"Voluntary Simplicity"

I love Grand Rapids. I've become quite comfortable here. The hot summers filled with fireflies and beach visits make up for the spiteful, stinging winters. There's something about comfort, though, that allows me to start thinking, "Yeah, I'm pretty awesome." In places of comfort, I often fool myself into a kind of blissful complacency when it comes to evaluating my own character. However, I've found I'm never allowed to remain happily ignorant for long...

More than one person has told me that I don't deal with change very well. In all fairness, I've experienced more than my fair share of "big life changes" moving back and forth from Colorado to Japan to South Korea. I would say I adapt pretty well, but those people are right; change in my life is usually met by great resistance and a shocking volume of tears. I'm moving into my senior year at Calvin, and as though I weren't facing enough change, my nineteen-year-old sister has moved in with me. Suffice it to say we have never gotten along.

At the Service-Learning Center, we have a summer reader filled with insightful articles that introduce old and new staff to service-learning as pedagogy and life philosophy. This week's article was titled "Preparing the Way for Justice." Lofty, right? "Here we go..." I thought as I dove into the reading. After skimming my way through a discussion of Kant's Metaphysics and Morals, my eyes and mind slowed down to read about the application of these metaphysics and morals through the lens of Thomas Merton's Life and Holiness. The spiritual discipline of "voluntary simplicity" especially caught my eye. Bradford Hadaway, the author, was presenting spiritual disciplines like voluntary simplicity as a teaching method for introducing students to a deeper understanding of service-learning. As always, such practices just as useful outside the classroom as inside. The author writes that, "simplicity expressed as a spiritual discipline is first and foremost an attempt to clear away things that clutter both our inner and outer lives." My mother, ever-ready with her piercing insights of my character flaws, told me yesterday the reason I don't get along with my sister is because we have inherently different value systems. Over 20+ years, she noticed that I value materials, while my sister values relationships. Both have their benefits and pitfalls, she told me. I take good care of my possessions but cling to tightly to them sometimes. My sister takes good care of her friends but sometimes can't see when helping them is hurting them. Needless to say, the fullness of both our personalities clash when my stuff is scratched, broken, or otherwise carelessly strewn around. I'm person that likes explanations more than coincidences, so as much as it makes me cringe to admit it, sometimes articles, conversations, rainbows, or what-have-you catch me at just the right moment and make me think hard about the space between who I am and who I'm called to be.

With all this change happening, I've had plenty of opportunities to be reminded that I'm not nearly as good, patient, understanding, and generous as I sometimes think I am. Hadaway writes, "The practice of the spiritual disciplines in their thick sense can develop the moral imagination necessary to break out of our narrow and limited perspectives about how the world operates and what people are like." Service-learning is all about discomfort. It's about the life-value-changing, world-rocking, headache-generating activity of making ourselves vulnerable enough for our flaws to be exposed and to be reminded that things aren't always as they seem. I honestly may never get along swimmingly with my sister, but her presence reminds me that I'm called to "lay up treasures in heaven" and not cling to desperately to my "stuff." As for being a senior, I still dislike the prospect of leaving the comfort I've found in Grand Rapids in less than one year, but maybe I can welcome the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of God's work in other cities.

Peace,

Anna
StreetFest Coordinator

We Practice: Covenant Making

At the beginning of every year, the student staff of the Service-Learning Center honkers down in a room for a couple of hours with the intention of creating a covenant. It’s quite the involved process. We grapple with the task of somehow developing a collective description, a sort of mission statement, with the hopes that it might best reflect upon the work we do and the nuances involved with doing it.

After hours of producing, we then attach ourselves to this covenant. Through revisiting it, creating visual representation, reminding each other, and pushing one another to put these words to action, the goal is to produce a living covenant.

The Covenant of the 2009-2010 S-LC Staff reads as follows:

“Rooted in the hope of what can be, together with conviction and humility, we practice. *Clap*

Crying out

Asking for forgiveness

Engaging

Educating

Challenging

Hospitality

Building

Joy

Faithfulness

*Clap* Rooted in the hope of what can be, together with conviction and humility, we practice.”

Each person on staff has chosen one of these practices to focus on throughout the year. In order to better remind ourselves of these practices in our daily lives, we took some time during our staff retreat to create individual paintings of our practices. These will hang together in our office.

In order to work on these disciplines together, the group has decided to shape our staff weekly staff meetings around the covenant. Aside from beginning our meetings with it, we’ve been taking turns leading the meetings. Each week’s theme focuses on one of the practices, and the assigned staff member provides points of reflection, activities to bring to life some of its different aspects, and questions for discussion.

It’s been a challenging and humbling reminder of the different practices involved in a life of faith. It’s evident that some of us are more gifted in certain practices more than others, but that as we challenge one another to grow in new areas, these practices can come together to shape both us individually and as a whole community, in rather exciting ways.

Education, Service-Learning, and Christian Practices

A few weekends ago, the S-LC staff enjoyed our annual fall retreat. For the discussion portion of our evening away, we discussed two essays; one, a chapter in Craig Dykstra's book, Growing in the Life of Faith - we discussed chapter five, "Education in Christian Practices." The second essay was an address by Nicholas Wolterstorff entitled, "Christian Learning in and for a Pluralist Society." Below is a window into our conversation:

Two different Latin roots provide us with the English word "education." They are, first, "educare," which means to rear or bring up, as a child – to train, shape, or to mold, and second, "educere," meaning to draw out from within, or to lead forth. Both meanings are represented in the word "education." Many of the hot debates about education today are rooted in the differences between educere and educare.

