Hunger for education fuels well-loved teacher – Maxine Hancock
On a sunny day in 1988, Arlette Zinck walked into a small seminar room at the University of Alberta. She'd been struggling with the decision of whether or not to pursue a PhD, and a sympathetic professor had suggested she sit in on his graduate seminar. The room, overlooking the Saskatchewan River at the edge of campus, was flooded with the soft light of late afternoon, streaming in through an entire wall of glass.
At the head of a table - around which an intimate group was seated - sat Maxine Hancock. She was lecturing on the moment of the fall in Milton's Paradise Lost. For Zinck, the moment was both magical and transformative.
“Maxine was so full of life and so fully and obviously rooted in this profoundly Christian view of the world," she recalls. “I was literally struck dumb." In that moment Zinck knew she was meant to continue her studies.
“I realized our minds are God's gift, and to use this mind well is a means to glorify God," she says. Today, Zinck, who is dean of the Faculty of Arts at The King's University College in Edmonton, says with gratitude, “Maxine is the reason I went into my PhD program."
Remarkable accomplishment
The two women would go on to become friends. And Hancock would go on to become Professor (today, Professor Emerita) of Interdisciplinary Studies and Spiritual Theology at
But Hancock yearned for more schooling. “My deep desire was to have a deeper research capability, a broader base. And I felt like I had worked as far as I could out of the resources I had. I was just hungry for more education."
She had always been an excellent student, but she admits going back to school in middle age took more than desire alone.
“It took a sense of call, and God's provision for sure," concedes Hancock, “plus a sense of timing."
With a farm to run and children to launch, it also took a supportive partner and a fierce belief that graduate studies were indeed what God had called her to. Still, they were challenging years.
“I think I was tired and stressed," she says, then pauses before adding, “I think that during graduate study, you're just tired and stressed a lot of the time."
But she believes doing that kind of sustained, thoughtful, careful consideration and articulation gave her new muscles for her mind. “It was like working out for a marathon. It had that sense of 'Wow! This is tough, but boy does it feel good!'
Hancock's youngest child, Geoff, experienced both ends of the learning cycle with his mother. “I've watched her learn and I've watched her teach," he says. “She taught me English in high school and she's a fine teacher. Yes, she's focused and passionate about learning, but her real joy has always been to pass on what she's learned to others."
Yet when Hancock - whom Zinck describes in such terms as “wonderfully vivacious," “exquisitely organized" and “achingly brilliant" - began teaching in 1993 at Vancouver's international graduate school of Christian studies, Regent College, she did so with modest ambitions.
“I'd come thinking that if I could ignite a dozen scholars, that would be a wonderful multiplication of my short academic candle," Maxine says. “I always thought of myself as a little candle that had started fairly small. But if I could light 12 tall tapers for a lifetime of scholarship and teaching, that would be good work."
It was years later, while mulling over the possibility of retirement, that she started to number the scholars she'd helped kindle and realized - to her joy - that she'd done the work she'd been called to do. “There was a lovely sense of completion and relief," she says. “I came to a point where I could say what Jesus said in John 17, 'Father, I've done the work you gave me to do.'"
New chapter begins
And so began a fresh chapter in the scholar's life, a chapter she describes on her web site.
“After more than 30 years of farming in Alberta and a dozen years in Vancouver, we have moved to the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia," she writes, “to establish a 'Grandparent Farm,' where all our grandchildren can touch the earth, watch the tides and feel the breeze."
At Windhover Place (the name she and her husband have given their new home) Hancock, 68, is still learning. But the lessons aren't found in any textbook. She speaks of learning how to practice the disciplines of her writing craft with “a gentle joyfulness."
“I'm still just finding my feet," she says, one year into official retirement. “I think the dear companionship of a lifelong marriage is a huge part of my life now and a treasured thing I don't want to hurry past.
“If there's anything that I'm trying to learn now - it's how to be stiller and not so urgent."
Ask her to comment on the value of formal study to our culture today, and she recalls a conversation she once had with Canadian poet Margaret Avison. “She told me that scholars are the earthworms who toil away out of sight, underground, to silently till and aerate the soil out of which all ideas grow."
The Church, Maxine says, needs to see the work of the scholar as “underground work," aerating the roots of culture.
“I would say to people, seek all the education you can, that your giftedness calls you into, and that your opportunities can afford."
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