H: Hi, Brandon.
B: Hannah, how are you?
H: Oh, I’m doing super well because I just made a homemade pumpkin spice latte, which is second only to a Yale Divinity School Refectory pumpkin spice latte.
B: Woah. You are a DIY kinda gal.
H: Thank you. I like to think I would have thrived on the pioneer–as a pioneer woman on the open plains.
B: As long as you had the pumpkin spice, you could probably like seal the log cabin with it. It’s probably …
H: It would be a multi-use pumpkin spice. I think that’s right.
Well, I feel a little bit selfish because I had an experience that our listeners did not have the pleasure of experiencing, which was watching you drink your first pumpkin spice latte.
B: You know, it was a revelation to me, on two levels. Revelation … let me start with the second revelation. Revelation number one, it was just really …
H: This is very Julien of you.
B: Yeah. You know, I was prepared rather cynically to dismiss the whole pumpkin spice movement and it is does seem rather like a movement. I was coached, you know, to have sort of cynical strong feelings about this. I’m not a joiner by disposition.
H: Sure. That I I believe yeah. Special special was introduced to this conversation mainly.
B: Special special. Right.
H: Because of pumpkin spice. Yeah.
B: But, lo and behold, I’m not special. Pumpkin spice latte is totally delightful. I think I need more of it. So that was the second insight. I … it was just quite lovely. And I think it deserves its place in the Pantheon of beverages.
H: Okay. Okay.
B: Yeah. But, but, the first revelation was that, you asked me if I wanted a beverage and you went to the refectory and you brought me a beverage. It was like, it was such a friend moment. So thank you. I felt really cared for in that moment.
H: Aw.
B: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And I have a way to reciprocate, which I’ll be sharing. Oh, good.
H: Great.
B: In future podcast episodes. Stay tuned.
H: The suspense is killing me. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, today, we’re talking with Parker Palmer, and I know that you are just more familiar with his work than I am. And I I kind of am wondering what his work has meant to you.
B: Thank you for asking. Yeah. No, I am so excited. Parker has been, you know, one of those mentors and guides that I’ve never met. I think we all have those folks who, whose leadership and wisdom have kind of always been there for us. You know, soon after we discover them, they just become sort of the regular touchstones, folks that we go back to again and again. And at least for two decades, he’s been this for me. His book, The Courage to Teach, was … is a book that I go to over and over again. It sort of has that kind of lectionary feel to it. Like, I’m gonna move through this in a kinda cyclical fashion, and it speaks to me, you know, in every season of my life. And I think, you know, I think about Parker Palmer like the spiritual director that I’ve that I’ve never actually met. But he has a kind of genuine authenticity, a warmth, a compassion, an elder sort of presence in my life, especially when I am tempted to believe that the work of ministry or teaching is about sort of learning a series of technical competencies and that’s it. That if I just know my stuff, memorize my facts, that I have all that I need.
And what Parker helped me really understand is that it’s really about embodiment. It’s about presence. It’s about trust. It’s about really relying on the work of the Spirit, the invisible, quiet, but powerful work of the Spirit that shows up in your presence as you do the very technical tasks of teaching or preaching or various parts of pastoral ministry, which is both in one way it has been a relief to me, but also has been an even more sort of demanding calling. Right? Because your whole person actually is the thing that does the teaching. It’s not just this expertise about the 13th century that I might have. Right?
H: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. You’re reminding me of my friendship phrase with my friend also named Hannah, where we keep talking about the Holy Spirit sparkle. I think that’s kind of our Church of England/Episcopalian way of reclaiming something within our own tradition that was familiar in a different tradition, but really exists here, really exists with all Christians and is evergreen.
It’s, you know, we talk sometimes about competencies and what we can teach people in seminary and what people need to learn after seminary. But this thing you’re talking about, this rootedness, this life with God and letting God live through you is so evergreen. Such that, and here’s me bringing it back, during pumpkin spice-election-hurricane-war season…
B: Oh, that’s a mouthful.
H: We’re going to be okay.
B: Well, I mean, I think what you what you’re reminding me of, and I think this is what partner Palmer would ultimately remind us of is that no matter what we’re called to do technically, right, you teach theology, I teach preaching, for listeners who might, you know, be church leaders and think about managing a budget or managing a team or, you know, making a visit to a hospital or preparing folks for marriage. Right? It’s an act of faith. I mean, it’s so obvious we can forget it. Like, we believe somehow that we are participating with the Holy Spirit and that God is showing up somehow.
Right? And it’s not just like a competency to master, but it’s an act of faith. Thank God. Because I often feel like my competency is, you know, somewhat limited.
H: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well and I mean, for almost a year now, I’ve been I guess not almost a year. Since the summer, I’ve been coming back to this image of the earthen vessel that we get in the New Testament that we kept hearing preached kind of on accident or maybe by the Holy Spirit over and over during the Leader’s Way week in residence that we are super finite at the end of the day, but there is an infinite God whose work we’re participating in a meaningful way. And that’s both daunting and something that we can find a certain level of rest in.
