Spirituality in HEIs: The Goose That Should Not Be Cut Open
There is an old story every child knows. A farmer owns a goose that lays one golden egg each day. It is enough. But enough is a word the greedy mind cannot hear. Why wait for tomorrow's egg, the farmer reasons, when the whole treasure must already be inside? So he takes his knife, opens the bird, and finds nothing — only entrails, and a dead goose. The daily gift is gone because he could not bear that it came slowly. Spirituality in our universities is that goose. Left to its own rhythm, it yields something precious every day: a steadying of the mind, a deepening of judgment, a widening of the sympathies, a quiet reordering of what a person takes to be worth living for. These are golden eggs. They cannot be stockpiled, accelerated, or converted into a placement statistic. They come one at a time, on their own schedule, to those who wait. The careerist mind cannot bear the waiting. It looks at spirituality and asks the farmer's question: where is the whole treasure, now, in a...
