Desire. A God secretly intoxicated
by dirt and water, breathing it
in and out.
Now, Mary thinks,
desire will say more to them
than death, and they will know
a way forward.
We were not the first to gather people. Christians were latecomers to a process that has always existed—a process of gathering people. Ancient powers, whether pharaohs or caliphs, shamans or princes, soldiers or priests, prophets or merchants, always gathered people together, seeking to verify or solidify their power, convey their dreams, or bring order to their worlds. There is nothing inherently good about gathering people together, but there is something inherently powerful.
Greed has always haunted gathering.
Some people hoard and some people have been hoarded. Both realities of hoarding meet us in the history of modern colonialism. From the slave ship to the hacienda, from the plantation to the field, from the mine to the market, people were gathered as a means to an end: to marshal their collective energy for mass work—planting, harvesting, clearing, building, capturing, loading, unloading, and of course fighting, especially to seize indigenous lands.
Those Christian colonialists moving back and forth between old and new worlds and between the conquest sites of the new worlds saw what few people had ever seen before—a vast array of peoples spanning heretofore incomprehensible distances, differences, and ways of living. In response to that sight and in light of their unquestioned power in those new places, these colonialists organized peoples in thought and space, and set in place a way to gather people that we are yet to escape, and maybe can never escape. Race, religion, and nation formed in that gathering work, each itself an unwanted conceptual gathering crafted in the power of whiteness. These forms of designation were unwanted because they were unnecessary for peoples who knew who they were in relation to the land, to animals, and to their gods, and how they were in relation to other peoples.1 But race, religion, and nation became useful designations for theft, inside the work of separating peoples from the land.
People groups have always existed, but it was not until the modern colonial moment that those peoples were forced to think themselves in the troubled togetherness of race, religion, and nation in a world being stolen, privatized, segmented, segregated, commoditized, and bordered. We inherited troubles. The troubles were not the differences in peoples, in their different ways of being in the world, in believing in the gods or not believing, in acting, or in thinking, or even in negotiating with or struggling within those differences. These were and yet are the challenges that come with being creatures. The troubles are something else. The troubles are found in how we have come to think and know our differences through the operations of a thick whiteness. The world nurtured by Western colonialism is a world living in the tormenting innovation of thinking ourselves and thinking our differences as racial, religious or nonreligious, and nationalist beings.
We live in a defeated conceptual moment when so many have surrendered their imaginations to working inside the ideas of race, religion, and nation as the most rational way to think collective existence and for peoples to know and announce themselves. It may be impossible to escape these ideas for thinking collective existence given how they are embedded in the world order formed through modern colonialism and enacted through education, but the more urgent question is whether we should continue to surrender our imaginations to them. The heart of the problem for us is not only that we are forced to think each other through these concepts, both individually and collectively. The heart of our troubles is also the way these concepts prepare us for a gathering governed by whiteness and the protocols aimed at its performance of control, possession, and mastery.
Whiteness invites us to imagine that we become visible to ourselves and others only through its narration of our lives. This was, however, much more than a thought exercise gone terribly wrong. It was inherent to the way Europeans transformed the world into private property and reorganized intellectual life within their cognitive empire.2 They imagined they could see the peoples of the world better than the peoples of the world could see themselves, and that their insight was key to forming institutionalizing processes that were crucial to global well-being. They were as indispensable as God. Western education and modern theological education were formed in this condition without entering into lament over its harmful effects; indeed, we became the means through which untold generations were shaped to think inside these troubled forms of gathering and the facilitating obsession of whiteness with its relentless need to perform its indispensability.
I remember those wonderful students who looked at me with deep frustration. We were sitting at a large round table in a theological school in Canada. These were students from many places—First Nation students and students from various Caribbean islands, students from Ghana and Kenya and South Africa and South India, students from Korea and China and Vietnam, and even a couple of students from the United States. We had spent the morning together sharing beautiful stories of faith journeys that wove in and out of many faiths. Many journeys now moved in a hard-won Christian direction, others moved around Christianity, like birds circling an unsure tree, while others moved in paths not near Christian faith. All of these students worked with, lived with, and loved peoples of many faiths. These students loved their families and their communities of origin, and each student sought a way to honor those many faiths and those loves, even as they sought together to articulate their own faith.
