O-week, Lent, and the Gift of Time

[extracted from a Sermon for Commencement Evensong, Feb 28 2010]

There is something painfully awkward about the fact that in our hemisphere Lent, a time of fasting, penitence and self-denial for Christians, tends to coincide with the commencement of the academic year. Sure enough, the first week of Lent this year was also O-week, not a time renowned for restraint or abstinence. However much you have been told about the importance of academics, well-being and proper conduct, I suspect the importance of mortifying the flesh has not been uppermost on your minds!

But O-week has not all been a time of euphoria and self-indulgence. All of you have learned new things, some of them challenging. Some of you are missing friends and family, however welcomed you feel in College. Others may not have felt completely included or absolutely comfortable with everything you have experienced, and are working out how say so. So there is a time of testing here along with the fun, that makes the conjunction of these seasons a bit less bizarre.

Others, however, have faced even harder challenges this past week.

On Wednesday night at a College not far from here, a young man died. Jarrad, a student at Glenn College at La Trobe University and until recently at Gippsland Grammar School, was a friend and schoolmate of people here this evening, some of whom feel his loss keenly. By all accounts Jarrad was bright, outgoing, well liked, and eager to engage with his chosen field of animal science. And his time has come and gone.

Jarrad’s death is a tragedy all the more shocking because of it happening now, when we are celebrating new beginnings; it seems to exacerbate this contradiction of what the present time means.

On a Thursday night many years ago, and much further away, another young man faced death:

He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’

Jesus was about the age of many resident tutors in our Colleges; not old enough to have fleshed out his CV properly, let along to have fulfilled the career potential of a major religious leader that others foresaw for him.

He realized however that, in his unique circumstances, the most life-affirming and world-changing thing he could do was to offer his life completely and fully to people who would not honour the gift, but abuse it. And we do not judge his achievement or the gift he was to us by the length of his years, but by the character with which he lived, and died.

This is the story at the heart of Lent. Lent certainly focuses on the difficult aspects of human existence—suffering, mortality itself—because it is a time for Christians to enter into the story of that young man facing death. We seek to do so partly because of the significance his death, as well as his life, have for us, as the epitome of a life lived fully for others, and which brings life to us all; but we do so mindful of our death, asking what difference it makes to our life now.

So Lent and O-week do have this much in common at least – that they place before us the challenge and opportunity of just how we want to live this time we are given.

Life is a gift every day. The value of what we will do with the gift does not depend on the amount of time we have spent, but on how we spend whatever time we are given.  So we should live not merely with a view to future opportunities for achievement or fulfilment of ambitions, however worthy; today, now, is the time when we must learn to be who we really are.

On Being a Student: Vocation

Based on excerpts from an address given at the World Student Christian Federation Day of Prayer for Students, Brunswick Uniting Church, August 31 2008

In the 21st or in any other century, students have had an acknowledged role or vocation in society that goes somewhat beyond the mere fact that they are studying. It has been recognized in many times and places that the combination of youth, intellectual ability and the opportunities for reflection presented in university life means that some of society’s most creative and most critical participants are its students. Students have very often been among those most actively producing new ideas and new cultural forms, and among those most concerned with identifying society’s failures and its need for change.

However the realities of being a student in the 21st century in Australia are not altogether conducive to this role. Some planned developments in our education system, along with some accidents of history, have made student life busier and often less well-resourced or supported. The rapid expansion of our campuses and student numbers without commensurate funding and overt government attacks on the funding of student activities are obvious factors. Less obvious things include the emphasis on coursework, which maintains a fairly constant pressure on many students throughout the year. All these conspire to make the visionary calling of the student a difficult one to foster. While the determined and the well-resourced may still find the time and space for activism, many are too occupied with the immediate demands of formal study and of paid employment to offer much energy to those other, traditional pursuits of the student.

It is tempting to bemoan this situation, and to romanticize the experiences of recent decades or the last century as though they were all protests and poetry. The lament of a 13th century Chinese observer recorded in the Shilin Guangji is strikingly similar to the complaints of some today! In fact students have rarely been immune from pressures related to the need for employment and productivity.

