Jesuit Spirituality for the Contemporary Pluralistic Classroom

The Jesuit ideal of striving to care for the whole person (cura personalis) forms a principle that transcends any single social, political, religious or professional context, offering educators something of a measuring stick to carry with us for the many domains in which we operate (Mesa 2017, pp. 287–366).1 As a spiritual principle, it means we must be attentive to the complexity of ourselves as much as we are sensitive to the complexities of others. There is no one moment when we might simply relax this guiding concept so as to reduce the fullness of the person who stands before us. As a parent and as a teacher, I am all-too-aware, however, of how I frequently reduce the complexities of the persons who stand before me, even those I deeply love and care for, in order to “make it through the day”, with efficiency and productivity as enacted principles that often trump taking the time to explore the fullness of our humanity. But I try when I can to recognize the fullness and wholeness of those I walk beside, and when I do so intentionally, I recognize better the difficulties we all face in trying to respect and care for each other in ways that will never be completely realized. Caring for the whole person in an educational setting means recognizing foremost that there is much more to a person's life and story than what transpires within any classroom setting. This is an obvious statement, but one that reminds me—and indeed calls me—to recognize to some degree those complex facets of each person's life that I might otherwise dismiss or ignore, whether through inviting students to share their backgrounds and views in assignments or in fostering conversations that bring such elements to the forefront of discussions. Putting the limited and focused goals of a class in dialogue with the entirety of an individual's life entails an intentionality that we have yet to see become the focal point of so many pedagogical aims. At times, I wonder whether most educators and students are aware of how many opportunities are being missed to integrate the varied pieces that comprise a singular life into a classroom experience (Mesa 2017, pp. 367–423; Traub 2008).2 In many ways, today's educators bring the vast complexity of an individual life into focus when taking account of the various overlapping elements of a person's background that coalesce within the classroom. Critical pedagogies such as intersectionality, developed in a feminist context, bring an individual's relations to gender, sexuality, class and race to the forefront of their contributions, asking those within a conversation to take account of the interconnectedness of each individual's background (hooks 1984, 1994). Accounting for the ways in which our circumstances (and even our bodies) intersect within the classroom provides a rich context against which new knowledges can emerge (hooks 2003; Connor 2014).3 In a previous study, I argued that the discourse of theology might be better represented if it took the lives of faith as they are embodied by individual persons as its starting point, rather than prescriptive or doctrinal statements about what a life of faith should be like (Dickinson 2020a). My sense is that theoretical and critical abstraction from the everyday lived realities we inhabit has driven a wedge between parts of ourselves that we are not sure how to suture together again. The field of theology suffers as a result of our frequently all-too-myopic point of view. We often miss the complexity of ourselves, and of each other, because we have prioritized the wrong things, favoring too often those abstractions from our embodied realities in order to exercise a cold logic or critical rationality detached from the lives that we live daily. Instead, we need to reimagine what education could be as a spiritual practice that takes seriously the care of the whole person and the ways that such care joyously disrupts the classroom. This is what transpires when students fully engaged in the course with their whole being decide to open up and share themselves with the class, often in unscripted ways that deviate from course objectives. I believe that saying this is the same thing as understanding that one's humanity must be recognized and acknowledged before any true learning can take place. This is generally the principle, as I understand it, of addressing the “missionary or humanitarian nature” of a situation before undertaking catechesis (Congregation for the Clergy 2001). In this brief essay, I turn to Ignatian spirituality as a guide for reforming education because I believe it provides helpful guideposts for making it through the (dualistic) divisions that productively channel, but also overly simplify our world and ourselves. The Jesuit principles of discernment, listening to resistance and striving for the indifference of love all point us toward the complexities of our inner worlds and the fragile selves that we are in ways exceedingly useful and necessary for true education to take place. These are the three guideposts that I will address sequentially in what follows. The seeds for a radical re-envisioning of education are to be found in the quest for a spirituality of education for the whole person. Even a secular outlook on education, I would