(Note: Prepared remarks by The Rev. Roger A. Ferlo ’73 for the baccalaureate service held Saturday, May 15, in Memorial Chapel. The reverend is director of the Institute for Christian Formation and Leadership and professor of religion at Virginia Theological Seminary.)
From one of this morning’s readings:
While I was still young, before I went on my travels,
I sought wisdom openly in my prayer…
My soul grappled with wisdom,
And in my conduct I was strict.
I spread out my hands to the heavens,
And lamented my ignorance of her.
Draw near to me [she said], you who are uneducated,
And lodge in the house of instruction.
I find it a bit odd to be addressing you here from the stage of the 51 Memorial Chapel. As much as I admire this building, it has never struck me as very church-like in its daily use, especially now that it has been pretty thoroughly transformed into a concert venue with pews. I have to admit that the spiritual center of this place for me has always been Chapel House. It’s up the hill from here, across from the cemetery. I used to clip grass around the tombstones when I worked summers on the grounds crew. All my adult life, I have thought of Chapel House and the cemetery next to it as the secret garden of the 51 campus. Removed from the sight of the lower campus if not from the late-night noise from Cutten, Chapel House now seems a bit of an anachronism, an odd throwback to a more reflective and less ironic age. But for me it was the house of instruction.
When I first visited Chapel House in the late 1960s, I was a bright, pious and naïve high school sophomore. Even though Chapel House was best known then for its innovative architecture and its unusual religious mission, it was the books at Chapel House that first attracted me. I was the kind of kid who haunted the local public library. I kept getting into trouble when I was in grade school for sneaking across the glass divide to browse the books in the adult section, the ones with chapters, and indexes and no pictures.
So if you have ever visited the library at Chapel House, you might understand why my first encounter with its books there felt so liberating. The books are housed in a magnificent room, with those tall blue wing chairs, built for privacy, where you can shut out the world and read. And there was all that religious art, just sitting there on the shelves or hanging on the walls, with no guards around. Some of it was ancient, not all of it was very good, but nonetheless all of it for me at the time seemed strange and new and exotic, a word that Chapel House taught me never to use. There was seldom anyone around, which made me think that the place was personally mine, that no one would ask me any questions about what I was reading, or worse, mock me for reading, which, nerd that I was, happened all too often when I was growing up. And then there was the intensive variety of the subject areas–books about Islam, about Zen Buddhism, about Judaism, about Hindu architecture, depth psychology, even Masonry and theosophy (all this was long before Dan Brown). It took a little doing to locate the books on Christianity, which were given no pride of place. I had never encountered such an ecumenical and multi-religious range of books and music and artifacts, made so wantonly available by such trusting people, on subjects that I cared deeply about but about which I felt woefully undereducated. It must have seemed an ordinary affair to the professors and students who lived here, but for me this room constituted a daring assertion of the equal dignity of every religious tradition, no matter how esoteric, how bizarre, how heretical, how just simply foreign.
And then there was the chapel itself, connected to the library wing by an odd little indoor-outdoor walkway. The parish church where I grew up was full of images and religious objects, so nothing in my experience prepared me for the starkness of the chapel at Chapel House. When I first saw it the building was just ten years old or so. It looked cutting-edge, new, experimental, modern in the way people on Mad Men would understand “modern.” My first visit was with a friend who was much more intellectually sophisticated than I was, and much less pious. His father was a local 51 graduate, so my friend had spent a lot of time on this campus, and walked around like he owned the place. He and his family attended a Presbyterian church, and his grandfather was a conservative country preacher in the north country. Maybe this was why my friend liked to vaunt his own skepticism in religious matters, and especially to mock my own naïve credulity.