B: Yeah. I mean, gosh. I mean, if we do nothing else in Leader’s Way, I hope that folks walk away with this sense of, more deeply abiding in God. I’m thinking of that John 15, this invitation to abide. And of course, Leader’s Way applications, if you’re listening to this, near the time that the episode is released, the Leader’s Way applications are open. And so, you know, think about joining this extraordinary group of innovators and visionaries and church leaders every summer, every June here at Yale. So you can apply. We’d love to love to have you with us. Can I tell you a little bit about Parker? A little bit of his resume. I mean, Parker will be the first one to tell you that his resume is sort of totally inconsequential. But …
H: Very Paul.
B: Exactly. Exactly.
B: So, Parker holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He has 13 honorary doctorates. Two distinguished … I know, right? Two distinguished achievement awards from the National Education Press Association. He’s author of ten books, seven award-winning titles, sold over 2,000,000 copies. In 2011, the Utney Reader, one of my favorite publications named him as one of the 25 visionaries on its annual list of people who are changing the world. He’s a member of the religious society of friends, popularly known as the Quakers. He and his wife, Sharon Palmer, they live in Madison, Wisconsin. And I’m so, so thankful and excited for the conversation that will unfold with us and Parker Palmer.
B: Hi. I’m Brandon Nappi.
H: Hi. I’m Hannah Black, and we’re your hosts on the Leader’s Way podcast.
B: A Yale podcast empowering leaders, cultivating spirituality, and exploring theology. This podcast is brought to you by Berkeley Divinity School, The Episcopal Seminary at Yale. Parker Palmer, it’s so great to have you here on the Leaders Way podcast. Welcome.
Parker: Thank you so much, Brandon. Very good to be with you and Hannah.
B: So, yeah, I spend a considerable amount of time with folks in spiritual direction. And one of the questions that I love to ask folks that I’m sitting with, not that we’re in spiritual direction, right, but, is to is to see if there’s an early childhood memory of God or an encounter with the sacred or something just so overwhelmingly beautiful that comes to mind that that maybe upon reflection has been important to you and maybe set you on on the spiritual path early in life. I wonder if a memory comes to mind.
P: It’s a very interesting question for me because later in life, as an adult, I’ve had maybe two, certainly one, experience that would qualify perhaps as a mystical experience.
Generally speaking, I have not been prone in that direction. But the childhood memory that comes back to me very powerfully, has to do with growing up in a Methodist church in a suburb of Chicago and having the great good fortune to have in that church a youth minister, with whom I traveled in the Methodist, the Young People’s Fellowship, MYF, something like that, Methodist Youth Fellowship, through junior high school and high school. His name was Bert Randall, and he never wanted to be anything other than a youth minister. He was not using youth ministry as a rung on the ladder toward the head pastorate of some big church. He just loved young people.
And the town I grew up in and the big, big high school I went to, 2,000 students, was a highly stratified American social structure, where, you know, everybody had their place and everybody was supposed to stay there. But, and that was true not only in the town, but in the high school as well. But on weekends, Bert Randall knew how to create the beloved community among young people. He valued each of us individually, and he taught us to value each other individually. So even though things, you know, kind of reverted, to, business as usual, five days a week, on weekends I got a taste of what I believe church is meant to be, and that was incredibly formative for me.
It was that it was that early grounding in community. More than any mystical experience, that really set me on the path that I’ve been on now for 85 years.
H: Wow. I could relate to that so much. One of the blessings of having grown up in a mega church environment was that there was a humongous amount of time and energy devoted to creating community for us as young people, and I think I owe a lot to that, Which now I’m in a totally different context, but very thankful that I was set on that path.
I’m wondering if you’ll share one of those mystical experiences with us.
P: Sure. Glad to do it. I’ll mention two, if there’s time.
H: Please, yeah.
P: So the one I remember quite vividly, came out on the high desert of New Mexico. I had gone out to Ghost Ranch and to an isolated, cabin or retreat site, a solo retreat site, about six miles off of that campus. And for ten days, I was all alone in the desert and under those amazing stars and skies at night with no light, from… no human-made light interfering. And, one afternoon, I was hiking out in the desert. I was out of sight of any human-made structure, although I had been very careful to, you know, to keep my bearings as best I could, so I could find my way home.
And there was this moment, which, as with most experiences that I’ve read about, I’m sure was an instant that seemed longer and deeper than that, when I had the profound apprehension that the cosmos was utterly indifferent to me and at the same time, utterly accepting and forgiving of me. It was that sense … well, it’s captured in an old Hasidic tale, as told by Martin Buber, where the rabbi says, “We should all have a coat with two pockets. In one, there is dust to remind us that we came from the earth and we’re returning to the earth. And in the other, there is gold to remind us that we are precious in the eyes of the creator.”
And that was exactly the feeling I had, not, you know, not as a thought, not as part of a belief system, not as an affirmation and a creed, but it was in my bones that I was both dust and gold. And I’ll never forget that.
