For Your Consideration

In this episode of For Your Consideration, we are sharing a talk delivered by our director, Mike Sacasas, during our spring semester open house on January 23rd.

The talk was titled “To See the World Whole.”

We live in what the poet Richard Wilbur called a "scattering time." The most powerful forces at work within us and without appear to be disintegrating forces. These trends are long-standing even if their unfortunate consequences are only now becoming apparent in an increasingly polarized society and a worsening mental health crisis. How might we learn to see the world whole again? How might we overcome the various forms of alienation that characterize our experience? And is there anything education can do to help us overcome this fragmentation? These are the question we will take up in this talk.

The talk concludes on practical note with a principle, a stance, a practice, and a truth that might help us see the world whole again.

Below is an excerpt from Mike’s opening comments. We hope you listen to the whole thing and share it with others.

To See the World Whole

My text for this evening is a passage from the gospel according to Tolkien. The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 2. These are the words spoken by the wizard, Gandalf the Grey in his confrontation with another wizard, Saruman, who is described elsewhere as having a “mind of metal and wheels.” To Saruman, Gandalf says:

“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

So let me start with my title—“To See the World Whole.”

When I first started thinking about this talk and what topic I might try to address, my mind turned to debates currently raging about the purpose and function of higher education, debates that have become not only politicized—because, of course, how a people is educated has always been, at least in part, a political matter—but which have become active fronts in the digitized culture wars.

What follows will not be anything like a thorough or substantive engagement with those debates, but my thinking did bring me back to a theme that I have thought about on and off for a long time: how do we learn to see, actually see, the world? We are always looking but rarely seeing, and much less are we seeing the world whole. And by “seeing the world whole” I mean something like experiencing a vision of reality, a vision that, of course, includes sight but also involves the mind, the imagination, the heart. How do we achieve such a vision that encompasses the fullness of reality in its depth and in its multiple dimensions: intellectual, sensual, moral, spiritual, etc.?

But the word whole also suggests something more than completeness or totality. It also suggest health and all of what the Hebrew word shalom encompasses: peace, well-being, even blessedness.

So asking how we might see the world whole can lead us to consider not only matters of knowledge and perception, but also how we might achieve wholeness of being for ourselves and also for our communities. How can we see the world whole? How can we see to it that the world finds wholeness, peace, shalom?

And, more to the point of what I would like to explore tonight: is there a relationship between the two? Might it be that learning to see the world whole might also help us find and promote wholeness?

If you enjoy the talk, we encourage you to share it with others.