He took special delight in revealing the content of the tall cupboards that you pass on either side of the room as you enter the main assembly space. He liked to make a little ceremony of rolling back the cupboard doors, as if he were about to raid the lost Ark. The guy was annoying, but I was stunned by what I saw: there was shelf after shelf holding objects and artifacts used in every variation of religious practice, all as readily accessible as the books in the library. I remember seeing crucifixes and menorahs, prayer rugs and bells, incense pots, hymn books, scrolls, and perhaps most striking, a laminated card depicting the floor plan of the entire building, with an arrow drawn across it an acute angle. If you aligned the card correctly, it functioned like a virtual mihrab. The arrow pointed directly to Mecca, transforming the light-filled space into a temporary mosque.
It was daunting how available everything seemed, how strange it felt to find objects at once so numinous and so touchable. There was something almost playful about the place, a kind of religious theme-park quality to it, as if, depending on your mood, you could choose to be a Buddhist bhikku or an Ethiopian monk. You could slap on a yarmulke and suddenly you’re in shul. You could put that laminated map on the floor at the proper time of day and suddenly can imagine yourself in solidarity with every Muslim prostrated for prayer in every mosque in the world. And when you’ve had your fill of multi-religious experience, you could replace things on the shelves, shut the cupboard doors, walk back through the walkway into the library, pull a book from the shelf, and figure out exactly why it was that religious people needed to do the religious kinds of things that religious people do, and what it all might have to do with you. Uneducated as I was, I had found my house of instruction.
I realize in retrospect that the story behind Chapel House paradoxically reflects the complicated if half-forgotten religious history of this entire region. 51 began as a frontier outpost of Baptist missionaries, pious men–we seldom hear about their women–who were caught up in the waves of religious fervor that prompted people to refer to central and western New York State as the Burnt Over District. It’s no accident that Joseph Smith discovered his golden pages buried in an Indian mound not that far from here, about the same time that thirteen pious Baptists pooled their resources to create a training school for local men who had neither the income nor the inclination nor the social standing to venture out to places like Harvard or Princeton or Yale for their theological education. In those early fervent days, I would assume that most faculty and students regarded Hindus and Muslims and Jews as infidels laboring in darkness, and Catholics as subversive agents of a foreign power. Their burnt-over fervor seems a far remove from the intent of the anonymous donor who paid to build Chapel House on this campus a hundred-thirty or so years later. She made every effort to avoid privileging one religion over another. “Religious leaders of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhist bhikkus and priests, and scholars and laymen of all the religions of the world,” she wrote, will find themselves welcome in this place of learning and meditation, even, she adds, “those who acknowledge no religious faith.”
But as removed as it is from the evangelical fervor of missionary Christianity that so marked the religious life of this region at the time of 51’s founding, Chapel House nonetheless reflects a thoroughly protestant belief in the necessity of personal devotion and individual conversion of heart, the same kinds of religious experience prized by 51’s evangelical founders, and that have so dramatically influenced American religious life to this day, for good and for ill. The severe and now rather dated modernism of the chapel’s uncluttered space calls to mind the Calvinist mistrust of decoration and image (although, to be fair, it must be said that the donor didn’t care much for the architect). Even the one visible religious object in the room, the simple unvarnished cross mounted as its focal point, can be masked by drawing a floor to ceiling curtain across the space. The room becomes an architectural tabula rasa, a blank page in three dimensions, a proving ground for the religious imagination, a theatre for conversion, a cleared-away terminus a quo for the mind’s journey toward God.
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| The Rev. Roger A. Ferlo ’73 delivers the baccalaureate address Saturday. (Photo by Andy Daddio) |
It’s important though, I think, when you try to negotiate the diversity of religious life in America, that you keep your sense of humor. I was once the rector of a small university parish situated in the middle of a large and thriving Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh. My church building sat on Forbes Avenue cheek by jowl with what looked like the largest Jewish Community Center this side of Tel Aviv. There were sixteen synagogues in that neighborhood, some of them affluent and influential, some of them just storefronts, a few just occupying a room or two in the rented house of a Russian immigrant. There was also a long-established Catholic parish in the neighborhood, along with the Sixth Presbyterian Church (this was Calvinist southwest Pennsylvania, after all), a Swedenborgian meeting house, and of course, in the shadow of the JCC, our own little Episcopal Church of the Redeemer. That neighborhood felt like Chapel House on steroids.
