Interesting but not worth it to read.

It was a gift to us from friends for the Christmas of 1995. They were personally acquainted with the author, Parker Palmer. To Know as We Are Known (HarperCollins, 1993), subtitled Education as a Spiritual Journey, became the book that, for me, articulated my latent ideas on “spiritual education.” As an undergraduate, I had seen myself headed toward the pulpit. I served as student minister in little country churches in Middle Tennessee. However, circumstances diverted me, and I became a young instructor in English at a church-related college instead. Occasionally I still filled in as an interim minister. As a result, I always thought of teaching as an alternate ministry, a way to serve, a kind of pastorate. I think I gravitated to William Blake and the British Romantic poets because they spoke to soul as well as mind and heart.

But I would never have voiced such views; I hardly had articulated them for myself. I had even cursorily reviewed the latter works of the visionary James Moffett (q.v.) and dismissed them as too idealistic to be taken seriously, the works of an eccentric who had studied with Buddhists and had himself taught yoga. Then Parker Palmer caught me with his first paragraph, headed “The Hidden Wholeness,” a phrase he borrowed from Thomas Merton.

“Ten years ago, when this book was first published, I thought I knew who my readers would be—faculty at church-related colleges and seminaries, professors of religion, and people involved in religious education. After all, the book is about the spiritual dimension of education, and conventional wisdom tells us that educators range from indifferent to cynical on matters of the spirit.” [p. 1]

He had found out, of course, that his prospective audience was much more widespread. By this time I was a senior professor in a major research university, working exclusively with graduate students, who were themselves preparing for lives as educators. But the profession that had brought me such satisfaction during my long career in the classroom had begun to seem less rewarding. I blamed my ennui on my current setting, on the decadent society of the 1990s, on my encroaching old age, on affluent, elitist, apathetic students. Palmer spoke for me: “. . . educators of all sorts are in real pain these days, and that pain has compelled them to explore unconventional resources.” He called this pain “the pain of disconnection.” “Everywhere I go,” he said, meaning public colleges, universities, and high schools, “I meet faculty who feel disconnected from their colleagues, from their students, and from their own hearts.”

Palmer defines “spiritual education” as personal, communal, collegial, and experiential; most contemporary classrooms, especially at large universities, have become impersonal, individualistic, competitive, and "academic." In his original edition of this book, he derived his concept of spirituality from ascetics sequestered in the desert; he called it “obedience to truth,” going back to root definitions of both those terms. But, in the preface his this edition, he changes his terms: “To teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced.” This sense of community reconnects students with their teachers, with one another, and with the subjects of their studies—”the hidden wholeness.” This is true whether those subjects be human figures in history, literature, philosophy, or religion, or the natural universe of physics, chemistry, geology, or life sciences. All genuine learning must be supported by personal interactions and a sense of commitment that is emotional as well as intellectual, active rather than passive, investigative rather than submissive to authoritarian messages. “In the absence of communal virtues,” he insists, “intellectual rigor too easily turns into intellectual rigor mortis.”

I wish that Palmer had shared more narrative accounts of spiritual teaching. At times, teacher educator that I am, I long for illustrative anecdotes. But like the desert fathers, he simply opens us up to envision our own responses: “we must cultivate personal experience of that which we [as professors] need to profess.”

“The true professor is not one who controls facts and theories and technologies. The true professor is one who affirms a transcendent center of truth, a center that lies beyond our contriving, that enters history through the lives of those who profess it and brings us into community with each other and the world.” [p. 113]

Though he emphasizes collaborative group work in the classroom and learning by consensus, he concludes with the importance of silence, solitude, and—yes, prayer. Finding images for community in modern physics as well as ancient asceticism, he continues to rely on Merton’s phrase “the hidden wholeness” of the universe as his foundation stone. One hears echoes of Lao Tzu’s classic Tao Te Ching in this sense of spirituality.

“This process of dialogue, where each person speaks in fidelity to inner truth rather than conformity to outward demands, is a process of checking and criticizing and clarifying our communal relationships. It is a quest for truth as troth [as in ‘I pledge to thee my troth,” that is, fidelity, trust, inner commitment]. As the dialogue goes on, a larger truth is revealed, a truth that is not only within us but between us. It is the truth that we are not autonomous agents, each with a private world, but are in community with each other. Community begins to emerge as we seek our inward nature. But it can grow only as we realize that our created nature calls us into . . . relationship with each other and all that we know; it can grow only as our inward response finds outward manifestation in relationships with dialogue and troth.” [p. 100]

Fortunately, I was given ten more years to explore and articulate the meaning of a “spiritual education” before I retired. I gave my doctoral students copies of To Know as We Are Known. I gave James Moffett’s works another, more careful reading. I hope—and pray to the Hidden Wholeness—that, as time goes on, this message will be heard by more and more teachers and exercised with more and more learners. So be it.