Happy Monday,
I came across a profound quote this morning that made me think about my many years of education and how thankful I am for a very important aspect of it. I hope it encourages you.
OH.
And itβs a short week this week, friends (for those of us in the US, anyways). Itβs only Monday, but I can almost smell the goodness that is coming on Thursday.
Have a wonderful day,
Glenn || PATREON / BUY ME A COFFEE
One of the things I most value about the education I got from Nyack College and Alliance Theological Seminary (both very Evangelical schools) is the emphasis they put on "inner work".
Now.
My thoughts regarding "inner work" have changed a lot since my days in the classroom. For instance, I used to place a high value on the "demonic world" and the need to "deal with our demons". I was very big on "spiritual warfare" and facing the literal demons in our lives. For me, this was a huge, huge piece of the inner work someone needed to do. I believed that we are all carrying demons around in our lives and we need to face them (often with help from someone wiser and more mature) in order to be and to live truly free.
I don't really believe that anymore to the extent that I used to.
However, I do still place a high value on "inner work". And what I mean by that is that we all have the need to look inside of ourselves, come to grips with the ways in which our past selves have been hurt, begin to realize the lives we have constructed in an effort to cope with that hurt. and pursue healing so that the past versions of ourselves can be set free from the baggage they carry and our present and future selves and be all that they can be.
Inner healing.
Inner child work.
Therapy.
All sorts of inner work was a huge focus at my school and, as a result, it's a huge focus of my life today. In fact, during my first semester in the doctoral program one of the assignments was to go through 6 months of therapy with a licensed therapist and write a few papers on what we discovered about our hurts, pain, baggage, coping mechanisms, etc. and then work with the therapist to pursue healing and growth in these areas. In that class we also had a Licensed Psychologist come in for a whole day of lectures, which ultimately led to an assignment where we had to research our family tree back to as many as 5 or 6 generations so that we could better learn "family patterns" and see what healthy/unhealthy patterns had been passed down to us ... AND we had to bring those findings to our therapist and work through it all with them. We THEN had to take detailed notes of those therapy sessions and turn them into the professor who met with us separately to talk to us about how all of what we were discovering about ourselves would/couple impact our present and future "ministries", families, etc.
Phew.
Right?
A doctoral program.
Semester 1.
THIS was the kind of work we were doing, and it was (and is) so, so important.
This morning I came across an essay by Parker Palmer called "Healing Our Divides From the Inside Out" where he says that, "in the United States, education is about mastering knowledge generated by others, and developing the skill to use that knowledge to impact the external world. In most cases, the higher one goes in education, the farther one drifts from self-knowledge."
What a profound idea, right?
Education in the Western world really is about mastering the knowledge that someone else has generated. Inner work aside, in seminary we had classes on ...
Theology.
Doctrine.
History.
Leadership.
Etc.
... and the emphasis in these classes was to memorize ideas, memorize arguments, memorize principles, memorize dates and movements and systems and then be tested on those ideas, arguments, principles, dates, movements, and systems so that we could receive a passing grade to advance to the next level of memorization or a failing grade to retake the classes again.
I was fortunate to have (what I think was) a mix of knowledge mastering AND the inner work I described above, but a lot of seminary students get NO inner work in their schools so that the focus is ALL about mastering the ideas of others and being able to toss them back out into the world with their own unique spin on them.
The result?
The higher they climb the education ladder.
The more degrees they get.
The more knowledge they master.
... The further away they travel from truly knowing themselves and being aware of their issues, their wounds, their hurts, their coping mechanisms, etc.
And.
Honestly.
The results of that can be deadly especially when that person graduates from those institutions and is given the power of a "pastor" or a "minister" or a "priest" who is responsible for fostering the spiritual lives of a congregation of people.
Why?
Because chances are pretty good that that minister will teach his/her/their congregation to master the ideas they learned in seminary as opposed to using what they learned in seminary to help lead that congregation into a deeper sense of self-awareness so that the individuals in the pews can develop into more whole human beings whose focus will be less on the mastering of ...
Doctrines.
Theologies.
Bible verses.
Etc.
... and more on becoming a person of love and grace and inclusion who will make the world around them and the people in that world better.
This morning I'm spending a few quiet moments reflecting on the hurts of my past and how those hurts have groomed me to respond to situations today that make me feel the ways I felt back when I was first wounded 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago. I've talked about "inner child work" before - this idea of realizing we have a younger version of ourselves inside of us who has experienced hurt or pain or abandonment or whatever and that the child responds internally to today's external circumstances that remind him/her/them of that initial wounding.
Yes.
I'm having coffee with younger Glenn today and we're chatting about life, giving each other a pep-talk, listening to each other's fears and worries and concerns.
Perhaps your inner child would benefit from the same today.