Spiritual Formation for Embodied Students
Winslow Homer (1836–1910), The Country School (A Country School-room in the Catskills, New England Country School) (1871), oil on canvas, 54 × 97.2 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO. Wikimedia Commons.
Granted that the world is relentless in catechizing our children towards its vision of the good life, are we as classical Christian educators equally intentional in the formation of our students?
In assessing our answer to this question, we must start by probing our answer to another question: how do we understand the essential nature of our students? This, however, forces us to contemplate a still further and more fundamental question: who are we as human beings?
If we are going to teach for spiritual formation in our classical Christian schools, it is important that we get our answers to these questions straight. There are, after all, many alternative answers on offer. We might, for example, think of our students as blank slates, presupposing an anthropology with no place for any noetic effects from the Fall. Or we might think of our students as essentially rational, thinking beings, proceeding from a view of human nature that focuses on the immaterial mind such that we are little more than brains on sticks. Or we might, to use Carl Trueman’s phrase, see our students as “plastic people,” following our postmodern belief that we can change even our bodies at will to conform to our internal sense of self.
None of these views of human nature, or by extension these approaches to how we understand our students, are acceptable for Christians, for whom a biblical anthropology must undergird how we go about our task as educators. The basic narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration provides the framework through which we must understand our students. To simplify, we must insist that our students are not blank slates, nor are they brains on sticks, nor are they plastic people. They are, rather, a perfect union of body and soul, created in the image of God but marred by sin and in need of redemption and formation into Christ’s likeness.
These twin points, that students are embodied beings and that they are in need of spiritual formation, intersect in the reality that our souls are formed by the habits, routines, and liturgies by which our bodies engage with the world. In particular, those sensory inputs and outputs that define our bodily senses have the radical potential to shape our souls. What, then, does this mean for our work as teachers?
As I have wrestled with how to reconcile biblical anthropology with Christian pedagogy, I have been greatly indebted to a powerful metaphor by St. John Chrysostom (d. 407), whom you may know as the “golden-mouthed” preacher and archbishop of Constantinople. In one of his homilies, known as “On Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children,” Chrysostom advances a striking image about the child as an embodied learner. Chrysostom portrays the child’s soul as a city full of various citizens, which represent different thought processes that can either build up or undermine the general welfare of the city. The teacher, he goes on to say, functions kind of like a king over the city, tasked especially with guarding the city’s gates, controlling the flow of citizens in and out of the city’s outer walls. These walls, Chrysostom goes on to explain, are in fact the physical senses of the body. Thus, the teacher’s job is to govern this unruly, motley bunch of citizens. It is, in other words, to “guard the gates” by providing a holistic education that takes seriously the fact that the learner is an embodied being who attends to the world through the senses.
Over the course of this homily, Chrysostom comments on how teachers can guard each of these gates. Taking my inspiration from him, I will herein set out some brief thoughts about how, in our context as classical Christian educators, we can best engage all of our students’ senses for the sake of spiritual formation.
The Tongue
We begin with the gate of the tongue. We know from Scripture that the tongue is “a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:8). The teacher’s job, then, is to train students such that the only citizens transiting out of this gate, that is, the only words coming out of their mouths, are honoring to God; as Proverbs says, “Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body” (Prov 16:24). Anyone who has spent much time in a classroom knows that the poison to honey ratio of words spoken is not what we would hope for. What then can we do?
We can start by taking seriously Scripture’s emphasis on the need for taming the tongue. Training our students’ habits of speech is not some prolegomena we hope to sufficiently address before we can get to the real curriculum; it is, rather, reflective of the kind of virtue that is at the heart of our work as Christian educators. And so we must provide clear expectations about what kind of speech is acceptable in our classrooms, and what kind of speech is not, and make sure that students understand what is required of them and, as is appropriate for their age, the reason why we take this aspect of their formation so seriously. Easy enough. The rubber hits the road, however, when we find ourselves forced to uphold these expectations. We need to have the courage to speak up when we hear (or, more likely, overhear) students making comments that require us to admonish them. Such is the burden of teaching for spiritual formation.
