Roger Ray, pastor
August 18, 2013
Elie Wiesel was asked, "What is it that you know for sure, that you have no doubt about?" Here is the response:
"I have no doubt that we are here for a purpose. I have no doubt that the purpose is not only to bring God closer to his creations, but to bring his creations closer to one another. I have no doubt that a human being is human simply because he or she is human--and we have no right to say that a poor person is of less value to society than someone who is rich.
I have no doubt that education is good for the soul, not only for the mind. I have no doubt that questions have their own magic, their own charm and their own immortality. I have no doubt that faith is only pure when it does not negate the faith of another. I have no doubt that evil can be fought and that indifference is no option. I have no doubt that fanaticism is dangerous. And, of all the books in the world on life, I have no doubt that the life of one person outweighs them all
For all of us who are involved in education, this week is when they may as well drain the pool and roll up all of the beaches because we are back in the classroom and as my daughter always said of this month, "life as we have known it is now officially over."
But if you are a college student there is at least one bit of good news. This Congress has not been able to do much but with a lot of pressure from the White House, they were able to pass a bill lowering interest rates on federally insured student loans. It was an amazingly hard fought bill because there was considerable political pressure to double interest rates on student loans under the banner of fiscal responsibility. Republicans complained that it was costing the government too much money.
Never one to sit in the back of math class, my new heart throb, Elizabeth Warren, fired back that the government was making over $50 billion a year in profit on the loan program.
Not that is likely that many members of congress actually believed their own rhetoric. They had a larger reason for wanting to continue to make higher education unavailable to the public. Conservative politics depends for its future on an unquestioning, compliant, uneducated population.
Not that I want to make too fine a point here, but how many of you were encouraged by the pastor of the church you grew up in to take classes in religion in college? The priest and the preacher, along with the politician and the captains corporate industry, prefer an uninformed public.
You may think that is unnecessarily cynical of me but let me go to the lowest common denominator to make my point, and by the lowest common denominator, you know I can only be referring to the diva of talk radio, Glenn Beck.
Glenn Beck, who tumbled from grace being fired first by CNN and later by Fox because, frankly, Beck is even too crazy for Fox, has landed in a radio program where Forbes estimates that he is earning about $80 million a year..... proving the old adage that there is a sucker born every minute.
Beck keeps himself in the news by entertaining his largely paranoid and racist following with one outrageous statement after another. A couple of days ago he told Oprah Winfrey that she disgusted him..... I have not been an Oprah fan since the Color Purple but even I know when it is not safe to shoot your mouth off.
But recently Beck was on a tear about higher education, vowing to his audience that he would never send another of his children to be indoctrinated by university professors. He would prefer, he insisted, that his children just be auto mechanics, even bad auto mechanics working at a gas station where no one ever goes to allowing them to go and be tainted by higher education.
Now, two things about that..... obviously, nothing puts distance between Glenn Beck and another person, whether it is a listener or one of his kids, as much as being exposed to accurate information. But the larger issue is that it is all a ruse...... Beck is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His kids will never have to work nor will his grandchildren or great-grandchildren. On the strength of a very gullible audience, the Beck family has crossed the Rubicon that you and I will never see.
So what he is really saying is not that he is willing to see his kids working as an inept, uneducated mechanic leading an impoverished and unfulfilling life.... He is, however, willing to see your children and your grandchildren leading an impoverished and unfulfilled life.
A retired friend of mine told me that he planned to audit one of my religion classes at Drury University where I teach but when he called and found out what it would cost him, he decided that I couldn't possibly know anything that valuable. The rise in the costs of higher education, even in state universities, is rising so fast that it is becoming entirely out of the reach of more and more people.
When the Great Depression and World War II had brought our nation to its knees, the government went to great lengths to make university education accessible to anyone who had the discipline and intelligence to go get it.
When I started in college 40 years ago, the tuition for a 4 year state university degree did not cost as much as the tuition charged for one of my classes at Drury. More importantly, it was possible for me to work a low paying restaurant job and still put myself through school. The buying power of entry level salaries has gone down and college costs have gone up.
Not very many years ago, there were states that made sure that there was no tuition charged to state residents because it is good for the economy, good for advances in technology, good for government, the environment and even for the military for our population to have a better education.... The only thing that education is bad for is conservative politics and traditional religion.
Elie Wiesel said that education is good for the soul as well as for the mind. Questions afford their own path to purify the soul. I remember hearing Scott Peck say that anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction. And so we question everything. We question our own religious tradition and the kind of unquestioning patriotism we were taught as compliant citizens and obedient warriors.
One of my heroes, Howard Zinn, said, "Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."
Some of you saints have actually suffered through reading my book that was a rewrite of my doctoral dissertation. Though I would not recommend that anyone suffer through it, the topic is important. My research was on the spiritual practices of monastic communities. I wanted to try to speak clearly about the goal of the spiritual life.
What I discovered in my research is that for very many centuries monastic leaders understood that the spiritual journey had three specific stages: purgation, illumination and union. Purgation had to do with making confession, separating yourself from the carnal desires of the world, disciplining yourself to live a life of self denial, prayer and peace.
The second stage, called illuminative, was about learning, study, becoming informed and illuminated. The third step, the more mystical union with God was, it was said, not possible without the other two. Interestingly there was no particular curriculum prescribed by any of the major authors. It wasn't that they expected everyone in the monastery to become a Biblical scholar or to be schooled in philosophy, but they did expect them to become informed.... To work at it, to think, to read, to understand.
They chanted the Psalms for hours every day. They sat in "chapter room" while the Abbot read to them from their book of order. They ate in silence while one monk, a lector, was assigned to read to the community from some spiritually edifying book.
I spent seven years visiting monasteries, staying for days or weeks at a time. Worshipping with them, listening to instruction, studying and though many of them maintained a religion that I just don't identify with, they also often had a vocabulary that would send you to the dictionary anytime you were alone.
Those years of my life affected me and it has influenced how I am a pastor among you. We have more guest lectures from college professors in this church than any other church I have ever known of. We do book studies, hold conferences and stay in the literature because, I am convinced, the only spiritual life that is not entirely self serving is an informed life.
Though being informed is sometimes painful and sometimes it can lead to cynicism, I believe that education is the only way out of either political or spiritual tyranny.
When I look at what separates most of us from the way old politics, old religion and old business runs the world is sort of like farming. If you asked a farmer if he was in favor of planting or in favor of harvest, he or she would look at you like you are crazy.
And you would be crazy..... no one can be enthusiastic about harvest if they are not equally invested in planting and you would have to be nuts to plant but never harvest.
I believe that our current congress, our current Supreme Court, our major corporations and our military industrial complex look at the world only as a point of harvest. They want power and money and they want it now. And if we let them take it all there will be a very small ruling class in this nation, surrounded by a class of permanent peasants.
We plant by educating the next generation of inventors, physicians, researchers, designers, architects, builders, teachers, statesmen and writers. Every time we cut funding to schools, raise tuitions, force students to go deep into debt to get an education, we are deciding to harvest without planting and when we do that, the harvest has to get smaller and smaller and we all become the more poor for it.
We began this sermon with a reading of what Elie Wiesel said that he knew for certain, about which he had no doubt. I will conclude with a bit of the same:
A university education should be free to any American who has the ability and the discipline to obtain an education. The interest our government charges students should not be one bit more than they interest they charge to banks because the investment we make in students is more vital to our nation's health than anything banks will ever do for us. And you, my friends, both seated here and viewing us on line.... You should question everything.... Question authority, question the government, question the church, question me, examine your own closely held beliefs... think critically and never stop seeking to learn, be informed and to understand the world around you and own heart.
