How do you teach someone to see differently?
It is one thing to teach students a new subject like geometry or chemistry, but how can you teach them to look at a familiar subject—something already within their field of vision—and perceive deeper layers of meaning? How do you help someone move from sight to insight?
In a previous article, I proposed that the lifeblood of teaching and learning in Catholic schools should be a way of seeing called the sacramental imagination. This is the human capacity to look beyond the surface appearance of everyday realities and recognize how they mediate God’s glory. Noting that it is more of a sensitivity than a skill, I argued that it can nevertheless be nurtured and developed. But how can people be led to see with new eyes? How can educators tune students’ imaginations to discern spiritual meaning in what they study?
To help pupils see more of the “ten thousand places” in which Christ plays, Catholic schools would do well to focus on several key dispositions, skills, and practices within an intentional context.
Key Dispositions
To see the possibility of physical realities conveying divine self-communication, students must start with an authentic appreciation of the physical. Teachers should therefore look for ways to engage students in God’s material creation and make the truth being learned available to their senses. In short, get their bodies involved. Rather than only showing a photograph of a sunflower’s stamen or a caterpillar’s chrysalis, teachers should ask students to draw it. Rather than merely learning musical scales on paper, students should sing songs and play instruments. Rather than solely using a number line written on the board, educators should also teach students to count using pennies, blocks, or other manipulatives. Rather than just talking about astronomy, students should model celestial bodies with clay.
Cultivating an appreciation for the physical also means exemplifying for students a genuine fascination with creation. Aristotle understood that knowledge begins with wonder. That’s easy to agree with, but how does an educator cultivate wonder or fascination in lethargic, distracted teenagers? The first step is to model it.
Cultivating an appreciation for the physical also means exemplifying for students a genuine fascination with creation.
What prompts us to pay closer attention to something unknown: someone straightforwardly telling us that it’s necessary for good grades or someone excitedly asking, “Do you see that beautiful thing that I see?!” When students observe their teacher rejoicing in the elegance of a math equation or marveling at a caterpillar’s metamorphosis, they will likely be more disposed to approach their subjects with wonder, gratitude, and expectation.
What, exactly, is the student expecting? That the object in question has something to communicate. In other words, creation speaks! One of the most important postures for Catholic school teachers to model, therefore, is expectant receptivity—a willingness to listen to and receive from their academic subject matter all that it has to disclose—and to respond in wonder. As philosopher Esther Meek put it,
What starts the venture is notice and wonder. Something about reality catches our attention. To start to know is actually first a response to a dimly heard beckoning of the wonder-full real. If we can see knowing as a relationship between knower and known, we can see that reality makes the first overture.
Providing students a daily witness of wonder, gratitude, and expectation is crucial for cultivating the sacramental imagination.
Another vital disposition for fostering an overture-and-response relationship with creation is what Michael Polanyi referred to as indwelling. By this, the brilliant twentieth-century scientist and philosopher meant a willingness not only to engage an academic subject with one’s whole person, including his body, but also to commit to it. (It is worth noting that “truth” and “troth” come from the same word. Students must betroth themselves—commit themselves with care and love—to what they want to know.) To indwell a discipline involves investing it with one’s time, attention, sympathy, and trust, and then seeing where it leads. Sometimes the fruit of imaginative seeing only comes through giving oneself first to a mystery and following where its surprising possibilities point. This is another posture that teachers can best encourage within students by modeling it themselves.
Key Skills
One of the most important skills employed by the sacramental imagination is that of attending to an object closely. Students cannot hope to discern an invisible truth unless they look carefully at what mediates it. One good way to train this sort of attention is to ask students to keep a nature journal in which they record with words and sketches what they observe in the natural world. Another valuable method is to have students look closely at a beautiful painting and describe all the details they see. It is amazing what we can perceive when we just slow down and take the time to notice what is in front of us. Effective teachers do just that.
