Responses...#5 To Know as We are Known

This reposnse is more of a straight book review than anything else. I almost hesitate to post it as I feel it may not add anything to the conversation. However, it is what I was thinking at the time, and may ellucidate some of what I had already said. It find it really hard to draw stuff out of material that I don't agree with; I tend to overcompensate. I know there's got to be at least some beneficial tid bits in even the worst of material, but I think I may look too hard and maybe malign the original intentions of the author in order to make it look like something I see as OK. When I look back at this response I see a line of thinking that is more clearly stated in some of my other writings, especially my final paper, which I will post eventually. The general Polanyian concepts of not being able to "commit non-commitally", and "a truth named is a truth claimed" is personally very convicting to me. If I say I believe it, then my actions must attend to it, and, conversely, my actions reveal that which I believe. In his book, Parker J. Palmer seems to want to dip his feet on either side as he walks along the fence; He blends world views and religions and even politics and, in the end, doesn't really commit to anything.

There is a particular quote from Palmer that jumped out at me while reading this book. Not because of what it said, but rather what it implied and the shadow that the implication cast over the rest of his words. In explaining why he could not support prayer in public schools Palmer makes the comment, regarding the act of praying publicly simply because it is allowed, “...any prayer that is so vaguely worded that it sounds agreeable to all is, by my limits, no prayer at all,”(Palmer, 10).
As I read this book there were times where I literally exclaimed out loud, much to the surprise of those enjoying the quietness of the library, “JUST SAY IT, MAN!”. I believe that Palmer has taken up an important cause in writing this book, reintroducing spirituality into education, but I found that he falls sadly short of both identifying the problem and offering any kind of effective solution, and in the process of trying to offer both, falls pray to his own condemnation.
So, “Just Say It,”. “Just say what?” you might ask. Well, many things, actually. In his introductory section of the first chapter, Palmer speaks of the problem of how younger generations are being taught in such a way that produces within them a “fantastic ethic,” in which, “the world is an object to be manipulated,….that a small part of it can be organized to suit their personal needs,” (pg 5). The college students he describes as being pessimistic about the future of the whole world yet, at the same time, having the utmost optimism for their own personal futures, I believe, nicely describes the common product of the current education system. In this Palmer identifies the problem: Truth, and the knowledge of it, is not being taught as a unified whole. The wholeness of truth as something to come to know and interact with is something that we have seen in all our readings thus far. He goes on to point out how divided and “sectioned”, if you will, our education system is. We are taught many things in our school, but all in different classrooms, by different teachers, on different days; and rarely do the subjects ever cross over into each other. In response, Palmer demonstrates an understanding of the need for the realization of the reciprocity of knowledge. “We must try to understand more about the knowledge we possess, for that knowledge also possess us,” (pg 6). The things we learn are not ours to take advantage of, but rather enable us while, at the same time, hold us accountable to them. The absence of this realization is what Palmer was lamenting in his illustration of the Trinity scientists.
It is when Palmer goes on to offer a solution that his silence provoked such a reaction in me. He leads up to the solution with great promise, “The question is urgent, and the evidence in response to it is troubling. But the problem will not have been truly engaged until we ask about the origins of our knowledge as well as its ends,” (pg. 6). I was eager to see where he would take us. However, I found that he lead me to frustration and disappointment. This is where I had my first, “JUST SAY IT,” incident. I kept longing to see the words that relayed something to the effect of God having been removed from our education system, but it was never there. Maybe, and that’s a big maybe, it was implied, but if it was, it was hidden in terms like “spirituality”.
As I read on, I saw why Palmer never comes out and says it. And that is because he doesn’t believe it. In entering into his conversation about curiosity and control, Palmer makes the comment that, “knowledge contains its own morality, that it begins not in neutrality but in a place of passion, within the human soul,” (pg 7). Here, Palmer sets himself up for tragic contradiction. He is about to go into a discussion of how we need to transcend through prayer, yet here he in fact turns inward to man himself saying that the morality lies in the knower, not that which is known. That which is known, as we have seen in The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God and On Being Human, points to God. It is His revealing of Himself to man. Right and true knowledge is moral. Man, as God Himself has told us in His holy scriptures, is not. Man is deceitful and desperately wicked. Man’s general sense of right and wrong is, I believe, very spiritual. It has no “scientifically” discernable origin. To me, it is one of the lingering and most powerful reflections of the image of God in His creation. And so, Palmer’s entire foundation is flawed in that it seems he couldn’t make up his mind about where the answer lies, in man or in God, so he has given man the God-like attribute of being able to be right on his own. He shows that he has not strayed far from his Kantian past of man forcing the chaos of reality into his own mold.
I was deeply troubled by Palmer’s use of the word love. “The failure of modern knowledge is not primarily a failure in our ethics, in the application of what we know.” he says, “Rather, it is the failure of our knowing itself to recognize and reach for its deeper source and passion, to allow love to inform the relations that our knowledge creates-with ourselves, with each other, with the whole animate and inanimate world,” (pg 9). What is this love he keeps mentioning? Where does it come from? This, again, sparked me to a “JUST SAY IT!”. I so wanted to substitute the word “love” with God. Man needs to see that God it the source of knowledge and that it is His tool, His way of guiding and directing and motivating. That solution, the solution of looking to God, would work; it would change how we know and what we do with our knowledge. Instead, Palmer offers no solution as he suggests that we simply look deeper into ourselves, to our own passions. That would only get us into a deeper problem! I found that his whole discussion on control and curiosity verse compassion was more directly a discussion of control verses submission. It is the struggle of man to be the possessor and controller of knowledge, the Kantian potter if you will, rather than submit to their own known-ness and the understanding that truth and knowledge belong to God, to whom they are the clay. I would say that Palmer supports that in leading up to the conversation, but then he goes on to say that the clay needs to believe even more that he is the potter in order for us to rightly handle knowing, that love is something that lies deep inside man himself. This concept is carried over in a very dangerous way into his discussion of prayer on the following pages in which he reduces prayer into nothing more than meditative introspection saying that, “In prayer we allow ourselves to be known by love, to receive this freeing and redeeming knowledge of ourselves,” (pg 11). In reality, however, in prayer we come obediently and humbly to our knees before the throne of God, our Creator, who knows us intimately whether we like it or not, and in Him, and only in Him, we see redemption through the knowledge of Him.
I held onto the hope, however, that Palmer would finally define his terms and come out and “just say it” when he began to talk about knowing face to face. Again, however I was disappointed. I saw again why he never says it, and, again, it is because he doesn’t mean it. He speaks of God and love, and even uses Paul’s writings (out of context, I might add) as nothing more than tradition; a model from which to draw on. His terms were vague, because, sadly, I don’t think he quite knows what he believes. He says “love” instead of “God”, “transcendence” instead of “appeal”, “spirituality” instead of “belief”, “tradition” instead of “faith” because he’s not quite convinced himself as to what those things mean. Palmer has seen the problem and does offer some good insights, but he is overall vague and sadly contradictory. It sounds like he is trying to please everyone from Christian to mystic. Sadly, this brings us back to that damning quote I mentioned earlier. “Any prayer that is so vaguely worded that it sounds agreeable to all is, by my limits, no prayer at all.”