Replying to LO26243 --
Dear Organlearners,
After having completed this contribution and scrutinised it for the last
time, it worries me a lot. It seems to be like preaching whereas I hate
monologues because so little learning happens with them. To prevent it
from stalling into a preach, please respond to it in our LO-dialogue.
Please tell us about your own learning with regard to grace and how grace
influenced your own learning. Please question me in whatever facet which
you deem necessary. I ought to initiate the topic and not trying to say
the last words on it. But I am deeply under the impression due to my
recent illness that I might say too little to late. Thus once again I will
paint a rich picture.
What do I understand self by the concept grace? It is to share with other
persons those things which they self cannot come by with whatever means.
It is to give freely what all the money of the world cannot buy. It is to
create miracles out of the ordinary. It is to help those caught up in the
slavery of rote behaviours to live like royal people. It is to activate
the divine in any person so that God Creator becomes tangible through that
person. It is to explore the depths of unconditional love which is
pleasing to God Love. It is to come at home in this incredible universe in
which we are living.
When Karen Roles <kroles@uswest.net> wrote in the topic:
Rose-coloured spectacles LO26243
>I am struggling with the spiritual question about the balance
>between grace and accountability. Our network believes much
>more in accountability than grace. I however am a believer in
>grace. Now I have a personal ethical decision to make.
>Do I compromise my own values in order to honour and live
>by the group's values. I think this might be the question at the
>core of every collaborative effort and maybe every learning
>organization.
I was struck by how much her description also applies to education. Just
replace the word "network" with "education" and read it all again. Then
take up a dozen or so modern textbooks on education and see how much they
are concerned with accountability and how little, if any, with grace. It
is almost as if we are forced to conclude that grace has nothing to do
with education. It seems that accountability is rather the core activity
of educational institutions -- learners have to be certified and even
graded that they have mastered the courses which they have enrolled for
while the institutions have to report how well they have spend the money
of taxpayers, parents and donators.
An educational system so bent on accountability while oblivious to grace
will eventually shock us with the inhumane events happening in it. Grieved
children will use violence and even deadly means to revolt against the
dead ends which they find themselves in. Teachers will get paid far too
little and often not regularly because administration begin to serve
itself. Management in its planning and guiding will spend so much effort
on the trivialities and banalities of information that they will grossly
neglect advances in knowledge sustaining solid character and gentle
personality. The self-interests of the nation and exploitations of the
environment will ultimately govern changes in all walks of education
rather than the passionate care for civilisation and nature pointing the
way for actual transformation. It is something that chills my blood far
more than anything else.
Except for my first five years as a kid and another four years some
eighteen years later as a researcher in soil science, the whole of my life
had been involved with education. So, with some half a century of
experiences in education, what can I say with respect to accountability
and grace? Most of my own major advances in learning happened as a result
of me receiving grace and not because of myself. I thought that I have
given good account of myself, but today I want to set it right by paying
tribute to grace. Grace creates miracles. Learning becomes a miracle
through grace.
Although we try to establish success in education with accountability,
this very success depends critically on grace rather than accountability.
I have observed with alarm too many times how accountability terminates
the learner's road to success. But I have also seen how grace brings an
end to abominable practices so that spirituality blooms once again.
As for myself, having been forced regularly by the system to grade
learners, I also succeeded afterwards in pulling by grace many of them
further along the road of success so that they eventually reach a higher
level of accountability. Thus for me grace does not undo accountability,
but rather suspends it until a higher level of understanding can bring
sense once again to accountability. All the bright opportunities which are
guaranteed by accountability seem to fade into a dull progress when
compared to one single advancement made possible through grace. I often
asked myself: Why wash the heads of one another by way of accountability
when we can wash the feet of one another by way of grace?
We may get from the above the notion that grace is good while
accountability is bad. This is not the case. Accountability and grace from
a complementary pair and as such both are good. Both have to do with the
hierarchy of organisations and spirituality. The difference is that
accountability pushes to higher levels of complexity while grace pulls
downwards to lower levels. Accountability reacts upwards while grace
reacts downwards. But when we stick to the one while excluding the other
they each will lose their positive character. It is easy to comprehend
that grace and accountability are complementary rather than dialectical
opposite. Opposites (antonyms) of grace are things mercilessness and
violence while opposites of accountability are things like corruption and
arrogance.
Through the years and recently once again, we had dialogues on empowerment
-- the evolution in our inner world which enables us to manage the world
outside us. This empowerment has a dassein (individualistic) dimension and
a mitsein (collectivistic) dimension to it. Accountability has much to do
with the dassein ("it is") whereas grace has much to do with the mitsein
("we are"). When the dassein of empowerment is stressed, it usually grinds
to a standstill since our failures become indissoluble constraints. But
when the mitsein of empowerment is enacted, it gets so accelerated that
the constraints of the past fade into dim memories. That is why the
dassein of learning individuals has to be complemented with the mitsein of
Learning Organisations.
