The whole: as seen from one of its parts

Note: the red font segments may be somewhat annoying, but they have a useful purpose. I will follow them as an outline of sorts during the presentation. Rather than read the entire blog, I will just make sure I touch on each of those main highlighted points.

In my first year of college, in the liberal arts tradition, I approached learning with a feeling of wholeness. The college gave each freshman student a cohort group of twelve to twenty others, and as cohorts we studied a wide range of subjects. Following each other from class to class, we linked commonalities between varying subject matter.

The campus community read one text that year, Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, and we incorporated it into our biology, writing, history, social sciences, etc. This framework of a common text between common students and teachers gave a universal language and sense of wholeness to our learning experience. After transferring from that school to come to BYU, I still worked to create for myself such a cohort experience as much as I could in the midst of a spacious student body. By researching teachers, classes, and study buddies’ schedules, I have found each semester marked by a sense of wholeness. Instead of having my education categorized—"first I walk to Statistics, then attend Research Methods, then do homework for Adolescent Development," and so forth—I have rejoiced in examining the areas of overlap between subjects. In bringing every separate subject and teacher into a realm of shared themes, I have enhanced my learning as a whole.

This semester, I decided to create a cohort theme based on increasing my understanding of morality. Therefore, I carefully researched the most quality teachers and courses and ultimately enrolled in:
· Moral Development, a research-based course
· Moral Foundations, a philosophical slant on the same research
· Writing the Quest (including documentation of the spiritual, or moral journey)
· Research Assistantship (under the direction of Dr. James Harper and the “Flourishing Families” project, I analyze the behavior of parents and children, making moral judgment calls on the positive and negative aspects of their interactions as a trained coder)

All these classes complement each other beautifully . The threads I have woven to tie them together as a whole have included theories of guilt and redemption, a recognition of humans as relational beings, and a notation of God’s intention for families, among other moral themes.

The idea of seeking wholeness in education is reminiscent of fractal patterns, a mathematical concept in which a part of the whole bears sameness to the whole. A snowflake is a fractal pattern; an ocean’s musical wave sounds are fractal patterns. And God is like a fractal pattern, with each of his children being parts of His whole, branching out like snowflake lace from a single molecular center, tumbling from the sky in a chorus of angel voices. The ideal of wholeness also transcends modern times, as most ancient art demonstrates merging between the spiritual and the everyday aspects of people's lives. Only recently have the nations attempted to compartmentalize spirituality, or propose a separation of private and public lives.

My spiritual quest, in keeping with the theme of examining morality, has involved seeing myself as a moral being, capable of making good choices or bad. As a child of God, I often feel more inclined to follow my inherent divinity and choose “the good.” When I choose rightly, I feel in harmony with the whole earth, in love with God, humanity, and learning. In contrast, when I stray from goodness, I tend to feel discord in my sense of wholeness. I experience a feeling of broken separation from God and others, and a lack of unity in my both my spiritual and intellectual parts. Such feelings of discomfort motivate me to get back in line with the fractal pattern of which I am a part. My quest this semester, both intellectual and spiritual (for they are both part of the same pattern!) has been to join the various parts of my life together in a beautiful whole.