Teaching

By Maria Harris

The chapter which is a theological reflection on the nature of teaching, from the book: Teaching and Religious Imagination, Harper and Row, San Francisco

Several years ago, while teaching a course called "Religious Models of Teaching," I asked the students to answer the question, "What is teaching?" in Haiku form. Bill Maroon wrote: We meet awkwardly. I invite you to walk. I find you dancing. Bill's poem captures some of the beauty, artistry, and depth of the teaching activity. For me, the poem continues to be one of the richest understandings of the teaching act I have ever been taught. More than that, it provides an example of a way of talking about, or of approaching teaching that is all too rare: the way of imagination.

The rarity of this approach to teaching can be illustrated from a number of perspectives. One might look, for example, at teaching as it is presented in introductory manuals for beginning teachers, whether these are manuals used in schools of education dealing with teacher training or in volunteer situations such as church schools. In such manuals we find a heavy emphasis on assessing the needs of students, setting goals and objectives, designing learning activities to meet these goals and objectives, and evaluation. Such presentations appear to assume that teaching is just a technical skill and that one can learn it much as one learns how to ride a bicycle. With new teachers, especially if they are preparing to teach children, introduction to teaching too often comes in methods courses where the bulk of attention is given to techniques, procedures, and exercises. Although this approach is not entirely unnecessary, it can forestall a broader, deeper understanding of the teaching act.'

In direct contrast to the above, other approaches to teaching assume that one can automatically teach without giving much thought at all to what teaching means. This assumption is often present in college and graduate school teaching, where possession of a Ph.D. indicates "mastery" of subject matter in any area from physics to philosophy and apparently presupposes "mastery" of the matter of teaching as well. Supposedly, if one "knows" a particular area of study (a particular discipline), one also knows how to teach that discipline. I suspect that generations of school-age children have been turned away from the romance of learning by the pervasive understanding of teaching as equivalent with the first approach. I also suspect that generations of graduate students and older adults have been thoroughly bored and kept from entering new worlds by the prevalence of the second.

These two understandings of teaching are not very different; in fact, they share the same basic view: Teaching is a matter of content and method. The first understanding emphasizes method; the second emphasizes content. The question that needs to be asked about both emphases, however, is whether either method or content are the most appropriate ways to think about teaching in the first place. I will attempt to respond to that question and thus to overcome some of the limitations of the two perspectives. (I do not want to be read as entirely rejecting the first attitude, which, I believe, does have some place in an overall vision of teaching. On the other hand, neither do I want to reject the testimony experience offers concerning the existence of natural teaching genius-the presence in our midst of the "born teacher." Further, I do not wish to ignore the enormous contributions already being made by such teachers of teachers as Sara Little of Richmond, Dwayne Huebner of Yale, and Elliot Eisner of Stanford, as well as the contributions being made to further the study of teaching at such institutions as the Center for the Study of Teaching at the University of Michigan. Certainly I am not the first to decry the trivialization of the teaching act.)

I offer, however, an alternative vision of teaching, a vision that draws on the religious imagination. I am convinced that our society desperately needs a philosophy of teaching that explores the dimension of depth in teaching, a philosophy that begins not with technique but with the majesty and the mystery involved in teaching. To return to Marcel's distinction, I want to move away from teaching seen as a problem, to a view that assumes it is far more appropriate to see teaching as a mystery. With William Walsh, I believe that "all too many of the problems of education are mysteries made shabby by the absence of reverence.

Because imagination is the root of the following description of teaching, it must be approached with fresh eyes. Rather than address teaching as a technical skill, then, I suggest we bring to it an attitude similar to that which we bring to any work of art. Such an attitude implies a beginning readiness to see what is there and to let what is there speak, rather than an immediately active attitude that sees teachers as agents, doers, and performers. The imaginative attitude implies, initially, an attitude of receptivity.

This process has emerged over the last two decades in my own work with both beginning and experienced teachers. We have discovered in our work together that teaching is analogous to any work of creation. That discovery was initially made in working with clay: We felt the clay, pummeled it, played with it, found out what it could do and not do; what we could do to it and with it and in interchange with it. In this book work with clay will be a basic metaphor to facilitate an understanding of how teaching may be a work of religious imagination.

The process has five moments, or steps; (1) contemplation, (2) engagement, (3) form giving, (4) emergence, and (5) release. The steps envisioned, however, are not like steps on a staircase, progressing upwards. Rather, they are like steps in a dance, where movement is both backward and forward, around and through, and where turns, returns, rhythm, and movement are essential.' Indeed, it will probably be apparent that each step is present in all of the others.