Nature journaling and picture studies engage students in the sort of expectant receptivity mentioned above—what philosopher Simone Weil called “waiting without searching.” This entails bringing to an object an open mind ready to see something new. Rather than assuming he knows what a chrysalis looks like because of a photograph in his textbook, an attentive student suspends prior judgment, sits before an actual chrysalis, and gazes at it with fresh eyes. Being asked to draw a detailed sketch in a nature journal can facilitate this sort of attention, thereby increasing the student’s aptitude for grasping truth. And even though the truth of a chrysalis is a “little fragment of a particular truth,” it is, according to Weil, “a pure image of the unique, eternal and living Truth . . . [who] once in a human voice declared ‘I am the Truth.’” In this way, Weil maintains that every school exercise is like a sacrament.
Another helpful skill for tuning the imagination is asking questions about the object to which one attends. This should flow naturally from the sense of wonder, curiosity, and receptivity mentioned above, but teachers can prime the pump by asking their own questions. As my friend and educator DeAnn Stuart proposes, such questions include “What do you notice?”; “Did anything surprise or startle you?”; “Why do you think it works that way?”; and “What do you think God is trying to communicate to us?”
Furthermore, asking students if they detect any patterns or likenesses with other things they have seen—or if it reminds them of anything else they have read or experienced—can also help cultivate their sacramental imagination. For example, a theology teacher who knows that his colleague is discussing caterpillar metamorphosis in science class can ask students how that knowledge might shed light on certain New Testament passages. After all, a form of the Greek verb metamorphoō is used to describe not only Jesus’s transfiguration (Matt 17:2, Mark 9:2) but also the transformation his disciples are called to undergo through the renewing of their minds (Rom 12:2). Integrating knowledge across disciplines is a key skill for honing the sacramental imagination.
Practices
Not surprisingly, the most powerful practice for cultivating this capacity is participation in the sacraments of the Church. A school that celebrates the Eucharist together frequently predisposes its students to discern hints of God’s presence in other physical objects around them.
Teachers can also enhance their students’ imaginations by providing them a stockpile of beautiful images, artistic compositions, and compelling stories. As I noted in my previous article, we interpret the meaning of something by finding a place for it to fit within the interpretive grid—that web of interconnected images, concepts, and experiences—that is present in our minds and memories. Therefore, placing before students beautiful objects to behold, compelling characters to identify with, and meaningful events to remember thickens that web and increases their ability to find related meaning in what they study.
Students need to sense that the Catholic faith is relevant not just to a private corner called “religion class” or “chapel time,” but to all of life.
And the stockpile of images for a Catholic student should be amply furnished by Scripture. But trained educators should do more than merely encourage Bible reading; they should assist students in reading the Bible typologically. Guided by the Church’s interpretive tradition, this way of attending to Scripture can help students make appropriate connections between the Old and New Testaments. Coming to perceive Jesus as a new Temple, how the Passover lamb prefigures the sacrifice of the cross, and what Peter meant by speaking of Noah’s ark as a figure of Christian baptism (1 Pet 3:20–21) can help students see beyond the surface level of objects and events.
A Context of Comprehensive Faith
Finally, if the sacramental imagination is a capacity for perception, schools should cultivate it by teaching students to see all things in the light of Christ. But simply offering theology courses is not enough. Such a limited approach would be like looking at a beam of light in a dark room in hopes of seeing a caterpillar that it shines upon. Rather, as C. S. Lewis argued, it is more illuminative to look along the beam, which entails stepping into its path and turning to see what it enlightens. For students to learn to view their academic subjects in the light of Christ, Catholic schools must invite them to step actively into his light.
This means providing a comprehensive environment marked by faith, from the policies in the handbook to the paintings on the wall to the PE teachers in the gym. Students need to sense that the Catholic faith is relevant not just to a private corner called “religion class” or “chapel time” but to all of life. As Lewis also asserted, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The full curriculum is illumined by the light of Christ, and the entire school provides an interpretive grid for grasping the meaning of life in him.
Conclusion
The sacramental imagination is not the academic product of a single unit plan, nor can it be developed by a plug-and-play procedure. Instead, it is a sensitivity that is nurtured within a certain kind of culture and by teachers genuinely curious about the deeper dimensions of their field. From this vantage point, Christ’s light can illumine the deeper meaning of realities all around us, including the lifespan of a single butterfly. Cultivating the sacramental imagination can therefore open up to students vistas not discernible by physical eyesight. In the words of the French novelist Marcel Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”