Making More or Being More?

James Hillman commented when asked about his book, ‘The Terrible Love of War’, that we live in a world where we live in competition with one another. For one to advance, another loses. We are expected to drag ourselves up by our bootstraps and always to grow. The numbers count. How many have joined the church since you arrived? How has the bottom line grown? The G20 being held in Brisbane is setting a growth target for the world to achieve this very weekend. 

Each of us is deemed to be a perpetual growth machine designed to always be hitting the goals society sets, chasing the Joneses like a dog chases its tail only to find out that when he catches it, it already belonged to him. In political terms, from Menzies to Hockey, we have been divided into lifters or leaners. You must make use of what you are given according to the rules or you will be cast out, with much gnashing of teeth.

The parable Matthew relates in Matthew 25:14-30 is often used to encourage us to use our God given gifts or suffer the consequences. Traditional interpretation suggest the businessman is God and his servants those of us who have been entrusted with the kingdom of God. Each are given gifts, in this case money and are expected to make it grow. Two are successful; the third apparently fails miserably and suffers as a result. Much sermonising builds on the story to encourage, or more often, apportion guilt liberally on those listening who, for a whole range of reasons, haven’t been able to double their investment.

Is this what this parable is really about? What happens if we move a little to the side and have a quizzical look at the story, putting it in its context and avoiding the personalisation of post-reformation theology or the imputed violence of the extortionist and his three henchmen as a symbol of the coming of the kingdom of God?

This parable is as challenging to Jesus’ contemporaries as last week was to the men of the time. How inappropriate for them to be compared to unmarried teenage girls who sillily forget to trim their lamps? How inappropriate to tell a story about a rich man who most likely lived abroad (a foreigner), a non-Jew as an archetype of God. He leaves money with his subordinates to invest for his future. Yes, this is a story about money, for that is what talents were. In modern terms the amount for the 8 talents is about $3 million dollars, something those listening could only imagine as the product of theft, bribery or extortion. You could not, in their eyes, amass such wealth any other way.

So how did the servants double that investment? Well, as the story assumes, being non-Jews or acting on behalf of a non-Jew, they could lend money at exorbitant rates (30-50%), enforce repayment or send people to prison. They would drain the poor people taking an unfair share of harvest or grain production as repayment. They were unscrupulous, breaking all the accepted Jewish rules and become wealthy, not for themselves but for their master.

The third slave seems to have had a moral conscience. Some commentators say he feared his master and didn’t want to lose the money and be punished, and so he put it in a safe place. As there was little or no inflation, burying the money was a safe and prudent option. He simply wasn’t prepared to be involved in any immoral or unjust acts, or break any religious taboos just to make money.

Yet when the landowner returns he punishes the prudent one, and rewards the unscrupulous. Is this an accurate picture of God and how God deals with people? Is God prepared for us to be unscrupulous in order to advance the Kingdom? Is God’s kingdom a violent and unjust place where we are punished for doing what is morally right and appropriate?

Or is Jesus channelling the spirit of satire, joining the ranks of the Chasers and Shaun Miccalef, holding up before those he was speaking to that the Kingdom of God does not fit easily into the personal growth program of the world. The kingdom of God is at odds with the Kingdom of the world and we need to let go of the benchmarks held up by society and seek a much more dangerous path, the path of righteousness and love. It will not bring you wealth, you in fact will be cast out by the rulers of this world, pushed aside and seen as irrelevant, you will be a leaner not a lifter, someone who needs to have their income managed by governments, programs approved by bureaucrats, sermons approved by the city council as is happening in some US cities and, generally, deemed irrelevant by those you live amongst.

I suggest the third servant actually ‘saw’ what was going on and made a conscious decision to live out his beliefs. His dialogue is blunt, exposing the brutality of the system, holding up a mirror to the landowner so he could get a good look at himself. The servant remained prudent, diligent and fair, and probably scared half to death, with good reason, yet he did not back down.