And important as that visionary element of student identity is, we should not disparage those for whom the pursuit of economic security is the more obvious goal of their studies, or forget that university education has something to do with such goals for nearly everyone. While privileged groups may tend to think that the student of Arts or Science is the archetypal creative and critical intellectual, those from communities which have been marginalized and which struggle to achieve freedom and democracy may find that real power and opportunity comes through their access to skills and knowledge of a more technical or professional kind.

The prophetic has to find some relationship with the professional. The professionally-focussed student may have lost something without a sense of vision or creativity, but the prophetic or creative side of student life can become self-serving without a broader frame of reference including service.

I suggest that they are linked by the idea of “vocation”.

“Vocation” and especially “vocational” are used often used rather prosaically, to mean something ike “job” and “job-related”; but strictly speaking, such language implies a relationship between a job, profession or some other pursuit, and on the other hand a wider or larger reality that has “called” the person into that role. To speak of vocation and to mean it is already subversive of a merely technical or economically-driven approach to study or to life; it means being willing to place study itself and life itself in relationship to a wider horizon of meaning and value.

Frederick Buechner calls vocation “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”. He affirms in this statement the possibility that what we find in ourselves most fulfilling and for which we yearn, can be related fruitfully to the needs of the world in which we live. This insight might bridge the apparent contrast between the prophetic and professional orientations of student life; for all are called to seek that meeting place between our own gladness and the world’s need.

Engaging Students

Based on extracts from the Morpeth Lecture 2008, given at Christ Church Cathedral Newcastle for the Anglican Diocese and the University of Newcastle, April 17 2008

Australian higher education is undergoing what has been described as a “revolution”. Its precise form is so far unknown, but the Federal Government is undertaking a fundamental review whose consequences might be far-reaching.

Not all the challenges the universities face have been fully or publicly recognized. There is a wide recognition that under-resourced campuses and crowded lecture rooms do not always really match the qualities and aspirations of the students and staff who inhabit them. Yet there is a related challenge that goes deeper than facilities, to the heart of the educational process and its aims.

There is an emerging national conversation about issues labelled "student experience" or "engagement". The results of a survey released by the Australian Council for Educational Research just last week make an important contribution to that discourse. The Australasian Survey of Student Engagement examines "what students are actually doing, highlights the most critical aspects of learning and development, provides a ‘learner-centred, whole-of-institution’ perspective, and gives an index of students’ involvement in study".[1]

Principal author of the report was Dr Hamish Coates, a former resident tutor and President of our Senior Common Room at Trinity College. The report, Attracting, Engaging, Retaining, contains some very positive data about how students experience Australian university education. It also suggests that there are areas, such as significant interaction between teachers and students, and enrichment of the educational experience through broadening activities outside the classroom, where measures of Australian students’ engagement with the university experience lags significantly behind their American peers’.

This is a particularly interesting and significant area to reflect on from the Collegiate perspective. Having begun life as a residential College community, Trinity has sought to maintain a sense of community where teachers and students are ultimately colleagues, "members" of the College as our constitution puts it. And since our purpose has always been broader than the provision of curriculum, activities beyond the classroom have always been crucial to the learning experience.

While we should be encouraged by the emergence of a serious discourse in Australia about student experience. it is less encouraging to see it being presented under a title “Attracting, Engaging and Retaining” students, indicating perhaps that many leaders and policy makers do not yet see engagement and experience as the heart of education, but adjunct to it, or even just as a means to maintain enrolments. In fact an educational vision that is unashamedly and primarily focussed on quality of student experience is ultimately more likely to succeed at attracting and retaining, as well as engaging.

Yet this is a challenge for us at Trinity too. There is no doubt that what we are able to offer students in the Collegiate environment is exceptional. Perhaps the challenge we face, together with the University and other Colleges, is how to make this kind of educational experience more widely available, and less the preserve of an exceptional and privileged few.

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[1] Attracting, Engaging and Retaining: New Conversations About Learning (Camberwell, Vic: ACER, 2008)