A PARADIGM FOR TEACHING

The process is also offered as a paradigm. Mutatis rnutandis (the necessary changes being made), it has a universality that makes it symbolic of other human actions. It calls for a certain rigor. And its pattern is organic in the sense that each step flows out of the one preceding it. From this, it should be clear that each one of the steps, in its own way, draws on the four forms of imagination outlined in chapter I as the ways, forms, or paths of religious imagination. The reflection or attitude of receptivity demanded in the exploration is a work of contemplation; the rigor is an act of asceticism; the bringing together of disparate elements is an act of creation; and the universality claimed is an argument for the sacramental quality of the process.

CONTEMPLATION

The first moment in teaching seen as a work of religious imagination is contemplation.' The task is to begin the teaching activity by seeing what is there. Thus we do not begin by preparing our material, we begin by being still. In this moment, we are asked to see teaching as a Thou, so that we might bring to it an attitude of silence, reverence, and respect.

In traditional religious usage, the term contemplation implies a totally uncluttered appreciation of existence, a state of mind or a condition of the soul that is simultaneously wide-awake and free from all preoccupation, preconception, and interpretation.'

In a remarkable passage from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard conveys something of what is involved in this moment. The passage is worth recording in its entirety.

When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I've never been seized by it since. For some reason I always "hid" the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write, I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passerby who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about, I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

It is still the first week in January, and I've got great plans. I've beer thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But-and this is the point--who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

What you see is what you get. In some ways, this is the essence of contemplation; cultivating the healthy virtues of poverty and simplicity which make us ready for the seeing, and then discovering that the seeing is a necessary condition for hope, for possibility, for the future. If we return to the notion that we begin the act of teaching with such seeing (with contemplation) what do we discover. I submit that we first discover the human coming together essential at the core of teaching. The teacher finds herself or himself in the presence of, and called to be at the disposal of, other human beings who have come into the teacher's presence ready to learn, to know, to be instructed.' Such a circumstance is perhaps most obvious with first-graders on the- first day of school-eyes shining, pencils sharpened, trust still flowing from their bodies as they put themselves in the teacher's care. But it is also a circumstance with adults. During my own long years in graduate school, I have yet to encounter someone who on the first day of a course in any semester will not respond when asked, "How did it go?" with an answer on the order of, "I think it is going to be good." For me, that answer symbolizes the contemplative moment where the readiness (for teaching and learning) involves the student's seeing the teacher as a Thou; the hope that the teacher, before seeing the student as student, will also see a Thou; and the additional hope that a community of partners learning and studying together will be created. Thus, the first object of contemplation is seeing teaching as a work where a community of people come together as a community of hope; a coming together of people, each of whom brings her or his radical particularity as this unique person. The first moment in teaching (contemplation) is the stopping, the taking time, the wide-awakeness necessary to "take in" the personhood(s) involved. What you see is what you get.

In teaching, however, there are not only two elements, the teacher and the student; in teaching there is always a third element, the subject matter. The two people do not come together to address one another, they come together in the presence of a third, which, in May Sarton's phrase, "fuses us at moments into a whole." The presence of this third element allows for the psychical distance necessary for learning. Like all stereotypes, the stereotype of group discussion, crass as it often seems, bears some truth, and can serve to illustrate the absolute necessity of the third element's presence in teaching. Usually expressed as, "And what shall we talk about today?" the stereotype captures the emptiness created when the third partner, subject matter, is not present; without the third partner a necessary condition for teaching collapses. The added dimension contemplation brings to teaching is not that this third element exists. Rather contemplation helps us realize that subject matter is also a Thou, a third partner, if you will. just as learners must be themselves, with all of their hopes and dreams, their capacities and unfaith, so that which is being addressed together in the teaching act must also be itself.

This realization gives several clues to the teacher about the teaching situation. It directs the teacher (the first partner) to see the thing being presented as itself, and to move with care when interpreting, analyzing, and explaining. At the same time, it also gives space to the learners (the second partner) and allows them to become familiar with the subject matter (the third partner), so that they, too, might engage in initial contemplation. At the beginning (and one way of thinking of every teaching event is to see it as the capacity for beginning), we seek the primary receptive moment where ordinary knowing slows for a moment, and not knowing enters, silently enabling encounter to occur. A too-quick move to cover the material can end in covering over the material.