It was the afternoon session that brought out the frustration, as we were then joined by Linda, a faculty member of the school, along with the academic dean, both white Canadians. Linda was talking about the matters that occasioned my consulting visit—curriculum development, interreligious engagement, and race. As she spoke, she explained the world—defining what religion and culture meant, suggesting what ought to be the contributions that religions and cultures make to each other and to the wider society, and charting the way for religions to achieve Enlightenment virtues. Some of what she said made sense, but all of the way she said it frustrated the students and me. They heard the same old plotting of their peoples and their lives on a journey not of their own choosing, but one pressed on them through the history of colonial relations and formations. That history arranged peoples on a line from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to truth, from barbarity to civilization, and presented all peoples with limited options for imagining a journey together with others. The students, however, were working different journeys, trying to find a togetherness with their peoples and with each other. Linda, on the other hand, presented herself not on a journey but as a destination.
I am sure that Linda never imagined herself as a destination, but she had been formed and then positioned that way. The Western academy and the theological academy exist within the long history of colonial convening, forming a shared practice of speaking to and for the rest of the world.3
What would it mean to be a professor who thinks the gathering differently in a school that thinks it differently? It would first require we learn the difference between colonial gathering and a gathering that aims in a different direction, that is, a gathering that recalibrates journeys and turns us away from the limited colonial options for knowing and living with each other. Such knowing of the difference begins by understanding how people are formed into the facilitating obsession of whiteness.
This is a tale of two. Jane was born in quiet Colorado, grew up in an all-white suburb, went to an all-white school (except for the handpicked colorful few kids who were there for her to practice multiculture, a proxy for the world). She then went to a fine small liberal arts college, then to an evangelical school to get a master’s degree, and then on to do a doctoral degree at a school of great reputation. While she was in all those schools she weaved her way through to the best faculty members (to her mind), avoided faculty of color except on social occasions, and was always very polite but never their student. She graduated, moved into an all-white community (except for the handpicked colorful few people who were there for her to continue practicing multiculture, a proxy for the world). She got a teaching job at a school, where she met Jack.
Jack was born in quiet Connecticut, grew up in an all-white suburb, went to an all-white school (except for the handpicked colorful few kids who were there for him to practice multiculture, a proxy for the world). He then went to a fine, fairly large liberal arts college, then to a self-acknowledged liberal-progressive school to get a master’s degree, and then on to do a doctoral degree at another school of great reputation. While he was in all those schools he weaved his way through to the best faculty members (to his mind), avoided faculty of color except on social occasions, and was always very polite but never their student. He graduated, moved into an all-white community (except for the handpicked colorful few people who were there for him to continue practicing multiculture, a proxy for the world). He got a teaching job and was there to welcome Jane.
Jane and Jack became good teachers—thoughtful, considerate, and careful—but each was a Minotaur who lived in a labyrinth created for them and by them where all the paths of their students would always lead back to them. The journeys of their students dissolved in their labyrinths, becoming marks and carvings on their corridors. Jane and Jack each formed their world not through narcissism or ignorance, but through something worse, a carefully orchestrated self-formation that they imagined was finished and now served as the home to which the students were invited to aim and enter.
Their homes, however, could not actually accommodate the students. They sensed this, and they heard the quiet complaints of students, always around the edges of the real problem. I wanted to end their worlds and take down their labyrinths, but I was so very late, having never been to their corners of Colorado or Connecticut. Yet what truly thwarted my efforts was their impenetrable helplessness, their shared illusion that this was the way they were—their permanent composition. I had no time machine to take them back and show them they had been schooled in a sickness—had learned a distorted way of gathering inside a distorted way of thinking, a distorted way of thinking inside a distorted way of gathering.
