I'm
involved in an initiative here at USC to encourage the use of
contemplative and meditative techniques in teaching and learning, in all
kinds of classrooms. The last gathering of our Contemplative Pedagogy
Faculty Interest Group was led by James Collins, assistant professor of
classics. He introduced us to theater games which he employs with
students to get them to go deeper in contemplating philosophical
questions. One of the
warm-up
"improv" exercises was for us dignified professor-types to wander
around an elegant old room in Doheny Library and point at things and
call them by any names but the ones we'd usually give them. As we
aimlessly milled about the room, someone would point at a chair and call
it an orange. Someone else would point at a book and call it a
rhinoceros. After a few minutes we got into the rhythm of it and all
sorts of seemingly nonsense names rolled easily off our tongues at the
objects in the room.
And we get paid to do this? - you might
ask....
Yes,
a pretty silly exercise. But one that awakened us, or re-awakened us,
to the fact that much of learning requires unlearning. In physics,
students must unlearn the idea that an object is uniformly solid, and
then they can learn that most of what looks solid is actually empty
space: the entire cosmos started out as a dense point the size, perhaps,
of a golf ball. If we can loosen up and pretend that a book is a
rhinoceros, perhaps we'll be ready to unlearn the assumption that humans
are fundamentally superior to all other creatures,
and begin to comprehend that the genes of mice are 99% the same as
those of humans.
The Belgian surrealist painter Magritte became famous for his painting of a pipe with words below it, in French, reading: "This is not a pipe".
His was a visual reminder that our names and definitions of things are
very often, if not always, opinions. We're entitled to our opinions,
but we equate them with reality at
our
peril.
This
morning I had a long conversation with the mother of an adult son whom
she believed was in an emotional crisis. She wanted my advice about how
she could intervene to help her son. It became clear in the course of
the conversation that the mother was the one in crisis. Yes, the adult
child had emotional issues. But the mother was the wrong messenger for
the message. The mother was too tangled up in her son's emotional
history to be useful as a
change-agent. The mother was devastated by her son's anger toward
her. I suggested to the mother that her job was to give love and
attention, and not advice. "It's a hard spiritual discipline to let go
of our diagnoses of our kids and our opinions about what they should
do," I said. "Our kids know when we are harboring any kind judgment of
them in our hearts - they are telepathic for these sorts of things. We
have to release them, so we can be fully present and compassionate."
When
I do an
accounting of the costs and benefits of the opinions I've held and
shared with people over my lifetime, it's clear that I could have
functioned very well without at least 90% of them, and the world around
me would have been none the worse for their absence. Lately I've been
challenging myself to see how few opinions I can hold. I find this to
be an extremely challenging discipline. I love having opinions and I
enjoy expressing them with vigor. In my job, I'm asked to expound on
serious matters. But it's better for me to lighten up, not weigh in.
As a preacher, as a pastor, as a professor, as a writer, my greatest
contribution is to ask questions, pose viewpoints, and encourage people
to think and feel for themselves. To put my ego and my opinions off to
the side, so that people can see farther and understand more deeply. In
teaching, I put brackets around my opinions by making the "time-out"
gesture with
my hands, to cue my students to turn on their critical attention and
not receive my opinions as facts.
"Who
do you say that I am?" Jesus repeatedly asked his disciples (Mark
8:29). They would answer, but, mysteriously, he would immediately
instruct them to keep their answers secret from others. What if Jesus
was posing a sort of Zen koan to his disciples, to get them past their
opinions and ponder Jesus' true nature, and their own? What if he asked
them
to
keep their answers secret, so that others would have ponder the
question for themselves?
The mother I spoke with today said something very sad, but also
familiar to many parents. She said her son told her "you don't know who
I am". That hurt the mother's heart. We all want to be known, not as
the object of somebody else's definitions, but as the essence of who we
are. Jesus wanted his disciples, his best friends, to know that he
wasn't just a
personality named Jesus. Not just the son of Joseph and son of Mary.
Nor was he just the Messiah, as the people of Israel came to define the
person who would save them from foreign dominion. He was
more than the names given him by others. He wanted his disciples to
know him, all the way down to the sole of his soul. His question may
have been a contemplative pedagogical tool to get his disciples beyond
evaluations and declarations that get in the way of fuller
comprehension.
How can you and I un-name the world so that we can know it better?
_________________________
PUBLICATION DATE: 3/22/13, St Johann Press ---
HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service
by Jim Burklo
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California
Excerpts:
“Having
a higher goal than our immediate intentions serves us in building a better
world. Knowing we are hitchhiking
to Alaska gets us to Seattle quicker, and with a better attitude. It delivers us to the holy compassion
at the heart of service.”
“I
have discovered that the skills required for me to be aware of the states of my
own mind and body are also essential in listening and responding sensitively to
other people. I may not be a
success in fixing all the problems of the people I aim to serve, any more than
I can solve all my own. But in the
process of trying, I can have loving, caring, soul-satisfying
relationships. To attend to others
lovingly, to accept them as they are, to be present with them fully – this
enables me to be more useful to them.
It leads me out of selfishness and into the heart of the divine.”
“No
matter how good our government policies might be, no matter how strong a
“social safety net” we weave - and in America we’ve got a lot of weaving yet to
do - there will be times when love must trump the rules. Being of service leads us to take
graceful action above and beyond the written and unwritten rules by which our
society functions. And we trust
that our acts of grace will lead by example, pressing for change in the
system.”
“We
don’t have all the answers. It’s
not always clear how best to help, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if we’re
helping more than we’re hurting.
But it sometimes it is in areas of moral murkiness that our presence is
needed most.”
“We
often think of service taking the form of practical aid to others in times of
need. But usually what is needed
most is our presence: showing up, body and soul, and fully attending to the
other.”
JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California