“A form exists within the clay you are holding in your hands, and you are to discover it.  As you work with the clay, let it work with you.  Give yourself time, concentrate, and you will encounter a form taking shape.  You will be able to feel it, to sense it, to know it.  When that happens, you can take off the blindfold and work from there.”

Maria Harris* honors one of her mentors, Mary Tully from Union Seminary in New York, by telling the story of an experience where Tully instructed the students to blindfold themselves and then gave the above instructions for working with the clay.  Harris then offers the following informative words:

Through the years I have often done that same exercise with others and realized that Mary Tully was right.  The form is there, waiting to be found, created, and re-created.  The power of the clay image is that it teaches us the nature of forming, informing, formation, and formgiving in education.  The work is ongoing, in mutuality with material, and open always to further meaning.  The molding of clay is a concrete metaphor illuminating the work of education as the fashioning and refashioning of the forms that human life offers, the forms we shape as artists at the same time we allow those forms to shape us.  For as human beings we are always extending our hands into life and into experience in order to give them form.

The work of education is giving flesh to and embodying, form.  But form is not an arbitrary organizational element – one among many.  Rather, as every artist knows, form is the actual shape of content.  Form is a marshaling of materials in relation to one another.  It is a setting of boundaries and limits.  It is a discipline, an ordering and a fashioning according to need.  As we examine the need in the church for a broader, more complete, and more extensive understanding of education, we realize that one way to understand it is as the fashioning of form.  Education in the church means taking those forms which ecclesial life presents to us, places in our hands, as clay to be molded.  Education is the work of lifting up and lifting out those forms through which we might refashion ourselves into a pastoral people. (41)

*Maria Harris.  Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989.