And then a second experience requires me to mention the fact that three times in my life, as I’ve written about and spoken about, I have descended into profound clinical depression. That’s been part of my life journey, part of my spiritual journey. And it’s one that I’m always grateful for a chance to talk about because there are so many people who suffer from clinical depression or who are living side-by-side with those who do, that I’m very eager along with a lot of other people these days to remove the stigma from that. To remove the, you know, to sweep away the barriers that say somehow that’s a shameful thing and you certainly shouldn’t talk about it. Because talking about it is part of healing. And letting other folks know that you’ve been there and that you’ve survived is part of healing for other people.
So I won’t go into immense detail, later if you’d like, but in depression, you’re not just sad, you’re annihilated. Your sense of self is gone. It’s not a feeling of sadness, it’s the terrifying fact that you have no feelings whatsoever because you have disappeared from the face of the earth as a being, as a worthy being, as a human being. And I can’t overemphasize the sense of worthlessness, of purposelessness, of meaninglessness. That’s what depression is about. It’s being an atom in a void, disconnected from everything that you’ve ever known about life, and feeling utterly unworthy to rejoin life, even when people are inviting you to do so. And in the middle of one sleepless night, insomnia is part of many depressions. In the middle of one sleepless night, I, and put this in quotes, “heard a voice” because I’m not … I can’t testify that it was an auditory experience, although part of me says it was. It was a voice that I could find nowhere within myself during the daylight hours or at night. But the voice said, “I love you, Parker.” The voice named me. The voice said, “I love you.”
And I’m not going to say that that was instantly curative or healing because it wasn’t. For me, coming out of depression every time I’ve gone into it has been a months-long journey with many components. But that registered with me. And for that kind of affirmation to register with a person who is experiencing self-annihilation, is worth noting. And, it was somehow a little spark that, somehow I was able to keep fanning as time went on until the flame of life, as it were, returned.
H: Yeah.
P: And, that’s the second mystical experience that will always be with me.
H: Wow. Wow. That’s amazing. I … so I have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and I have a close friend who also struggles with depression who … I think for both of us, one of the key ways we’ve found to minister to each other is to remind each other of the love of God, and that’s had to be the thing that kind of, like, shows that first pinpoint of light. And, often, it’s honestly a painful one to recognize that you can be loved and that you’re worthy of love. That it’s not kind of a happy-clappy warm moment necessarily, and I don’t wanna speak into your experiences. But, for me and I think for my friend, I’m thinking of that’s often been a sort of painful thing to feel as an opening point to coming out of the depths.
P: Yeah. In my case, I’m still there hanging by my fingernails off the cliff that might well take my life. But something has shifted, something has happened. One of the things I’ve written about, Hannah, in this regard is one of the most powerfully curative or healing acts that another human being performed for me. And I’ve always thought of this other human being as … being moved by something sacred and something holy in the way he was in the world. I’m a Quaker, we don’t have saints, but he was a Quaker saint. And his name was Bill Taber. I was living in a Quaker community at the time at Pendle Hill, where I lived for a decade. And, Bill, knowing that I was in trouble, would come to my house every afternoon about 4 o’clock. He would sit me down in an easy chair, having asked my permission to do all of this. He would take off my shoes and socks and he would massage my feet.
H: Oh my goodness.
P: And he’d … he rarely said a word. He was a very quiet man. Occasionally, he would say, I feel your struggle today. But he would just continue massaging my feet. Occasionally, he would say, “I feel you getting a little stronger,” and continue massaging my feet. He never delivered the message verbally. He connected with me humanly in the at the one point in my body where I could feel a connection. Because for me, my body was dead. I couldn’t feel anything, but I could feel that. And he somehow provided a tether for me back to myself, back to earth, back to other people. And so, I think mystical experience can sometimes be very grounded in a human exchange of extraordinary simple but extraordinary dimension.
H: Oh, yeah. Most definitely. I … I’ve described it before as wanting so badly to be able to flip a light switch and just turn my emotional capacities back on. I wonder if we can talk about this just a little bit more because I have received so much bad advice in the church in regards to mental health, and I think it’s helpful to get something good out there. People have told me things like, “Don’t seek medical attention or medication. That’s either an easy way out or a non-spiritual way out.” And I’ve heard people, you know, say every all kinds of things to the effect of, like, “Well, just stop being anxious. Like, have you tried have you tried that? Just kinda, like, buck up.”
How … how do you think about mental health as both spiritual, but also something that it’s okay to seek help for?
P: Well, what’s come to mind first of all, Hannah, is a phrase my grandfather used to use when he heard something for which there are very impolite names in our society. He grew up on a farm in Iowa. And he would simply look at me and say, “horse hockey.” And that’s what I want to say.
B: I think we need to revive it.
P: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I wanna say to the kinds of things you just mentioned.
H: Right.
P: In fact, once I had come back to myself through one of my depressions, I was I sat one afternoon with a woman who came to speak with me having read what I wrote about it in a in a little book called Let Your Life Speak. And she was burdened by the church, which was basically accusing her of having somehow failed to get close enough to God or to, you know, to chant the right words or to perform the right actions to be rescued from this darkness. And she said, so what did you do as a Christian that helped you come back to health? And I said, I don’t have any idea.
H: Right.
