To know as we are known

In Silence

“Traditional disciplines aim at revealing the prerational ground of our knowing and our living, the ground of love from which truth arises. As such they are alien to many academics, not simply because they are not practiced, but because the prerational always contains the risk of irrationality which academics rightly fear. But if we would teach a truth whose totality is beyond the mind’s capacity to capture or conceive we must risk disciplines that break the mind’s dominance. Even more we will find our rationality enriched and expanded by the power of prerational love. The risk we feel is not really the risk of error; it is the challenge of transformation that comes as we allow ourselves to be mastered by truth.” (p.117)

“The skillful anthropologist does not rush into a village imposing the received concepts of social science on its people and life patterns. Instead, he or she spends much time in silent, receptive listening for the other’s reality.” (p.120)

In Solitude

“We have hidden ourselves behind the barriers of impersonal knowledge because we do not want to be found out. The knowing self is full of darkness, distortion, and error; it does not want to be exposed and challenged to change. It seeks objectified knowledge in order to know without being known. If we can learn this lesson from the discipline of silence, we will be lead into the disciplines of solitude where this evasive knowing self can be brought out of hiding to be transformed by truth and love.” (p.121)

“Solitude opens us to the heart of love which makes community possible; life in community manifests the love we touch in solitude. Community requires solitude to renew its bonds; solitude requires community to express and test those bonds … most of us in our daily lives exist neither in solitude or community but somewhere in between … this is the vacuousness of mass society and of mass education … in this half-lived middle ground, our solitude is loneliness and our attempts at community are fleeting and defeating. We are alone in the crowd, unable to touch the heart of love in ourselves or to touch others in ways that draw out the heart." (p.122)

"Community, I have claimed, is the nature of reality, the shape of our being … community is not the collective identity of the crowd that cancels out all selfhood. Nor is it a mystic merger into a single, cosmic self. Instead it is a network of relationships between individual persons, solitary selves, each with an identity and integrity … In solitude we come to know ourselves as we are, to know ourselves as we are known by love.” (p.122)

“In solitude we do not gain more knowledge of the world, about what is ‘out there’, but we gain something far more valuable; knowledge of what is ‘in here’, of who it is that knows … The entire objectivist agenda, which insists on locating all problems and solutions ‘out there’ somewhere … But as we face ourselves in solitude, we are slowly freed from the stranglehold of our dependencies and darkness and from the destructiveness of our objectifying life. “ (p.123)

“The freeing and healing discipline of solitude requires that we simply stay with it, confronting ourselves with patience, bearing the pain that comes as we withdraw our projections from the world and find their source in ourselves. As we do so, solitude eventually offers a quiet gift of grace, a gift of acceptance, of compassion, for who we are, as we are. As we allow ourselves to be known in solitude, we discover that we are known by love.” (p.124)

Parker J. Palmer (1993) To know as we are known: education as a spiritual journey, HarperOne, New York.