Introduction to SSCS Presidential Address 2021

Abstract

Introduction to SSCS Presidential Address 2021 Steven Chase How are we to teach spirituality? Most people who pick up this issue of Spiritus ask themselves this question any time they enter a space where they are faced with the gift and challenge of doing just that. Teaching spirituality is not a "lifestyle", it is not even a comprehensive "way of life". It is, as Barbara Quinn convincingly describes the art and practice of teaching spirituality, a desire to find the roads by which we "lead the students into the heart and soul of a text, a person, a tradition, a practice."1 Teaching spirituality is, for teacher as well as for student, an exploration of desire. It is the artful process of finding answers that sow seeds of evergreen questions leading to what Dr. Quinn calls "the edge of mystery" through the "pedagogy of discernment". For Dr. Quinn "the edge of mystery" is of course explored by words, but words alone do not fully access the edge, let alone the core of mystery. Exploring mystery in a pedagogical environment is a process which engages the full person focused within the dynamics of the present. Spirituality or teaching spirituality, whether apophatic or cataphatic, hopeful or in a state of ambiguous grief, is journey that, as Dr. Quinn makes clear, engages body, mind, heart, and spirit. This whole-person-knowing reveals the present. And, it can leave us transfixed by wonder. Wonder, born of attentiveness or contemplation of the present moment, prepares and initiates choices that are not based on agitation, fear, or instability. Ryan Holiday outlines in his book, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, the arts of being at peace regardless of what is happening in the present moment.2 The Stoic Philosopher, Epictetus for instance, writes of something beyond the explosions of mystery, words that do begin to touch; they may even become the present: [End Page 1] For if a person shifts their caution to their own reasoned choices and acts of those choices, they will at the same time gain the will to avoid, but if they shift their caution away from their own reasoned choices to things not under their control, seeking to avoid what is controlled by others, they will then be agitated, fearful, and unstable. Epictetus, Discourses, 2.1.12 As Quinn, too, reminds us, to teach spirituality is to teach students to pursue their own reasoned choices, leading to the possibilities of serenity, tranquility, stability, knowledge, and love. And again, so much more than these words alone, she reminds us of the choice of the present…and how we arrived here. Within the essay on the pedagogy of spirituality, Dr. Quinn moves from the birth of monastic and scholastic schools in the Latin West during the twelfth century to, Ignatius of Loyola and the pedagogy of discernment, to contemporary work on right hemisphere-left hemisphere brain functions and their effect on the pedagogy of spirituality. Dr. Quinn also works to remind us of the importance of the recovery of embodied spirit in Christian spirituality. In her most basic question within this important and intriguing essay, Quinn asks, "Will we wake to the opportunity that teaching spirituality has to inch us back to a view of life in its wholeness?"3 Approached from several different meaningful perspectives, she encourages us toward and makes the case for relearning the reality of embodied spirit as a form of spiritual wholeness. In pursuing this she follows, for instance, Ignatius of Loyola and the power of learning and discerning the "language of the Spirit" as a language of both heart and knowledge. As the prophet Jeramiah writes, flowing into us from the unceasing divine presence comes, "a heart of knowledge that I am God" (24:7 NIV) Heart and knowledge, body and soul are what Quinn explores. In reading it, you will remember who you are and why you do what you do. We, most of us if not all, teach and learn spirituality wherein the language of the Spirit communicates to us as whole persons wholly in the present. Thank you for reminding us all of this, and more, Barbara...