P: I don’t have the foggiest notion. It was a slow process. It was a step-by-step healing. It was breathing. It was doing what I could. And I told her about a whole bunch of stuff, including taking antidepressants when I needed to be on them, which I needed in each of these three descents into darkness. I haven’t had to stay on them, but I needed them at the time to provide a floor under my sinking …
H: Yeah, oh, yeah.
P: …sense of being. When she left, I felt like I’d let her down, but a week later, I got a letter from her. She said, “Thank you for liberating me from all of that stuff that I’ve been hearing at church.” She said, “I’ve left that congregation.”
H: Oh, wow.
P: And “I’m basically, I’m finding better people to hang out with.” And so I’ve never I’ve never regretted the simple truth telling of saying, you know, spirituality isn’t a magic wand, and God doesn’t do magic. We sometimes do magic for each other, you know, mediating this sacred impulse to nurture life in each other as my friend who rubbed my feet did for me. But I think it’s really criminal the way some theologies end up penalizing people for a kind of darkness that it doesn’t take five minutes of thought and maybe a little more of study to realize this is partly genetic, this is partly situational, this has to do with the conditions of modern life. I often … A lot of people have come to me to talk about depression and at some point in the conversation, I will often say something like, “Look, the world we live in, you’d be crazy if you weren’t depressed.” Who’s crazy here? The people
B: This is the logical outcome of the culture we’ve created.
P: Exactly. Exactly. So don’t buy that horse hockey. You know, hang on to the sanity of what you think of as your insanity, and then you can start working it in some creative ways. Bottom line for me, I know we could talk a lot about this and I’d be glad to talk more if you’d like, but one of the … when I’m with a person who’s suffering from depression, given my own experience, first of all, I spend a lot of time listening, even if the responses are coming slow. One of the things depressed people most need is someone to listen to them patiently, someone to be in the room with them faithfully, someone, unlike most people, who doesn’t treat depression as a communicable disease and just wants to get out of the room as quickly as possible. You know, as if this person might give me COVID of the brain or something.
That that’s you know, I experienced a lot of what I called drive-by caring. You know, pop in, say a word of encouragement, pop out because I might catch the disease. And that’s not compassion, and that’s not helpful, and that’s not healing. So I like to sit with people, ask honest, open questions, listen to answers, try to develop a picture of who this person is, and help this person feel received in their present state. And then, if the moment is right, I want to be able to say to them, welcome to the human race. You haven’t told me anything that I haven’t experienced. You haven’t said anything that millions of people haven’t experienced. This is part of what it means to be human. Maybe we can just reboot and say, what would life look like if we didn’t treat this as somehow a spiritual error or a cosmic calamity, but just part of slogging our way through life, which sometimes has us in the muck up to our waists and sometimes out under the sun on a beautiful day in a field full of flowers. Welcome to the human race.
B: Well, I mean, thank you for this because I recognize how much of this sort of internalized unhealthy theology that I’ve had in my life around this. And your sharing about this was profoundly transformative to me. I mean, I’d had many of your books on my shelf and look to your wisdom often to support me in my ministry. And I can tell you exactly where I was, the very spot that I was driving on the highway when I heard you talk about this. I don’t know that it was the first time you did talk about depression, but it’s first time I had heard you talk so candidly about this, on Krista Tippett’s program. I think it was, “Speaking of Faith” in those days, “On Being” now. Right? And every time I drive by this path, this part of the highway, I think … that’s where I heard Parker talk about this. And I could feel my DNA rearranging. And for me, what it did was it gave me permission to feel whatever it is that I happen to be feeling on any given day in my ministry in my life because you had given me permission to be a human being. And I wonder for folks in ministry or folks in leadership who might feel this sort of extra burden, not only do I have sort of the primary burden of the depression I might be struggling with at a particular moment, but this extra layer of shame that Christian leaders, spiritual leaders aren’t supposed to be human in this way. It really freed something for me. I’ll never forget it. And I think about you every time I drive up the highway, which I do, I don’t know, a dozen times a month. So thank you for that moment many years ago.
P: Thank you so much. That lovely.
B: The book for me that sort of awakened something and set me on a path, Parker, was The Courage to Teach. It’s sort of … it’s sort of an icon for me. It’s always on my bookshelf. It’s always within my line of vision. And what this opened up for me is a kind of exploration of the inner life, the embodiment that teaching invites us to. Because up until that moment in my early vocation, I thought of my professional life as developing a set of competencies.
I need to get good at covering content. I need to know my content. I need to show up on time. I need to put together a PowerPoint presentation. Right? All these sort of skills. And I thought that once I ticked off all those boxes, I was good to go and I could be really great. And then you introduced this whole other dimension of teaching, of being, of ministry that sort of threw a grenade into the middle of my life in the best possible way. So when you talk about the inner life of teaching or ministry or embodiment, can you share a little bit about what you’re what you’re trying to point to?
