Words of EnCOURAGEment #9
Recovery or Renewal?
by Rick Jackson, Co-Director
When “bubbles burst”—whether in our financial or personal lives—we have choices to make. Do we just feel impoverished while mindlessly waiting for the next bubble to inflate our bank accounts and our egos? Or can we mindfully pause to absorb painful lessons so that not just recovery but something better can emerge? These challenging times provide opportunities to transform adversity into promise through our compassion. In the words of Parker Palmer’s essay that follows, we can foster renewal through “Linked Hands, Love and Democracy.”
What’s the difference between recovery and renewal? When I’ve got the flu, recovering means regaining my health. If I’ve lost a sum of money in the stock market, I’m eager for the Dow Jones to rise and recover my losses. But renewal connotes something more personal, demanding and ongoing. It is a journey and sometimes even requires starting all over. One clue to renewal is in an ongoing Benedictine ritual: monks stop whatever they are doing seven times a day and go into the chapel to get quiet and listen. Then they go back out and invest themselves in the world again. Their constant desire is for their outer purposes to be renewed by their greater spiritual calling.
Our new President’s “no drama” demeanor appears to serve our collective yearning for renewal in public life. In a recent news conference a reporter fished for a sound-byte by asking why it had taken the White House two days to respond to yet another piece of bad financial news. President Obama thought calmly for a moment before saying, “Ed, it’s because I think it’s important to know what I’m talking about before I speak.” The president’s pause demonstrated not only a capacity to recover from an in-your-face question but also about his commitment to the renewal of civil public discourse. Rather than responding to confrontation in kind, a few well-chosen words invited everyone to take a breath and get a fresh grip on reality.
Linked Hands, Love and Democracy
by Parker J. Palmer
Our friends at the Fetzer Institute (the foundation that got us started fifteen years ago and continues to be a great advocate of our work) have begun a new project on fostering “compassionate communities.” Recently, they asked participants to answer two questions: (1) What have you learned about how compassion is at work in communities? (2) What is the next phase of your work and what role do you see compassion playing in it? Here are my answers:
1. What I’ve learned about how compassion is at work in communities would fill a book. From my seminary days working with junior high kids from NYC’s Spanish Harlem; to my five years as a community organizer in Washington, D.C.; to the decade I spent living in the Quaker community at Pendle Hill; to my year of teaching in Appalachia; to the work I’ve been doing in “Circles of Trust” around the country for the past fifteen years, I’ve been blessed with a million sightings of this not-so-rare bird! If compassion means mutual aid and generosity, there seems to be more of it in communities that have less “stuff.” These communities know something all of us need to know: real abundance is found not in a surfeit of money and things, but in a rich network of relationships in which we can give and receive as need arises. If compassion means a capacity to accompany others in difficult moments and passages in life, there is more of it when we become more transparent and vulnerable to each other. Only when we can see another’s suffering is the doorway of the heart likely to open—a fact that has strong implications for our capacity to have compassion for strangers thousands of miles away, whose suffering we see only on monitors or TV screens. No matter how we define compassion, it seems to begin “at home,” in the smaller settings of our lives, before it flows out to larger forms of life together. As political theorists have said for many years, the habits of the heart on which democracy relies begin in the “little platoons” of our lives—and that includes the habit of the heart called compassion.
2. The next phase of my work has two parts: to continue to partner with the Center for Courage & Renewal in spreading ”Circles of Trust“ around the country, and to find ways (including but not limited to those circles) to work on the renewal of American democracy by renewing the soul of the citizen. Compassion is the aquifer from which citizenship flows: without a capacity to identify and ”suffer with“ others beyond the confines of private life, there can be no sense of being accountable to a larger community, especially a civil community. Something that looks like citizenship may emerge from the simple desire to protect one’s perks and privileges—but that motive ultimately makes society a war of all against all, a banal and brutal place. Banality and brutality are also not-so-rare birds in our land, so we need to replenish the aquifer of compassion from which citizenship flows by working with the “little platoons” where people have a chance to learn a habit of the heart that trumps narcissism and greed. I believe this is possible: beneath our narrow self-interest there is a deep-rooted human desire to receive compassion, and at least a dim understanding that to get it you have to give it, that what goes around comes around. In the work I want to do next, I do not intend to appeal to a high ethic of compassion, but to the soul’s tropism toward wholeness—a deep imperative of the soul to live out life’s brief span in generative rather than degenerative relationships, in circles large and small. This is one way, I think, to keep working toward a good society: a society that is measured not by how well its strongest members can do but by how well it cares for the weakest in its midst.
