Virginia Tech Reflections
For years, when I’m asked to speak about college ministry in the Episcopal Church, I go back to the fact that I came into the Episcopal Church through the Canterbury Club at Virginia Tech. That bare fact, used by me to illustrate the importance of campus chaplaincy, has now opened into a flood of memories as I mourn the deaths of the students and faculty killed there in a rampage on Monday of this week.
Blacksburg is set in the old, worn-down, gentle hills of southwestern Virginia. While the wind does whip coldly and cruelly across the central drill field of the campus during the winter; spring, summer, and fall are splendid, radiant, flower-filled seasons there.
And the students and faculty inhabiting that lovely valley are earnest, funny, bright people, like academic communities everywhere. I did think, though, that there was a sense of community there, an expression of the rootedness in community that characterizes the American South. Like ubuntu in South Africa, the community feeling in the South is societal, and not particularly Christian. You could say it is unbaptized.
In this regard, I remember a favorite professor, John Levy, an urban economist, a New York Jew, pausing in the middle of a lecture, and saying, with fondness but some bemusement, “Are you students actually conscious of how homogenous you all are?” There were a lot of pink and cream faces, blond and light brown hair, in the room, lots of tweed and khakis. A kind of community is facilitated by ethnic homogeneity.
But this societal-level community is not co-terminus with the community of the Church, figured since St. Paul as the Body of Christ. Within the Church there is the possibility, the invitation, to make societal concepts like ubuntu and Southern communal spirit into something that consciously embraces diversity, that goes beyond tribal and ethnic solidarity into something for which God longs and towards which we are drawn by God, the unity of a world where the dignity of each being is respected, and where the common life is valued as well, where there is unity in diversity.
Now, I’m not going to idealize the Episcopal Canterbury Club at Virginia Tech, or Christ Church, Blacksburg, the parish that hosts the chaplaincy. But I can say that so much of what impels me in my current ministry, my vision of Christian community, was set in place in that chaplaincy and that parish. There was intentionality about our individual spiritual disciplines, and the discipline of our lives together.
I’ve kept up somewhat with the ministry there over these many years. I believe it to be as vibrant a Christian community now as it was then, perhaps even more so. What has changed, though, is the diversity of the university community. We must view communities within the larger community, those with religious values that hold up diversity and the larger dimension of a spiritual ground upon which diverse life rests.
Many people are praying for the victims, the gunman, their families and friends, and the whole community. I would ask that we also pray also for the religious communities in Blacksburg, and particularly Christ Church and the Episcopal Campus Chaplaincy as they seek to carry out their mission of Christ’s love in this setting of pain and shadow.
