Yesterday I turned in my portfolio for promotion. I put pictures of it on Facebook and received plenty of support from friends and colleagues. I feel eternally grateful for the good wishes everyone has sent me, and look forward to honouring their commitment to the task of researching, learning, writing, teaching, and serving for a lifetime.

The grammarians reading this may have noticed the singular form of “task” above. Not to turn overly pedantic about the point, yet there is no mistake in the statement. In fact, I would argue that these five elements feed into a single act. This act, that of “professing” within one’s field, gives me such pleasure and enlightens all the facets of my own life is so many way, one body cannot contain it. This enjoyment must pass to others through as many variants and modes of expression as could be possible in the course of an intellectual career.

Here is another way to approach the idea. When Khalil Gibran wanted to expound about his views on teaching, the narrator of The Prophet detailed the following:

“Then said a teacher, "Speak to us of Teaching."
      And he said:
      No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of our knowledge.
      The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
      If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.” (The Prophet)

I would add to this his conclusions on the ideal of “work,” one on which his prophet dissertates a while before his discourse on teaching:

“Work is love made visible.
      And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
      For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.
      And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
      And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.” (The Prophet)

If work is love, and teaching the expression of love for the sake of awakening another’s abilities, then research could be the re-writing of one’s own knowledge in order that love may have a space in and from which to reside and to flourish. In this sense, then, we are “among the books, seeking human knowledge” (Gibran, “A Lover’s Call XXVII”), full of a greater self-knowing yet in need of guidance to unite that which informs our individual capacity for illumination from within. To serve others, then, is to know, learn from knowing, inform, describe, and awaken, so that the path may continue from me to those in need of one to follow. Once they see a path they can eventually make their own, just as we did; they can, in essence, profess as we did.

Good night! / Tenham uma boa noite! / ¡Que paséis unas buenas noches!