Just a few blocks up the street from the Redeemer rectory a group of Hasidic families had demarcated the invisible lines that bounded the territory around their shul. They had strung up an evruv–an inconspicuous, all but invisible network of wires that linked and enclosed several city blocks. In a Hasidic neighborhood, you set off an evruv in order to create a safe ritual space where some laws of Sabbath keeping could be suspended, a designated block or two where you could push strollers full of kids on Saturday morning, or arrange to pick up your groceries. By stringing up an evruv, the local Hasidim had created a kind of virtual village–a shtetl– in the midst of rust-belt America.
One brilliant Saturday morning, a clergy colleague of mine was entertaining her elderly mother, an elegant, proper Protestant lady of a certain age who was visiting from California. My friend needed to drive her mother through the Hasidic neighborhood in order to get to an appointment in another part of town. As usual on a Sabbath morning, there were large groups of Hasidic families walking toward the synagogue. The women were dressed beautifully but soberly, with longish skirts and sensible shoes, their heads covered by a scarf or snood; the men and boys were dressed in black suits and white shirts, and were wearing their distinctive broad-brimmed black hats. My friend’s mother watched the proceedings with evident interest as they drove through the neighborhood. After much thought, she then turned to her daughter and remarked: “I had no idea there were so many Amish people living here in Pittsburgh.”
Perhaps the greatest compliment I have ever been paid came from a rabbi I knew in this neighborhood. We had spent a pleasant afternoon talking about the ways that our scriptures and our traditions had shaped our lives. As he left he said “Thanks for this time together–it would be good for us to get together again for some lernen some time soon.”
That lovely Yiddish word lernen has stayed with me, and in many ways captures the kind of dynamic tension between faith and reason that I have been trying to articulate. To translate lernen simply as “learning” doesn’t quite capture its semantic resonance. Lernen is not about schooling, it’s about a way of life, an approach to learning that discerns the power of the Spirit in the all-too-human give-and-take of honest conversation, grounded in the sacred text. In the end, lernen is about Wisdom. It is never a private affair. It recognizes that divine truth is revealed most plainly in community and in relationship–in the communities we form around the sacred page, in the honest relationships which such community creates and fosters. People engaged in lernen are contradictory, argumentative, not necessarily in agreement, but united in reverence for a sacred text that itself speaks in many voices. Moreover, these kinds of readers are also united in loving respect for each other, despite their deepest differences. To engage one’s sacred text in this way is enter a community of readers who take a deep joy both in the text and in each other’s company, who in this ancient work of lernen experience a new lightness of being, as the Spirit of God lifts the conversation to the things of life that really matter. I have always thought that it was this kind of sheer delight in the act of reading that shaped and nurtured Jesus’ own revolutionary understanding of Torah.
I say all this knowing full well the peril of religious group-think, the dangers of assuming that only this group or that group holds the real key to the sacred text, and that the rest of the world must follow suit. That is the risk of regarding any text as sacred. It is the risk, in effect, of checking your critical instincts at the door, of joining a community of readers who have closed themselves off to new data, who use their sacred texts and the religious practices that stem from them to hammer away at those who disagree. Every religious movement I know of runs this risk, and the destructive results are evident for all to see–whether you are Hindu or Jewish or Muslim or Catholic or Anglican or Protestant or Orthodox or, for that matter, atheist. Liberally educated religious people must embrace protocols of reading that are at once faithful to the text and to the community that treasures the text, but open to hearing and in fact eager to encounter other texts and other interpretations, including interpretations of their own texts that call into question their own deeply-held convictions about what those texts mean.