P: Oh, yeah. It’s a great … it’s a great question. It’s a big question. Right? Because I think the inner life is everything except the tip of the iceberg. And you know, the problem in modern life in a developed society is that we focus so much on the tip of the iceberg, which is all of those externals about how we look, how other people see us, about the skillfulness of our actions, about the knowledge we do or don’t hold, especially in the academic community. And we act as if all of that were very, very, very complicated stuff and that’s why we must spend all our time living from living on the outside of who we are, right? Because that’s where the action is. And I have to say that the farther I went in my schooling, from kindergarten through a PhD at Berkeley, the more obsessive and insistent the focus on the externals were. In grad school, nobody gave a hoot about what was going on inside of me. But, you know, it happened. I was at Berkeley in the sixties, so a lot was going on inside of me. But nobody cared about that. They wanted to know if I could run a Pearson rank order correlation coefficient on a body of data, you know, or remember everything Max Weber said about the routinization of charisma.
And so, you know, you do what you have to do at the time, but meanwhile, you’re a bleeding, suffering, struggling human being trying to figure out who the heck you are meant to be in this world. And it turns out that inner exploration is a lot more complicated than exploring the external world. I mean, I didn’t have that much trouble knowing how to negotiate, you know, some of the power games and blah blah blah. But understanding myself so, you know, a task of a different order.
H: If you’re enjoying the Leader’s Way podcast, you might like to join us in person as a Leader’s Way fellow. The Leader’s Way Yale certificate program combines the best of seminary, retreat, and pilgrimage. Fellows meet in person at Yale for a week in June, then continue their learning in mentor groups online. To learn more, visit our website.
B: You might also like to join us for one of our upcoming online courses or workshops. Our learning space is hopeful, courageous, and imaginative. This year’s offerings include courses and workshops on prayer, preaching, conflict management, and more. Clergy and lay leaders from every country, denomination, and seminary background are warmly welcome to join us for all of our programs.
P: So for me, the inner life, comes with a lot of … with a lot of different words. What we think, what we feel, what we imagine, what we fear, what we hope for, what animates us, what shuts us down, what guides us, and what shapes us. All of this is the inner life. And to cultivate the inner life, I think is to –I’ll just follow the image cultivated. It’s to stay alert to what’s growing in there and how we want to encourage or discourage certain kinds of growth. Whether or not we cultivate our inner life, it’s cultivating us. It’s curating who we are and how we are in the world. So it’s intimately related to all of that outer stuff and how we do the outer stuff is intimately related in the feedback system to what’s going on inwardly, as when one deeply regrets something one just said or realizes one has stepped into the same hole twice and wonders what that’s all about. It’s this constant feedback loop. I call it life on the Mobius strip, where the inner and the outer keep cocreating each other.
So let me … let me use a concrete example. The subtitle of The Courage to Teach is, as you know, Brandon, is Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. And one of the things that sent me off in that direction was that I was the first person in my family to go to college. And when I started reflecting on my student experience, as I was getting to the point of maybe becoming a teacher, a professor, whatever, I started realizing what a central role fear had played in my life as a student. Because I was a first generation college student, I had no intellectual heritage or background. I hardly imagined myself ever going past college even and getting a PhD and becoming a writer and a teacher. That was just like life on Mars to me. And so I never walked into a class without shaking in my boots. You know, am I good enough for this? Can I master this subject? Or am I gonna fall flat on my face? And there were … there were teachers who exacerbated those fears. And if I didn’t fall flat on my face, I came close under those conditions because they were tweaking, they were pushing the fear button all the time, which is sort of the last thing I needed.
And then there were other teachers who seemed to know how to how to mitigate fear. And under their tender loving care, I could be a very good student. I could graduate from college, Phi Beta Kappa. I could win a Danforth graduate fellowship. I could get a PhD from Berkeley with honors because I ran across some teachers along the way who didn’t make me run scared, but who evoked the better angels of my nature, if I can put it that way, because they were operating from the better angels of their nature. They knew that their task wasn’t to try to crush young people’s hopes and dreams or, you know, pretend to be the smartest guy on the planet, which always involves putting other people down. They knew that they were meant to be teachers.
And what’s interesting to me is that in later years, as I worked my way through this mess of fear multiplying fear, in other words, fearful teachers because that’s what these people were fearful about their own intelligence, about their own status.
H: Yeah. Yeah.
P: About how they stood in the competitive ranks of their own disciplines. Fearful teachers multiplying fear in the classroom in a way that amped up student fears. Later, I learned that people who research the brain have discovered that if you ramp up fear far enough, you shut the brain down. The brain does not function well under fearful conditions. And in fact, there’s there are many, many research based stories to tell about this. One of them that I just love involves the work of a woman named Sheila Tobias who transformed the teaching of math for young girls for girls and young women. Because back in the day, when I was going to school, girls and young women were flunking math regularly. And everybody thought they you know, they had a sexist explanation for it, quote, “Women’s brains are not structured in a way to make computation possible.” Well, Sheila Tobias came along and said, People, this is a no brainer. The reason females are failing at math is because they’re told from day one of their lives that women can’t do math. They’re afraid. It’s really not rocket science, folks. So she says, if we can create a new pedagogy, which addresses this fundamental problem of fear, we will, within a generation, have women performing at levels equal to and better than men.
And she did. She did. Look up Sheila Tobias, look up the revolution in math pedagogy. It’s all right there. And today, you cannot walk into a high-tech firm or you cannot read the history of computing, etcetera, or of high level science without finding woman after woman after woman whose extraordinary skills at math helped make/create those breakthroughs.