The act of teaching itself, the people involved, and the subject matter: These are the first three objects of contemplation. But one more needs mentioning. The act of teaching demands a contemplation of the environment, that is, of the context or the situation in which the teaching takes place. This refers not only to the physical setting and to such mundane elements as chairs, desks, carpets, temperature, and time, but to the social, political, and economic environment as well. A tactic that experienced teachers incorporate to ensure this aspect of contemplation is previsualization, imagining and seeing in the mind's eye the place that will be entered and the people who will be entering that place together. This element in teaching is what Elliot Eisner calls the "implicit curriculum."9 My concern here is simply to name it as a factor in the teaching act. It is an essential partner in the teaching activity, acting upon, acting with, and sometimes acting against it. In other words, the environment, too, deserves awareness, silence, attention, and respect.

ENGAGEMENT

The second moment in the teaching process is best named engagement. Having fulfilled the requirement to stand back and to be still, the teacher must now gather the disparate ingredients (or elements) in teaching and catalyze them toward re-creation. Engagement means diving in, wrestling with, and rolling around in subject matter. Engagement brings the contemplative imagination to bear on something tangible, and makes the creative (compositive) imagination active. Just as sculptors move from feeling, touching, testing, learning about, and contemplating clay, to the moment of getting their hands and fingers involved in it (engaging it), teachers must also move beyond gazing at and apprising to the far more active work of interaction, interchange, and "messing with" the subject matter.

In teaching, as in any work of art, however, the moment of engagement may be resisted. Artist Ben Shahn suggests that three obstacles keep us from genuine engagement. The first obstacle is dilettantism, the non serious dabbling in what is presumably a very serious matter. The second is fear of our own creativity. And the third is the misconception of what kind of a person an artist is.' Each of these obstacles must be overcome in order to be genuinely engaged.

To become genuinely engaged, we must first take seriously the nature and the meaning of subject matter. Otherwise, dillettantism is almost inevitable. For the teacher, the engagement must begin through involvement with subject matter at the deepest and most profound level: Subject matter must be loved. Although this is not always possible to explain, it is possible to exemplify. This poem by James Worley describes a teacher as an engaged lover. Mark Van Doren (1946)

You know, he didn't teach me any thing; The Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Dante-wait I'm often etched by what he said of trimmers (or by what he said that Dante said of them) that they weren't wanted, even down in hell but otherwise (and that's the wise he was) he taught me not a thing that I've remembered.

Why, then, is he the uppermost in mind when I am asked-most often by myself "Who was the finest teacher you have known?"

The style, the style's the trick that keeps him kept no, not a trick; it must unfold as grace, inevitably, necessarily, as tomcats stretch, as sparrows scrounge for lice: in such a way he lolled upon his desk and fell in love before our very eyes again, again-how many times again with Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton's Satan, as if his shameless, glad, compelling love were all he really wanted us to learn; no, that's not right; we were occasionals who lucked or stumbled or were pushed on him he fell in love because he fell in love; we were but windfall parties to those falls.

What is needed to understand subject matter in such a way? I suggest it is the realization, initially, that the term "subject matter," hides an equivocation. To quote William Walsh,

It is often assumed that there is some necessary relation between the educated mind and a wide range of scholarship, a notion to which university teachers are especially prone. But this seems to be a dubious assumption. It is founded on the habit of thinking of subject matter in a grossly materialistic way as an area to be covered, or as a volume to be exhausted or a bulk to be chipped at. It is confirmed by the other habit of taking subject matter as a single instead of a double concept. But the term subject matter disguises an equivocation. It conflates two related but distinct meanings. On the one hand any subject matter is a system of clues, concerned with human existence, organized about some initiating and defining concept, expressed in language and argued by human beings. On the other hand, subject matter is that world of meaning, order of nature, physical process, pattern of events, organization of feelings which the former kind of subject matter enables us to conceive. It is that labyrinth of reality through which and towards the understanding of which any particular discourse is a directing and guiding thread."

Walsh concludes by asserting that unless subject matter in the first sense empowers us to understand subject matter in the second sense, it fails to serve its purpose. Unfortunately, this is precisely what all too much contemporary teaching does. My own suspicion is that such failure is inevitable if the meaning of the act of teaching is understood only as a set of procedures or methods designed to present subject matter; and if subject matter is assumed to be that system of clues concerned with human existence, organized about some initiating and defining concept, and nothing more.