So what does that say to us as we move through Advent? What does it say to us as a church as we look to the future? What are we waiting for and how are we going to see it when it arrives?

May I respectfully suggest we look closely at the unsuccessful servant and remember?:

 ONE: That we are to be the church in the world. We are not a business, a professional centre or even a school. We are the church, the body of Christ alive in the world and committed to being ‘a peculiar people’ in a peculiar time.

TWO: That we are to holdfast to what is the God News, as troublesome as that may be, the imitation of the living Christ, and remain committed to the blueprint for the kingdom of God as outlined in the sermon on the Mount. There is no room there for making money, or anything else, unjustly.

THREE: That we remain comfortable with being cast out because we avoid what is acceptable practice on the basis it is not in tune with the practices of the Kingdom of God. Paul reminds us in Phillipians 4:8, ‘Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.’

FOUR: That we remain faithful even though we know our actions will be greeted with ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth. Thomas Merton writing to a despondent Jim Forrest during the fight for equal rights in the 1960’s in America, says, ‘“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

Our challenge is to sit in the place of the outcast servant and do what is right in the eyes of the kingdom and its people. Gandhi rightly suggests that ‘The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly’. Our love lives in relationship and we work to ensure that God’s love is real right where we are, even if that pushes us to the outside. That is what God is waiting for.

Learning Begins.....When?

Noticed on the noticeboard outside a school the following sign: "Learning begins 7th October." What a strange sign. I found myself asking the question: "When does learning stop?"

Now, before all the teachers jump up and down, I do realise what the person who put the sign up was trying to say. They were referring to when school would recommence after the holidays. I know that. What I began wondering about was the implication that learning only occurs in formal schooling, that young people are not learning when they are not in school.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk wrote, "The least of learning occurs in the classroom." He was a teacher having taught both at Columbia and St. Bonaventure Universities and been responsible for the academic education of the novices at Gethsemane. He knew the importance of formal education.

He understood learning is not restricted to the classroom and what is taught in the classroom is perfected in experience outside of that specific learning space. Henri Nouwen, Catholic writer and priest, adds that we only learn what we have been taught when the teacher is no longer present. A quick glimpse at the Christian Gospels and the Book of Acts will affirm his thesis. The disciples began to learn the truths taught to them by Jesus when they had to engage with the world without him. No longer could they defer to him to tell them what to do, they had to connect with the wisdom they had heard and seen and translate that into their own knowledge base. Major scientific discoveries often find their way into reality by exactly the same journey. Ideas taught are tested, refined and completely rediscovered long after the scientist has left the classroom.

Over my many years of working with people, young and old, I have noticed most learn by experience intertwined with the formal and informal learning they have been exposed to over their lives. They need both, and learning through a collaboration of both can be seamless and unobtrusive, often going unrecognised by those involved. It just happens. They learn how to cope with grief and loss through experiencing death and tragedy personally. I am constantly amazed how young people are able to confront, process and make meaning from extreme experiences, discovering insights and learnings that can never be taught or confirmed any other way. Only then do they reach into and connect with the learning they may have received in formal classes.

Taking young boys sailing and asking them to sail the yacht to a specific destination gives a purpose to those often strange and unfamiliar formulas they learnt about in maths and could imagine no reason for remembering. In context they learn what they have been taught but can not repeat in classrooms or exams. Building community gardens, designing murals, working in retail and hospitality and more, build on and contextualise the learning which only begins in the classroom.

Watching an artist on a reality TV show, I discovered a method for creating portraits I had not seen before.  Right at the beginning she simply scribbled over the canvas in black pastel. There was no sketching the subject, no setting a background, no formalising the shape as is taught in formal art classes. She simply scribbled on the canvas. When asked by one of the judges why she did that she replied she used the shapes that appeared in her scribble to get the shape of the portrait she was about to paint. The portrait would appear on the canvas in the lines she had just drawn.

