The Phoenix: Wisdom, Spirituality and Community on the Campus
My talk today has been gleaned from the ideas of two of the keynote speakers at the tertiary chaplains’ conference that I attended in Vancouver recently – from Judith Plaskow, who is a Jewish feminist theologian currently engaged in teaching religious studies at New York’s Manhattan University, and from Richard Burridge – who is the Dean of King’s College in London, and from my own reflections on the insights they had about about developing wisdom, community and spirituality on the university campus. These ideas tie in strongly with some of the goals of SCM and also with the things that Richard Randerson said to us here last year about campus ministry – and I’d like to share some of those ideas with you today.Two key ASCM goals for Australian universities are to encourage students to develop a critical, thinking faith, and to build community on the campus – but we have all become aware in recent times just how easy those things are to say, and yet how difficult they are to successfully put into practice in the current university environment, that is fundamentally changed from that experienced by people who attended university 50 or even 20 years ago. I believe these two speakers help us to reflect on these problems and offer us some insights – and open up a just a small crack in the way forward in a difficult environment.
The conference theme was based on the concept of the mythological Phoenix, a beautiful bird that arises from the ashes following its death to live on in a new way in another era. The Phoenix appears in many traditions around the world in a variety of forms, with the central image being of a bird that lives for five hundred years, and then dies in a funeral pyre lit by the sun, with the flames fanned by its own wings. This mythological bird then arises from the ashes to live on in a renewed way. The important key to this tradition is that profound change and death at the end of one era can lead to the prospect of new life and hope in the next. We are right on the brink of a new millennium during a time of deep social and cultural change, and also of change both in the whole concept of what tertiary education is, and what campuses are about, - so this image offers hope that the valuable concepts of community, wisdom and spirituality can arise from the ashes of their own death as it were – to live on in a new way in the university context.
Wisdom:
Gaining and imparting Wisdom remains an important part of our educational endeavour – at least notionally. However it is an ancient understanding of learning – and far from the modern concept of education which is seen as a way of acquiring practical knowledge, information or technical skills – to equip students for the market. But understanding education as gaining wisdom challenges education providers to see students in a different way - as far more than consumers of knowledge, but as beings who have needs that can only be resolved by addressing both the human and spiritual dimensions of their lives.
For Judith Plaskow – imparting wisdom on campus is about raising a critical consciousness in students. It’s about alerting them to the fundamental injustices in the world, encouraging them to question traditional religious practices – and then even more importantly, alerting them to their ability as community to together effect real change. Our highly individualistic mindset today means that students (and indeed people generally) have lost all sense that they are any more than a single atomic individual – who is powerless to address any of the problems they see around them. Plaskow uses every opportunity she can to address this problem with students on the campus where she works.
Richard Burridge – on the other hand addressed the need to reclaim the ancient model of “wisdom” as a vital part of learning by maintaining a strong prophetic voice against the problems that arise within market-based education. This is an area of higher education that the market place has affected with a vengeance, - learning patterns and course offerings have been revolutionised - with wisdom now seen as having less and less real value, while “information” is something to be prized and gathered. Knowledge is no longer valued for its own sake – but for how well it serves the needs of the market.
Campus ministers, chaplains and SCM leaders, must play a leading role in addressing the search for wisdom and true learning in university life, he claims - by maintaining a prophetic voice against the trends that devalue them and by continuing to encourage students to develop a critical faith, and to question injustice and flawed values wherever they are found.
Interestingly -in scripture - wisdom isn’t depicted as an abstract goal to be attained – but as an embodied woman.
When I was in London I saw a sculpture outside the Church of St Martin-In-The-Fields that presented one of the most profound images I have ever seen. Erupting out of a huge block of stark white Portland Stone, that was said to be millions of years old, and carved in the rock - was a tiny, carved, clearly new born baby boy, with his umbilical cord still attached. Around the edges of the stone was carved the words “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”
God valued our humanity enough to take on human flesh and to live among us – so in response we need to deal with people in an embodied way, and to value their embodiment. How does this work for the increasing trend towards virtual and distance education – where people so easily become disembodied words and writing, working towards a “pass” on a piece of paper – indeed even much of the on campus learning increasingly takes place in a disembodied way, with students simply a number on a computer. WE must reclaim their embodiment as people, and value their need to be immersed in a corporate learning experience, where they and their ideas are seen and known. It is crucial to maintain live, face to face engagement in sharing wisdom, despite the growth of the virtual community and distance education. Students and staff are incarnate embodied human beings - and virtual disembodied learning is detrimental to the human soul.
So an incarnational model of learning means remembering that students and staff are not just consumers of products in the educational market place, but human beings precious to God – who thought enough of humanity to become incarnate in embodied form.
