One of the boldest decisions that I have ever made as an educator was taking twenty-four middle school students on a camping trip at the end of the school year. We had made our way through a couple of months of astronomy and what better way to conclude the project than to celebrate our learning by gazing at the celestial bodies with our own eyes! My time in the Midwest should have informed me that this was a naive plan, as Michigan skies have a mind of their own. Despite detailed planning, it started drizzling by the time our tents were up and was soon pitch dark with nothing to be seen beyond the nebulous veil. But as I was making my last exhausted circuit around the campsite, the clouds began to thin and soon, the stars peeked through. Rushed, with my eyes still fixated on the sky not knowing how much of the moment we had left–and knowing that the students were far from being asleep–I hurried the students out of their tents. With much excitement, the students joined me in the cold, and we marveled in the beauty.
Reflecting on this experience, I wonder about what made the moment so significant, or beautiful. The aesthetics surely made the moment magical—the transcendent light of the stars spread across the varying shades of ebony and obsidian. But what stayed with me was the willingness, gratitude, and acceptance that the students brought to the moment of beauty under the stars—the openness demonstrated by the students’ hands wide open with communally shared wonder to receive the beauty of the night sky. As an educator, I realize I now have a language for the kind of beautiful community that I have hoped all year long to nurture in my classroom. Maybe a community of open hands is a way of articulating an imagination of the Christian community that Christian teachers shape in their classrooms and invite their students to inhabit.
Two explorations have helped enrich this vision of the community of open hands. The first conversation involves the Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper.[1] The Reformed view of communion understands the people of God as being communally lifted into the presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit, rather than Him coming down to be embodied in the physicality of the world. Any material that one could possess cannot be a “magic of contact” with the divine. Thus, for Calvin, the location of the connection with Christ at the Table was in the intangible—the communal event in which the Holy Spirit moved–the time that is shared by the community. Ultimately, the beautiful mystery of the Lord’s Supper demonstrates a resistance to privately claiming the beauty of the sacrament; no one person fully owns or experiences this beauty alone. It is therefore necessary for the people of God to come to the communion table oriented to others. Thus, the image of open hands allows us to imaginethe individual whose hands are unfurled from a posture of self-interest to a gesture of grateful receptivity toward others and Christ at the Table.
Elaine Scarry is the second conversation partner who added to this image of open hands in her reflections on beauty and radical decentering or unselfing. According to Scarry, “at the moment we see something beautiful,” as she alludes to Simone Weil, we are required to “give up our imaginary position as the center.”[2] Through unselfing, one realizes that “It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede our ground to the things that stand before us.”[3] It is as if encountering beauty initiates one in the process of losing oneself. It could also be seen as the process through which one truly understands one’s position and orientation in and to the world. In this sense, encountering beauty extends one’s vision to the world beyond oneself.[4]
Scarry describes this broadening as “capacious regard.”[5] When engaging beauty, the perceiver is led to a more generous regard for the world and its constituents; “all the space formerly in the service of protecting, guarding, advancing the self (or its “prestige”) is now free to be in the service of something else.”[6] Encountering beauty thus offers such opportunities of decentering, where one’s hands are opened to others and the world.[7]
This vision of a community of open hands seems to express a core truth about human beings–that we are invited through grace to the unraveling encounter of beauty in and for community. What would this truth about human beings mean for how Christian educators approach their classrooms? For one, it draws our attention to what it resists–the sin of individualism manifesting as clenchedfists or closed hands in our classrooms. Students may engage their courses and studies with a heightened interest in their own grades, time, and career trajectory after college. The gripping attitude of possessiveness approaches education as something one owns, seeking what is easily acquired and what is useful. All these things shape a posture of disregard for others, building barriers to community in the learning process. Teachers are subjected to the same realities. For instance, a teacher may consider knowledge as something that one can own and possess as well as add to their status or power. Or a teacher may consider the goal of the course to be mere delivery of information. Or the teacher may fail to continually reflect on whether the classroom practices are at times isolating and estranging students from each other in the learning process. For both Christian students and teachers, the community of open hands is a much-needed reimagination of the classroom.
I see an opportunity here for a renewed emphasis on the communal aspect of education. A community of open hands encourages us to resist the tendency for learning and teaching to be a solitary activity for self-service. With the emphasis on the uncurling and opening oneself to community, these reflections urge us to reimagine the classroom as a community postured with unselfing gratitude and receptivity. The beauty of the educational moment often is situated in the communal reality of a particular time and space. The Reformed emphasis on the event of communion helps us consider this. The beauty that is experienced–for instance, the short moment of gazing at the stars together–is a communal memory in time, valuable because of all who were present to share it as well as all the intentionality that made that community possible. The pedagogical task of the Christian educator is to foster a community of learners whose hands are invitingly opened up to all things beautiful–the beauty in each other and the world.
[1] In her recent talk at Calvin University titled “Reformed Theology and Beauty,” Laura Smit notes that a faith tradition’s eucharistic theology might determine the tradition’s overall approach to beauty. Laura Smit, “Searching for a Reformed Theology of Beauty,” [Presentation]. Calvin University, March 19, 2025.
[2] Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton University Press, 2010), 111.
[3] Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 112.
[4] Scarry’s idea of “unselfing” also involves an inward openness of the self–the openness to being wrong and to being changed. Beauty offers opportunities for one to check and adjust one’s perception, “[inciting] in us the longing for truth” and “[bringing] us into contact with our own capacity for making errors” (p. 52). Not only do we come open handed to encounter beauty as a community for further community, but we also additionally open our hands to who we really are, including our wrongs.
[5] Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 113.
[6] Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 113.
[7] These thoughts on beauty by Scarry seem to speak to the issues of privatization and exclusiveness, especially against individualism. Scarry’s thoughts touch on the sense of scarcity in the lens of the modern-day consumer; there is never enough when beauty is something to possess and control. Scarry’s reflections say otherwise. Beauty is always abundant and hospitable; it welcomes engagement rather than pushes out. Beauty makes itself available and invites the work of making space for all. The stars in the night sky may not show when we want them to and neither are they obliged to. But for those who look up together with the eye of gratitude, there is more than enough for all to enjoy. We experience the fullness of the beauty in the night sky when we engage it as a community of open hands.