further contend, must cultivate a more authentic spirituality of education, one that seeks to address the fullness of our humanity beyond the rationalistic reductions that continue to govern contemporary academia. As a small child raised in the United Methodist Church, I started asking fundamental questions about what matters most to people and why we seldom take the time to focus on what we value most, especially things of personal faith. If so many people indicate that faith in God was the most important thing in their life, then why were not most people striving every day, in every way possible, to embody their faith through their actions? Why did I see what appeared to be the opposite strike most people as more interesting and worthy of their time and attention? Similar to Martin Luther's scrupulousness that started a revolutionary movement in the Church's sense of what it meant to be pious and faithful, the desire to reconcile seemingly opposed tendencies manifested itself in my young mind through a tension I perceived between following one's faith in peace, love and kindness or following one's nation in warfare, should one be called upon to do so. As these impulses seemed diametrically opposed to one another, I was routinely accosted by the question about which one took precedence over the other: was one's loyalty to Christ to win out over one's patriotism, or should things go the opposite way if others demanded it be so? I was never fully able to resolve the issue, though I did plumb deeper into questions surrounding the appearance of the tension itself. I wondered, for example: are religious matters purely human issues or are they really involved with divine things? How can we know those divine things? And in what ways have humans distorted those things with our own ideologies and all-too-human desires? (Dickinson 2021). Eventually, in my twenties, I converted to Catholicism while teaching at a Catholic high school in Saint Louis, Missouri. I obtained a master's degree in religious education at a Jesuit school, Saint Louis University, and continued to cultivate a list of philosophical and theological inquiries, increasingly discovering the classroom to be a wonderful laboratory for further exploring why we value what we value, and how we might gain a better understanding of where those values clashed with others. As I taught courses on the Bible, I began to notice a tension in biblical narratives between what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur would call the legalistic and prophetic sides of monotheism (Ricoeur 1967). For every law proclaimed and upheld as if such gestures were the only fitting way to serve God, there were also prophetic cries for justice that seemingly undid the force of law in favor of those marginalized by the normative conditions of their religious society. This is a tension that seemed to structure the entire Hebrew scriptures, as prophets would speak about justice needing to be done at the same time as religious leaders demanded that the people obey God's laws as their primary motivation. It was, and is, in ineradicable tension as well, one that continues to haunt all necessary normative structures and the laws that support them. When I finally defended my doctoral dissertation some years later in Leuven, Belgium, I explored this same tension in terms of canonical norms and those internal messianic forces that work to bring more justice to each normative measure (Dickinson 2013). The terms had shifted to a more philosophical register, but the tension was remarkably similar. This was because our world is so heavily permeated with such dualistic oppositions—such as the classical Christian one between law and grace—that we continuously strive to overcome them, while failing to note why and how they continue to govern us. Since then, I have continued to look at the ways that humanity has dichotomously divided up reality in order to better identify and label it, for example in the dualistic opposition between fetishes and sacraments, which I took up in another context (Dickinson 2020b). Such facile, binary divisions are, on some level, inescapable. They are the cost of having, and of making use of, the highly reductive medium of language and all forms of shared, symbolic representation. We continuously seek to overcome the limitations of language, and we are forever thwarted by the apparent necessity of our I would the question about how we might resolve these dualistic I would beyond the of language and toward those gestures for or those philosophical that not for a but to rather the of our world in order to our to these (Dickinson than on a that the fullness of our humanity or or or as Paul divided up the world in to the we could to a logic that would every divided against itself even a in can be divided into and a that the in some I for our seeds of the as the and Jesuit we the human from the or canonical from messianic calls to them, or even fetishes from sacraments, because they are all together in some Catholicism a that is in with an that many religious yet that is at to some and to others and of the of such a logic might us in better ways to with our world and the educational to We can Catholic to to a that was a time of in the Catholic and of the complexity 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