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I’ve been a little quiet here lately as this very difficult semester comes to a close. It was healing yesterday to spend some time with Dr. Fauci before our MSU doctoral convocation.
In his address he drew on lessons from the pandemic and encouraged graduates to expect the unexpected, to engage meaningfully with science, whatever their discipline may be, to resist the normalization of untruth, and, importantly, to find and prioritize joy in their lives.
This last resonated deeply with me – it reminded me of a passage from Robin Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass:
“We are showered everyday with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gifts and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”1
This is such a beautiful expression of the faith that animates a life committed to education. And it has been a gift to be reminded of it as this semester comes to a close.
On Tuesday morning when I made my way to the sacred circle, past the resilient tree, to Linton Hall there was a silence such as I had never heard before. It was not the silence of a holiday break or of freshly fallen snow … it was the silence of a broken world. It was the presence of an absence—Arielle, Alexandria, Brian. It was the sound of grief and loss and emptiness.
It took my breath away.
So I paused to find a way back to my breath, to settle there and listen, to bring my heart and mind close to absence and to quietude, so I might begin to mourn and grieve.
“Breath is a practice of presence.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned, 21.
Let me resist the urge to make sense of what makes no sense. What is given us to learn, perhaps, is absence—the withdrawal of being.
Let me be present to this absence here, so I might find a way to be present for others.
A gift appears from my friend and colleague Ruth Nicole Brown, Chair of the Department of African American and African Studies: A poem by Howard Thurman. It points a way and I follow.
For a Time of Sorrow
I share with you the agony of your grief,
The anguish of your heart finds echo in my own.
I know I cannot enter all you feel
Nor bear with you the burden of your pain;
I can but offer what my love does give:
The strength of caring,
The warmth of one who seeks to understand
The silent storm-swept barrenness of so great a loss.
This I do in quiet ways,
That on your lonely path
You may not walk alone.
In the “silent storm-swept barreness of so great a loss” there are no words … and yet here the words find me, press me to find more words, not so much as to make sense, but so we might find a way more deeply into the absence and to the connections that somehow make it bearable.
So just fragments here … words that have found me and images captured as we make a way.
The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this instant.
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart, 144.
Another gift finds me, this one from my friend and colleague Tani Hartman, Chair of the Department of Art, Art History, and Design— a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: “II, 29” [“Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”]:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
I flow, I am; or at least I try to be—try to find a way toward meaning at this crossroads…
MSU, we love thy shadows
When twilight silence falls.
Flushing deep, and softly paling
O’er ivy covered halls.
Beneath the pines we’ll gather
To give our faith so true.
Sing our love for alma mater
And thy praises MSU.
Welcoming MSU students back to campus.
Thirty years ago, Parker Palmer wrote a new preface for the paperback edition of his book, To Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey.1 Reporting there on his experience traveling the country to explore the issues raised by the book, he writes:
Everywhere I go, I meet faculty who feel disconnected from their colleagues, from their students, from their own hearts.2
Thirty years later, that sense of disconnection has calcified into alienation.
The processes and practices that shape our academic lives are badly out of joint with the purposes that give our lives meaning.
Palmer puts it this way:
Most of us go into teaching not for fame or fortune but because of a passion to connect. We feel deep kinship with some subject; we want to bring students into that relationship, to link them with the knowledge that is so life-giving to us; we want to work in community with colleagues who share our values and our vocation. But when institutional conditions create more combat than community, when the life of the mind alienates more than it connects, the heart goes out of things, and there is little left to sustain us.3
It’s not just that institutional conditions have an alienating effect on the communities that give them life, but our institutions themselves are disconnected from the mission they profess to advance. As we put it in the HuMetricsHSS white paper:
The values that institutions of higher education profess to care most deeply about — articulated through university mission statements, promotional materials, and talking points — are often not the values enacted in the policies and practices that shape academic life. This disparity has led to a growing sense of alienation among faculty who entered higher education with a deep commitment to certain core values, values that are themselves very often articulated in the founding documents of institutions of higher education.4
Palmer’s book looks to spiritual traditions for a path forward in the face of such pervasive personal and institutional alienation. He writes:
In the midst of such pain, the spiritual traditions offer hope that is hard to find elsewhere, for all of them are ultimately concerned with getting us reconnected. These traditions build on the great truth that beneath the broken surface of our lives there remains — in the words of Thomas Merton — “a hidden wholeness.” The hope of every wisdom tradition is to recall us to that wholeness in the midst of our torn world, to reweave us into the community that is so threadbare today.5
To cultivate the wholeness to which Palmer points requires discipline and intentional practice. To reweave ourselves into community, reconnect ourselves with our purpose, and realign university values with institutional practice, we need to create structures and cultivate habits that reinforce the work that gives our personal and institutional lives meaning.
In this effort, it is helpful to have examples. I am grateful to work with imaginative colleagues who have managed to create a few. The appointment of Morgan Shipley as the inaugural Foglio Chair of Spirituality is a tangible effort to integrate what Palmer called “authentic spirituality” into the life of the University. “Authentic spirituality,” writes Palmer,
wants to open us to truth—whatever truth may be, wherever truth may take us. Such a spirituality does not dictate where we must go, but trusts that any path walked with integrity will take us to a place of knowledge. Such a spirituality encourages us to welcome diversity and conflict, to tolerate ambiguity, and to embrace paradox.6
This fall, a trusted path led us to a place of wholeness where we celebrated the Ascension of the new Department of African American and African Studies. This event marked the opening not only of a new Department, but also of new possibilities for deepening our connections with one another and with the reciprocal, community engaged work our torn world needs most urgently.
At the heart of these efforts to put the heart back into things beats the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative, a framework and a process designed to elevate the quality of teaching, research, and engagement by integrating practices of wholeness into the life of the university. We have tried to capture something of the spirit of this initiative in the video below.
Beneath the din of anxiety that animates our public conversations about the future of education, concrete steps are being taken to reconnect higher education with the “hidden wholeness” that gives it life and purpose and transformative power.
FreshRSS 