The following is an excerpt from my memoir of Bennett giving a talk at the start of our course. He wanted us to consider our current world. Mind you, this was the fall of 1972. I offer it here as we come to the end of 2021 and look towards what kind of world it is that we are leaving for our children.
My attention went back to Bennett as he was saying, “What kind of world is it that we want to live in, for our children and our children’s children? The people who live in the world now are not facing reality. We stumble from crisis to crisis, the larger the organization the worse is this tendency to avoid the big issues. If only we were prepared to discipline ourselves and not grasp at everything. But nobody is willing to give because they fear to lose something, they have become attached to quantity.” He shook his head with pressed lips.
Then he looked right at us, light shining from his eyes. “Value is not in ‘how much’ but in ‘how real.’”
I hung my head, afraid he might be looking at me, realizing I had never gone hungry, that I had a closet full of clothes at home. I glanced over at Jack, remembering how he never drank the last sip from a bottle being passed around, or took the last cracker from the box, because he might need to offer it to someone else. I’d grown up with admonishments of, “Finish it up, make room on the shelf for more.”
I looked up at Mr. Bennett and was surprised to see no sign of accusation. Instead, he was smiling kindly at us and saying, “You have all come here thoroughly conditioned by this grasping world. If you are not willing to struggle with this and to get free from it, how can we have anything which would appear to show what the world could be?
“Then he looked right at us, light shining from his eyes…” I think it should have been, “Then he looked right INTO us, light shining from his eyes.” A wonderful post for Christmas! If only one lesson was taken back from Sherborne, it might be, “Value is not in ‘how much’ but in ‘how real.’”