Finally, we need to be mindful of the influence that we as teachers can have by setting an example through our own speech. Are you prone to complain or grumble where your students can hear you? Or do they “catch” you speaking words of gratitude and love to others? It is imperative that we as teachers take responsibility for guarding the gate of our own tongues, and from that foundation proceed to guard the gate of our students’ tongues by training them in virtuous speech.
The Ears
Let’s next consider the gate of the ears, corresponding to the sense of hearing. While the focus of the gate of the tongue was on the words that come out of the mouth, here the emphasis is on the words that come into the body, namely by reading (recalling that in the ancient world texts were almost always read aloud).
As Christians, we can guard the gate of the ears by soaking out students’ minds in the Scriptures. When we have students memorize, repeat, chant, sing, and recite Scripture, we are training their ears to evaluate what is true, good, and beautiful insofar as it corresponds (or not) to what they have internalized from God’s Word. And in so doing, we are doing as God instructed, teaching God’s commandments diligently to our children; after all, we are to “talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut 6:7). Let us then center our children’s ears on the words of Scripture.
Engaging with non-Christian literature poses a greater challenge for guarding the ears of our students. While Chrysostom had a largely negative view of pagan literature in his day, other church fathers such as Basil of Caesarea took a more positive view of what can be learned from these writings because, after all, all truth is God’s truth. And such has been the dominant view within the Church ever since. What matters, then, is that we introduce non-Christian texts in careful, age-appropriate ways, ensuring that we are always providing adequate support to help our students process non-Christian content from a biblical perspective.
Whether from the Bible or from pagan writings, we can maximize the impact of words on our students’ ears when we lean into the power of narrative. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes, man is “essentially a story-telling animal.” Jesus, of course, taught in parables rather than treatises on systematic theology. Therefore, when we consider the kinds of virtues that we want to inculcate in our students, it is the stories of the Bible, of the saints of centuries past, of the characters of great literature that often lodge the notion of a particular virtue in children’s minds more than merely defining or discussing what a virtue may look like in theory. That is to say, it is the stories that we teach our students that often have the greatest power to incline our students’ souls towards either virtue or vice. Let us then be vigilant in guarding the gate of the ears.
The Nose
The next gate is the gate of the nose, referencing the sense of smell. No, this isn’t about the stink of unwashed adolescent boys; in his homily Chrysostom focuses on how expensive perfumes relax the brain and the body, such that students come to pursue luxury and pleasure as the ultimate goods in life. Our role as educators, then, in guarding the gates of the nose is really about training our students to be on their guard against the corrupting, soul-threatening temptations associated with wealth and luxury (cf. James 5:1-6).
In taking up this topic, we are indeed striking at the heart of much of the American dream. Many of our students might come from very wealthy households in which the pursuit of wealth is an unquestioned good, to be achieved at all costs. Even within the Church, the prosperity gospel has convinced many would-be Christ-followers that what Jesus wants more than anything is for them to be rich. As educators, then, we need to draw contrasts between a life lived under the rule of the false god of mammon and a Christian view of the good life, in which we are called to be content in all circumstances and to unhesitatingly use our riches for the advance of the Kingdom of God.
Literature and history classes can trace themes pertaining to different views of the good life as they consider the motivations and actions of fictional characters and historical actors alike. But to really guard the gate of the nose, we will need to lead our students into age-appropriate, uncomfortable spaces outside of the classroom in which they can serve others in meaningful, potentially even costly ways. This represents just one way by which our students can begin to develop a heart for serving “the least of these” (Matt 25:40). Service to others cannot be an optional add-on to the curriculum; rather, it is at the very heart of what we are doing in forming the souls of our students.