The academy convenes. It draws people together, and facilitation is its birthright. This connotes a beautiful kind of centeredness where teacher and institution are gladly surrounded by the matters of life—of people, of problems, of questions, of theories, and of many things in between. The problem we face is a diseased centeredness, one sickened with something akin to a virus that begins to work in a body, moving from parts to the whole outlook of a person. This centeredness sickened by whiteness grew from the pedagogical imperialism of the Euro-colonialists who imagined the whole world as their students, expanded as their reformatting of the world expanded, took definitive shape as they formed educational projects across the planet, networked through their imperial languages and the formation, production, and dissemination of ideas and materials from books to maps, from classrooms to rituals of evaluation.
The facilitating obsession of whiteness performs less a consistent set of characteristics and more a consistent refusal—a refusal to envision shared facilitation, a refusal to place oneself in the journey of others, a refusal of the vulnerability of a centeredness from below (rather than from the towering heights of whiteness), where the sense of my own formation is not only still open, but where I am willingly being changed not by a nondescript other but by nonwhite peoples historically imagined at the sharp point of instruction. In short, this is a refusal to release oneself to the crowd.
Judgment
You can get away with that here,
They said,
the judgment was already rendered.
Your Being is Primate.
We, however, are Bypass.
You can pray to your gods in public,
They said,
You being Primate.
We, however, bypassed.
You can say “Amen,” and scream, shout
out many words aimed at every
direction, You native, Indi-ground,
po’bo’ burned Primate.
We, however, are passed.
You can dance, slinging your body
around the space as if a holy ghost
holds you up,
We, however, passed
into the night, where no one
works like that any more
and in the stillness
we can hear and feel you move
but we cannot see you.
The judgment was already rendered.
The subtlety of colonial gathering is very important. It is one thing for people to be gathered in their differences. It is another thing entirely for people to be told how to know, think, and negotiate their differences, and still another thing entirely to have differences created in front of their eyes and told generation after generation to see themselves and others through these manufactured differences.4 People disagree, peoples disagree, but in the long histories of Western colonial education, rarely if ever have people or peoples been allowed to name and voice those disagreements separate from the refereeing positioning of whiteness.
“I don’t see a way out,” he said to me.
“These problems cover me too thickly,” he said to me.
“Tattooed into my skin,” he said.
“Really?” I said.
“I will take them to my grave,” he said.
Then I said, “That sounds reasonable to me,
Nicodemus.”
Why do we gather? Everything hangs on our answer to this question. This question has to be asked freshly beyond the colonial imagination. Just as the Western academy convenes, so too does the theological academy convene. But our convening is always undomesticated, imbued with the realities of the crowd, driven by a God who reaches everywhere and particularly to those not seen by conventional ways of seeing. But that convening must be unleashed from controlling desire, which means our convening will always be dangerous.
It was the crowd that wanted Jesus crucified, but Jesus yet wanted the crowd. Western education and especially theological education have not been able to digest this truth. To be turned toward the crowd is to be turned toward those who need but who also hate, those who hope for life but are also susceptible to the wooing of death, to become its agents. Fear is a crowd failing, violence is a crowd addiction, and ignorance is a crowd’s stubborn habit of collective mind. Jesus knew this and this knowledge anchored his life, but it did not guide his life. Jesus came for the crowd, just as God comes for the creature.
God comes, aiming for ecstasy in the body of the creature. This must never be denied. To deny this is to undermine the central purpose of theological education—to give witness to God’s embrace of the creature and the desire of God to make embrace the vocation of creatures that have yielded to the Spirit. The urgent work calling us in theological education is to touch the divine reality of longing, to enter into its power and newness as the logic inside the work of gathering and inside the formation that should be at the heart of theological education. Yet there is another effect of whiteness that thwarts our work. Beside its obsession with facilitation with its diseased centeredness, there is also the reformation of relationality within exchange networks.
