Life-long learning

I increasingly appreciate the idea of life-long learning. Having bunked off a proper job in order to go back to college I was renewed and invigorated by an intense period of learning; learning about theology and Church and stuff like that, but also learning about how to learn and write and other skills of equal importance. I am immensely grateful for that gift despite many hard lessons.

There is a bit of a joke in Clergy circles about sitting in another Clergyperson's study and rather like Time Team then dating the decade when the person was in college as theological preferences and hobby horses are fossilised on the bookshelves all around you. Even though there is a significant element of the role of Pastor directly related to teaching and the education of others, we often take little time of our own in the necessary ongoing study needed to fuel such an ambition. In fact I am still slowly reading the books I bought in college six years ago and which are still unread.

Learning in its fullest sense is more than simply the individual's head knowledge of some facts. I think it was Brian McLaren who spoke at Greenbelt about embodied knowledge as the description of how the Body of Christ together holds something that it knows corporately which is more than the sum of all the bits of knowledge held around by its members. There is also the knowledge that dictates how I behave even if my head holds a radically different idea (so I might say, following the chain of thought through some recent posts here, that I know I am a child of God in my head but I often behave as if that was not true).

I loved the Frank Zappa quote about education in 1980s America

They didn't so much graduate as be unleashed on society

perhaps that describes my time at Theological College too. But I would also want to make the point that any course of learning has to include a degree of un-learning; old ideas are replaced by newer more accurate ones and opinions are shaped in the light of a new insight, old practices are moved on and so forth.

Advent, like Lent, is a time of preparation and restraint - watching and waiting for the coming Messiah, and these ascetic themes also suit a sense of wanting to hold back and un-learn some things, so that I might make space for new learning. I want to un-learn things about myself and things about how we do Church, because I want to see change in both. I could be more specific, but I am actually going to spend time watching and waiting to see what I must forget...

So in Advent what are you willing to un-learn?

Comments

[Caroline Too]

I have, of course, no uterior motive in applauding your commitment to lifelong learning and in encouraging all your readers to consider who might possibly help them engage in further life long learning themselves

yours sincerely

Caroline Ramsey
The Open University

:-) only kiddding... but I was in my mid thirties before I discovered that learning could be life changing... it's so exciting.

[Caroline Too]

sigh, maybe I could learn how to spill next... sigh