Students from the Edge House were singing as we hiked into Conkle’s Hollow. Sandstone cliffs rose up on either side, striated by the lapping waves of an ocean that disappeared millennia ago. Thin trees clung to them, and when the wind blew yellow leaves shook loose and scattered like the rain that was occasionally falling. A thin waterfall trickled down at the trail’s edge, and small fish darted in the shallow pool at its base. And the song reverberated through all of this, as other members of our group arrived at the big rock where the Edge House students were perching, and joined them in singing. We sang pieces from the paperless music tradition that Alice Connor teaches at the Edge House, and then Amazing Grace, at the request of a student from OSU, and then songs by the group Psalters, that Alice lined out for us, giving us each verse in turn and waiting until we’d repeated it before weaving the whole song together. A few years previously, my friend Jared Talbot, who is a post-doc in biology at OSU, had proposed to his wife in the Hocking Hills, and after she’d said yes, they’d hiked to the Rock House, where a Mennonite group had sung song after song together, a gift to any stranger walking through the rock formations. Our singing in Conkle’s Hollow that day allowed Jared to pass that gift on to all the other hikers who had braved the rain and came down the trail behind us.
We were on retreat as a community of campus ministries in the Diocese. There were students from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio State University, Mount Carmel College of Nursing, Xavier, and Ohio University. We had conceived of the retreat as a response to the pressures and anxieties that afflict everyone in Higher Education these days. The anxieties that plague campuses aren’t unreasonable. Students worry about the future, about the amount of debt that they’re taking on, about the availability of jobs in their field when they graduate. They worry about who they are and who they’re becoming, who they’ll love and how they’ll manage to love themselves. When planning the retreat, the campus ministers talked about this anxiety and turned, as we always do, to scripture to help us make sense of the present mood and frame a response to it. We looked at Jesus’s words in Matthew 6 – “can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? Why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” We talked about how Jesus’s words might have multiple meanings. Yes, they’re a call to rest faithfully in God’s grace, but they’re also direct advice. Go and look at some flowers. It will make you feel better. And, we added, extending the thought, consider who you really are responsible for. There are so many voices demanding our attention that we can’t possibly respond gracefully to all of them. If we can become clear about our true responsibility, we can choose not to answer the demands of those whom we really aren’t responsible for, and give ourselves more fully to the things that truly call us.
So we gathered at a rented house in the Hocking Hills on a weekend in late October. When we gathered on Saturday morning, we introduced ourselves by naming things we were grateful for. Then Alice led us in a meditation on Ruth, who is responsible both to Naomi, her bereaved mother-in-law, but also to herself, going to Boaz in the night and requiring that he pledge his protection to her before she lays with him on the threshing floor. Out of the grace of this meditation, we went to Conkle’s Hollow, where we sang together at the base of the sandstone cliffs. Granted, it was October, and the only lilies in evidence were in a vase back at the house. But when the singing ended we all felt the profound stillness of the light rain of an October day. Later that afternoon, some of us hiked again, to the Rock House, and sat in the ancient hollowed out cliffs that had once served as a tribal fort, watching the play of color on rock and drift of leaves as they fell. That evening we gathered for public story-telling, asking first who had taught us responsibility in our lives, and then telling stories about the time when we came into our own sense of deep responsibility. These stories proved to be intense and powerful and often very sad. A box of tissues was passed along from person to person. And it occurred to me, listening to them, that there is often something lost in the moment when we come into our responsibility. They are so often moments of crisis, when the old dispensation, under which we’re free from the responsibility that someone else bears for us, disappears, and we find the weight of that responsibility shift onto our shoulders. And yet every one of these stories was a story of gain, as well, since receiving and accepting responsibility is an act of love. By accepting responsibility, we grow in our ability to love.
George, one of the Downtowners Campus Ministry group, pushed us to think beyond the responsibility we bear towards ourselves and those we love, and consider the responsibility we have for the world at large. The next morning, Dr. Ellen O’Shaunessy brought the point home in her homily as she talked about a trip that she and her husband had taken to Mother Emmanuel in Charleston after the murders this summer. How do we move beyond the confines of our own narrow world, and realize that we are responsible for strangers, some of whom act and look in ways that are very different from us? And how, and most challenging, do we learn to feel responsibility for those who have done us grievous harm – the killers who pick up guns and take innocent lives? After she was done speaking, we found an answer to her question in shared eucharist, and shared singing, which teaches us that greater responsibility that encompasses the whole world. It’s a lesson we learn bit by bit – by learning responsibility to ourselves, how to rest and how to discern our heart’s true call, and by learning responsibility to our loved ones, by taking on their burdens in moments of crisis. We learn through listening carefully to each other, as singers do when matching their voices, and by looking carefully at the world, at the shape of cliffs and the fall of leaves. When we consider the lilies, its not a small or insignificant act. It’s a moment of preparation for the coming Kingdom of God, a way of glimpsing that Kingdom, resting in it, and confirming that we’re willing to do whatever is required to help bring that Kingdom about and have it reverberate through other people, as if it were a song.