Now, my own portrait skills have been limited up until now. Her method is one that I use as a general guide in all my other paintings but I had not thought of using it for portraits. So I did, and it works for me. This not something I learnt formally, but by observation and experience.

What does this have to say about how we do education? May I suggest the following:

• Good education is collaborative. What I mean here is, it is a collaborative effort between formal classroom instruction and experience. It is needs the opportunity to engage with life in a way that allows classroom learning to be discovered, interpreted and contextualised without the tendency to over scaffold that process. It has to be natural and intuitive, not forced and manufactured. Education is defined by its fit with the individual, the context in which that individual finds themselves and the journey they are engaged in. It is collaboration in the full sense of the word. It is risky, challenging and scary as it shifts all involved from their familiar roles to that of a learner. this is especially so for the formal teacher.

• Good education requires quality down time. If, as it has been suggested by Daniel Arielly, that the majority of us are at our best in the two - four hours after we wake up, that is when formal education occurs. (bakadesuyo.com) Why not use  the afternoons for learners downtime reflection, journalling, exploration and to have experiences which may engage the formal learning they had been doing before break. This is probably a step to far for most education administrators and principals but is vital if we are to provide quality learning. A quick look at monastic pedagogy proves valuable here. The rhythm of monastic life is built around early morning education (reading and classes), reflection (prayer), downtime (rest and contemplation) and physical work. It is in tune with the normal rhythms of nature and the human body, and it provides an opportunity for experiential learning that has proven effective for many hundreds of years.

• Good education is not imposed but discovered. Modern education has been taken over by the need to produce outcomes, achieve test scores, embed work ready skills and to turn young people into widget producing, widget consuming contributors to the infernal drive for profits. We impose upon them the outcomes we wish for them to achieve instead of democratising education and allowing them to discover, explore and unpack the mystery that is life. While some of this is an natural outcome of education we need to find ways to do this without prescribing the path and the destination. Young people are naturally inquisitive, creative and intuitive. Good education reinforces those qualities.

• Good education requires respect. Respect for the process of learning, the mystery of life and the individuals and institutions engaged in the process. Young people and adults come to have respect for these elements in different ways and at different times. They are not identical. They do not arrive at the same place at the same time. Education systems group young people by age and this may not be the best way to educate them. If respect is necessary and people get there at different times, despite being the same age, why do we not teach accordingly, allowing young people to travel through their formal education at a speed suitable for them? Why not allow them to package together the various elements of learning, classroom and experiential, in a way that works? Why do we impose a structure that works for some but not others, that allows young people to fall behind, become demotivated or simply give up? Once again I point to monastic pedagogy which allows for the needs of the individual to be met in different ways at different times. How each use their times of reading and reflection is up to them. Even the work structure has a sense of ownership built into the process. The experience of Thomas Merton and his journey through his monastic life exemplifies the flexibility and accommodation taken to ensure he made the most of who he was, even if the institution did so begrudgingly at times. 

It may be true that experiential learning only stops when we stop breathing and we have long since left the classroom. I fear many of the students in our classrooms have perfected the art of breathing for survival reasons only. Learning has long since passed them by.

Tell me what you think - glennloughrey@gmail.com

Educating Boys II

What are some of the keys to educating teenage boys? How do we activate their sense of adventure, risk-taking and questioning in such a way that it leads to wisdom?

I use the word wisdom, not learning, for a specific reason. All education is about the gaining of wisdom and, as Thomas Merton suggests, more happens outside the classroom than in it. Wisdom is the capacity to engage, evaluate and assimilate events, experiences and knowledge so that one lives a life that values and is valued by others.

Teenage boys behave chaotically, dangerously and impulsively yet can be thoughtfully, compassionate and engaged. Yet the capacity to do so requires a different pedagogy than is generally employed in schools. What does that look like?