The Eyes
The fourth gate we can analyze is the gate of the eyes, which brings us to consider the role of sight in our students’ formation in faith and virtue. In his homily, Chrysostom’s thinking concerning this gate immediately went to ensuring students were protected from sexually explicit settings. Of course, as we all know, issues such as internet pornography have dramatically escalated the need for us to thoughtfully guard the gate of our students’ eyes. But what role can we as Christian teachers play in this process? Let me suggest two thoughts.
First, we need to consider the impact of technology that we are using in the classroom. While many of our schools have internet filters that hopefully take most of these sexual temptations out of play, there is still the question of where we are training our children to fix their eyes. As we learn more about the pernicious effects of screens and digital technologies on rewiring our children’s minds, we need to be exceedingly thoughtful about when and how we introduce these things in the classroom. Or, to approach this issue from a positive framework, we can be intentional about how what we display in our classroom cultivates our students’ imagination for the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Second, we need to consider the nature of our homework assignments and how technology might be used outside of the classroom in the student’s home. If, for instance, we assign homework that involves watching a YouTube video, we have no control over what kinds of suggested videos might populate the webpage and tempt students to click on them. More generally, as David Smith has suggested, we need to consider whether the homework we are requiring our students to complete causes them to engage with their friends and families, or if it is simply encouraging or even requiring students to hole up in their rooms with their internet-connected laptops. In these ways, we can guard the eyes of our students.
The Body
Finally, Chrysostom introduces us to the gate of the body or the skin, focusing our attention to the way that touch plays a role in our spiritual formation. Just as the gate of the nose called us to train our students’ affections away from wealth and luxury, guarding the gate of the body means training students to resist the pull of comfort and ease.
Like the rich man in Jesus’ parable, our default is to seek comfort so that we can say to ourselves, “relax, eat, drink, be merry” (Luke 12:19). Certainly our world tells us that we should do everything we can to ensure instant gratification and endless merriment and pleasure. Within the church and our Christian schools, perhaps even more insidious than the prosperity gospel because it is not so obviously false, are the claims of what some have called “moralistic therapeutic deism.” The therapeutic part here is crucial; as the view holds, God just wants us to be happy; surely he would never ask us to do hard things. He is not the kind of deity who could possibly tell his followers, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). To use a modern idiom, then, we need to relentlessly cancel moralistic therapeutic deism from our schools and from our students’ imaginations. But how?
If there is any concept from the early church more foreign to our lived experience as twenty-first century North American Christians, it surely must be the call to ascesis, to habits of bodily self-denial that push us deeper into prayer and reliance on God. Thus, the call to deny oneself as a practice of discipleship is all but vacant from our spiritual landscape. But what if ascetical practices, such as fasting, are precisely the antidote to our American hyper-consumerism? Those of us from liturgical traditions that follow the church year have a built-in mechanism for engaging in ascetical practices in the form of Lent, but Christian educators of all types can think of creative ways to push their students outside of their comfort zones by having them engage in real labor and getting their hands dirty. Consider, then, the positive formative impacts of even things as simple as a farm and garden program in which students learn to grow their own food as a powerful rebuke to our fast-food society. Let us so guard the gate of the body.
Conclusion
Much more could be said about teaching for spiritual formation. But simply by reflecting on the nature of our students as embodied learners, and by listening to the saints of old (in this case, St. John Chrysostom), we can cultivate a more distinctly Christian imagination for our pedagogical endeavors. After all, if it is true that Christians have a different anthropology than that of modernity or postmodernity, the education we provide to our children needs to reflect that fact. Let our classical Christian schools lead the way in guarding the gates of our children’s souls.
Note: This article was originally delivered as a plenary lecture at The Stonehaven School’s Summer Teacher Training, a regional event for ACCS schools in the Southeast, in July 2023. The content is adapted from chapter 3 of Dr. Hughes’ book Teaching for Spiritual Formation: A Patristic Approach to Christian Education in a Convulsed Age (Cascade, 2022).
