What the Commute Taught Me

I got on a forty-dollar bus from Indianapolis to Union Station in Chicago every week for three years. I took Dramamine because I got motion sick. I wrote papers on the bus. At Union Station I picked up the Metra west and rode it to Lombard, Illinois, where I walked three blocks to the parking lot of Lombard United Methodist Church, got in my 1989 Ford Ranger, and drove to Northern Seminary.

I thought the classroom was where formation happened. The commute was where formation happened.

Here is what I mean. In the classroom I learned about spiritual direction. On the bus I learned to sit still in a space I did not control, with people I did not choose, for hours at a time. The classroom gave me the language for what contemplatives call recollection — the practice of gathering yourself inward, attending to what is present. The bus made me practice it whether I wanted to or not.

The parking lot at midnight, engine running, Heather pregnant with our second child, Hannah in the back seat — I was not reading Merton. I was trying to figure out if I had made a terrible decision. That is a different kind of formation than the kind you sign up for.

What I have come to believe: the curriculum and the commute are both necessary, and we overvalue the curriculum.

The curriculum gives you categories. The commute gives you content. The curriculum tells you what contemplation is. The commute makes you contemptible enough to need it. The curriculum teaches you to say "I am not in control." The commute teaches you what it feels like when that is true.

I am not arguing against education. I have a master's degree and I am grateful for it. I am arguing that we keep trying to engineer formation into the classroom because the classroom is controllable, and we keep being surprised when the actual formation happens somewhere else.

What has formed you? I am willing to bet it was not the thing you signed up for.

It was the commute. The parking lot. The motion sickness at midnight that would not let you do anything but sit still.

Formation is not a curriculum. It is what the curriculum makes room for — and then what life does with the room.

Matt Headley

Founding pastor of Ecclesia Community. Ordained United Methodist. Flower farmer. Builder. I walk with a limp. That is why I can walk with you.

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