Tradition

Friday 3/30/18 4:51 AM

Next Friday a colleague and I are leading a workshop about using Desmos, an online graphing utility, in the classroom to enhance teaching. When I first began teaching I didn’t even have a calculator, let alone all of the powerful technologies available today. I have always tried to stay up to date with new technologies and I have tried to embrace new things and incorporate them into my teaching. Trying to think of new, creative ways to teach is one of the things I love most about my job. However, as I age, the rate at which technology is changing seems to be faster than the rate at which I can learn it. Sometimes doing things the old way is easier and entails much less work.

My devotional theme for the week is liberty, and a quote by Thomas Merton in his book New Seeds of Contemplation caught my attention this morning. “The mind that is the prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is the captive of its own desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a supernatural desire. For how can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire?”

My first thought was my teaching and how being prisoner to conventional ways of teaching stifles any kind of creativity. I can never learn new, or better ways of teaching a concept if I am unwilling to experiment with the unfamiliar. Of course, experimenting with the unfamiliar also brings with it the possibility of failure and I have to embrace the option of failure if I am to experience the thrill of success.

Merton suggests that my relationship with God can also get stuck if I am a prisoner to my own desires. He writes, “I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me. I must learn to ‘leave myself’ in order to find myself by yielding to the love of God. If I were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of his life that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest.”

Lately I have had an uneasiness, a feeling that God is calling me to something different. I do not know specifically what it is, but I have been troubled by the racial injustice that is experienced by many of my current and former students. I want to do something to address the systemic problem of racial inequality in our society but have no idea where to begin. I need to look for God in every part of my life and remain open to the new, and possibly crazy ideas that pop into my head. Who knows, maybe I can be an agent of change.