Blindspot!
From Issue: 1057 [Read full issue]
Guided by Love
Howard Thurman maintained that the experience of redemptive love was essential for individual and collective self-actualization. Such a love affirms. In The Growing Edge, he contends that whether we are a good person or a bad person, we are being dealt with at the point beyond all that is limiting and all that is creative within us. We are dealt with at the core of our being; and at that core, we are touched and released.
In much of his work. Thurman cautions those of us who are concerned with radical social change to not allow our visions to conform to a pattern we seek to impose but rather allow them to be "modeled and shaped in accordance to the innermost transformation that is going on in our spirits."
To be guided by love is to live in community with all life. However, a culture of domination, like ours, does not strive to teach us how to live in community. As a consequence, learning to live in community must be a core practice for all of us who desire spirituality in education.
All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like. All of us evoke vague notions of community and compassion, yet how many of us compassionately went out to find an intimate other, to bring them here with us today? So that when we looked around, we wouldn't just find a similar kind of class, a similar group of people, people like ourselves: a certain kind of exclusivity.
Compiled From:
"Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope" - Bell Hooks, pp. 162, 163