Clarity for Teachers: Day 14
‘If you’re told something helps, but it makes you less clear, stop doing it.’
I must have been thirteen or so, when I said it to a youth leader at church: ‘I don’t find the concept of hell very helpful.’ I still remember her expression, testifying to the gulf that stood between us. Here I was, this strange kid who talked as if faith were a matter of concepts — and to make matters worse, I was the minister’s son. ‘I don’t think any of us find it helpful,’ she said, picking up my word cautiously. I knew what I meant: I didn’t claim to know if hell existed, the kind of faith I had didn’t seem to depend on this, but the idea that our behaviour ought to be guided by the threat of punishment after death seemed … unnecessary. There were other grounds on which to base our actions, other ways of living out what I met in the stories and riddles of the Bible. I’ve seen enough of hell since then to realise how little it has to do with ‘after death’, otherwise I might say the same today.
I was chatting with Charlie about these commentaries. He named the strangeness of having such scrutiny directed at these lines, these free adaptations of translations of an old text.
‘They are words in their own right,’ he said, ‘and if they resonate and move your mind, then they are valid. The point is not doctrinal loyalty, but active help.’
Today’s card brought me back to that last bit. I’m still the kid who talked about hell as a concept: I can steeple my fingers and muse on the nuances of language, see how much meaning I can juice from each day’s advice, but the point of the exercise is whether I can find something here that helps.
I think about some of the teachers I’ve had. Not the ones in classrooms with certificates of education, but the ones I stumbled on or sought out and made the decision that I wanted to learn what they could teach me. It’s happened a few times in my life, and what has followed is an intense period of months in which I soak up as much as I can, and then a settling into a more even friendship. In that first period, though, it’s like I have to walk around inside this person’s ideas, their models of reality, trying out how the world looks from there, learning what helps. It’s not a pick-and-mix sampling job, there’s deep immersion involved — a willingness to be changed, to try a different way of being — but the end result is not doctrinal loyalty, not a clone of their way, but a grafting of what I found there that helped into the living map of my own being.
You have to walk a long way into someone else’s models of reality before you find out whether there’s something there that helps. The cost of this is high enough that I tend to think you shouldn’t invite anyone into such a journey, let alone try to persuade them — they have to ask, and ask the right way. In the old stories, the student often has to ask three times, and if she takes no for an answer the first or second time, then that was probably for the best.
As a teacher, your job is not to invite people into the long journey into whatever landscape of inner knowledge you depend on, but to have made that journey yourself and brought back certain things that seem to help. You offer these things — put them at the service of the wider community — and where they meet with recognition, you invite a student to try this thing on, walk around with it for a while, see where it fits and where it rubs. Then once in a while, you get a student who asks for more, who wants to understand why this or that thing seems to work, and if they convince you that they know what they are asking for, you may agree to take them further into this inner landscape.
And in all this, there’s a need for a safety mechanism, a sanity check, for student as well as teacher. That’s what I like about today’s card: it doesn’t matter what anybody tells you, there needs to be a test. If it makes you less clear, stop doing it.
Västerås, 18 March, 2020
This is the fourteenth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
