On Teaching: "The Importance of 'Passive Voice'"

For many years, I have been teaching my students to avoid using the "passive voice" in their writing, because I want them to make the subjects of their sentences the doers of the action. I tell them that "I threw the ball" is better than "The ball was thrown". However, yesterday as I was walking in the park, I suddenly realized that the passive voice has a place in life, even if it should be steered away from in writing. The passive voice, after all, suggests that there is no doer of the action, but just the action itself. No individual person threw the ball; the throwing just happened. In one sense, of course, this sounds ridiculous; of course someone threw the ball. But in another sense -- a more spiritual one -- there's a wonderful truth in the passive voice. It reminds us that, while all of us are indeed individuals, we are, more importantly, part of an infinite force (sometimes called God, or Allah, or other names), and it is this force that actually causes everything that happens. It may appear that a separate person is throwing the ball or teaching the English class, but actually, from a spiritual viewpoint, the grand, limitless Universe is doing the throwing and the teaching. There is no individual doer, only the one universal Doer. Perhaps, when I describe what happens in my English classes, I should more carefully acknowledge who or what exactly does the teaching. Instead of "I had a good class today", I could say, "A good class happened today." Instead of believing that a single, isolated person called a "teacher" caused the learning to happen, I could use the passive voice to show that a far, far greater force than any one person was involved in creating whatever education happened.