We help one another to become masters in managing the worlds inside and
outside us, not because we owe one another according to some or other
social account, but because we love each other. This love is called agape
in Greek. This love never takes into account what we owe each other, but
authorises the endless stream of grace which is indispensable to our
spiritual growth. It is through grace that we transform ourselves from
fearful masters into respected servants assisting those who are not yet
masters of themselves. By this grace we lead others with our spiritual
possessions so that they can excel in spirituality too. To seek without
grace the empowerment of the disadvantaged is to search for a snow ball in
a hot desert. Grace allows us to perform the miracle of empowerment.
What strikes me as most peculiar is the correspondence between
accountability-grace and LEC-LEP (Law of Energy Conservation and Law of
Entropy Production) as complementary pairs. LEC is through and through
concerned with accountability. The system's total energy E cannot be
created or destroyed. Thus, when the total energy E within the system
increases, we know that outside the system the total energy has to
decrease with the same amount so as to balance the change within the
system. Energy E and entropy S always go together. The form or
organisation of energy is expressed by the entropy S. When a system
imports a certain amount of energy E, it indissolubly also imports the
form of that energy and thus an amount of entropy S. The system's gain in
entropy E and entropy S by way of importation, is exactly lost by the
surroundings to account for it.
This gain by transfer in both energy E and entropy S can just as easily be
lost by merely reversing the transfer process from import to export. It
means that accountability may always be reversed since the system and the
surroundings mirror each other. However, the system may also gain in
entropy S without gaining in energy E and thus entropy S from the
surroundings. In other words, this entropy is not imported from the
surroundings by means of energy E integral to it, but by creating it
within the system by means of its own free energy F. This internally
produced entropy S in the system which always consumes free energy F can
never be reversed. How can we ever reverse by export what has never been
imported in the first place? The effect of this internally produced
entropy is to change even further the form or organisation of the energy E
within that system without requiring simultaneous exchanges (import or
export) with the surroundings. This irreversible production of entropy
within a system, acting on past exchanges of energy E in an accountable
manner with the surroundings, but not relying on any present swoppings, is
for me the conception or initiation of grace within that system.
This conception of grace by irreversible entropy production will not
automatically lead to the birth or emergence of fully fledged grace. In
fact, it may abort or immerge into a curse rather than grace. The
potentially divine may become actually the demoniac. This is so because
irreversible entropy production which gives additional form to energy
always has form itself. This deeper form to all forms of energy can be
expressed by means of the seven essentialities of creativity, namely
liveness, sureness, wholeness, fruitfulness, spareness, otherness and
openness. Should we not take into account merely one of the seven
essentialities, potential grace will not emerge, but a curse will actually
immerge. In other words, grace is not completely unaccountable itself, but
has a striking complementarity with accountability through the seven
essentialities of creativity.
Let us consider, for example, how wholeness and openness are crucial to
grace. The system SY has indeed to be considered as a whole. However, the
system SY and all its other surroundings systems taken together as the
complex system SU form the universal system UN, the whole of all wholes. A
system never experiences grace as a result of its own wholeness because
grace also requires openness so that increasing wholeness will result. In
other words, with wholeness alone and not also openness we cannot have
this "increasing wholeness", something which Jan Smuts called holism. We
humans have evolved into Homo sapiense not merely because our genes have
been the most fittest among all animal species to survive by adaptation.
We have evolved also because the rest of nature has extended so much grace
to us.
We assume that we only have to take ourselves into account for the ability
to pry nature open so as to lay bare its deepest secrets. But this prying
open of nature has only become possible because in the past eons nature
opened itself up so much to the human species. Do we not share almost 90%
of our genes with all other mammals? It is through their grace as well as
all other animals and all plants that we have been fortunate to proceed
beyond the last of 2% of the primates (big apes) into Homo sapiens. It has
become high time for us to give account of this grace by acting gracefully
towards nature too.
When I live for a few days in the desert like one of its many thousands of
ysterious species, not relying in the least on my reversibly imported
technologies to provide me with food, clothes, shelter and safety, but
obliged to take what the desert has to offer me for my well being, I
always become aware just how immense the grace of nature is. It supplies
me with all the water, food and protection which I need to survive. It is
only through the lack of learning that I am oblivious to this provision so
that I will sadly perceive the desert as my enemy rather than my friend.
It also teaches me one lesson above all others -- learn from the desert as
the surroundings otherwise I will perish.