Wolterstorff answers the question, “why make what is simple (the gospel of Christ) so complicated?” What is the place of Christian learning in a pluralist society?

Dykstra discusses what Christian practices have to do with education.

Practices are loosely defined as “habitations of the Spirit,” or “forms of participation in the practice of God.” “Patterns of communal action that create openings in our lives where the grace, mercy, and presence of God may be made known to us.”

Wolterstorff says that Christian learning allows Christian faith to shape it, from measuring what is legitimate to investigate, to affecting how one treats fellow learners and investigators. He says that “Christian learning is faithful learning. Learning faithful to faith in the triune God, learning faithful to the Christian community and its tradition, learning faithful to the Christian scriptures.”

Christian learning is also the learning that forms and shapes us. He uses the concept of “Christian enculturation.” He says, “being a Christian will incorporate a certain identifiable cultural formation. And for the acquisition of that formation, education is indispensable. Not necessarily academic learning; but certainly education.”

Wolterstorff sees learning ultimately as eucharistic, or grateful, and eirenic, or peace-bringing. It also carries the potential to bring destruction, and it isn’t always grateful, but in its purest forms it is eucharistic and eirenic. He also says that “Christian learning contributes to our shalom by interpreting reality and answering our questions.”

Wolterstorff shudders to think that the American Christian impulse is to downplay “the learning that helps to keep alive and hand on that tradition which consists of the eucharistic and eirenic cultural activities of our forefathers and foremothers in the faith.” Learning allows us to remember and be inspired by those who have gone before and who can instruct and inspire us for the work of the Kingdom.

He discusses the fact of our national directional/religious pluralism. In this context, “the business of Christian learning in our pluralistic society is to give content to the Christian voice in that dialogue which ought to be taking place in the public square of American society.” That public square is full of ideas about what justice and peace look like. Wolterstorff argues that Christians ought to bring the prophets, the gospel, the Christian wisdom of the ages, humbly to bear within that public square.

He makes the claim that “if there is to be that voice on behalf of biblical justice, there must be Christian learning.” The conversation that includes the Christian voice in dialogue with other voices may never take place, but if it ever does, Christian learning will be indispensable in order for a Christian voice to participate. Christian learning, according to Wolterstorff, must be accompanied by Christian virtues.

Dykstra then, in explaining what the practices are, and how they fit into a program of education, concludes that Christian practices, while sharing much in common with other types of practices, have the fundamental difference of not being about mastery and control – but of being about receiving gifts and grace instead.

Christian practices (think Crying Out, Asking for Forgiveness, Engaging, Educating, Challenging, Hospitality, Building, Joy, and Faithfulness) are human activities that are cooperative, socially established, and coherent and complex. They contribute to human moral progress.

“Practices are those cooperative human activities through which we, as individuals and as communities, grow and develop in moral character and substance.” Importantly, Dykstra argues, they can be taught, and hence, passed down from one generation to the next.

The way to learning a practice, according to Dykstra, is through good coaching, lots of words, attention and analysis, apprenticeship, some reading, conversation and argumentation, and a lot more physicality than we think. We need models, mentors, teachers and partners in practice. We also need to be models, mentors, teachers and partners in practice.

Dykstra acknowledges that we live in a world with multiple layers of practices, not all of which are Christian. What are some of our regular practices that are embedded in other layers of our layers outside the specific orbit of our Christian faith?

Here is where Wolterstorff and Dykstra overlap. Dykstra agrees with Wolterstorff in his comments relative to the intersection between our civic and our Christian practices and commitments. “Education in Christian faith must concern itself with the mutual influences that various practices have on one another, as well as with whatever complementarity or conflict may exist between the goods internal to Christian practices and goods internal to others. Because we are all citizens, for example, we must inquire in to the nature, effects, and implications of our simultaneous engagement in practices constitutive of Christian life and those central to public life in the broader culture. We need to inquire, for example, into the continuities and discontinuities between medical practice in our society and practices of care for the ill and the dying that are now and have been in the past characteristic of the church. This applies also to a wide variety of other social practices.”

Dykstra ends with an explanation of how Christian practices are peculiar from other practices. Fundamentally, this difference lies in the area of mastery, excellence and control. Rather than mastery, the human task according to the Christian story is to use the gifts of God rightly as gifts for good. Trust and grateful receptivity replace mastery and control as the end goals. Rather than excellence, we aim for faithfulness.

It is no coincidence that faithfulness is the final practice in the S-LC covenant for this year.

Questions

How are the practices in our covenant, like baseball learn-able? Teachable? Able to be analyzed?

How do they actually get practiced?

In what ways is the learning that attaches to service-learning like educere (draw out), and in what ways is it like educare (shape, mold)?

How are the practices that the Service-Learning Center enables and encourages designed to equip Calvin students to participate in the public square dialogue that Wolterstorff talks about?

How are our practices (Crying Out, Asking for Forgiveness, Engaging, Educating, Challenging, Hospitality, Building, Joy, and Faithfulness) designed to educate us with educere, or educare?