Sermon #63 (4th September 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
It’s that time of year again. Even if you’re not personally going ‘back to school’ this week – even if nobody in your house is gearing up to return (and there’s not been a last-minute dash to buy a new school uniform) – there’s a certain back-to-school feeling that descends on most of us in September. Perhaps, like Vanessa Rush Southern in the reading Lucy gave for us earlier, you’ve been minding your own business in Tesco or WHSmith when, under the influence of a ‘Back-to-School’ display, you’ve suddenly become overcome by a pressing urge to get yourself a new pencil case or a lunch box. These rituals which mark a new school year, a new start, suggest ‘all is new and all things are possible again’.
For most of us gathered here this morning, our schooldays are far behind us – at least in the sense of being students on the receiving end of compulsory education – I know that we’ve got a number of teachers in our congregation – and I also know that some of us are perpetual students who can’t resist going back for one more course, and one more course, as there’s always more to learn. And that’s something that we’re affirming in this morning’s service. Our learning is never done – we learn in all manner of different ways over the course of a lifetime – and a commitment to lifelong learning is something worth celebrating. As Jiddu Krishnamurti said: ‘There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.’ Words from Jiddu Krishnamurti, which are printed on the front of your order of service if you’re here in the building, if you’re at home you can find them on the church website along with the full text of the service.
Unitarians have always tended to be people who value education highly. When our non-conformist forebears were excluded from higher education on the basis of their faith – 250 years ago you used to have to subscribe to the ’39 Articles’ of the Church of England if you wanted to graduate from Oxford or Cambridge – so Unitarians helped set up ‘Dissenting Academies’, where radical thinkers took in those who could not in good conscience profess to believe in things they didn’t think were true, and educated them to university level. Additionally, our forebears advocated for the education of women and girls.
Often when we think about learning, about education, we think about it in terms of institutions – schools, colleges, universities – and I did give today’s service the title ‘Back to School’ after all. I wonder what that word – ‘School’ – evokes in you? Maybe your schooldays were ‘the best days of your life’ – maybe they were more of a mixed bag – maybe it was a downright traumatic experience. I’d put myself in the ‘mixed bag’ category. I loved to learn, and academic-type learning suited me pretty well, but rubbing along with other kids who didn’t love school had its challenging moments. But – weirdly – before I’d even left primary school, the idea of ‘lifelong learning’ had caught my imagination. Once a year – this would be in the mid-1980s – the council would pop a fairly weighty brochure through our letterbox detailing all the courses available in ‘Night School’ across Tower Hamlets (and possibly also neighbouring boroughs). Oh! Poring over the pages of this brochure was right up there with studying the Argos catalogue for potential Christmas presents in my childhood! The smorgasbord of possibilities for adult education in those days was quite phenomenal and I used to dream of working my way through all the options one day. Would I sign up for woodwork? Or pottery? Jazz guitar? Sign language? (Me and mum did sign up for pottery class together when I was ten and the results are still on show in our front room; dad signed up for woodwork and then he built his shed and our outhouse). These sort of accessible self-improvement courses were life changing for many. But within a year or two, of course, government cuts meant the range of courses began to shrink, many adult education centres were downsized or closed altogether, and I never had another brochure to get excited about. That was, and is, a crying shame. Anything that curtails access to education – which makes it a privilege only for the rich – or which saddles people with life-long debt – is, surely, to be vigorously resisted.
Still, there are many different ways to learn, and arguably only a small proportion of our learning happens in classrooms. In our earliest years we learn, less formally, from family and caregivers. We pick stuff up from the world around us. From TV. If, like me, you grew up in a family that were big on TV quiz shows, you probably committed the capital of Burkina Faso to memory at an early age. And this sort of rote-learning-of-facts has its place – especially if you want to try your luck on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire someday – but there’s so much more to learning than just memorising stuff. We learn practical skills by watching others and copying them – we might learn how to make pastry, or jam, or jumpers, just the way our nan used to – we might pick up the know-how for car or bike maintenance while hanging out with an older relative during weekends of tinkering in the garage.