When I was in Gethsemane Monastery, the home for 27 years forThomas Merton, I pondered how this educational institution took men, barely out of their teens, often with little education and life experience and produced writers, academics, astronomers, civil rights activists and leaders. How did that happen? How did a self-possessed young man such as Merton, who ran away from the world, became the leading Catholic author, activist and interfaith communicator of the 20th century?

As I sat in the chapel and watched the monks say the daily offices beginning at 3.15am, I began to discover the key to their success. The rule of St Benedict sets out the parameters, the monastery practices mirror this ancient rule. What happened in the chapel had not substantially changed since 1848 when the monastery began. What happened in the silence, work, learning and rhythm of Gethsemane hadn't changed substantially over that time either.

The key to working with young teenagers I believe can be found in a daily routine giving energetic young men space and boundaries to discover self and others:

• Silence & Solitude 
• Education
• Repetition
• Work
• Community - Prayer

In subsequent posts I will look at each of these separately and suggest how they may be incorporated in the modern educational offering.

Educating Teenage Boys

Recently I put my class of 13 and 14  year olds through a growth mindset quiz with interesting results using the research of Carol Dweck. What I found asks hard questions of how we do education, particularly with teenage boys.

It was anticipated that the good students in the class, primarily the girls, would score higher than the troublesome students, mostly boys. That makes sense. The good students, concentrate, work hard and get better results. Therefore it is logical that they have more of a growth mindset than the 'naughty' boys.

Wrong.

The 'naughty' boys outscored the the good students at every level. They were the ones with a high growth mindset, even though their academic scores failed to show it. Why?

My thesis is that teenage boys are risk takers, possibility thinkers and curious. They want to know what is possible and what they can do. They take risks in the social and emotional aspects of their lives. They push the boundaries, try new and sometimes dangerous 'things' and, generally, are resilient. They bounce back. They are impulsive and find themselves trying stuff they didn't think possible. They are growth mindset thinkers.

The good students have a more fixed mindset because they are committed to getting right, making sure they give the right answer, do the right thing and behave appropriately. They engage their logical thinking system 2 (Taleb) before acting.

But it is interesting to see what happens as boys progress into years 10-12. In my class these are the students who yell out, argue, comment, offer answers and get involved. Sometimes they are chaotic and create chaos but they are there, taking risks and being heard. When they get further along they have learnt that this is not appropriate for 'good' students and close down. They know they are not good academic students and therefore simply withdraw. The very tools that helped them to learn, their risk taking chaotic spontaneity, is shut down. Their growth mindset becomes a fixe mindset - 'I can't do this.' And I would add, 'I can't do this like this'.

So what do we do?

We stream classes so that we allow the boys to have the freedom to engage their teenage risk taking in a learning environment. Now, I know that goes against the prevailing attitude, but after some 30 years working with teenage boys, I believe it is an appropriate strategy. It allows the 'good' students to develop their own specific approach to learning with out them being impinged upon by the chaos of a shared class room.

I will continue to explore this and would like to know what others think.

Teenagers, Emotions and Rational Thinking!

'What were you thinking, oh, that's right, you weren't' is something I hear when adults are talking to teenagers about another internet blunder, stupid behaviour or risky stunt. And we smile and shake our heads muttering, 'teenagers!'.

Yet that question is not only directed at teenagers. What about celebrities and naked selfies, politicians and sexual indiscretions, sportsman and another alcohol induced brain failure, and road 'ragers' regardless of age? What were they thinking? The truth? They weren't.

Remember back to your last regrettable moment and try and work what was going on there. How did you find yourself in that unthinkable moment? What were you thinking? If we are honest, there was in fact little thinking going on.

We were being led by our emotions. Dan Ariely, in his book 'Predictably Irrational',  outlines the roles of emotions in negating our reasonable selves. Ask a teenager  in a classroom about safe sex, safe internet rules and safe drinking and they will provide you with all the rational and appropriate replies. They will declare that they would always engage in safe sex, that they follow internet etiquette and do not, under any circumstances drink to a dangerous level.

