Thomas a Kempis

It is a slippery slope that one walks upon when comparing the solace of living under religious dogma to the pursuit of one’s own truth, meaning, and purpose. Rationalizing one’s present state of being in the world by adding up one’s past experiences requires great care not to cloud the truth of what one is at any given moment. Memory is at best selective. It changes over time, and part of its primal function is to keep the here and now of perceived identity from falling apart. Some turn to religion to find that sense of truth, meaning, and purpose that gives us each a sense of identity, of knowing ourselves and the path that we continue to lay out before us.

Chlöe Lum, an aspiring elementary school teacher studying in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, was added to the administrative team of the school’s Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture, & Education (CIRCE) last June, 2019. CIRCE encompasses Learning in Depth (LiD) under Simon Fraser’s Imaginative Education (IE) umbrella. This branch of Simon Fraser’s Faculty of Education has been formalizing what LiD’s founder and Professor Emeritus, Kieran Egan, has ambiguously admitted is a notion of sustained focus, self-discipline, and perhaps a kind of self-directed creative apprenticeship learning. On Kieran Egan’s behalf, Chlöe Lum posted an article he wrote that was an attempt to bridge his own experience as a Franciscan novice to his creation of LiD at the University years later.

He proposes this connection from a quote by the monk Thomas à Kempis which roughly translates into the notion that mastering something requires commitment and only when we have spent a good deal of focused time and effort on that something does it eventually not seem like work and becomes to a certain degree enjoyable. He refers to this transition of deepened interest in something as a change that makes the interest “become sweet”.

More interesting, however, was reading his description of life in the friary. This was the true structure or framework from which LiD was given the discipline to grow. The friary “bell” reflects a mainstay of today’s school environment, but the respect for the bell has been diminished greatly due to the constant redefining of what of the structure of curriculum is and how the devaluing of self-discipline has morphed into a malaise of entitlement. Egan goes on to lament the loss of discipline in its more respected form of sustained, consistent, and focused attention. Such a loss in today’s society might explain the proliferation of many distraction-saturated online lives and the content-overload to which many have become habituated.

There are two extremes at play here. One is distraction that leads to an inability to focus for long enough to find something fulfilling in life, and the other is focus and study on one thing to the exclusion of everything else leading to an unhealthy fixation. Both reflect an imbalance that either threatens identity or keeps it from being fully actualized.

Egan’s self-reflection shines a light on that slippery slope which has taken secular form in the struggle to balance time to express oneself and consume others’ expressions with the lost art of taking time to ruminate, to step back and see the larger picture that can more clearly reveal one’s own truth, meaning, and purpose.