Or you might be a life-long bookworm – many of us are voracious readers, I know – or latterly audiobook readers – the Heart and Soul regulars are always swapping book recommendations. These days the internet has opened up a whole world of information to us – including access to many resources that would previously only have been available to a few – if I can’t call a certain fact to mind, or I don’t know how to fix something technical, my first port of call is to ‘Ask Google’. More often than not, Wikipedia will sort me out, or a discussion group will put me on the right track, or someone will have created a handy YouTube tutorial to lead me through a process step-by-step. Of course, internet-learning has to come with a health-warning of sorts, as along with this great democratisation comes the lack of any pre-filtering, the lack of any guarantee of accuracy, of the sort you might assume (rightly or wrongly) when learning from a more traditional source or institution. The internet is a wonderful resource and we must always use a bit of discernment, question the accuracy and agenda of our sources, and be alert to misinformation and manipulation. In truth, the same goes for any source of learning, but perhaps both the risks and rewards are amplified online.
Another hugely important way in which we learn is from personal experience. Sometimes you might hear people joke that they’ve been to the ‘University of Life’ or even to the ‘University of Hard Knocks’ – it seems to me that such things are usually said with the intention of disparaging academic learning and implying that it has no relevance or value in the real world – but surely learning-from-books and learning-from-life are both valuable and complementary. The reading from Barbara Rohde, which Jeannene just gave for us, suggests that when we have a noteworthy experience in life – it might be an ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ feeling experience – either way the suggestion is that we should ask ourselves ‘what did you learn from that?’ or ‘how did that change me and my understanding of reality?’ And we can also learn from the experience of others – the learning can be especially rich if we mix with people of different ages and backgrounds – people whose life experience are very different to our own. The internet comes into its own here as it can enable us to seek out other voices, people whose paths we might never cross in our everyday lives, and to listen and learn about life from their testimony.
All these forms of learning – and doubtless many others I’ve not mentioned today – are vital. We reach out and grab such opportunities to learn, however they present themselves to us, throughout our lives. And it’s important to remember that we generally learn in a way that’s appropriate to our age and our stage of development – at first we might be presented with a simplified way of understanding something – and over time our understanding will gradually become more sophisticated as greater nuance and complexity is introduced into the picture. It’s generally an error, I reckon, to get too attached to what we were taught in an earlier stage of development. If we don’t remain open to refining, revising, and rethinking, we can get stuck. It’s important to keep our knowledge and understanding up-to-date – scientific understanding in particular is being refined all the time – so for example it’s perhaps more important to comprehend the scientific method, and be statistically literate, in order to interpret ambiguous data and news stories more wisely (rather than simply memorising specific equations or holding tight to supposed ‘facts’ we were taught 40 years ago but which have been superseded by more recent insights). Or in another domain, our understanding of history is being reassessed, as we slowly become more aware of the privileged lenses our history has often been taught through, and the voices and perspectives that have long been suppressed or distorted are at long last coming to light.
Sometimes, it is important to be ready to unlearn, and to let go of what we thought we knew, in order to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Maybe some of our prior understanding was mistaken, or distorted, or an oversimplification of a far more nuanced and complex reality. Some of what we’ve learned is good, truthful, trustworthy – some is not-so-much – and we need to discern which is which. We might think of that process of discernment as the spiritual dimension of learning. It’s something we practice together, here, at church – we pride ourselves in drawing on wisdom from all sources and learning from diverse voices and traditions – but we’re also discerning, critical, and discriminating (in the positive and constructive sense of that word) as we attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff. We hold up new sources against what we already trust to be true, we measure them against our personal experience, and we check for coherence and congruence with our values and principles. And I know many of you are engaged in the same sort of search in your own individual journeys. Seeking truth and understanding – cultivating virtue, discernment and wisdom – doing the work. We are changed by what we learn – it becomes part of us – it shapes our way of seeing and being.
Learning is a lifelong process and – if we’re doing it right – over time we will come to integrate what we have learned from so many different sources along the way – and, perhaps, we will pass the learning onward. So as I bring this to a close I want to return to the words by Leslie Owen Wilson which Antony read for our meditation – just some abridged fragments – it’s written from the teacher’s point of view but as she says ‘I came to teach but was changed in other ways, and now remember that life is still a two-way street.’ – it reminds us how transformative the process of learning (and teaching) can be.
‘I came to teach, to see what I could find inside my students’ deeper selves…
I came to try and open minds… I came… hoping to connect hearts to heads and hands.
I came to entreat, to coax ennobled thoughts, ideals, and love of self and others…
I came to probe, and sometimes poke, to make them think, and laugh at small and narrowed views…’
So, in that spirit, may we remain ever open and receptive to opportunities for learning. And may it be so for the greater good of all. Amen.
Sermon by Jane Blackall
An audio recording of this sermon is available:
A video recording of this sermon is available: