The Path to Joy

I am an eighty-seven-year-old man who has been a teacher in some form for all my adult life. I am an only child, an introvert, an intuitive, and what sociologists call a seeker. I have an inborn call to help others to grow into the maturity of their being. I am naturally drawn to see the potential in people. I began as a high school teacher in a Catholic high school in 1953. After twenty-five years of teaching world history, english, religion, and introductory courses in both philosophy and psychology, I was asked by church leadership to do work as a conflict mediator and consultant to parish staffs and diocesan agencies. I had been a counselor as well and have done advanced study in listening skills, confrontation, problem-solving, and managing conflict. I also completed a four-year seminary curriculum and a master’s degree in religious education and human resources. As you see from all this, humanities has interested me quite a bit.
Research on seekers tells us that about 15 percent of people fall into that group. I am also somewhat skeptical of conventional ways of thinking and am a rebel against anything inhuman in the established order. In my midlife, I even resigned from my job as guidance director after a disagreement with a new principal when she established excessively harsh discipline policies that disproportionately affected students who came to us with a difficult family history. In my role as guidance director, I thought we could handle these situations with more discretion. As a lifelong high school person, I am far from a bleeding heart. I value enlightened structures, but I don’t want to be part of an administration that won’t try to understand circumstances and be inclined to be kind. I realized then that Jesus’s story of the Good Shepherd was my guiding light and educational model. Reality is complex (one of my favorite words), and you have to be both head and heart to manage and help adolescents. I am also a big believer in the hidden; so much of everything is not manifest. You might have to wait, listen and explore. I am a big fan of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who would have us believe in “the endlessness” of everything.
The 1950s, when I began teaching, was a somewhat settled time in white America; some have even said it was boring. In the mid-1960s, the local drug coordinator said to me, “People in this town think that 1953 was the best year in history.” The sixties were notably different. I left the United States in 1960 for seminary in Switzerland. I returned to the same high school in 1964 and experienced the tumult of those years to follow. It was culture shock to me. High school seniors were much more questioning and rebellious than in the fifties. I liked it. I remember a senior coming to me after class and saying, “I hate this course. You never give any answers.” I felt like Socrates in the agora. I had a lot of good answers but wasn’t going to tell this band of rebels. I even created a course in modern philosophy using William Barrett’s fine book The Irrational Man. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Racial riots broke out in major cities. Vietnam War protests were widespread.
A few years later, at another school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, protesting students were fired on at Kent State University. Most of the students in that school were from middle-class, blue-collar families that were law-abiding and conventional. Kent State was a step too far for them. They came to school but refused to enter the building. They were protesting. I was surprised but thought, “Good.” As chaplain, I stepped in and asked the principal to let me conduct a “speak up” assembly in the gym. It proved to be an excellent moment to let them say what was in their hearts and on their minds and to begin to process events.
I haven’t loved much of what I have seen in teenage culture for the last fifty years. Consumerism and conformity, technology and advertising have become dominant, and we have become less thoughtful and less imaginative, with very little memory. We are out of touch with the deeper dimensions of our lives unless pain intervenes. “Me, now” has become the mantra for the dominant culture. Until recently, I had very little hope for a turnaround. Much of contemporary culture is wandering in the wasteland. I Remember a sociology class with Ernest van den Haag, who spoke of three kinds of culture: folk culture, high culture, and mass culture. The folk culture of primitive and poorer people preserved ancestral truth well. “High” culture was appreciated by the educated. It comprised all the best that is known and thought in the world (Matthew Arnold’s description of those who know the classics). Mass culture is created out of the popular fads and fashions popular in the contemporary, other-directed society. I like to describe it as doing what everybody else is doing because everybody else is doing it. Contemporary media brainwashing accounts for much of our thinking. I admire many people old and young who have their truth because they inherited it in the goodness and wisdom of their families. The only other alternative seems to be broadly well educated with personal critical skills to judge the culture and find the way by one’s inner resources.
I am an idealist. I think it is important to have a vision and hope for our young people; the mind and the heart need development. Knowledge, understanding, and wisdom can lead us to truth and kindness. To seek the truth and to love goodness in all things seems to describe it well. The great Western philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle moved to this understanding of life. Thomas Aquinas, the great Christian theologian of the thirteenth century, speaks of it as being “a radiant life.” Attaining the life of such harmony and rhythm and sharing with others is in our very nature. The sad alternative is described by Henry James, an American novelist: “For the small fry of the future there is such a thing in the United States as the freedom to grow up blighted and may be the only freedom in store.”
All of the world’s great religious traditions speak of being “a way” or “a path” to some glory that could possibly await us. Of course, we know so well that there are so many pitfalls and casualties along the way.
Josef Pieper, one of my favorite Thomistic philosophers, asks Christians in “a meditation for Pentecost,” “What is to be celebrated at Pentecost on the feast of the Spirit?” He tells us that the ancients understood the Spirit as the power to come into contact with the totality of the world. What distinguishes a spiritual being is that the sphere in which it lives is that of reality as a whole. “The life of the Spirit amounts therefore, to existing face-to-face with the world as a whole … not just the totality of diverse things, but the overall meaning, the essential foundation of all that is.” It’s not just being in touch with specific goals like making a living or having fun. Technical achievements are only means. We understand our meaning in literature, the arts, philosophy, and religion, where the story of meaning is told.
Jesus will be so bold as to say, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Buddha will speak of “the eightfold path.” The way of the Torah is the heart of Judaism. Martin Buber will write of “the way of Hasid.” In China, the Tao is to be your guide. This morning, I read The Great Philosophers by Karl Jaspers, and Jaspers asks, “Did Plato show the way? Does he still show the way?”