A Collegiate Way of Life at Baylor University

With the days of summer upon us and so many of us spread out over the four corners of the earth, Brooks College is strangely quiet in most quarters. Summer maintenance and the restoration of the Great Hall paneling mean that the college will not be perfectly quiet. This week we are hosting two national groups that are gathering for seminars in our spaces, and they bring conversation and company into the college as well. And of course Zachary is always ready to pierce the still, silent air with his exuberant boyish whoops and hollers.

The great emptiness of the halls and the general quiet of the college, especially in the evenings, reminds me how grateful I am for the well-orchestrated symphony of life in Brooks College. Our crescendo of activity at the end of the spring term, culminating in the great celebration of Commencement Day, is wonderful. A gradual decrescendo then completes the term, as so many of you slowly trickle away to be with your families at home, to begin new jobs, or to undertake mission trips or study abroad. I believe Alex Tworkowski sounded the last, beautiful note of this year’s long decrescendo, so to speak, when he finally left the college yesterday; he’ll be in Bangalore, India on a mission trip this summer.

Now that we are all mostly away from one another and the college, I want to help you think about something important. It is simply this. Our time apart from one another is essential for our time together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose little book Life Together has much wisdom to offer, makes the point well in two terse cautions. “Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community,” and “Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone.” He elaborates:

We recognize, then, that only as we stand within the community can we be alone, and only those who are alone can live in the community. Both belong together. Only in the community do we learn to be properly alone; and only in being alone do we learn to live properly in the community. It is not as if the one preceded the other; rather both begin at the same time, namely, with the call of Jesus Christ. Each taken by itself has profound pitfalls and perils.

Those who want community without solitude plunge into the void of words and feelings, and those who seek solitude without community perish in the bottomless pit of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair. . . . The day together will be unfruitful without the day alone, both for the community and for the individual.

Thus, I urge you to make good use of your days alone this summer, ordering your time with a sense of indebtedness to the excellent fraternal and sororal life that we want Brooks College to represent. Bonhoeffer says that three things are important when one is alone and away from the community: meditation on Scripture, prayer, and intercession. In at least these ways, you have my pledge to use the summer days ahead to prepare myself for more able service among you. I hope that you will do the same.

One final good word is mine to give. Baylor’s terrific director of media relations, Lori Fogleman, has written an outstanding piece about a national recognition that Brooks College received in March. Somehow, the story was written and posted, but the link to it was deactivated so that it received little public attention. Media relations has reactivated the link, however, and you can read all about our NASPA Gold Excellence Award. What a fine and encouraging acknowledgment of our efforts it is!

God keep you, each and all, and bless you wherever you may be.

Woody Allen is said to have remarked, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

By that standard we face big challenges in succeeding as a college. We are not showing up except in barely respectable numbers for our Sunday college dinners. We are not showing up, apart from a small regular group, for our weekly college teas on Tuesday afternoons. We are not showing up–but for the smallest possible fraction of our membership–at either morning or evening prayer in Robbins Chapel.

I understand how busy schedules are, I know that not everyone can attend every event, and I realize that the measure of our success as a college is not perfectly definable in terms of how many people participate in given activities. Nevertheless:

• each of us made a promise, upon acceptance into the college, to invest our lives in one another through regular participation in college activities;
• routine absences at the college’s marquee events reflects poorly on our commitment to one another; and
• absenteeism causes us lost opportunities to enjoy and learn from one another, to build deeper friendships and lasting traditions, and to prepare ourselves to leave behind a legacy that others will cherish.

I am personally saddened to look at the unbelievably talented members of our college, to think about the ways that we could throw ourselves into a more tightly-knit and rewarding collegiate community, and to acknowledge the stark gap between our tremendous potential and the reality.

So, I am writing to you frankly because I care too much about you and the college to watch idly as we squander an opportunity for a better way of life together in Brooks College.