The colonial form of greed aimed to destroy a communal metaphysic grounded in sharing, mutual ownership, interpenetrating uses of goods and services; bartering, buying, selling, borrowing, and exchanging all woven in relationships extended over time, relationships that were themselves enveloped in stories that gave rationale and meaning to such activities. Such communalisms were not utopias, nor were they immutable, but they were powerful ways of thinking the one in the many and the many in the one.5 But the goal of the colonialist—whether trader, explorer, missionary, merchant, or soldier—was to reduce the many to the one as a point of negotiation, management, conversion, and profit. The goal manifested in every colonial site was to move people slowly but clearly from any kind of group thinking about their wants and needs to thinking like an individual who could enter into exchange over goods and services guided by a rationality freed from communal obligation except at the level of volition. Such people would form connection through capital and perform a relationality woven first and foremost in utility and aiming at profit. Exchange networks need not be personal, need not be communal, need not be storied, need not suggest long-term obligation or relationship, need not even require names or identities. They only require items and money, that is, commodities.6
1698, in a port city on the west coast of Africa,
near what is now Ghana,
the following conversation took place:
African I: What’s your name?
African II: You don’t need to know my name.
The earth starts shaking.
African I: What are you selling?
African II: This ox.
African I: Where did it come from?
African II: You don’t need to know that.
The birds start crying not singing.
African I: How much do you want for it?
African II: I want guns and alcohol.
African I: I have that.
Many plants and trees collapse to the ground.
African II: Let’s do business.
Two hands touch in agreement.
The world feels ruin.
Exchange networks, however, may create something personal, communal, storied, and obligatory that leans toward mutual recognition and relationship. Exchange networks can form friendships. Of course, in this schema, without the commodities there is no community and friendship is an option. But this is a strange kind of friendship, created ex nihilo, out of nothing, and governed by an individualism that makes sustaining and cultivating the friendship a singular endeavor built on the strength and desire of the one for the other one. This is the world the colonialists put in place, and we have imagined community through it, which means that we have never really imagined community. This is quintessentially the work of whiteness. Ironically, it was the communal hospitality of so many indigenous communities that made the work and world of the colonialist possible in the first place through the willingness of indigenes to share land and life, food and practices for living together.
I remember Ben and Leonia and my disappointment over what they could not hear. I was there at this retreat center with a group of professors discussing teaching and relationship building with students. The group had shared deeply about the struggles of connecting to students, working with multiple challenges both in the students and in ourselves, and about connecting with the communities of the students. Ben had been a solid participant over those days, offering his advice and techniques on engaging students, but by the last full day of discussion he had had enough. Ben said he felt that we all were losing perspective on what the “business of education” was about (his exact words). “I am not here to be the student’s mother, father, brother, buddy, or therapist. I teach Bible. My goal is to make sure they understand how to read texts. They pay for a service and I deliver that service.” Then he aimed his next comments directly at me. “I think it is unethical and a denial of the power relationship between me and my students to cross the boundary of the student-professor relation, especially as a white man. These students don’t come to my school to become my friend, but to get the education they came for.” Leonia, an African American woman, said she agreed with Ben. “I am not trying to become friends with these students, especially the ones that don’t respect me. My goal in the classroom is to establish my authority in what is already a dangerous and contested space for me. It is not a space of friendship.”
In the four days of conversation, I had talked about sensing communion and building toward that sensing but never once had I talked about friendship. I wanted the group to find a way to see a different structure of relationality beyond the strange kind of relationships we inhabit through exchange networks. That vision of relationship aims at control, not of the would-be friend but of the conditions within which the friendship would exist. This is friendship shaped in an isolation imagined as focus—one on one—but is in fact a tragic suspension of the sinews of our connection. This is friendship imagined as what constitutes community. It is a work accomplished through the decision of the individual to will connection and share knowledge. But such a way of envisioning friendship denies the already—the entanglements and the enmeshments—that constitutes the realities of life.7 It is these realities that were attacked by modern colonialism and that are constantly refused by the exchange networks of modern capitalism.
I asked Ben and Leonia what the worship and chapel services of their schools meant to them. What was the significance of singing and worship with students, holding hands and praying with them, sharing the eucharistic meal with them, sitting with them for hours in their offices, connecting with them online and through emails, listening and counseling them, eating meals with them, writing recommendations for them, encouraging them to stick with the course, or the program, or the education itself? Ben answered quickly with one word, “Work.” Leonia pondered these questions and then said to me, “I see what you are getting at. But this is not friendship.” “No,” I said. “It is something so much more.”