One of the lovely paradoxes of lernen is the odd way that the Wisdom tradition, and the rabbis and teachers who followed Wisdom, both in Jesus’ day and later, characterized this discipline of reading. Like Plato’s charioteer who keeps the horses of passion in check, Wisdom disciplines her subjects. “Put your neck under her yoke,” says the book of the Wisdom of ben Sirach, “and let your souls receive instruction; it is to be found close by.” The metaphor had staying power. “Take upon yourself the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven,” says the Mishnah. Recite the Shema at dawn–that the Lord our God is one God–because your first act of daily life is to take the yoke of the Kingdom upon you. “My yoke is easy,” says Jesus in one of his more rabbinical moments, “and my burden is light.”
This last metaphor — this ancient image of wisdom’s yoke — brings me, finally, to this occasion, and to you, to the liberally educated people who are sitting in this room. A baccalaureate is a strangely vestigial occasion, especially at colleges like this that have long since left behind their religious roots. It is a ceremony that embodies the contradictions of our own institutional history in particular, and of American liberal education in general. We gather like this in a space that looks like a chapel but has been put mostly to secular use. And then, depending on who you are and where religiously you are coming from, you participate in a secular ceremony with religious roots, or a religious ceremony with secular implications. You’re listening to me deliver a sermon as if it were an academic address. Or are you listening to me deliver an academic address as if it were a sermon? And to make matters even more confusing, you are all to be clothed with a secular symbol of intellectual accomplishment–an academic hood– that calls to mind the very kind of yoke that the Wisdom writer and the rabbis and Jesus talked about. I had no idea there were so many Amish people here!
I suggest that all of us here try to regard these academic hoods not simply as the secular symbols of advanced degrees, but also as symbols of the act of lernen that my rabbi friend cherished so deeply, and that is at the heart of the liberal arts ideal, no matter what our religious convictions or lack of them. Can you wear these flimsy hoods tomorrow morning at commencement as a sign of your lifelong commitment to the life of the mind in service to the life of the soul, however it is that you define soul? And not just your own minds and your own souls, but also the minds and souls of all whom you encounter. In all our academic achievements, can we learn gentleness and humbleness of heart, learn to live with an intellectual modesty that is in the end both Socratic and Pauline, that in knowing what we know we acknowledge how little we know, and much more there is to learn?
Let’s be frank, there are dangers in what we are up to here, dangers that academic occasions like this one tend to mask in good feeling and nostalgia. One is the danger of spiritual pride, of intellectual hubris, the conviction that our educational achievements somehow make us more entitled, that in earning our degrees we have been inducted into some kind of intellectual elite, and that religious belief is in the end just superstition, alien to the life of the mind.
But the converse is also true. There are times and places in America where a deep resistance to learning will make itself felt. You will feel it in a popular culture increasingly hostile to the educated mind. You will feel it in a political culture where strident voices pillory knowledge and expertise as somehow undemocratic and elitist. You will feel it in a religious culture where the give-and-take of the intellectual life is perceived as an alien threat to people of faith. This culture of disdain has a long history in America, and exhibits particular virulence today. My hope and prayer for you is that you will steadily resist such know-nothing religion, that you will wear the yoke of your continuing learning with passion and determination, and that you will demonstrate that the love of learning and the quest for meaning, are one and the same love, and a life-long enterprise, which some of us here might describe in our religious traditions as the love of lernen and the desire for God.
In keeping with my rabbinical theme, I considered ending this talk with a quotation in praise of Torah from the Zohar, that wonderfully bizarre 14th-century compendium of Jewish mystical thought. The author imagines the Torah as a beautiful and attractive woman (like Wisdom herself in the tradition) “disclosing her innermost secrets only to those who love her.” The kabbalistic imagination gets a little erotic and steamy at this point, so I will spare you the details.
