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