.
(2000). Let Your Life Speak: Listening
for the Voice of Vocation.
Peck, M.S. (1997). The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace.
Simon and Schuster
Sapphire (1996). Push.
E. Michael Brady is the 10th Holder of the Walter E.
Russell Chair in Philosophy and Education at the