Spring, a Frenzy of Promise and Peril
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Paul Michalec
Every year I make it a practice to search out the first signs of spring. I begin watching long before the snow melts or the winter constellations slide below the horizon. I seem compelled into this state of being by two sources. The first is an abiding fascination for the subtle ways that spring asserts the gift of renewal on the landscape. The second reason is a sense of impatience; enough is enough. I’ve had enough of winter’s cold and dormancy. I’m ready to dance in the mud, anticipating spring’s jubilant colors.
I can tell you that spring is on the way. I have witnessed the early indications that the earth is leaning toward the sun. But as April shifts to May here in Colorado I find myself wishing that the deep economic, social, and educational winter around me was following the natural world and preparing for spring’s rejuvenation. I keep watching but little change is evident; “enough is enough.” How many more families will lose their homes? How many more individuals will face a major health crisis without the safety of insurance? How many more students will struggle through another class that feels meaningless and disconnected from what really matters?
I would truly welcome a little spring right now in the American economic woodlot. The need is so compelling that a bit of active change seems called for. I ask myself how I might do more to feed the hungry, support the wounded, or gather wandering learners. How might I nurture into being the first early signs of spring in my personal and professional life? And yet I have to monitor my concern for others and my passion for change. I can find myself, if I’m not careful, with a very full plate of must do’s. Have you ever found yourself overloaded with projects and tasks of your own choosing? Especially ones that are intended to turn the world’s need into the spring ground of possibility? After all, that is what happens in the natural world; the sun warms the earth, the ground thaws, and my flowerbeds and gardens burst forth with growth. But it is also clear to me that no matter how much I might wish it to be different, the human world rarely transitions from season to season as easily as the natural world.
Teaching With A Sense of Joy
An interview with Ramona Lundberg, high school educator, former Presidential Science Teacher Awardee, President of the South Dakota Science Teachers Association, and National Board Certified Teacher/Mentor in South Dakota
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator David Henderson
As I write this I am surrounded by thoughts of my experiences with Ramona when she was in the first cohort of Courage to Teach retreat participants that Maggie Anderson and I facilitated in South Dakota. Often a cohort of retreat participants will have a voice that speaks into the circle with particular poignancy. Although this cohort had several such voices, I thought it would be interesting to speak to one of the many classroom teacher voices that have resonated so powerfully for me a few years after their experience:
What brought you to this work?
What brought me to this work was the longing for the opportunity to be real, authentic as Parker would suggest, with fellow teachers. Though I had no idea what the retreat series actually involved, I had read portions of Courage to Teach and thought that if the retreats were based on the book, the experience would have to be good.
Was it primarily value-added (affirming to what you already were about or perhaps tilling a garden you had well under way) or transformational (breaking new ground for you)?
The work was transformational for me. I am, by most accounts, considered a successful educator but prior to the retreats had a certain amount of unspoken doubt and hesitation. I did not teach or live with a joy or sense of well being that I now possess and am not hesitant to reveal. All aspects of the retreats contributed to this change. Through the inner work, the group sharing, personal statements and the Clearness Committee, I gained a sense of peace and assurance of personal worth and goodness previously unknown. The retreats provided me the time and gentle encouragement to learn about what I need. For this I am forever grateful.
Courage to Lead as Teachers: An Emerging Opportunity
by Terry Chadsey, Associate Director
By some measures, American schools have changed significantly in the twelve years since Parker Palmer wrote The Courage To Teach, but Parker’s frame about teaching remains deeply true and provoking.
The question we most commonly ask is the “what” question—what subjects shall we teach? When the conversation goes a bit deeper, we ask the “how” question—what methods and techniques are required to teach well? Occasionally, when it goes deeper still, we ask the “why” question—for what purpose and to what ends do we teach? But seldom, if ever, do we ask the “who” question—who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form—or deform—the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world? How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?
Although this fundamental experience of teaching has not changed, the context of teaching in public schools is shifting profoundly, providing both new challenges and new opportunities for teachers.
I started teaching in Chicago in 1975. Over my twenty-two years in classrooms, across different districts and schools, one descriptor of my role is “independent contractor.” Each year, I was given a classroom, some materials and a set of students. What happened in my classroom was completely up to me. There were occasional professional development days, but I remember those primarily as days of rest away from the intensity of seven hours with students.
That context allowed a high degree of autonomy but there were costs too. I had no sense of being part of a larger process. I did my best to move my students along with little sense of what happened before or after. I worked in isolation and had little dialogue with my colleagues. I had little opportunity to see others teach. When I faced tough situations with students, I faced them alone.
In the past decade school accountability has shifted the context of teaching dramatically. Largely gone is the isolation and autonomy. There are standardized expectations of what to teach and how to teach. Teachers are expected to be high functioning team members. Professional development is focused, coordinated and embedded in the school and classroom. Teacher mentors and coaches are more plentiful.