| January 24, 2010 | To Teach One Another Reverend Don Vaughn-Foerster |
Education is one of those words that means different things to different people. Definitions run the gamut from to inculcate the teacher’s or the society’s values and mindsets in the other person, i.e. indoctrination; through training a student to use a tool, a concept, or a behavior, as in apprenticing and coaching; and on to facilitating intellectual development and spiritual enlightenment. As a church we do all of these to some extent; but, different from the government or private school down the street, we do it from a religious perspective. We do “religious” education, or at least attempt to do so.
Religious education is of primary importance to the quality and the survival of any Unitarian congregation. We have to do a first class job in this area or we, ultimately, have little to offer new members when they come. When we take seriously the educating of ourselves religiously, we lift ourselves above ideas and practices of the past. When we take seriously the educating of our children religiously, we give them the chance to go where their own inquiries take them. We free both them and ourselves from those ideas of others that we have found spiritually insufficient.
By religious education I mean not only learning about the content, the practices, and the history of religion but also seeking wisdom about life in general. Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines “education” as “that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.” Bierce observed that education can produce both those who understand and those who only think they understand. That gets to the point of what I think “religious” education is all about. I think it is a search for the limits of our understanding -- a search for wisdom, the wisdom that helps us understand where we actually are in relation to each other and in the scheme of things; the wisdom that acknowledges both the primacy of the intellect and the necessity of the heart for understanding. After all, it is the deepening of the mind and the widening of human experience that enables us to know what we know and what we don’t know and that enables us to look beyond superstition and blind faith (those twin tyrants that enslave human beings to their fantasies.) In the history of our free faith, thriving congregations have almost always had such strong and effective religious education for both adults and the young folks. A religious group needs a “school” -- actually, it needs to be not just a place of community, worship, and social action, but also it needs to be a school -- if it is to succeed.
As adults we all recognize that we need to continue to educate ourselves because information about human beings and their environment increases so fast these days. Therefore, we read books, watch television programs, go to movies, attend self-improvement classes, work on undergraduate and advanced degrees, participate in workshops, discussion groups, and seminars at the Fellowship, and listen to religious addresses (sermons). We do all this with active, receptive but critically acute minds (we hope).
Along with the need to celebrate life and to participate in a welcoming, supportive, and justice-seeking community, education (especially religious education) is one of the main reasons we come here. If we come only for community involvement and celebration, we have only a wobbly two-legged religious stool that is more likely to support self-satisfied, faith-oriented “bottom structure” than aspire to understanding. In such a situation we have to invent a third leg of outside, arbitrary truth to keep our basic beliefs, i.e. our religious bottoms, from falling over.
If we have children, we are even more interested in the religious education aspect of the church. We want our children to be as well and as reliably informed as possible about their religious beliefs. We want them to recognize the religious shell games going on around them and in which many of their friends uncritically participate. We want them to have the tools to become well-informed, clear-headed adults. We want them to know enough about the religious world not to be like the youngster who thought Shirley Temple was a synagogue for children.
If we no longer have children in our own homes, we still have a great stake in the religious education of the children of our fellow members. Unless these young folks are provided for, the future of our religious community is put at risk -- for it simply won’t exist very long unless young families are continually joining it. Religious education for children and young people is a basic, continuing -- necessary -- activity of this congregation.
This congregation is lucky to have within it some young parents and a few older adults who understand this. FUCV has a solid religious education program for its children. It is not a large program at this time, but it is a firm foundation on which to build a much larger program as more young families are added to the church. We need it because the world out there is preaching to our children whether we are or not.
A young mother once told me about an experience her daughter had with a little girl friend. It seems that this friend had asked several times for her daughter to go to church with her and for a variety of reasons this mother did not think it was a good idea. But the little girl persisted until one day on the playground she pressed the issue rather strongly. This mother, feeling sorry for having to disappoint the little girl, still made it clear that her daughter was not going to go. With that the little friend broke out in tears and cried, “Now I won’t get my candy bar for bringing a friend to class.”
This kind of pressure is not put on children here. Children here are not rewarded for proselytizing; they get their juice and cookies anyway. Furthermore, what they get from the adults who deal with them is a deep concern that they learn to deal with life and ideas on their own terms. What the children of this congregation truly get is a foundation on which to build wisdom. A wag once said that “smart” is when you believe only half of what you hear; “brilliant” is when you know which half to believe. Here we try to show which half is which or if either half is to be believed.
On the adult level there are still more reasons for adult concern about religious education. The adults themselves need study groups, discussion groups, forums, and the like because, unless these are available, the quality of intellectual involvement in the congregation tends to diminish. The Sunday morning service and its religious addresses (i.e., sermons) are too much a one way street to keep a religious search for wisdom healthy. This requires a lot of initiative and participative cooperation from individual members themselves.
