The Spirituality of Learning

Last updated on: May 17, 2013 at 8:11 pm by Andre E. Johnson

The Spirituality of Learning 2013-05-17T20:11:00-05:00 Andre E. Johnson

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Christian Scientists think of angels as bright ideas. Angels are moments of clarity and expanded consciousness, moments of fresh vision and creativity, broadened perspective, and infusions of loving inspiration. Christian Scientists, who think of God as pure Mind, a divine principle of loving consciousness, see the intellect as a portal of revelation.

I come from a line of Christian Scientists, educated people devoted to the art of learning, whose hearts and imaginations are fed by angelic ideas, who are restored to health and wholeness through the spiritual practice of learning. Of course, not only Christian Scientists access the divine via the portal of the intellect. The heritage of growth through learning, and liberation through education, is upheld by Jesuits, Orthodox Jews, swamis and gurus, poets and scholars, and anyone who embarks courageously on immersion into a new discipline. Children, whose biological development keeps rapid pace with their cognitive burgeoning, are greeted by angels on every horizon.

I am a PhD student, a professional learner. Presently I am preparing for comprehensive exams. Naturally, the task of preparing for comps is accompanied by great trepidation. It is the time at which one is asked to master the literature and historical lineage of their field of study in order to be able to teach it to undergraduates and to more incisive graduate students, and to be able to engage with fellow field specialists about new research and emerging methods for conceiving of, connecting, and conveying information within and beyond the field. The heritage of the academic profession is to be encyclopedic about one’s field of study, and to be able to constellate ideas and explications into related clusters. These constellations amass into a celestial canopy of ideas, the effulgent latticework that is your field of study. In other words, you have to get the lay of the land and to be able to name the giants whose shoulders you stand upon.

The reason this task is laden with such trepidation has to do with the enormous amount of literature that beleaguers virtually every academic discipline. All of this information has to be taken in and synthesized. The proof of the achievement is passage of a series of exams that ask you to demonstrate your grasp of up to 210 academic treatises relevant to your field. Even if you aren’t particularly interested in or compliant with certain arguments that have been made, if they have been made in the neighborhood of your topic, you need to be conversant on them. It is part of the vocation. So people like me are asked to read about a book a day every day for about nine or twelve months, and to reintegrate other pertinent literature read throughout graduate and perhaps undergraduate coursework.

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