However, if subject matter is appreciated and seen as the world of meaning, order of nature, physical process, pattern of events, "labyrinth of reality" toward which the system of clues has been designed to point, then a richness of meaning to subject matter appears. This richness helps lessen the fear of our own creativity (the second obstacle to engagement mentioned above), for it allows the subject matter its own character, inviolability, and power to address. Our own creativity as teachers is not the only creativity operating, however. A creative dynamic exists in the subject matter as well. Put another way, neither teacher nor students) needs to "do it all:" Subject matter is also a partner in the learning process. Engaged playing with the meaning of subject matter leads to further discovery. Beginning with Walsh's insights into the term "subject matter" as having two senses or meanings-first, the system of clues, second, subject matter as labyrinth of reality-I would suggest a third and a fourth.

The third meaning of subject matter is beyond, under, over, and essentially related to the first two: Human beings are subjects, even more, subjects who matter in the sense Paulo Freire has taught us.

For Freire, authentic human existence pivots precisely on this point. In his brilliant and truly creative educational philosophy, authentic existence demands freedom, and the conflict preceding and leading to that freedom is one between either being a spectator to one's own reality or being an actor who initiates her or his own activity toward the world, an actor who is engaged. For human beings, the essential decision is between speaking or remaining embedded in a culture of silence, between naming oneself or being named by others, between remaining an object or becoming a subject. Here is the heart of Freire's vision: What makes human beings human is that each of us has an ontological vocation to be a subject, namely, one who can separate from the world in his or her own consciousness, be critical of it, act on it, and transform it-in the process making the world a subject, too."

Before looking at the fourth meaning of subject matter, we must now return to Shahn's third obstacle, the misunderstanding of what it is to be an artist. We misunderstand what it is to be a teacher if we think that teaching simply means to hand on, hand over, or convey subject matter merely as a system of clues. Actually, teaching is far more. Teaching is the creation of a situation in which subjects, human subjects, are handed over to themselves. Thus, when we understand that engagement with subject matter means engagement with human beings as subjects, we can also see how the contemplative moment is incorporated into the moment of engagement, where our ontological vocation to be subjects not only requires us to be engaged with the world, but also to stand back and to look at how we look at the world. As engaged subjects, engaging with subject matter, we are contemplative subjects as well.

Based on the above, we can now look at a fourth and final sense or meaning of "subject matter," one which is consonant with Jewish and Christian tradition: namely, the belief in a Creator divinity, always acting in human affairs, holding all in being by its sacred presence. Theological doctrine would describe this belief by using a phrase such as "the Being of being." But for our discussion it seems more appropriate to speak of the Subjectivity of subjectivity: The belief that everything and everyone in existence draws that existence from participation in the One Who Is, and that any human subjectivity which exists does so by reason of its own being in, dwelling in, and having been created in the fullness, richness, and depth of the Subjectivity of God.'

Whenever I reread Martin Buber's classic essay on education, it is this last rendering of subject that captures my attention. Buber speaks of the educator discovering an inner religious impulse to be in the service of the One who is able to do what human beings cannot do: to create and form and transform. The educator is set in the imitatio Dei absconditi sed non ignoti: the imitation of the divinity who, although hidden from sight, is not unknown." Once more we are met by the holiness of teaching. From the attitude of contemplation, we discover that the teacher is-through engagement with subject matter in all its renderings-someone called by, called with, and calling upon the Creator God to save, to perfect, and to manifest the divine image that dwells by reason of subjectivity in all existing being.

FORMGIVING

One of the greatest teachers I have ever known was Mary Tully, my mentor at Union Seminary. She once gave us a simple exercise connected with clay. We first played with clay and discovered something of what it could do (for example, it could only be stretched so long, then it would break; too much air would harden it). Then we were asked to blindfold ourselves and to continue to work with the material. We had contemplated, we had become engaged, but now was the moment for us to interact with the clay and to give it form. As we dutifully blindfolded ourselves, Tully gave us the following directions: "A form exists within the ball of clay you are holding in your hands, and you are to find the form. But, you are to find it in the interchange with the clay; you are not to impose some prior vision of what is already there. So, take the time, concentrate, work with the clay and let it work with you, and in time you will discover that a form is taking shape. You will be able to feel it, to sense it, to intuit it. Once that happens, you can take off the blindfold and work from there.

I have often done that same exercise with others and discovered without a trace of doubt that Mary Tully was right. The form was there, is there, waiting to be found. The power of the clay metaphor is that it teaches us the nature of forming, informing, formation, and formgiving in the activity of teaching. It teaches us that teachers and students work together with material, contemplating it, engaging it, bringing to it as much as they possibly can; but that for true formgiving to occur, any and all prior absolute conviction regarding the exact nature of the form itself must be absent.