So what goes wrong when they find themselves in a close embrace with a school friend of the opposite sex and they haven't a condom, on facebook and are angry about being dumped by their girl/boy friend, at a party where everyone is getting tanked and their friends pester them to go for a drive? The odds are they will end up having sex, post an inappropriate image of their ex, drink too much and drive too fast.

Why? Because their emotions are hot. Emotions over-rule the logical brain in these circumstances. It really is about, 'if it feels good, just go for it'. Peer pressure, opportunity and lack of boundaries, or those who will police the boundaries, means that higher order thinking goes out the window.

If you look closely at your last regrettable incident, you will see that you were responding emotionally to the situation you found yourself in. Something somebody said or did, opportunity to experience the forbidden or overindulge, self pity, feelings of powerlessness and loneliness, grief and loss and more have conspired you to do something without engaging your brain and behaving in line with your principles.

It is the reason essentially good people behave badly.

When we say, 'What were you thinking, oh, that's right, you weren't' to a teenager, let us remember that not only are they struggling with the stages of brain development, they are also in the midst of a highly emotional period of life. They are see-sawing back and forwards between rational thought and their emotions in a way we adults have forgotten.

While it is important we educate them about relationships, bullying, internet etiquette, safe sex and socialising we must also educate them about the power of the moment, their emotions, to over-ride everything they believe they believe. Emotional education is often missing from education programs aiming to address behavioural issues.

This is a plea to educators to remember the power of their own emotions, to translate that to the out-of-control emotions of a young person struggling with adolescence and all its intricacies, and to unmask the role emotions will play in what they do.

It is their feelings that lead them, not their thinking. Just like it does for adults.

What A Waste of Time

"It was a waste of time, but I will do it again." Eden had just spent three days on a silent retreat. No technology. No needless talking.  Early to bed, early to rise. Spiritual direction. Group sesions three times a day. And more.

"It was a waste of time, but I will do it again." Eden is a typical 14 year old, bright, intelligent and very, very active. Always doing something. The biggest challenge for her was to stop doing. To stop being in a hurry. To let go of the expectation to achieve, get a result, to have something to show for her weekend out. 

It took two days of reading her book and writing in her diary, feverishly, before she arrived at the place of 'no thing doing'. Sort of. It wasn't easy to put down her book or pen and do nothing. Writing a diary is good. So is reading. But if they are a distraction from the inner journey, from the the silence and solitude of stillness, then some time apart from them is appropriate. It was in this time Eden came to appreciate the value of wasting time.

It is not easy. She almost went a little stir crazy. The preconditioned desire to be active, the implanted should of a consumerist technological society, refused to go without a fight. She became agitated and a little stressed as she remained firm in her efforts to do no thing. It did become easier. And it was good.

"It was a waste of time, but I will do it again." We live in a technological world, not so much in a mechanical sense, but in the reduction of all of life to one of endless outcomes, usefulness and instrumentality. We are in a hurry to do something useful, to achieve a result and to get the best out of everything and everyone. Life has been objectified and if it isn't useful it is deemed to be useless.

We have reduced education to the busyness of learning skills to cope with a fast changing world and to ensure we get a good paying job so we can travel, buy houses and cars and be comfortable. There is little time for reflective learning, touching the inner journey or just sitting with ourselves. What a waste of time.

We have reduced spirituality to a private practice that helps us be calm, relaxed, successful and stress free. It has been seperated from the transcendent and reduced to another pragmatic tool for sale in a consumerist society. Forget about any sense of soulful community. What a waste of time. This is all about me.

Work is about the bottom line, for both self and the employer. How to pay the bills, maintain the life style and make more. Profits, shateholders and the minimisation of responsibility to state and its citizens through the avoidance of taxes, and more, appear to rule. People lose out to the God of money. Why put people first? What a waste of time.