So, you know, I just think that we … one of the things that baffles me about the American university is that we claim to be research-based. Right? As if we did everything by following the North Star of facts. Well, horse hockey. We have decades of research showing us that pedagogy, good pedagogy, requires things like attention to emotions, not saying leave them at the door. Requires things like personal, intimate engagement with subjects, with questions, with unknowns, with each other, not top-down delivery of factoids. Your computer hard drive is great at risk at storing factoids except when it crashes. The human mind is not great at storing factoids. The human mind is great at gathering things in gestalts and relationships and patterns, in weaves, of … not the kind a presidential candidate is talking about, but of actual … of actual reality. So we need different language these days. We can’t just say reality, we have to say actual reality. You know?
So, pedagogy that recognizes, that embraces those research findings would look very different from the dominant pedagogy in the academy today. And yet we continue to, you know, hobble along with, I don’t know, 16th-century teaching methods, as if we really were a research-based institution.
B: Well, I wonder I mean, all of us have taught in various ways, and I wonder how you created the space, you know, for people to show up with the fullness of their humanity. How did you think about dispelling that fear once you realized that the fear was such a factor and such an obstacle to learning and creating the communities of learning? I wonder what, you know, what were some of the things that you began to do maybe differently than the way you were educated?
P: Yeah. And of course, that that would take us to a level of micro detail that’s kind of hard to encompass in a short period of time because you’re really talking about leadership for community, right? It’s pretty easy to talk about authoritarian leadership. You just stand up there, you have a system of punishments and rewards. You punish people who get outside the box you want them in, you reward people who stay there. You demand attention, you breathe up all the oxygen, and you take up all the space in the room and, you know, just create followers rather than creating community.
So here’s some practical things that I did, that I tried to do. I tried always to be truthful with my students about how I was rising and falling in relation to my own standards. I tried always to be truthful to them about the times when I had let them down as well as the times when I felt like I’d asked them to rise to an occasion. I’ll give you a quick example. My very first teaching job at Beloit College in Wisconsin, I had this one course on General Sociology. And I was … late at night, I had–I was married and had a young child by that time. Late at night, I was barely keeping up with the students in this scan of different sub-fields of sociology by, you know, reading the textbook faster than they did. And then inventing enough material to, you know, to fill the hour, three days a week. And I went in, on this particular day, about a third of the way through the term, to give a lecture to cover the section on family sociology. I had fallen asleep the night before in the middle of reading the chapter on family sociology. And so I went in unprepared, but I … you know, undaunted, I pushed ahead. After about fifteen minutes, I was so sick of the sound of my own voice. And I’d … sorry to keep returning here, but my grandfather was a powerful person in my life. I kept hearing him saying “horse hockey,” as he looked over my shoulder. I finally I just put all my notes down, and I said, I’m sorry, to my whole class. There was probably a hundred students in there. I’m sorry. I failed you. I’m not ready for this. You can just tear up all those notes because I have just said nothing of value.
This was … this was back in the day when I was still lecturing. Eventually, my pedagogy morphed into a circle engagement style. But I said, tear ‘em up. Go home early. I’m gonna go home early. I’m gonna come back day after tomorrow, ready to teach this properly. I apologize. And I will do my best to get it right next time and for the rest of this term. And I know it all doesn’t always work out like this, but that moment became kinda legendary on this liberal arts college campus.
H: Really?
P: They’d never seen anything like that. And a year later, when I left Beloit to return to grad school, it was just a two year appointment, an interim appointment that I was testing out academia to see if I belonged there. And then I went back to Berkeley to finish the PhD. Two years later, at graduation, the spring that I left, I was surprised with, a faculty and student-based vote that made me teacher of the year. And awarded me a $1,000 grant to take back to grad school with me.
And, you know, I’m a lucky guy because I was able to … as I say, it doesn’t always work out that way, but I was able to take a moment of real failure and somehow, you know, hold it in a way that resulted in growth for all of us. So sometimes, I think community building is for those of us who … involves those of us having, who have power, exposing our vulnerabilities and letting other people know we don’t always get it right. We need to be honest about when we don’t get it right. And because I don’t always get it right, I have compassion for those of you who are not getting it right. This isn’t about getting it right. This is about learning and growing.And I’m trying right now to model something about how one learns and grows. So that became a very important moment in my teaching life.
I’ll tell you one other story because the stories carry the … for me, they carry the weight. I can do this in abstract points, you know, but the stories are weighty for me.
Maybe 15 years ago, I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and there’s a big state university here. And the folks at the university are aware of some of my books. One of them invited me to come and teach, a class of about a hundred students. I think it was in the School of Social Work. And so I determined what topic I would pursue, and the teacher said, “Well, how do you intend to do that?” And I said, Well, I’ll talk for just a little while, maybe ten, fifteen minutes orientation. I know that they will have read such and such a piece. And then I’m just gonna turn to open discussion and dialogue, and try to bring together some kind of, you know, fabric of understanding around this kind of subtle complicated topic.”