My own conviction is that form-giving is the paradoxical center of teaching. It is the moment when preparation, prior knowledge, and the understanding of subject matter as a system of clues is essential. At the same time, it is the moment when all the learning may produce something quite unexpected, the paradox being that the pre-known, the finished, is needed. The teacher's presence at this moment is essential; the teacher acts very directly, but the quality of the teacher's involvement is, in Buber's phrase, through a "strange paradox." The teacher carefully selects and prepares from the actual world that which is to be presented. But, "if education means to let a selection of the world affect a person through the medium of another person, then the one through whom this takes place, rather who makes it take place through himself, is caught in a strange paradox."'6 Buber concludes that the paradox is that one must always do this selection, prepare it, and present it "from the other side, from over there, from the surface of that other spirit which is being acted upon-not of some conceptual, contrived spirit, but all the time the wholly concrete spirit of this individual and unique being who is living and confronting the educator, and who stands together with the [teacher] in the common situation of educating and being educated."

Of all the moments in teaching, perhaps none is more dependent on the exercise of the imagination than is formgiving. Not only does the power of imagination make formgiving possible, teaching in a formgiving way is possible only if the teacher imagines that it is possible; if the teacher imagines that this is what teaching is. If the teacher believes that teaching means merely to hand over ideas, facts, and concepts to be memorized, teaching is certain to fail. For in the step of formgiving the human being is, in Wordsworth's phrase, tenacious of the forms which it receives. The point to be remembered, however, is that the forms human beings strive for, and feel for, through all the darkness and blindfolding, are not "finished" thoughts (the French pensle pens&), but thought and reality and meaning "in the making," in the giving, in the going-through, in the living (the French pensee pensantd). The only forms that can be given are "the perspectives from which we see, the dimensions by which we grasp, the frames that stabilize, the categories that define and sort our experience.""' In other words, forms are not our ideas, our concepts, our learning. They are, instead, the grounds of those ideas, the roots of learning, and the foundations of our lives: love, identity, death, intention, destiny, courage, hope.

In teaching as an activity of religious imagination, the moment of form-giving is the one where our creative imagination gives shape to the content or subject matter; form-giving is the way we attempt to put subject matter together. New form comes into being because we take the risk of becoming artists, becoming creators, becoming teachers. From form-giving flows the fourth step or moment in the teaching process: emergence.

EMERGENCE

Perhaps no passage about a teacher and a student working together is better known-at least in the English-speaking world than the following:

She brought me my hat and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation can be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure. We walked down the path to the well house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly, I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten-a thrill of returning thought: and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

In this passage Helen Keller describes the moment of emergence, that point in the process of teaching where something new is being born, and where the learner takes possession of the received form. Emergence is marked by tentativeness, by a gathering of strength, and by a beginning possession, not by completeness and security. Because of this, emergence is often characterized by "I think I've got it," followed by "I lost it," followed by "I think I've got it," with repetitive frequency. (One thinks, for example, of Eliza Doolittle at the Ascot races forced to speak "proper English" too soon; she hasn't yet "got it." Eliza's true moment of emergence-let it not be forgotten that My Fair Lady is the story of a teacher and a student-comes with her unforgettable declaration, "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain." And then Henry Higgins can say, "She's got it; by George, she's got it.")

Most moments of emergence are not as dramatic as Helen Keller's or Eliza Doolittle's. Nonetheless, they all signal a movement of the teaching act toward its completion. They all say that although something new is beginning to be born, that something is connected to what has gone before; but for the present moment, in this learner, in this situation, subject matter is being and has been reformed, indeed reinvented for the future with a life of its own. Emergence may best be characterized as awesome, since although its coming can never be controlled or predicted, its happening is unmistakable, irrevocable, and not unlike birth. Emergence is the herald of new life.

The temporality and the rhythm in teaching is perhaps nowhere as evident as it is in emergence. What happens in the moment of emergence may be quite different from what was expected. "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies," said John Dewey, "is that people learn the thing they are studying at the time they are studying it. More seriously, the moment of emergence has an inner requirement: It needs to occur

in its own time, and not on a schedule constricted by semester or term, by examination or pressure. Perhaps the following passage from Zorba the Greek can help us to understand this better.

I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as the butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath. In vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand. That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.

