Chapel of the Holy Spirit, Assumption University
September 12, 2024
Scripture Readings:
1 Corinthians 8: 1B-7, 11-13; Luke 6:27-38
Our Scripture readings this morning deal with the requirements of love. When we get to the Gospel, those requirements are really formidable, even to the point of loving our enemies.
The very first words of the first reading, “Knowledge inflates with pride; but love builds up,” are something like a warning shot across the bow for an educational institution such as ours. As it relates to the proper relationship between knowledge and love, it got me to thinking about about teaching.
I have a confession to make: once in a while I go online to look at the website: Rate my Professor.com. There are many good reasons not to take this seriously, but my curiositas sometimes gets the best of me.
Among the favorable reviews of professors, one line recurs with a certain frequency: this professor really wanted me to succeed. In practice, this could mean a number of different things, but this what you pick up from students:
I feel visible in her class. She knows who I am.
Her comments on my papers are helpful
She makes herself available in office hours and is happy to discuss any difficulties I might be having.
She is respectful to all students and to various points of view and she’s good in drawing us out.
In short and as a way of summarizing, she goes out of her way to seek the good of the students.
Isn’t this what it means to love: to seek the good of the other, even at expense to oneself? This is the definition of love that befits all Christian vocations according to their proper mode: this is what it means to love one’s spouse, one’s children, the brothers or sisters in community, one’s country, alas even one’s enemies. Take away all the other meanings we attach to the word love – which in our English language has to carry an awfully heavy burden – we are called to love our students, to be always alert to their good. Nobody has to remind us that this is not always easy.
So,the hard-earned knowledge of faculty members who devote their lives to teaching does not inflate or puff up – but is employed for the good of their students and in the service of love. I don’t think I need to say that this applies to many others who work with students across the campus.
——-
The Assumption University mission statement speaks of our common activity in terms of pursuing the truth. Understood properly, this is also a guard against a knowledge that inflates…. In a couple of important ways.
First of all, the truth – insofar as it has a direct bearing on how I live my life – is much bigger than any one of us. It’s not something that we simply comprehend or lay hold of. Discovering the meaning and purpose of my life presupposes a consideration of the most important questions: where did I come from, what’s the source of my life; where am I going, what’s my destiny; before which altars in my life am I going to bow (I hear my friend, Bob Dylan: you gotta serve somebody…)
Assumption chooses not to put brackets around those questions, but to take them on. We have made a clear decision to stay true to ourselves in this respect. But in all of this we need help. We need good teachers, great books and friends – a term I understand to encompass everyone who joins us in this adventure of discovery.
To pursue the truth in the company of friends. It is important how we understand this. Friends are not accessories to our education nor are they simply a byproduct of four years of college. Good friends are necessary to help us to listen more attentively, to see more clearly, to move closer to the truth.
And, above all, we need God. Our recognition of this is the best protection against a knowledge that inflates.
Let me end by invoking the example of St. Augustine, one of the great foundation stones of an Assumption education. At the age of nineteen, about the age of our traditional sophomores, he read a book that fundamentally reoriented his desires. Up to that time, he had been ambitious for all that glitters in the world, and his own knowledge and rhetorical powers he saw as a way of exercising control over others. The book he read, the Hortensius of Cicero, filled him with another kind of desire: to pursue the truth at all costs. He proceeded to invest his remarkable gifts of mind and heart in that endeavor.
What makes him such an instructive example is that it took him a number of years to come fully into the light– he needed teachers, he needed books, he needed friends. Ultimately he came to discover his utter need for God, who turned out to be not so much the end-product of an intellectual search, something he could lay hold of, but a personal God who laid hold of him, who bent down to heal his wounded humanity and who made possible the wholeness for which he so desired.
This turns out to be the second pillar of an Assumption education, an education that is not only a striving to reach beyond ourselves but an opening, a receptivity to a God who graciously comes to us in our need. The recognition of that need and the God who comes near in the person of Christ form the enduring basis for this community of teaching and learning that is Assumption.
May God’s Holy Spirit enlighten and enliven all dimensions of our life together this academic year.
Fr. Dennis