If you are a freshman and you have not yet rallied around the commitments you made upon acceptance into the college, I invite you to live up to your promises during these last six weeks of the year. Time is short, but the clock has not yet expired on your first year! If you are a sophomore or junior, thus comprising the time-tested backbone of the college, I ask you to challenge and encourage others to follow you, and to inspire one another to do better than we have. If you are a senior ready to graduate in May, I challenge you to finish your time with us memorably and inspiringly, helping us to remember you affectionately and well after you’re gone.

As always, I invite you to help me lead us in a way that fulfills the best aspirations we can share for the college. I am thrilled to be among you–so much so that I want us to be better than we presently are. I hope that you share that hope and that you will do your part on behalf of it.

The old hands among us know that I like to send around a college-wide note now and then. Three weeks into the semester I am finally sending you, both longtime colleagues and brand new friends, my first letter of the year. We have had a busy few weeks together, haven’t we?

Having our collegiate society gathered together gladdens my soul and quickens my step. Why is that? For starters, both within and beyond the walls of our college we constitute a community that is:

• full of potential for lasting and meaningful friendships;
• blessed with opportunities for the alternately quiet and boisterous occasions of joy-filled, mutual presence to and for each other;
• rife with occasions for open-ended, soul-searching conversations about God’s call and the Lord’s will, as well as clear and confident testimony regarding divinely ordered truth, beauty, and goodness;
• well suited for offering ready help in bearing burdens to heavy to be borne alone;
• full of potential for developing the self-understanding in community that is requisite for wisdom;
• designed for enjoying alongside worthy companions the essential collegiate experiences of feasting, learning, praying, celebrating, living, hoping, and being together.

Life is better, isn’t it, when it is shared in the company of friends? Learning is also a richer and finer experience when we can participate in it alongside of friends. A vision of such is at the heart of why Brooks College exists. We are not here to learn and work alone, but together.

On that note let me invite you (again!) to take up a thought experiment proposed by Alasdair McIntyre. “Imagine two individuals,” he writes, “who encounter the activities of some ongoing community. One of them becomes caught up in its life. She finds herself energized by so doing and makes the purposes of the community her own, finding the reasons advanced for identifying with those purposes good reasons. She shares the community’s hopes for its future prosperity and, when the community is apprehensive of or saddened by setbacks, she too is apprehensive or saddened. The other by contrast is unmoved by her contacts with the community. She forms relationships with some individuals who happen to be members of the community, but this fact about them is irrelevant to her interactions with them. In no way does she become part of the community.”

Which kind of person do you intend to be? Will you be caught up in the life of Brooks College, this special residential college at Baylor University? Or–God let it not be–are you unmoved, uninspired, and uncommitted to receiving from and giving to the society of friends gathered in this place?

Will you be not merely a member of the college in word and name, but also a member of the college in deed and in reality? Is Brooks College a home in which you find yourself and your place among friends, or is Brooks College little more than a nice building to which you return for a night’s rest? Do you see all of the ways in which MacIntyre’s thought experiment has relevance for us–for each and every one?

I want to be caught up in the life of this community. I routinely find myself energized by making the purposes of this community my own, and I care to see Brooks College thrive because its wellbeing is also my wellbeing. I long to Brooks College a beacon to Baylor and the wider community of what life together at its best might offer. And have no doubt, when we face setbacks or struggles I too will share with you apprehension and sadness because I care for you and for our community.

I hope I can count on you for such things. I hope you are here because you want to give yourself to something bigger than yourself. I hope you are here because you know that the collegiate experience is not only about self-reliance and independence, but even more fundamentally about deep and abiding friendships that point us beyond ourselves and ultimately to the Lord that made us, loves us, and calls us heavenward.

Evelyn Waugh has one of his characters observe that “to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.” May we show in abundance, this day, this week, this year, that we have some sense of the root of all wisdom precisely inasmuch as we truly know and love each other.