The poignancy of the passage is evident: Too much pressure, too soon, violates the law of nature, the law of teaching, the law of eternal rhythm. But the passage also gives courage, especially to those entrusted with the young. It is a good thing to know-better-to be convinced that you do not have to do it all in the fourth grade, or in the primary school, or in the infant's room, even if you are the fourth-grade teacher or the primary-school teacher or the infant-school teacher. Likewise, you do not have to say the final word on sin even if you are the ethics professor. You do not have to speak the final word on living even if you are the mother, the father, the grandparent. Emergence happens silently, and one does violence to keep pulling up the plant to see if the roots are growing; emergence happens in divine time (in illo tempore) and not in ours. Emergence cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, emergence is a reminder to any teacher that for new life to be born, the teacher will probably have to live through periods of sadness and grieving and staying in the darkness, even to live through periods of mourning and of death. But if the teacher does so, a final moment in the teaching process is bound to occur.

RELEASE

We look again to working with clay to find an image of the final step of the teaching process. When we form new life out of clay (when we take off our blindfolds and see life occurring before our eyes), a great temptation confronts us. We find ourselves tempted to keep on working, to make one more line, to add one more design, to deepen just one hollow. When this happens, it is important for us to be aware that there is a point in the creative act of molding-as there is in the religious activity of teaching-where one must say, "I can do no more," and where the only right thing to do is to let go. This is the moment of release. -Release acknowledges that one can do no more, that for whatever it is worth, new being is sent into the world, and the movement or moment or step now demanded of the teacher is cessation of movement, or rest, or emptiness.

Swimming teachers sometimes begin teaching, especially if their charges are fearful, by keeping a strong and supportive hand under the stomach of the new swimmer. But all good teachers of swimming know that they must eventually remove their hand if any good is to happen. Release is the moment in teaching where we remove the hand, where we say to the other, "It is no longer mine; it is now yours." As with emergence, sadness can be, and often is, essential to the moment of release. In fact, release is a fine time to learn humility. The great teacher, to paraphrase Lao-Tzu, the people do not notice. The next they honor and praise. The next the people fear, and the last the people hate. When the great teacher's work is done, the people say, "Ah! We did it ourselves." In the moment of release, learning passes forever into the newly created vehicle, and the human response, the holy response, is not "the teacher did it," but, "Ah! We did it ourselves."

I argue for the holiness of the moment of release because of its echoes in the religious life of the world. Release is close to satori, the absence of desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time. It is close to the Zen art of archery: In Zen the archer and arrow are one, here teacher and subject are one. I is also close to the Hsing-Hsing Ming of Zen, which says that when you strive to be quiet by stopping motion, the quiet you achieve is always in motion. It is akin to the full rest of Sabbath in Judaism, where the cessation of movement re-creates the world. It is the full emptiness of the kenosis known to Jesus of Nazareth, who emptied himself becoming obedient to death. Release is the moment of simplicity-Annie Dillard's healthy simplicity, true, but also the complete simplicity of T S. Eliot "costing no less than everything."

But release, although the last moment, is not the culminating moment in the teaching process. Yes, release is the moment of rest, of emptiness, of stillness. But it is so only that out of release a new moment of contemplation may begin where the ascetic, creative, sacramental work starts once more.

And what necessity urges beginning again? Why continue? The answer to that question will be explored throughout the rest of this book. The simplest answer, however, is that the teaching process must continue because of the continuing demands of the situation; or, put more simply, because of the continuing demands of the world. In subsequent chapters, I will argue that teaching as an act of religious imagination is a power to recreate the world. For now, however, in focusing on the why behind this conviction, I can do no better than to recall the words of Nobel laureate Par Lagerkvist, whose poetic insight suggests a cosmic vocation.

May my heart's disquiet never vanish; May I never be at peace; May I never be reconciled to life nor to death either; May my path be unending.

Lagerkvist does not need to say more, but the teacher needs to be aware that the moment of release, with its Sabbath quietude, has a dynamism within it that allows us the possibility to hear the disquiet of the world. In the peace of release, the teacher is enabled to hear the agony of those human subjects who are not at peace. In the moment of reconciliation that release symbolizes, the teacher realizes she or he cannot be reconciled to life or death as they now occur on the planet, and that the teachers path is unending because the world awaits recreation.

Teachers, by reason of their vocation toward re-creation, must continue on this path. If they do, they discover the next station along the way. And since teaching is a vocation centered in the religious imagination, that station is incarnation. It is to the nature of incarnation in the teaching process that we shall turn in chapter 3.