During my years of attending classes – high school, undergraduate school, graduate school, etc. – I read a lot of books not because I chose them but because they were chosen by a teacher or professor. Some were read and then forgotten the moment the exams for a particular class were complete, some were read and added to my personal library for future reference or for loaning to friends and colleagues, some have been read and re-read over the years, and a few – a precious few – have become very good friends – resources that refresh, renew, and restore as the journey of life continues.
One such book is To Know As We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education by Parker J. Palmer* – a book that was assigned by a professor who is responsible for several volumes in my collection of best friends. I was re-reading Palmer’s book again in recent days and again encountered a section that had lovingly been highlighted by my yellow highlighter in order to be able to find it with ease. It reads:
This love is not a soft and sentimental virtue, not a fuzzy feeling of romance. The love of which spiritual tradition speaks is “tough love,” the connective tissue of reality – and we flee from it because we fear its claims on our lives. Curiosity and control create a knowledge that distances us from each other and the world, allowing us to use what we know as a plaything and to play the game by our own self-serving rules. But a knowledge that springs from love will implicate us in the web of life; it will wrap the the knower and the known in compassion, in a bond of awesome responsibility as well as transforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality, accountability.
“Love in action,” said Dostoevski, “is a harsh and dreadful thing,” and so it can be. A knowledge that springs from love may require us to change, even sacrifice, for the sake of what we know. It is easy to be curious and controlling. It is difficult to love. But if we want a knowledge that will rebind our broken world, we must reach for that deeper passion. We must recover from our spiritual tradition the models and methods of knowing as an act of love. (9)
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