The coming weekend brings us the first official day of spring. For natural reasons, the season of spring holds a place of deep affection in the human soul. It brings to us gentler breezes along with its knee-shaking thunderstorms, of course, but beyond the change from wintry weather it is the unbidden profusion of renewed life that we cherish most as a part of spring.

Doesn’t the season of spring call forth our consent to be changed and renewed in our own lives? Unlike all of the rest of nature, though, the renewal of human persons does not follow merely from the changing of the calendar. Seeing all else around us made green, vivid, and warm may increase our longing to be remade, but whether or not we are given the gift of new life depends on our openness to the means of grace that God offers to us.

If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, then perhaps we can discern the ways in which the Lord beckons each of us into the new life for which we too are made. As we do so, I believe that we will find that our thriving depends crucially upon that of others.

Simone Weil speaks powerfully of our interdependence using a vegetative metaphor. She writes, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. . . . A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”

Membership in Brooks College offers a tremendous opportunity to sink deep roots that can nourish us. Have you grown roots within our grace-filled community through an active and natural participation in it? In what ways are you embodying in your life the treasures of our past so that they may be preserved and given to others? Do you hold particular expectations for the future that envision the growth of your own life as an integral part of our college? Should you hesitate on any of these points, let me invite you to look and listen for the sights and sounds of spring around us, be inspired to renewed life in your own person, and stretch vital roots deeply and widely into the college.

An outstanding place to begin for many of our number is in the renewal of a commitment to our weekly Sunday dinner. When we break commitments to one another, we do real though reparable harm to our community. Since in entering Brooks College we all pledged to honor each other through the weekly breaking of bread together, since it represents a great occasion for being rooted in a good life together, and since springtime calls us to a new beginning, I hope to see everyone back together in the Great Hall on Sunday for the start of the wondrous season of spring.

I’m adding one of my favorite springtime poems at the bottom for your pleasure and reflection.

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Spring

by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

I did something out of the ordinary last week. After reading a vivid account of civilian casualties and deaths resulting from Israel’s recent military action in Gaza, I decided that I needed to do something.

I firmly believe that identifying with and praying for those that suffer is in itself an effective and important means of responding to suffering. Generally, that is what I try to do when I read or hear about difficulties or tragedies, be they near or far, and in no way do I want to diminish the significance of that form of interceding.

Yet in this case, for some reason, I decided that my prayerfulness had to be accompanied by something more. Perhaps it was because I was especially moved by the deaths of so many Gazan children and by what struck me as the disproportionate use of force by the Israelis. The result was that I wrote a letter to the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and copied a handful of U.S. officials that might play a peacemaking role.

In retrospect, I am struck by how small a thing it was to write a letter, and also by how limited and frankly helpless I am to do much about this particular tragedy on the other side of the world. At the same time, I also recognize that it is right to speak out about issues where matters of justice and injustice, and life and death, are at stake–even if grieving, praying, and speaking out are all that it is possible for one to do.

I also look back at my letter and see ways in which I should have expressed my concerns less stridently. Deeply held convictions do not always have to be expressed with the sharpness that comes across in what I wrote to Ambassador Meridor. I am including the letter below, so you can read it for yourself, but in doing so I want to acknowledge that I am neither wholly satisfied with it, nor do I see in it any particular cause for self-congratulation, nor do I suppose that certitude accompanies all of my judgments. Still, it constitutes a willingness to say that something is wrong, that we share responsibility for addressing it, and that I want to be a part of improving our lot in the world.

When you come up against the evils and tragedies of our world, as you ultimately cannot avoid doing, I hope that you will grieve, that you will pray, and that you will speak with directness, integrity, and reason insofar as you are able.  Beyond that I also hope that you will respond as compassionately and helpfully as your circumstances allow, whatever that entails. Sharing with you in a vision of responsible engagement with and witness to the world makes being a part of Brooks College all the more rewarding. Thanks for letting me tell you about my latest experiences in trying to make good on the promise of life together with you in this place.