What do our faith communities need to learn about in order to better serve the world around us?  Twenty-four clergy and lay leaders gathered in April of 2014 to answer this question and form a new group in Columbus that we dubbed “The Ministerium of Ideas.”  It’s the outgrowth of a community that had met for almost forty years, gathering on Friday mornings to listen to talks given by Ohio State University professors.  This group thought of itself as “the Church listening to the University,” and I started attending the talks in 2012, when I became Missioner for Campus Ministry.  I was attracted to the group for several reasons, the first being the graciousness of Bob Russell, who organized the talks.  Bob is in his eighties, long retired from being a Presbyterian campus minister, but still deeply curious and connected to the life of the campus.  He, and his efforts, reiterated to me one of the most important aspects of campus ministry these days.  The Western tradition of higher education came out of the church, and church and academy have long had a symbiotic relationship.  The academy provides the church with new knowledge and ways of thinking about a changing world.  The church spurs the academy to think ethically about new discoveries, and prophetically calls it to return to its original purpose of nurturing the human soul, educating the characters of young people, and making the benefits of its discoveries available to all.  Campus ministry acts as a bridge between the church and the academy, and the talks that Bob Russell organized for so many years showed me a way to strengthen that bridge and widen it’s reach.

The twenty-four clergy who gathered in April to answer that initial question were from a variety of mainline denominations, and from the Jewish and Buddhist faith traditions as well.   We ate lunch together and switched seats every fifteen minutes, using a World Cafe format for our discussion.  Our initial question generated many more questions.  How do we build diverse communities?  Are we failing at critical thinking?  What would it be like to participate in communities of creation instead of communities of consumption?   What are the armageddon type fears of the moment?  What will it be like to create bridges between physical & tech-based communities?  We asked many more questions, but of all the questions we asked, the one that touched me most deeply was, “how do we even define our current culture?”

It became clear to me that many of us were feeling bewildered by the rapid changes in the world around us, many of which are technology-induced.  Many of us felt unmoored, unable to make sense of a world where communities are virtual, religiosity is declining, consumerism seems to have become definitional to the human race, and only utilitarian values seem to matter.  And it occurred to us that if we felt this way, most of our congregants probably did as well.  The beauty of that question, “how do we even define our current culture,” was that we all suddenly realized that we weren’t alone.  The terror of that question was that it seemed so huge, something that would take years to answer, even as the culture transitioned beyond whatever temporary answers we could arrive at.

After the luncheon, I was joined by Bob Erickson and Jim Miner in putting together a schedule of talks that would begin to explore at least some of our questions.  Over this past academic year we heard about collaborations with the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math), learned about institutions that have changed to meet the needs of their changing neighborhoods, explored the intersection of religion and the imagination, and investigated end of life issues.  We considered ways of cultivating a culture of reverence, asked whether it’s possible to live lives that aren’t centered around the economy, practiced reading the voice of our culture, and played with different models of religious community.  Each of these talks generated as many questions as they answered, but as our last speaker, Ben Norton, said, faith is a journey, not a set of certainties.  Over the course of this past year, we came to realize that listening to the voice of the university is a faithful act, one that expands our understanding and helps us address the urgent questions of our parishioners and neighbors.