The main point I want to get across today is that we all have a stake in religious education whether it is the education of children or the continuing education of adults. Perhaps this will be better understood if I talk a bit more about what makes religious education “religious” in the first place. In a figurative way, let's picture the human being as divided into two parts: an inner and an outer. On the one hand, there is what we may call the core; on the other hand, what we may call the husk. By core I mean that which is the person’s innate being, that person’s nature or essence. Biblical theology calls this the soul or the spirit, or the heart. By husk I mean all those things about a person that are added to the person from outside -- things that originate exterior to the person and are incorporated in the person’s environmental self. This part of the person is sometimes called “personality”, the person’s means of relating to the outside world.
By and large, it is the environmental self (the husk) with which one’s education is usually concerned. It is the environmental self that most parents, teachers, ministers, and friends seek to mold, develop, and admonish in children and in each other because this is the part of the person that is easy to see. The other, the inner core, is too hidden from us, too subjective, easily to identify or be concerned with -- or so it seems.
So, oftentimes, much effort is made to teach the other person (child, teenager, adult) to be well adjusted or schooled in the group’s values and practices according to the teacher’s or the group’s views of what that means. More often than not, this is only to tinker with those aspects of the other person that are external to the person’s real self and real desires. Consequently, what we are trying to teach is likely to be in contradiction to the other person’s pure conscience.
It is here that we most often miss the mark, for a kind of “education” it might be, but “religious” it is not. Religion does not begin in that part of us that we take-in from the outside. Religion begins in that place within us where we feel most acutely the impact of our existence. Religion begins where we ask the most pointed questions of ourselves about our own identity, the nature of the world, and the worth of persons around us. Religion is applied in our daily lives but it begins in the core – the heart or soul, if you prefer.
It’s a sad result that when all our attention is focused on our “environmental self” -- as it is when we are concerned with learning by rote, or lecture, or superficial dialogue -- we easily lose the “feel” of who we really are and we forget how to think thoughts that are our own. If our education is to have anything religious about it, it must allow us to see the deeper dimensions of meaning that, ultimately, can only be experienced and appraised by our inner sense of being.
In Unitarianism we make great claims for the quality of our religious education, and much of it is justified. But it is just as easy for us to turn out “rote” liberals as it is for other religions to turn out “rote” fundamentalists. This is what we are likely to do if we do not touch our children or each other in the core of being.
Now the question: How are we to organize ourselves to touch our children and each other in this way? Historically, our efforts at education have tended toward inculcation of liberal notions and practices in children and, hopefully, encouraging teens and young adults to stay with the program of learning and thinking that we think we have taught. At the same time we have tended to assume that adults don’t need much organized attention in these matters but can pretty much follow whatever their whims and wishes may be. The result usually has been the forfeiting of the opportunity to identify in the young and to continue to develop in the old an ever-expanding understanding of life. We often have focused on social skills and personal self-esteem in the young and, in the old, on unchallenging workshops, lectures, and classes that are issue-oriented and abstract-concept-centered. Furthermore, given our emphasis on individual privacy in matters of personal belief, we tend to evade the necessary prerequisite to acquiring wisdom, which is seriously to delve into experiences of the heart as well as deeply to probe the mind. The alternative is more fully to focus on what the content of our inner core means to the expression of our outer husk – and to do this across all age groups. It means making substantive effort to speak to the spirit throughout our span of life, both individually and collectively.
Our CUC and UUA headquarters have finally come up with an approach to religious learning that has such promise. It is what is being called Lifespan Learning. This asserts that learning is a lifetime project, starting in childhood, proceeding into adolescence, and continuing throughout the complete phases of adulthood. The basic notion is that, throughout our lives, we need to deal with information and experience in spiritual encounter – if that is not the way you would put it, then by forming a personal relationship with that information (i.e. truly internalizing it.)
This is a new paradigm that means letting knowledge touch us in our inner being, in our core. New curricula have been devised to encourage, if not completely to enable, this and many Unitarian and UU churches are changing their religious education programs to function in this way.
In fact this church has a Lifespan Learning Task Force that, for some months, has been engaged in reorienting religious education in this direction. When their plans are put in place this coming fall, planning for the education program will then be integrated and holistic so that all age groups, from childhood through adulthood, will be dealing with similar subjects according to the interests, needs, and capabilities of the age group.
It is not for me to describe that program this morning, but a good bit of information about it has been making its way through the religious education department this year. And now the Task Force is ready to share its efforts with the whole congregation at a workshop that is to be held after the worship service next Sunday. I hope those of you who take religion and education seriously will be at that workshop. It could well be a defining moment in the history of this congregation.
Let me leave you with these thoughts. I believe we want the education of both our children and ourselves to be more than merely superficial and informational; we want it to be religious. And for this to happen we must open ourselves (our inner selves, our core) to those we would teach and be taught by. If our religious education is to have a truly religious dimension, our aim must be to stimulate in one another a morality that is not superimposed, but that stems from within, a spirituality that is not feigned but that is real and profound. Ultimately, this is the only way in which we can “teach one another” and learn from one another in religious terms.
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