408 - Where I Am Going

Where I Am Going
By Jacqueline Grennan
179 pp. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968. $5.95.

To read this collection of speeches, delivered from 1963 to June 1967, is to be introduced to a remarkable woman. She is deeply religious and joyous; she has a sense of the past while at the same time an urgency not to be held or bound by history; and she is profoundly conscious of an involvement with the future: "It is where I am going that is important, not where I am." She is a woman who distrusts vested interests, entrenchment in an historical artifact, status (in the sense of a fixed and irrevocable position), opportunists (in apposition to purists or tacticians), tribes and tribal cultures (in Harvey Cox's secular-city sense) which limit thought and the possibility of human action, closed systems, ingroup climate. She has strong faith in responsibility: a responsible skepticism, a willingness to live on the edge responsibly, the theory that man must be the author of his actions and then be willing to take responsibility for them.

She admires men willing to do a new thing strangely; she sees a crying need in the world for each man's authentic voice, and for experimental rather than strictly academic learning. In this respect she thinks of education as power but only in the open sense: she is a woman who feels she ought to go where nobody else will go, to look at what nobody else will look at. She is a gambler in thought, and especially a defender of the gambler in the educational enterprise. She is willing to live only in an open world provided with continuously ongoing thrusts into truth. She is excited by difficulties; she sees the need for opening our persons to the real world, of making room for deviant behavior, for divergence in human action.

409 - Where I Am Going

Almost all the words in this description are her own.

Her heroes are Rahner and Daniel Berrigan, Küng and Harvey Cox, Chardin, Mary Magdalen, and John Kennedy (whom she knew personally). Oh, yes, add her parents. To these persons, or to their writing, she refers often. She is a young (fortyish) midwesterner whose influence is now national or even further, a "religious" who chose to leave the convent to enter into her own kind of creative secularization ("to be segregated is always to be deprived"), and an educator who moved Webster College in the same direction. She is a lecturer whose rhetoric, but never her thinking, is carefully calculated to her audience, whether she is speaking to a Peace Corps gathering, making a convocation address to a newly-founded Negro University in Texas, addressing the students at Vassar or at the University of Missouri, or delivering commencement addresses to a teachers' college, Skidmore College, and a private high school (all three within twelve days in June, 1967).

But primarily Jacqueline Grennan is an educator who happens to be a Catholic, not a Catholic educator, and who told a forum at a Jesuit College: "I personally do not believe that colleges and universities ought to be owned and operated by religious orders." She is and always has been an evolutionary thinker in a conservative faith, a revolutionary thinker in a conservative vocation, and a teacher whose theory of education is this:

Education is the conviction that we are finite men in finite time, confronting decisions for which we will be responsible, for which there will be sanctions external, or inherent in our responsibility to other persons; but knowing that we are fallible and that we can be wrong-knowing also that to be totally inactive and unable to move is be finally irresponsible.

Doris Grumbach
College of Saint Rose
Albany, New York