And this professor said, “Oh, oh, don’t do that. They they won’t they won’t go along with you.” She said, “I’ve tried, you know, asking for comments or questions and there’s just this vast silence.” And then I said, “So what do you do then?” She said, “Well, I just have to keep lecturing, right?”
H: Oh, god. So so, you know What you’re describing is, like, a professorial nightmare.
P: Exactly. Exactly. I totally it is a nightmare. I’ve I’ve been there. I’ve done that. But, you know, you get old enough and you think, hey. Hey, I I don’t care. Listen, I I’m leaving right after class. You know, I’ll never see you. So I got in there. I I did my thing for ten or fifteen minutes, and then I said, “So let’s talk. Here’s a question.” And, you know, radio silence. It was like, you know, a blackout during World War 2. You know, you don’t– don’t let the enemy know you’re out there. And so, I just waited it out. I mean, it helps to be a Quaker because we like silence. And finally, there’s this one young woman in the back. It’s always a woman in the back of the room who just who raises her hand and says something very tentatively, right? After I was saying, “I’d really welcome, you know, any comments at all. No worries. Just where do you wanna take this?” And so very tentatively, she raises her hand and I don’t remember what she said. But I, you know, I said, “Thank you. Thank you so much. That’s a wonderful question or insight or take can take us in a wonderful direction.” And I started building on that. And, of course, with that hospitable response, a couple of other women were emboldened to ask. And then finally, some guys got in on the act because guys are more scared than women about looking stupid, and they’re less compassionate toward the professor. So pretty soon, it’s just building and building.
And they … the professor had to kick us out of there in time for the physics class to come in because people wanted to keep talking. Not all of them, but half of them did. Right? And so, at the end, she said, my professor friend said when she took me down the hall out to the door where I would leave and go home, she said, “Well, that was amazing.” But she said, “I noticed that you used two really clever techniques.”
And I said, “h, really? Really? What were they?”
And she said, “Well, you would you would always you would always kind of plead for a comment or for a next question or for a continuation of the discussion. And then you were just very effusive with your thank yous.”
And I said, “Oh, those weren’t techniques. That’s when you what you do when you’re dying on the vine. You beg for life.” Right? And and then you’re full of gratitude that someone threw you a crumb.
It feels like it’s an oatmeal. You know? But it … but I said to her, “It happens only if you are truly dependent on your students.” Right? It’s only if you are true– the miracle of the loaves and fishes happens only if you are truly dependent on the crowd. And I mean truly, Because that’s what generates the pleas, the prayer for help, and that’s what generates the depth of gratitude when you get even a little help. I mean, come on, five loaves and two fishes? That’s … that’s a pretty high division, you know, just get that out among a thousand people. But that’s the way it works.
And that’s how you … that’s one of the ways you build community. You stop being the impermeable, untouchable leader. Yeah. Yeah. With everything under control by God, and you start becoming vulnerable, your fate rises and falls with the group. And people come through.
H: If they think you think you have the secret answer, you’re toast. You’re toast. You have to totally trust them and believe that wisdom doesn’t only exist in your own self.
P: Right. Right. Right. I’ve often said well, I don’t know if it’s often, but lately I’ve I’ve realized if you are fully yourself, which really means embracing your limitations as well as your potentials, your whole parts as well as your broken parts. If you are fully yourself, it’s impossible to be full of yourself. Because you realize you’re damaged goods, and you need help. Right?
H: It sounds less nice than earthen vessel, but a little more true.
B: It also reminds me of that one scripture. It reminds me of that wonderful line, of Paula D’Arcy. I don’t know if you know Paula D’Arcy, a wonderful spiritual writer, who says, God shows up disguised as your life. So in those moments, I … I’m also thinking about the faith that it requires just to trust. You know, I don’t … I don’t need to make any sort of magic happen, that somehow God is showing up, not even mystically, although it’s nice when that happens, of course, but God is in in this moment in me and my life and my students’ lives. And, I don’t need to go, seeking something special, or extra.
P: Yeah, I totally agree. And, you know, because life is sacred. I mean, that’s what we mean when we say that, in every nook and cranny. And trust engenders trust. There’s no other way around it. And sometimes you have to be the first one extending trust, which is risky because sometimes you don’t get it and you don’t get it back. I mean, I can … I know stories where people might have tried something like I did in that class at Beloit College, you know, tear up your notes, “I’ll get it right next time,” and they would have got fired. It’s the way the world works.
H: I’m hearing a strong encouragement to live in love and authenticity instead of fear. And I think this this applies not only to teachers and professors, but certainly to priests and people who have flocks of any kind. It’s a deep and true encouragement.
P: I’ll just say one more thing along those lines about exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life or a leader’s life—
H: Yeah. Please.
