Appendix 17: Notes for Teachers/Desire-Quest-4 (the religious quest)

Noting the difference between

(a) explaining and verifying an aspect of an actual existing structure (you and me) and

(b) prescribing religious doctrine

often helps participants overcome their fear of dogmatic and doctrinal suggestions and interferences.

And again, noting the above difference also helps to recall, first, the history of human beings, including our cave paintings and stories of tribal beginnings (in relation to the gods) or of leaders who intersect between the human and the divine, and again, second, the fact that someone answers “No” to the desire-quest is also evidence for the desire-quest and not for its absence. (For a more technical development of this lower-viewpoint [secularism], see Piscitelli [1985].)

In any class we teach, we will find as many warps and weaves in terms of students’ religious foundations as we do political or ethical foundations. Nevertheless, and as a general analysis, the fundamental desire-quest for religious meaning continues to emerge as a part of human conscious structure.

Thus, and though our efforts here are aimed mainly at secular education, a part of that education is to discover that--however diverse, neglected, or denied--all human beings have a desire-quest for religious meaning as a part of our existing structure. For our purposes, that meaning is broadly defined and points to no particular doctrine but rather is the part of conscious structure from whence any religious doctrine emerges.

The discussion in this phase of the discovery project is always a stopping point in class discussions. It follows that students and readers of this document need to remain open-minded; to bracket and set aside for the moment our own religious assumptions (except as generalized evidence); and to look only to the philosophical point that may be established empirically and critically—the prior conscious-human structure and its desire-quest-4 that inform those responses, answers, doctrines, and faith journeys and that include the generative source of denial and rejection of religion and doctrine.

On the other hand, the teacher or discussion leader needs, first, to be prepared to allow time for explanations, shared experiences, and discussion—wherever the students want to go with it.

And, second, the teacher or discussion leader must be prepared to address these concerns by distinguishing critical-philosophical from religious discourse and by focusing on the fact that human beings raise questions about ultimate concerns, even if that concern is as primitive as wondering what god made the sky and earth rumble (when hearing thunder); or how we came to be, what is the ultimate meaning of life, or what happens after we die, or what God is like, etc. Without allowing enough time to work through sometimes half-conscious presuppositions about this aspect of our own (the teacher’s or group leader’s) consciousness, we risk offense and a potential derailment of the experiment, depending on where participants are at the moment in the polemic of their own ultimate concerns.

Specific to this concern is the religiously sceptical student who is disturbed about the suggestion of the religious question and who may go away without understanding what the text or the teacher means by an ultimate or religious desire-quest, and who may, in the worst case, think we are in the business of proselytizing rather than exploring and quit the class where “the evangelical” or “the fundamentalist” is preaching (the common response from the attitude of secularism [Piscitelli 1985]).

On the other pole (the sacralist), the religiously oriented but (perhaps) doctrinaire and provincially misguided person, having uncritically identified with what they think the teacher means (giving support to their doctrine), risks never developing an empirical-critical, philosophical, or theoretical component in their thinking about either the structure of consciousness, the desire-quest-4 aspect of the trans-cultural base, or their own religious foundations (Piscitelli 1985).

Thus, we are naming the religious desire-quest within us in very general but also generative terms. As expressed in the theory, the question is: is it really and ultimately worthwhile? This question is a general articulation of a basic human quest that begins in childhood (Coles 1990), that often is experienced without being known, that goes unnamed or un-reflected on, and that seeks answers to even simple questions like, “where do I go when I die?” and, “what’s behind the sky?”

This desire-quest, then, fuels our fears and desires about, not only existing or dying, but about what happens to us after we die. These are questions we all have already asked in one form or another either in vague or in open and direct thought and language (Coles 1990).

Moreover, though the question is presented here in its general form, its particular expression in our lives is always clothed in personal experience and culture and must not be viewed as merely theory or an abstraction from human living.

Rather, we can understand the religious desire-quest in its culture-specific clothing as quite concrete--its answer-response informs, somewhere in our schemata and at the background, every discerning aspect of human living, whatever that clothing may be (Lonergan 1972, 115-116).

As such, we might use the metaphor of a set of bowls to understand our desire-quest-4 and how it relates to the other quests. Here the outer bowl is our desire-quest-4. That bowl is larger than the rest and gives order to them. However, in a philosophical sense, that order is not in the form of a culture or a doctrine yet, but in the form of a quest—the one that generates all culture and doctrine in history.