Seize the day! (Carpe diem!): Ignatian spirituality in the classroom

Sep 04, 2014

I wonder how many schoolteachers would actually see spirituality as even an element in their professional work. And yet, even a cursory comparison with other professions will reveal an instinctive tendency we have to see teachers as, at least potentially, spiritual figures. Fictional representations are a clue to this not-so-hidden intuition. One such portrait of the teacher as spiritual guide would be John Keating, the character played famously by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, a figure who has done far more to make teachers feel inadequate than any inspector! Whether you find Keating an inspiration or an irrelevance, you cannot ignore the fact that he manages to key into the imaginations of his young charges and lead them towards a life-changing experience, a goal most teachers, in my experience, regard as worthy of emulation. He instructs his pupils to seize the day (Carpe diem!), to overcome their inhibitions and to live life to the full, a notion which might to some ears sound vaguely compatible with the Gospel but which to my taste is too tightly subtended by an almost nihilistic suspicion that ‘tomorrow you shall die’. This seductive portrayal of American romanticism is a spirit which, these days, we are practically hard-wired to find intoxicating – but it is very far from the spirit of Christ.

My interest here is to look at the spiritual dimension of teaching and to outline the component parts of that particular spirit we have come to call ‘lgnatian’ as it might be lived out in a school context. What does a school look like in which a significant number of the teachers are actively involved in ‘finding God in all things’? And in what ways might it be – to use a rather unfashionable term – countercultural?

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS
It is that exasperating phrase which says so much and so little about what lgnatian spirituality is all about. This is not the place to explain and develop the content of the Spiritual Exercises which are the privileged means by which people learn to ‘find God in all things’, but there are two things that need to be said. Firstly, that it is a skill which needs to be learned from another and worked at as part of the discipline of a reflective life. It has a great deal to do with habits of the heart, rhythms of daily prayer and meditation, and above all with the development of a kind of perception which most ‘secular', and many religious people are not even aware exists – what one might call attentiveness to the action of the spirit. Secondly, that expression ‘all things’ does not imply a kind of moral vacuum – as if one could find God in cannibalism or blood sports – but rather an openness to every area of human activity. It has been one of the more perverse effects of modernity to compartmentalise our lives into non-communicating fragments – we have ‘private’ lives, ‘professional’ lives, ‘sexual’ lives, 'family lives, and ‘spiritual’ lives, to name but a few of the more prominent sectors, but precious little to integrate them. The lgnatian tradition asks us to draw all of these together: our faith, our politics, our aesthetics, our sense of humour, our capacity for friendship, and indeed everything which passes for the human.ls that counter-cultural these days? Radically so, I believe. A spirituality which holds out the promise that a whole world of experience is out there, waiting to communicate the mystery of God to us, sits rather uneasily with the compulsive mind-set which places the latest reality TV event at the centre of things.

What happens when this ‘engine’ of finding God in all things is at work inside us? How is our character, our very being, subtly but importantly transformed when we adopt the practices and habits which Ignatius recommends to us? I would say that there are seven key movements in the lgnatian spirit, and I want to sketch them below.

Christian humanism
These days, ‘humanist’ has become a kind of sloppy synonym for atheist or agnostic. This is a somewhat regrettable usage from a Jesuit point of view, as it seems to rule out the possibility of a Christian humanism, and this is something that is very dear to us. People are often surprised at this, but the reason for our concern for the human comes from the key insight of Christian belief, that in Jesus of Nazareth, God united himself once and for all to humankind. It is a startling claim but one that is lethal for certain kinds of religiosity. If God sees his world with human eyes, if he appreciates what signifies on a human scale, if our concerns and worries our joys and hopes register on his divine radar, then the very least we can say is that they matter. Sometimes people fail to take their own lives to God in prayer because ‘he has much bigger things on his mind’. Occasionally you meet people who are alienated from their own desires or inclinations because somehow they have learned that there is a way they ‘should be’ which trumps the way they are. And all of us, at some time or other, feel isolated and alone in the cosmos and (increasingly) in a human world which seems impersonal. These are all symptoms of a spirit abroad in our world profoundly opposed to true humanism.

For Christian humanism, man can never be ‘the measure of all things’, but God, in his grace and mercy, can approach us in such a way as to accommodate us and our foibles. Next time you find yourself giving that lesson on interest rates or on the First World War, remember that Jesus knew what it was like to live in a human economy, to engage with (and be crushed by) the forces of history. When those irregular verbs come up, you might spare a thought for the difficulties faced by Jews and Christians in first century Palestine as they struggled with Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and no doubt with Latin and other imperial tongues, and as they juggled translations and mistranslations of sacred texts. Jesuits have, over the centuries, been rather good when it comes to exploring and relishing all these different phenomena. Their openness to the cultures they met beyond Europe often contrasted quite startlingly with the evangelising approach of other missionaries who were convinced they had a universal, almost abstract message to get across and they had to overcome the rather tiresome local way of seeing things if they were to succeed. The Jesuit suspicion is always that somewhere in the quirky details of human life there is treasure to be found, a way of breaking open the mystery of Christ which can speak immediately to a soul in a way that a euro-centric, propositional approach never could. This key insight must surely give any teacher the confidence to know themselves to be at the heart of the spiritual mission of a Jesuit school. It is not only the RE department which imparts spiritual direction when the spirit of Jesuit humanism is at work.

A sense of wonder
The Christian humanist is open to a double sense of wonder: not only at the extraordinary richness, diversity and depth of human experience, but also at the nobility and generosity of the God who joins us in it. The capacity to generate this contemplative ‘wonder’ is not the sole domain of any academic discipline: I have heard teachers of science and English literature tell me with equal confidence that their students have achieved states of wonderment. And that is how it should be. To be caught in amazement at the beauty, subtlety, symmetry or whatever of something we are studying is a key spiritual gift. It is to be able to ‘lose yourself’ in something other, and we know from the Gospels that it is only in losing ourselves that we find them. It happens more frequently than we are likely to notice. One of my fondest memories of a Flemish Jesuit sociologist who taught me a great deal came when he was asked how he had spent his day off: ‘l watched the rain drops on the window pane’. What a waste of time, I thought, and so it was; wonderment is a waste of time – it really is about losing something, but a fruitful loss, one which strangely opens us up to Another. Ignatius liked nothing more than to look up at the stars...(a sense of wonder). -- Thinking Faith

--Damian Howard SJ is a member of the Thinking Faith editorial board.

--Continued next week