“ ... teaching, when done well and faithfully, when done as a vocation and not merely as the way to earn respect, a paycheck, and a pension, involves spiritual guidance.”
I'm thinking about Morrie Schwartz, Mark Van Doren, and Daniel Walsh these days.
Those who browse amazon.com or visit bookstores know that Morrie Schwartz is the subject of Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie, which has been near the top of the New York Times best seller list for over a year. Mark Van Doren and Dan Walsh figure significantly in the life of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. They appear in The Seven Storey Mountain and are mentioned often in the most recently published volumes of Merton's journals.
Morrie, Mark, and Dan were teachers.
Mitch Albom, a syndicated sports writer, reconnects with Morrie, his former Brandeis University college professor, as he channel surfs one night. Morrie is on Nightline. Host Ted Koppel is caught up with the story of how Morrie faces the death knell of Lou Gehrig's disease with dignity and courage.
The interview moves Mitch, too. He calls Morrie and they decide to meet on Tuesdays, as they had twenty years before. This will be Mitch's “last class” from Morrie, taught from experience with no required reading, where subjects included “love, work, community, family, aging, forgiveness, and, finally, death,” and where a funeral will be held in lieu of a graduation.
Long before the Nightline show, Mitch had known Morrie as someone who did more than teach sociology. Morrie revealed to students what a life looked like when a person made selfless choices. He understood the dilemma students anticipated as they confided to him their dreams of balancing a commitment to success and to meaningful work and their fears that they would sell out to the success side of the equation. Some, including Mitch, did just that.
Morrie attracted students because he was an attentive, available, and honest wisdom figure who did not judge but rather drew out in Mitch and others their best selves. More than a moral compass, Morrie made service and a life given in love for others not only compelling but also necessary in the human stretch for wholeness.
Probably neither Mitch nor Morrie would call Morrie a spiritual guide. But he was one.
A half century before Mitch and Morrie, Thomas Merton met Mark Van Doren and Dan Walsh at Columbia University. Van Doren was an English professor who offered, according to Merton, explorations “about any of the things that were really fundamental – life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering, eternity.” But Van Doren's influence was felt beyond the classroom as well. It was he who proposed to Merton that the door to the ordained priesthood might not be closed after his rejection by the Franciscans.
Dan Walsh, a philosophy instructor at Columbia, helped the young Merton explore possibilities that eventually led to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. Walsh had time – found time – for Tom Merton and listened as he spilled out his fragmented search for “more.” The two talked often about God and about one's response to God's plan in a bar on Manhattan's Upper West Side – not the usual venue for spiritual guidance, but that's what was taking place.
I'm thinking about Morrie, Mark, and Dan these days because of a growing conviction I have that teaching, when done well and faithfully, when done as a vocation and not merely as the way to earn respect, a paycheck, and a pension, involves spiritual guidance.
And while the fact that neither Brandeis nor Columbia is a Catholic university has not been lost on me, the odds should be better than even to find in a Catholic university, and one like mine, with a Jesuit heritage, some faculty members willing to serve the promise of young persons.
The additional fact that attention to the spirit takes place with academic types like Morrie, Mark and Dan should jolt those who consider spiritual guidance to be solely the province of campus ministers.
Not all faculty would be interested in such activity; not everyone would have what it takes to do this well. Those most eager to hang out a shingle as spiritual guides to students might be the least gifted and could cause harm.
What paying attention to the spiritual entails is the formation and development of personality. Personality, in this sense, needs to be understood as more than “personality theories” or within simplistic questionnaires that speckle the pages of popular magazines. Rather, what is at stake in personality formation is a person's developing into the unique being God created. In the best of worlds, parents, friends, and spouses serve that promise, but sometimes teachers do, too.
Friedrich von Hugel, the British theologian who wrote about spiritual guidance, held that personality is growth and movement outward and beyond the preoccupied self. It is a gift and an achievement – the actuation of what was there at the beginning, as offered, as grace.
Personality, for von Hugel, is not individualism but the process of constituting a self. It involves dropping all favorable comparisons of self with others, all competition, all unnecessary self occupation, and replacing them with love, service, adaptability, and attention to others.
Von Hugel thought that young people – university-aged young adults particularly – must take responsibility for what they have been given and for what they might become. The heart of personality, after all, does not lie in freedom of choice but in what that freedom chooses and becomes.
Morrie, Mark, and Dan sound like people who understood what Friedrich von Hugel was talking about. They also help us profile what spiritual guides are like.
Such guides, first of all, are persons who surrender themselves to a higher power that for me, as a Christian theologian, is a personal God. Because of this yielding, guides assume no position of power over others and resist the almost irresistible trap as professors to have all or even some of the answers.
A second trait: they are persons of humility.
Third, they are persons who recognize that young people's dreams are not their own dreams. So they honor and remain faithful to the young person's dream, encouraging him or her to stay the course. Almost routinely at class reunions students reminisce with or about professors who believed in them, saw them through a fog, or otherwise inspired them. Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach, to cite one example, often tells the story of how a Jesuit introduced him to the Aeneid and fatus, the notion of destiny, which molds Paterno (and probably his team) to this day.
A fourth quality is closely allied to this one: spiritual guides believe that one person can make a difference and that action flowing from contemplation has revolutionary possibilities. Spiritual guidance happens only one person at a time, but even so, a sacramental principle soon takes shape with an awareness that the world is redeemable precisely because no one works alone but rather is connected with others.
Fifth, the intellectual lives of guides are honed to appreciate that the social critique acquired in the classroom is not enough unless it leads to an acceptance of the burden of a given situation and a willingness to become responsible for that situation. In fact, according to Jesuit Jon Sobrino, “the finality of a Christian university lies in making society grow in the direction of the kingdom of God.”
Sixth, because of all of the above, spiritual guides serve as integrators for students who no longer see classroom learning and a daily life of faith and values conjoined. The Jesuit tradition once offered, and in its new form may still offer, the ratio studiorum as a system of education to synthesize and link classical education with Christian values. In a secularized culture, spiritual guides may be the ones who keep lines of communication open so that faith and critical inquiry can be valued and discussed.
Joseph Appleyard, SJ, writes of the Catholic university as a place where religious experience is brought into dialogue with “secular” knowledge with no apologies, indeed, with a sense that this conversation is a crucial component of what an authentically Catholic university stands for. I suggest that spiritual guides are the ones who connect the dots and are the point persons for that activity. Perhaps these spiritual guides are those who will keep alive the spirit of the ratio studiorum until a ratio nova takes shape and takes hold.
I encouraged my own children's choices of Catholic colleges. Though my son chose Notre Dame and my daughter Georgetown not especially because these were Catholic institutions but for a number of reasons, that was fine with me. But I hoped they would both find professors who took seriously the exciting, complex, irreplaceable human beings entrusted to them. I wanted them to be surrounded by adults who honored the intellectual life but who valued the spiritual as well and who knew how to inspire, inform, and nurture.
I was not disappointed. More important, neither were my children. In both places my children met professors who appreciated and influenced their lives, who inspired a vision of and solidarity with the underserved as the nexus for happiness, and who understood on some intuitive level that heart-mind-soul-body is not divisible.
I am aware of what I wished for my children whenever I enter a classroom. Behind each student I see parents like myself who throw caution and money to the wind, trusting that their daughter or son will come across a Morrie or a Dan or a Mark who will ask the right question the right way at the right time, who will challenge or reconfirm a vision of their world that makes a difference, who know that a baptism of social responsibility is at the heart of education, and who believe as von Hugel did that the promise of personality is worth serving because it yields a graced freedom incalculable at any price.