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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.
This question, What does religion sound like?, inspired the creation of a remarkable collaborative project on Religious Sounds between Amy Derogatis of Michigan State University and Isaac Weiner at The Ohio State University. Yesterday, I had the privilege of making welcoming remarks at the opening of the Sounds of Religion exhibition at the MSU Museum.
In thinking about what I would say, I returned to my own experience of religious sounds. Here are my welcoming remarks:
When I think of religious sounds, the first thing that comes to mind is silence …
*Pause – Breathe – Allow the silence enter the room and focus us.*
Growing up in Philadelphia where I attended a Quaker school gave me a deep respect for what comes to presence when we quiet ourselves and listen.
The second thing that comes to mind when I think of religious sounds is the resonant timbre of my stepfather’s voice. As Amy knows, my stepfather was Ted Loder, the longtime minister at the First United Methodist Church in Germantown. Ted preached the art of listening, which, if I am not mistaken, is at the heart of the religious sounds project.
In fact, Ted has a prayer in his book Guerillas of Grace entitled: Help Me Listen 1.
O Holy One,
I hear and say so many words,
Yet yours is the word I need.
Speak now,
and help me listen;
And, if what I hear is silence
let it quiet me,
let it disturb me,
let it touch my need,
let it break my pride,
let it shrink my certainties,
let it enlarge my wonder.
As I have followed this project over the years, I have come to appreciate the power of listening to shrink our certainties and enlarge our wonder. By focusing on sound, Isaac and Amy have expanded the discipline of Religious Studies, moving us from words and ideas to the world of sound and the transformative power of listening.
This research embodies many of the core values the College of Arts & Letters is trying to advance. It is a robust collaboration between two major public research universities, rooted in a trusting relationship between Isaac and Amy. That relationship has also allowed the team to work across appointment types within each university to draw in staff members, academic specialists, IT experts, and of course many students and community partners. The project invites us to bring our whole selves into the research, moving us beyond a purely intellectual approach and into our bodies where sound and silence reveal the deepest truths of religious experience. In so doing, the research team uncovers how people physically enact religious practices not only in formal worship spaces but also in everyday life.
And finally, let me also say here what is difficult to hear; that this project unfolded during a very painful period in the history of MSU as the Nassar sexual abuse case demonstrated what can happen when we fail to listen. In the wake of these institutional failures, this project gained depth and integrity because Amy and Isaac and all those involved in the project redoubled their effort to listen with intentionality and humility and care.
I would like to thank Dr. Amy DeRogatis and Dr. Isaac Weiner for their incredible research on display here today. I would also like to thank the co-curators Vicki Brennan, Ely Lyonblum, Alison Furlong, and Lauren Pond for all their tireless efforts in making this exhibition so beautiful.
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