Community:
Examining the issue of community was also central to the conference, both by trying to foster a sense of community within the conference itself, and by trying to reach new understandings of how it could be developed and built on the university campus, as about 400 campus ministers from 35 countries including a variety of traditions, backgrounds and faiths came together for the week.
However, despite this expressed goal, building “community” proved to be quite a difficult task during the conference week – the voices remained diverse and disconnected despite attempts to draw them together. And I believe that this speaks volumes about the difficulties we face in creating community on the modern campus. In fact I think an important starting question that we need to spend some time teasing apart is what exactly is community and what are we trying to create.
Richard Burridge addressed this issue by first looking at the university’s historical aims – which were
Burridge pointed out however that in the latest British survey of education (and I suspect any documented Australian aims would be similar) the primary goal of a university education is to ‘serve the needs of the economy’.
The higher education community has grown massively in size, with classes and tutorials no longer places where individuals can learn together in small groups – but where classes are huge and disembodied. The market place has replaced the concept of the academic community – with huge losses.
Burridge used the analogy of the shift from corner shop to supermarket – where the gains and losses are similar. Students now have a smorgasbord of choice in their educational career, and pick and choose exactly what they want to do in a consumer environment - but the price has been an almost total loss of any sense of being an academic community, a loss of the knowing and being known that occurs in the corner shop model . The student has simply become the customer, and courses – the products. An education is something to be purchased simply for future financial gain, and for a foothold in the market..
Key questions we need to address and reflect on are whether this concept of market education and community are fundamentally incompatible, and whether a ‘supermarket’ full of competing customers can ever be community? These questions are not easily answered of course – and we will continue to struggle with them.
So what is to be done? It’s no good simply being nostalgic and wishing for former days. The whole concept of the campus and how university education is appropriated has undergone fundamental change. Students come and go – they take what they need and then leave. Most extra-curricular groups across the campus are suffering from the effects of this shift – no one stays around the campus to ‘be community’ any more, and most find their community needs fulfilled elsewhere. Only the Australian icons of sport and the bar retain their customers – and any sense of a being a university community.
So do we simply give up on the idea? Clearly not. When people do succeed in meeting together in community, fundamental changes occur in the way they see the world. Plaskow spoke of the need to raise a critical consciousness in students, and Burridge of the need to maintain a prophetic voice against the forces that mitigate against it. Somehow, those concerned about this issue, campurs ministers, chaplains and SCM must continue to work towards constituting a meeting place for students and staff, where they can be inspired together about creating a just society, and about their ability to take an effective role in change.
Burridge used the early church’s pattern of “communion” as a model. This he claims, was a bringing together of a diversity of people – better described in the first place as communion rather than community. Creating communion between diverse voices, across groups, disciplines and faiths must be the first step. Campus ministry must address all research, all scholarship, teaching and learning and engage with the curriculum. Richard Randerson spoke to us last year of the need to facilitate relationships and dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. This then is an important first step in becoming the prophetic voice on campus against false images of both wisdom and community.
Spirituality:
Post-modern society has lost its way spiritually – leaving a huge spiritual void. Despite this however, the search for spiritual value and meaning never stops – it is a fundamental human need. The current resurgence of interest in spirituality represents a challenge. As a solution to the barrenness and lostness, we now have a “a post-modern smorgasbord of beliefs” and a culture that promotes “create your own spirituality”. “Religion” on the campus on the other hand - is considered to be the chaplains territory.
But spirituality, which Plaskow describes as ‘life lived in the presence of God’; or as “cultivating an awareness of the presence of the sacred in our lives”, is not just a lifestyle choice – it deals with vital questions of truth and reality and of who we are in the world.
Here is another area of tremendous challenge, that once again is increasingly dominated by the market. A cursory glance across the range of groups offered on campus suggests they are competing amongst each other for a “market share” of spirituality, with denominational chaplains also competing amongst each other for trade and for clients. The multi-faith, ecumenical, multi-cultural experience of campus life offers important opportunities for dialogue and relationship – rather than competitiveness in a market environment. Campus ministry needs to be to the whole community, in an ecumenical, inter-faith environment – and in a way that reflects and takes up the challenge of the surge in the search for spirituality, without buying into the pressure to conform to market rules and to compete.
So as we conclude we return to our original image. The Phoenix is a symbol of new life from the ashes, of a rebirth of key ideas and values on the brink of a new millennium. The old ideas of wisdom, community and spirituality have died in a funeral pyre – overtaken by market forces on the campus. But the hope raised by the image of the Phoenix – and by the Christian story – is of new life arising out of the ashes to live on in a new way.
Campus ministry then must be about maintaining a prophetic voice within the institution against the impact of forces that have eroded true wisdom, genuine community and spirituality. The aim must be:
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