Wholeness: Something we Know before We Teach

Have you ever driven through an unknown community and wished you had a map or a global positioning application on your cell phone or a global positioning device mounted in your car?  Why is that?  I thought the reality of the territory should trump any map?  Isn't it better to ask the locals who konw? 

I was recently in Stevens Point, WI and I learned the value of both people who knew the territory and a good map.  When I arrived there my map proved somewhat lacking.  For one thing it knew nothing about construction zones and so as a result I could not use the streets that was recommended on my map.  So here I relied on some locals, who knew the territory, even without studying my map.  Both were helpful in their due measure. 

When we are growing up before our years in school, we are learning things that are the territory.  We have knowers called parents who should know the territory.  We learn from them about wholeness.  We learn what the whole of something is before we ever are shipped off to pre-school.  I want to distinguish learning from studying or territory from maps in this entry, because we have loss the balance of both in education and because learning precedes studying and learning is also enhanced by studying. 

Wholeness is not an unknown.  It is the distinction we learn very early in our lives and is high on a child's word frequency list, if we consider the concrete words that children use as well as the abstract idea of the whole.  Wholeness itself is abstact, but also wholeness is not so much known abstractly as it is known concretely for children.  When a child learns that: "This is the tail of the kitty", then they learn that there are parts to the kitty as well as the whole kitty.  In fact, the knowledge of the whole kitty is learned before parents acting as knowers name the kitty's various parts like tails and whiskers. 

We live today in a time dominated by studying and learning has fallen onto rather hard times among the educated.  It is as though we value maps so much that the territory is rather inferior.  I think here of the explosion of earlier and earlier pre-school.  I think it is high time that we reverse that trend and create a new priority and a new balance between the two. 

In my study of holiness, a key factor is that I have known, even if I cannot teach, the realities of both "wholeness" and "set apart" before I knew them as possible definitions for the biblical concept of holy.  I have known both of these things before I even begin to study them in earnest in school.  I have learned too that I often I grasp a concept through knowing by learning that idea before I can provide the evidence that teaching by studying requires. 

Let me mention one example.  I once read the statement "Pride and despair are close cousins".  Because of where I found myself living emotionally at the time, I realized immediately the meaning of these words for my own life and in reality.  It took a little longer time for me to find the proof through studying for this concept in my Bible.  But also I already had a pretty good hunch during my studying that I would find it, because I knew the territory before I found it on my map.  I believe the same can apply to my grasp of wholeness in reality and the time after that it takes to find proof in my Bible or on my map.  I can already see solutions to probems from knowing wholeness before I can fully reach a better understanding of biblical concepts like holy.

The distinctions I am making here between learning and studying and knowing and teaching,  I began studying this distinction quite a long time ago under Dr. Donald N. Larson at Bethel University (then College) in St. Paul, MN.  I heard and learned this distinction along time ago, but it took me a little longer in studying it.  Try many many years!  The way I now visualize the distinction is to think of a vertical line from knower to learner and to think of a horizontal line from teacher to studier (student). 

So when I speak of wholeness, you already know what it is.  If you lost a limb in a tragic car accident, you know that your body is now less than fully whole.  The question is this: Can we teach the idea and get beyond just knowing it?  Have we studied it, so that when we see that word and the words that belong in a same meaning class (technically a "semantic domain"), we are able to effectively group them together?  Do we see too how often we use words that belong in that same class or category according to the context?  That is a different level of being versed on the meaning of wholeness.  It is both knowing and teaching together that produce a balanced and educated person. 

Every day we use hundreds of examples of wholes and their parts and yet rarely notice them, because our studying misses the mark, even while our learning and knowing does not.  How many times per day, do we create statements along the line of "the tail of the kitty" and yet we are not taught to see them as other examples of parts and wholes?  This is not healty, because the map of teaching needs to match up with the territory of learning.  Otherwise, people will discard maps and end up having to learn every lesson for themselves the hard way rather than enjoying life more because they don't have to learn every lesson the hard way because they possess of a map from teachers.

Remember my trip to Stevens Point.  It took both the knowers of the community and the studying my map (certainly made by teachers!) to get me to my destination that I was trying to reach.  Without either one, it would have been a painful journey and I would have arrived late rather than on time for my appointment.  

So what do you think?  Is it not knowing wholness that is causing us to miss the mark?  Are we as learners and knowers deficient or are we as studiers and teachers deficient or maybe even a a deficiency of both?   We need to put wholeness (and its parts) to the forefront (#2 on the priority list behind personal names) of our studying, just like it is in our reality.of living.  Then wholeness will be receive justice from the map given to us in school and in our "Holy Bibles".
   

Sincerely,

Jon