Teaching as Vocation—Part III: Formulations to Reality

The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (Summer, 2014), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

To a person, my elementary, middle, and high school teachers in the small western Pennsylvania town of Hollidaysburg were conscientious and cared about us.

Depressurizing Students

I recall one typifying moment in which I went to a ninth grade history teacher, saying that I was afraid I might be having a nervous breakdown—going to school, doing homework, working 25 hours a week in a barber shop as an apprentice, being in the school band, and practicing for a school play at night. What Miss Ruck said to me (words I clearly recall) was unbelievably liberating and healing: “For the next few weeks, I want you to sit in the back of the room and look at TIME magazines. You are excused from any assignments for the time being. Do not feel any pressure from me. You can do this. You are making the highest grade in the class and you can stand to ease up. Just get to feeling better.”

And I did what she said. And I got over my anxiety. I cannot tell you how often I have thought of the grace of that moment and sought to pass it forward to students of mine who found themselves in stress or distress.

My later years as pastor of a congregation for three years in Asheboro, North Carolina further instilled in me this recognition that students have lives larger than my experience with them in the classroom and at the same time deepened in me a sense of compassionate concern for each student in my care—whether they did well in my class or not.

Crisis of Faith

I went to Gettysburg College, an excellent liberal arts college and I was offered an outstanding education. I did not always make the most of it and I did not always do so well, but it was there for the taking. I started out as a history major. I did not do well learning facts and piecing together the dynamics of so many historical periods (Ironically my dissertation revised as my first book was a historical study!). So I changed to become a philosophy major.

Studying philosophy was a critical experience in my life because it created in me a profound crisis of faith. I was the child of a pastor. As a youth, I had been very active in church and regional youth groups. I planned to be a Lutheran pastor, like my father. But that was not the only reason why I was religious. When I was fifteen I had a powerful mystical experience of the presence of God that transformed my life and flooded me with love.

While I told no one about this experience until years later, the relationship with God that this experience generated quietly fed my inner life and an intense love for others over many years. Then, when I was a senior in college and studying philosophy, I realized that the entire way in which I had conceived my religious experience and imagined the reality of God was simply untenable. When the framework for my religious experience crumbled, so did my relationship with a god, my peace, and, frankly, the strength of my love. I felt empty and desolate.

From Formulations to Reality

After college, I went to England to study at Oxford. There I not only had the intellectual experience of the absence of God; in addition, I had a profound existential experience of that absence—of there being no god, an empty sky, no meaning in the universe, no inherent meaning whatsoever in life. In its own way, this experience of disintegration was just as profound as my earlier mystical experience of integration. I came to believe that meaning, any meaning, would have to be created by us. I was not agnostic, as if I were unsure; rather, I was an atheist by belief and life experience—not by a choice, it was just the way it was.

Needless to say, I struggled with this death or non-existence of God for many years. When you are in such an honest quest, you never know what the outcome will be. And you do not know if you will ever again recover faith or encounter God. However, I had given the study of philosophy a chance in college, so why not give the study of religion a chance in seminary. And, indeed, it was my study of the Bible at Oxford that enabled me slowly, bit by bit, to come back to faith—or rather, I should say, go forward and find some new and richer experiences of God.

It was an ongoing, indeed intermittent experience of God that became integral to my quest and that permitted me to be free to doubt, free to know uncertainty as part of faith, free to embrace ambiguity amidst a relationship with God that was ever changing, dissolving, re-emerging, and growing. I became comfortable with doubt and disbelief, and even loss of faith, as an integral part of the journey—to doubt my formulations of God so that I might leave space for the reality of God hopefully to emerge and surprise me in new ways.

The Gift of Experience

Now, when I teach, I have never, ever set out to create a crisis of faith for my students so as to replicate my loss and recovery of faith. Nevertheless, the material we study in the Bible and the conversations we have in class often lead students into a crisis of some dimension of their faith.

The gift from my own experience is that I am wholly comfortable with such crises. I am not afraid for students in their struggles. And I can often provide some guidance that enables them not to be afraid, but also not to back off or withdraw or abort their quest for the meaning of life in a way that would block the work of God in their lives—even in their disbelief.

But even more than this, I learned from my experience the most valuable lesson—that learning can be transformative, that education is not just a matter of adding on knowledge or skills or methods to what they already knew, although it can be that. Rather, learning can be intensely personal and life-changing.

I am not talking about conversion. I never preached in college classes and did not seek to lead anyone to be Christian. Nor am I speaking of psychological therapy. That has no place in the classroom. Rather, I see learning (and teaching) as a process of challenge and growth, in which the human spirit is engaged in a process of change and movement, without knowing what direction it might take or what outcome it might have.

The Adventure of Being Human

I invite students to engage with their learning, to entertain ideas, to embrace possibilities, to imagine new worlds, to experience the lives of people different from themselves, to let their beliefs and values be challenged, to be open to change and difference. I think that this is just good education with most any subject—from anthropology to political science to ecology.

One of the most depressing moments of my teaching career was when a student at Carthage said to me, “I don’t think anyone is going to change in college. By this age everyone’s mind is made up about things.” I was not so much discouraged in my role as teacher as I was sad for her and others like her who just shut their minds to the adventure of being human.

My role as a teacher was not to decide how the student should be changed or transformed or how they should come out at the end. That was not up to me. Besides, that is a mystery out of my control and beyond my purview.

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