Listening to Goddess-God-the Divine
6.1 Listening to the Divine Song in the Classroom
In this section, I give readers a sense of what it means to be in the classroom with the students listening to the Divine song. I reconstruct student voices in the class by paraphrasing their words based on my class notes and memories of conversations with students in and outside of class. These student recreations are necessarily biased because they represent only one viewpoint (my view as the professor) in the classroom. That viewpoint is embodied in my personal and professional values as the course instructor.[1] While my attempts to recreate student voices may not accurately represent all the students’ viewpoints in the class, I hope they convey a sense of what it means to be in the classroom listening to the Divine song with the students.
I want to inspire teachers to incorporate some of these ideas in their own listening course, and to encourage instructors and students to cultivate a greater capacity to listen to the Divine song in their academic and personal lives.[2] To accomplish these goals, I organize each section as follows. First, I introduce a class activity with a personal story. Next, I describe the class activity from the viewpoint of students in the classroom (an amalgam of several students’ views). I provide additional information about the activity for instructors considering adapting it into their listening course. Finally, I conclude with reflection questions about how the activity deepens our understanding of listening to the Divine song of life.
Meditation
As a nineteen-year-old college student living with my parents in San Jose, California, in the late 1970s, I withdrew my savings of five hundred dollars to travel across the country in a Toyota with a Dominican Sister to a Benedictine monastery in Wisconsin. We ate dried figs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and slept in the open air at campsites (or in the car when it rained) to save money on the trek. We arrived for this one-week national gathering of young adult ministers to learn how to better serve our respective young adult communities. The monastery was an ancient structure surrounded by woodlands teeming with various flora and fauna in the summertime. On the second day, after our evening session ended, I wandered the monastery halls and discovered a private library. I felt a strong Divine presence walking among the authors who had written these spiritual books. Perusing the shelves, I discovered one book that profoundly influenced my ideas about meditation called The Open Way.[3] The book lit the lamp of meditation within me, leading to a lifelong interest and practice in meditation. I used parts of the book to develop a method to teach meditation in the classroom.[4] Before learning the open way of meditation, my ideas of the Divine were strongly influenced by my images of the Divine Father, Mother, and Son.
Divine Father, Mother, and Son
Every Sunday morning as a young