We have reduced the human being to a biomechanical entity which can be adjusted, improved, reinvented, supercharged and reduced to a little more than sum of its mechanical parts. Brains can be changed, mindsets reset, intelligence expanded, where does it stop? When will we cease to be human and what does it mean to be human anyway? Does being human mean living with limitations and borders? What happens when we fiddle with humanness to such an extent that we become a new creature, something other than human? Is being a human enough? What a waste of time.

Eden has begun to see that wasting time is good, neccessary and appropriate. You discover yourself, or at least make a start on the inner journey. You begin to discover unity with others and creation. You begin to discover the transcendent and your proper place in the world. You discover your centre, without which you can not engage with, or resist, the technological world in which we live.

Busyness prevents us from wasting time. Our busyness is manufactured by a technological consumer society which needs us to consume both goods and time in pursuit of being more than human. Having more, being more, doing more in some way helps us to go beyond our limitations and borders. We seek to become more than we already are. Somehow we need to leave behind ourselves in search for more, more what, we are not sure, for we have not made the time to discover who we are.

And that's the learning for Eden and the new contemplatives. We are human. We need no more. We need to become what we already are, not seek to become something else. Only through the inner journey of letting go of the shoulds found in our over hyped world and staying connected to our true self do we become fully human. It is a movement of the soul, of depth, and not of spirit which is a movement of flight. It is a slow, rythmical journey of sufering and joy, not of safety and happiness as promised by the television ads, personal well-being gurus and technological breakthroughs.

Less is more. And it is a waste of time. But I, too, will do it again. Now.

#yearwithoutalcohol

It is now almost 3 months since I started this project. And what an interesting time it has been!

Life has been as hectic and stressful as it could possibly be, perhaps a little more than usual. Work, home and personal agenda has seemed to ramped up.  Not out of control, but very high pressure.  Yet I have not felt the need to open a bottle of red and drown my anxieties as I used to. I go out to restaurants, conferences and meetings and remain alcohol free without any real effort. 

It is just what I do now.

The challenge as not been so much one that I have had to deal with, but one others have had to deal with. What do you do with or say to someone who is drinking sparkling water while you open your second bottle of wine?  After you have asked if he his still not drinking, what comes next? It is a conversation killer!

Invitations out become less and less. You are only invited now to be the designated driver, the one who can blow in the breathalyser without risk. Not drinking places you on the outside of the cultural divide. You are no longer normal or accepted as being normal.  How can you live without a drink sometime today seems to be the message? Surely no party is a party, no gourmet meal a feast without a drink?

Not drinking doesn't make you feel better necessarily nor does it make you a better person.  It just makes you a sober one who is aware of what they say and do and has the freedom to say and do no thing at all. And just a little more fiscally better off!

Try it. It is safe to do so.

#yearwithoutalcohol

Watching the news, reading the newspapers and following social media, it has been hard to miss the apparent rising incidents of alcohol fuelled violence. Young men have died because other young men have attacked and killed them, often without reason.

All the discussion about how to stop it have ranged from stronger laws, more police and more education aimed at those who are at greatest risk. Yet we seem to have ignored the role alcohol plays in our culture. The role it plays in the lives of almost every average Australian, male and female has been ignored. Is there any reason for celebration or commiseration that does not involve alcohol? Having your first drink and getting drunk is an Australian rite of passage.

It is time to change the culture.  How?

Be the change you want to see (Ghandi). It is up to you and me, gentlemen. Our children model their behaviour on ours. Let's set the example.

Join me in #yearwithoutalcohol.

I enjoy a red wine as much as anyone but I have also suffered and caused others suffer because of a dependent relationship with alcohol. I have decided the best thing I can do to change the culture is to change my own.

This will be MY #yearwithoutalcohol.

Imagine if governments went a year without alcohol taxes and sports teams, the arts and entertainment events went without alcohol sponsorship? What a message that would give!

Join me by following the hashtag and placing a comment here.

We can make a difference!