P: -the priest’s or pastor’s life. That inner landscape image is very visceral and visual for me. I think as I’ve done my own inner life explorations about thought and feeling and fear and hope and, you know, where is it– where is it all coming from, I’ve realized that I really do have a landscape, and that that landscape, like any landscape, has different locales in it. So I have a locale called fear. Right? It’s there. But I also have locales that might be called hope or fellow feeling or faith, where—and I have choices about where to stand as I move toward you, or as I move toward a class, or as I move toward my parishioners. I’ve thought a lot about the biblical admonition, Be not afraid. And I’ve realized it doesn’t say you can’t have fear. It says you don’t need to be your fear. Be not afraid. So if I stand in the fear that’s always in me somewhere, that’s never left me. If I stand there, in my, on my inner landscape and move toward you, I’m going to create more of the same. That that’s how life on the Mobius strip operates. Bring fear from within myself into the outer world, I create more fear in the outer world. That feeds back on me and creates more fear in me.
But if I choose consciously to stand in a place called hope or fellow feeling or the knowledge that somehow at some level we all want this to work. Like, I move toward you with a different result. I move toward you with more vulnerability. I move towards you in a way that gives you more sense of room at the table for you too. I move towards you, you know, not as someone who’s come to conquer your mind, but someone who’s come to partner with you in this enterprise called living. So inner landscape is a very real thing for me, and I’m grateful, you know, for the image.
B: All right, it’s just been so beautiful just to have a conversation about the things that we love, teaching and learning and growing. You know, it’s our custom to, to land, these wonderful conversations in a in a sort of ritual way and that’s by asking the question about hope. You know we’re living in a heart stretching moment. Politically we’re divided. Folks are despairing. There’s a kind of ecological catastrophe that that we’re on the brink of, of creating together collectively. And so in the midst of the chaos, where do you find hope, Parker?
P: Well, let me let me not even try to pretend that I live in hope every moment of every day. Because I don’t. That would be crazy, in this kind of world. Even this morning, I was with the election coming up on us hard in a couple of weeks, I was trying to, you know, find the right place to stand in my inner landscape. And there are moments when you just have to shake your fist, I think, at heaven. I mean, I’m, you know … I’m mindful of Psalms in the Holy Writ that say, Lord, smash the teeth of our enemy. Okay. That’s … I don’t … I don’t know what you do with that in spiritual direction except to say, it’s complicated being human.
It’s complicated being God. It’s complicated to have that of God within you, as Quakers would say, because there is no emotion that God is unfamiliar with, I do believe, on the testimony of scripture alone. So welcome to the human race. You have … you have that moment. And the question is whether you can understand what’s going on in that moment, the anger and the hurt, for example, translate that into energy, which it which it is, and hook that energy to some worthy goal.
I grew up in a tradition that that said anger is unseemly for a Christian. I no longer believe that. I think anger is an energy that arises in me, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it until I hook that anger to something, to a goal that is destructive of myself or other people, or both. So hope for me isn’t just an attitude, it’s an action. And the action is measured first by its intentionality. What am I trying to do with this action? Am I trying to be life, a life-giving presence in the world, or am I threatening to be a death dealing presence? You know, that choice is clear.
I’m … As a Quaker, I’m … I aspire to live a nonviolent life, but that doesn’t mean a non-angry life. Doesn’t mean, you know, trying to pretend that I’m something other than I am, which is a human being who gets anywhere from profoundly annoyed to ragingly angry at some of the things that human beings do to each other. But again, the question is, what is my intentionality with my life? And I think there’s another question there underneath all of that, which is about discernment. Do I have a good discernment process that involves both solitude and deep inner searching and community, and the sorting and sifting that community can do? We have many voices inside of us, and the Quaker commitment to, you know, to follow the voice of the inner teacher… not every voice is the inner teacher. And we need a community to help sort us and help us sort and sift what voice we’re listening to and what our … what our true calling really is.
So it’s complicated, but life is complicated. And this is an especially complicated time. So I cut myself a lot of slack for getting it wrong from time to time, but then just being able to get back up and try it again and maybe get a better … a better outcome.
So, you know, Socrates let’s go back to Socrates.
H: And I always want to.
P: And just quickly say, he told us the unexamined life is not worth living. Right? And now that I’m 85 and I’m old enough to amend Socrates, or at least supplement Socrates, my counsel to humankind is: If you are determined to live an unexamined life, please do not take a job that involves other people. Because you will do great damage. Otherwise, keep examining your life in solitude and community, and you’ll be the better for it, and so will the rest of us.
H: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for joining us, Parker. I feel like we could talk for another five hours. I kinda wish we could. But I just know this is gonna be a deep encouragement to so many of our listeners, and I feel so blessed by this conversation.
P: Oh, I do too. Thanks to both of you, Brandon and Hannah, for inviting me and for your wonderful questions and your companionship along the way. Thank you. Many blessings.
B: Oh, it’s been such a grace to, to have you with me in my life through the written word, you know, was grace enough! But this is the sort of extra blessing of, of being able to encounter your work in person and to share a few minutes together. So, I’m endlessly thankful.
P: Well, I feel the same way. And I’ll close with words that my grandfather also said whenever I visited him and had to then leave. He said, Write if you get work.
B: Amen.
H: Thanks for listening to the Leader’s Way podcast. You can learn more about this episode at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu /podcast. Follow along with us on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast.
B: And you can rate and review us on your podcast app and be sure to hit follow so you never miss an episode. And if you like this episode, please share it with a friend.
H: Until next time.
B: Peace be with you.