Seeking the Transcendent

If you only want to be what you already are and to be taught what you already think, there’s no real growth, no authentic dynamism possible. You’re stuck within the limits of  “Me.”

- Robert Royal

Robert Royal is the editor in chief of a website called The Catholic Thing. I found that above quote in an article of his addressing the proposed renovations of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. You may read his opinion of that here if you like: Notre Dame Restorations

The words I lifted from his essay are among the most profound I have ever come across. In a nutshell, I think he speaks to what a good, real, and true education should speak to, and by extension it demonstrates where modern education fails miserably (at least, too often). When we stop seeking what is beyond ourselves, when the transcendent is shown the door, what too easily and readily replaces it? The "Now" or as he puts it, the "Me". 

But most people, I believe anyway, don't want simply the "Me". They are looking for the better thing, what C. S. Lewis among others refer to as the numinous, the other than me, that thing which might be called the Divine. We know in our hearts that we lack that transcendence. We visit places such as Notre Dame to actively seek it. It is not in our schools. Indeed, I rather think we've outright banned it in public education. In too many of our private schools, in fact.

At the risk of going from the, ahem, sublime to the ridiculous, I will compare transcendent feeling to our current modes of education based on what I found in, of all things, a book titled Baseball Haiku. Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry, and baseball being popular in Japan the sport has found itself the subject of haiku poets both there and here in North America. 

Stripped to its very basics, haiku is a 17 syllable poem in a 5-7-5, three line pattern. The first line has five syllables, the second has seven, and the third five again. The authors of the book, in explaining haiku, teach that it is much more than a rhyming scheme. Haiku is supposed to be the expression of deep and profound thought in limited words. It is supposed to open a door for the reader to the numinous, based on the poet's solitary, one on one connection with it. It is an attempt to express the nearly inexpressible.

When I was both a student and a teacher I remember giving and being given English class 'lessons' in haiku. Yet we weren't given that background, that essential understanding. In retrospect now I see that the idea of haiku was so dumbed down as to be genuinely insulting to the true point of it. That's because all we were told was, "See here, write whatever you want in this 5-7-5 pattern and look! You're a haiku artist!" The emphasis wasn't placed on haiku; it was placed on the student.

I assure you that my 11th Grade attempts at haiku were pathetic, and with all due respect so too were the offerings of my students when I was teaching. To the greatest degree it was due to one thing: no actual, honest understanding of haiku. Stripped to nothing but its mechanics, haiku is meaningless. As such, talking about haiku in class was meaningless. It did not have meaning because it could not, given such bare and rote instruction. The meaning isn't in the form: it's in the intent of the poet as he does his best to reflect transcendent truth. It's not something you simply 'do' for mere classroom credit. It's not a thin way of experiencing another culture. Haiku is about touching the eternal.

Even my poor explanation doesn't in any way get to the real point of haiku. That's greatly because you can't describe it so succinctly in one blog, just as you can't really understand it in one or two class sessions of high school. You're only playing around in a classroom and in fact not learning anything, about the style of expression, about yourself, about the world around you or the otherworldly. There's no connection made between the here and now and the not here and now, the eternal. The student's mind is not made to see beyond itself, and therefore cannot expand and grow. Our education today isn't about anything quite so mystical, despite our natural longing for it. Teachers are left with the mundane drivel of making you the best you you can be, without any true consideration of what might actually do you the most good. 

When education becomes only about you, well, quite bluntly, you will not turn outward but inward. You will surely have little but your own selfishness and self interest indulged. You will be affirmed merely in your base desires. You won't grow. You will only be, again as Royal puts it, trapped in the "Me". I don't see where that can bode well for our future.