On the basis of accountability, there is no harsher master than the
desert. Within two days it teaches me to replenish my water losses -- to
take in what my body has lost through evaporation (sweating). Nowhere
will I find a pool of water to drink from. I will rather have to search
for subterraneous plants like Fockea angustifolia ("kambroo") to satisfy
my needs for water. When I find one, I often contemplate that what I will
be drinking in a couple of minutes has taken one plant many years to store
for me. Chewing the watery tissue of a "kambroo" gives me ample time to
think about grace and the miracles which it gives rise to.
Many of the parables of Jesus are not to make us accountable, but rather
to teach us about grace. In the parable of the workers hired to toil in
the vineyard (Matt 20:1-16), we learn that grace is superior to
accountability. Accountability still pushes upwards to the level from
which grace already works downwards. In the parable of the Samaritan,
(Luke 10:30-37), we learn how indispensable effective contact (i.e
fruitfulness, one of the seven essentialities) is to grace. Neither the
pharisee nor the scribe succeeded in making an effective contact with the
man wounded by robbers, despite all the opportunities to do so. Only the
Samaritan, although despised by the pharisees and scribes because
Samaritans could never share in the "account of Israel", acted gracefully
towards the victim.
When going down the steps of a ladder, we need its two rails supporting
the steps to guide ourselves with. When going down along the ladder of
grace, we need a ladder with the seven essentialities as its rails to
guide us. The older I become, the more I learn just how easily we can
fall off this ladder of grace because of insufficient openness. Openness
entails that in our learning we go beyond our understanding by
accommodating those understandings of others which seem to be
incomprehensible or trivial to us. By increasing openness we learn that
those whom we have perceived as our foes can become our close friends.
Some organisations seem to pose a threat to our own because they are in
direct competition to us or utilise their resources better than us. We
then often fear to collaborate with them because we suspect that as our
foes they will seek the demise of our own organisations. However, once we
undertake an open symbiosis between all concerned, we learn about a new
dimension of grace -- a peaceful, interactive co-existence. But should we
restrict this openness to a selected few and not all concerned, this
symbiosis will immerge destructively into a cartel (joint monopoly). Grace
will bite the dust and fear will once again drive our accountability.
Accountability is concerned with our past accomplishments whereas grace
compels us to look at our future and what can still be accomplished.
Little of what we had to learn cannot be accounted for by others who have
learned it before us. By making ourselves accountable to such past
learnings, we prepare ourselves for the dungeon of rote learning. However,
by searching how much our own authentic leaning corresponds with those who
have preceded us, we become aware how much grace is involved with being
able wherever we live to trace the learning of others anywhere in the
world through all the ages. To be able to read and thus share what some
learner in the past have committed to script is sheer grace to me. The
Renaissance some half a millennium ago was the result of such grace.
Suddenly, through the invention of printing, learners ere able to compare
their knowledge with that information left by civilisations belonging to
the past. Likewise Internet is now doing almost the same. People do not
leap back into time as with the Renaissance, but they leap all over space.
Einstein's 4D-space-time continuum is now becoming a reality.
It is often said that language is humankind's greatest invention ever. But
what drove this invention? To make an impression on each other by means of
the information we can so create? No, but to be gracious to one another
by sharing learning and knowledge so that any learner in future can
benefit from it. However, sharing our learning and knowledge by means of
language is one of many kinds of art. When thinking of all kinds of
artistry we have to conclude that art as a whole is a one-to-many-mapping.
The meaning of art is to share the one divine within the artist with the
spirituality of many others in any possible tangible manner -- to undo
with grace the demoniac which is bent on destruction. God Creator is the
greatest artist of all with one Creation which is so rich that all our
many works of art still cannot give an account of it. By allowing us to
share in Creation in a creative manner, God Creator have extended grace to
us beyond our comprehension.
This brings me at the end of this long contribution to a most valuable
lesson which I learned from Nelson Mandela -- to dignify fellow humans
through grace rather than demanding accountability is to break with the
demoniac through embracing the divine. We white people suspected that all
hell will break loose when Mandela would become president because we were
brainwashed to associate him with the demoniac. We never suspected him to
become a leader in the league of grace. Why? We were too busy giving an
account of apartheid. While he evolved in grace within prison, outside his
prison we stuck to accountability. Thus we committed ourselves to a far
worse spiritual prison. The key to dignifying fellow humans is to learn
how to be graceful to them, to let them share in what they never can
account for.
Should you be in a position of leadership as a manager, facilitator or
even a teacher, try to supersede accountability from below with grace from
above. Do not fear -- whenever your act of grace stems from love rather
than trying to corrupt the system, you will succeed in joining the lower
with the upper in a peaceful manner. You will become surprised beyond your
wildest expectations at how much learning you will catalyse. Not the
least, you will learn self that grace which flows from love-agape is the
bridge to become a friend of fellow humans, nature and God Creator. Your
spirit will become at rest because you will have arrived at home.
With care and best wishes,
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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