Let me end on a slightly less sexist note, with a text dating from the same period, but more congenial to my own religious history and commitments, and central the Western understanding of the relation of the intellectual to the spiritual life, whatever one’s religious conviction or lack thereof. It is late in Dante’s Purgatorio. The shade of Vergil is taking his leave of Dante the pilgrim, whom he has guided through all the circles of hell, and now almost to the top of the seven storey purgatorial mountain. They have braved and endured the circles of pride and anger, wrath and sloth–qualities Dante recognized as all too familiar in himself, as they are all too familiar in the lives of both academics and priests. (Academics and priests have much more in common than either of us would care to admit.) But Dante’s purgatory is not about punishment. It is about conversion of life. Counter to all the theological assumptions of his day, Dante doesn’t imagine purgatory as a vengeful cauldron of fire filled with suffering souls. Dante re-imagines purgatory as a vast theme-park of conversion, a magic mountain of repentance, full of poets and artists and musicians and princes and scholars, with the Earthly Paradise itself accessible to the redeemed and chastened soul that has reached the mountain’s peak. As an unbelieving pagan, Vergil knows that he cannot himself cross into the sacred precincts of a restored Eden. His time as teacher, counselor and mentor is drawing to a close:
… The temporal fire and the eternal
You have seen, my son, and now come to a place
In which, unaided, I can see no farther.
I have brought you here with intellect and skill.
From now on take your pleasure as your guide.
You are free of the steep way, and free of the narrow.
Look at the sun shining before you,
Look at the fresh grasses, flowers and trees
Which here the earth produces of itself.
**
No longer wait for word or sign from me.
Your will is free, upright and sound.
Not to act as it chooses is unworthy:
Over yourself I crown and miter you.
(Purgatorio xxvii, 127-142; Hollander translation)
As valedictories go, that’s about as good as it gets, and it’s one I now offer it to you. As you leave this place, diploma in hand, no one cannot promise you, as Vergil promised Dante, entry into any sort of earthly paradise. Nor will we offer you crown and miter, for which you should be grateful. Those wretched symbols of power both secular and religious have often destroyed the people who wore them, with collateral damage to innocent people all too evident as you read the daily news reports. For the time being, anyway, let these flimsy academic hoods suffice as the college’s parting gift to you: poor things, but our own.
Every time I return to campus for trustee meetings, I make a point of revisiting Chapel House, and always cross the road to pay my respects at the graves of some of the people who shaped my early intellectual and spiritual life in this place. There are more graves there now than there used to be. Chapel House, on the other hand, hasn’t changed all that much. The library has a new classification system; the vinyl LPs have been replaced by CDs (no IPod technology as yet as far as I know). But the Zen circle is still there, and the dinner gong in the refectory, and the cross behind the curtain, and the brass relief in celebration of the Torah that hangs over the fireplace. The chapel endures in its mid-century modern severity, looking now a little quant in these post-modern times. But when recently I poked into those recessed cupboards–the contents of which had so fascinated me on my first visits–I was dismayed to discover that they were now mostly empty. All I could find was some cleaning materials, a battered set of protestant hymnals, a well-used poster of instructions put out when people came here for Quaker meeting, and one of those laminated floor-plans, with the arrow pointing toward Mecca.
I should have been disappointed, but I was not. The difference between the 51 of those early years of Chapel House and the 51 of today is sitting right here in front of me, in the striking variety of religious commitment and religious self-understanding that you represent as a class and as a student body — Catholics and Jews, Muslims and Protestant evangelicals, Hindus and Mormons and Buddhists, nature mystics and atheist champions of social justice. I see the difference downstairs in this very building, where Judd Chapel has been transformed into a model site for inter-religious collaboration and mutual respect. Your religious diversity constitutes the spirit of Chapel House made incarnate. It is a privilege to be here with you today, to celebrate with you this milestone in your intellectual and spiritual life. May you return as I have, time and again, to be renewed and restored by this beloved house of instruction, hidden away and vibrant in these long-since burnt-over hills.