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January 19, 2009

His Excellency Sallai Meridor
Ambassador of Israel
3514 International Dr. N.W.
Washington DC 20008

Dear Ambassador Meridor:

Over the course of my thirty-seven years, I have admired and supported the Jewish people scattered around the world. As with many Americans of my generation, some of my earliest childhood memories include listening to stories of the unspeakable horrors your people suffered in the Second World War. With my family, I cherished the courageous witnesses to my Christian faith found in such exemplary figures as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom who gave themselves up in defense of the Jewish people. In reading their work, and in struggling through the work of such divergent Jewish writers as Elie Wiesel and Herman Wouk, I have wept in sorrow at the evils suffered by Jews during the last century. I want the Jewish people to flourish, to enjoy peace both in Israel and around the world, and to embrace blessings of the God who brought us all into being.

Understanding, then, my lifelong sympathy for the Jewish people, I want you to recognize as all the more costly my indignation at the unbelievable devastation that Israel has brought to Gaza in the last month. The conduct of your government and its military has been brutal, cavalier, indiscriminate, and reprehensibly violent. Not only has it resulted in a terrible loss of many innocent lives in Gaza–a reality that makes the action intrinsically evil–but it is also almost certainly an ineffective response to the violence of Hamas. In short, as matters appear to me now, it is an increasingly easy matter for me to regard the plight of the Palestinian people as much the same as that of the Jewish people.

Your government’s unjust and ill-advised extremism in Gaza has all but dried up my deep wellspring of goodwill toward Israel, for when the persecuted become the persecutors, not justice but wickedness is wrought. Criminals, terrorists, and thugs should by all means be held accountable for their deeds. Such a principle as this, of course, is universally applicable and holds whether evil conduct is traceable to lone desperadoes, organized criminal syndicates, terrorist groups, or state-sanctioned military units.

Lest Israel be thought of as–and become–no better than the rocket-wielding vigilantes that seek your people’s demise, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to make a lasting peace with Gaza. Indeed, nothing but the most generous possible outpouring of material relief, sincere compassion, and spiritual sympathy from your government to the Palestinians in Gaza is appropriate.

I hope against hope that Israel in the days ahead can demonstrate nobler policies of statecraft that what the world has recently seen. If so, then perhaps I can in the second half of my life sustain the admiration and support for the Jewish people that has been such a defining feature of my life thus far.

Sincerely,

Douglas V. Henry

If you are anything like me, you likely see the end of the fall semester approaching and experience some ambivalence. On the one hand, the end is in sight—hooray! On the other hand, the end is in sight—big trouble!

Over against those extremes, in my more moderate times of reflection on the past semester, I recognize both accomplishments in which I have proper pride along with failures that I genuinely regret. A little self-critical consideration brings me to see plenty of ways in which I might have been a better teacher, scholar, friend, father, mentor, husband, and Christian. Such thoughts almost always cause me to look for an opportunity to make a fresh beginning, building on demonstrated strengths and remedying obvious deficiencies.

Because I expect that something along these lines holds for your circumstances as well as mine, I want to encourage you, in the midst of increasingly busy and perhaps impossibly demanding days, to pause for a few minutes and consider where you presently stand. In fifteen minutes of quiet reflection, you ought to be able to identify some things that have gone well during the past dozen weeks of the term, as well as other things that you wish you had handled differently.

Having done so, perhaps you can join me in making a new beginning, even in the waning days of the fall semester, that will bring us through finals week with renewed commitments to the priorities we share together in Brooks College.

In a related vein, let me remind you—here at the outset of Advent and the beginning of a new year in the Christian calendar—that our weekday services of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer offer regular opportunities to thank God for the blessings we enjoy and to seek the Lord’s help in our struggles. Indeed, I am unsure where I would be without the chance to “start over” again, by God’s mercy, every morning and evening. I’ll make another new beginning tonight at 10 p.m. in Robbins Chapel. Will you join me?