I am not suggesting there is no such thing as proper boundaries between faculty and students. Nor am I trying to dismiss the integrity of friendship or the efforts required to sustain it. I am challenging the prevailing vision of its constitution in the Western world and all the places touched by the legacies of colonialism. That vision is like having a swimming pool in the ocean with perforated walls that one imagines holds separate water, when it does not. Friendship is a real thing where people open their living to one another, allowing the paths of life to crisscross in journeys imagined as in some sense shared. We need such friendships. But friendships form on a social fabric before they create a fabric, and it is that social fabric that deserves much more attention and reflection first for the ways it has been deformed—creating the illusion that we are only actually connected by choice—and second for the ways it may be remade, making possible a reality of intimacy, communication, reciprocity, and mutuality that builds from a deepening sense of connection.
There are, of course, many who shun such sensing, having been raised in or subjected to a cruel communalism where a community demanded too much, withheld too much, gave too little, or simply tried to destroy their life. Such communities were places from which to escape, never to return. I have encountered many in the academy who glory in the safety of the individual and who feel freed from soul-killing communal optics and obligations. It would be wrong to see such folks as only those who have fallen victim to the corrosive effects of modernity, having stripped away from themselves their own social skin. There are communities that no one should inhabit, and there are forms of communalism that destroy healthy habitation. But escape is an act that can become a practice that can become a habit that can form us into social patterns fully captured by the exchange networks of capitalism. The tragedy occurs here when a social habit becomes an intellectual habit that wars against the communal in educational institutions.
At the very beginning of this book I mentioned the idea of escape. It is a motivation for going into the academy and being in the academy that must never be underestimated, and unfortunately it has been underestimated in its role in forming the energy that thwarts a formation in communion. So many scholars in the academy escaped. They are here in relief and release from where they are from in so many ways—economically, socially, culturally, spiritually, intellectually, and sexually—and they have vowed never to return. It is a private vow that often has public effect, turning some scholars and the institutions they inhabit into citadels against any hint of a communal vision that suggests the places of their former confinement. I am not saying that most scholars have an antagonistic relation to their places of origin, nor am I naming in Freudian fashion some psychological condition that plagues scholars. Indeed, some scholars are not refugees or fugitives of any sort. They inhabit an academy nicely aligned with the worlds out of which they came. I am pointing to an often-tacit shunning of the communal that shuts down the imaginative capacities of a scholar or an academic community to envision an ecology of learning that aims toward it. Those who have escaped often only imagine social life on the run where friendships form with suspicious and vigilant volunteers, always ready to escape once more if they sense confinement approaching. The formation we need overcomes that kind of friendship formation, but more importantly it presses toward a different kind of communalism. It presses toward a gathering that breaks boundaries and crosses borders.
So Peter said to Cornelius, “You know that we Jews do not associate with you Gentiles. I should not be here in your home. But God showed me that I cannot any longer call anyone profane or unclean. Now tell me why I am here?” (Acts 10:28–29)
The crowd is itself a destination and not a means to an end. The goal of cultivating those who can gather people centers theological education in its erotic power. A number of feminist scholars have written powerfully about erotic power in varied ways that all give witness to a deep energy in the world, which for many is registered in the bodies of women.8 As Audre Lorde said, “Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.”9 It is this erotic power that draws us toward one another. Erotic power is, as Rita Nakashima Brock states, “the power of our primal interrelatedness,”10 and it is this power that is feared, resisted, or exploited by those committed to patriarchy and to social forms that use the ideas of coupling and the family to control this power, channeling it to be used by nation-states and corporations to shore up their destructive communal visions.11
Erotic power has been drawn in our time into the trajectories of colonial control rooted in whiteness and made malignant through the racial segregation that has shaped and continues to shape so many individuals and communities. Desire rooted in control is disordered desire that inevitably forms social prisons that drain life. Too many well-meaning people who have been formed in social spaces constituted in and by whiteness perform that malignant power in the way they touch, hold, and envision the social.
I remember Ushi’s exhaustion. She was the only Asian woman on a faculty of fifteen—nine other women, all white, three white men, one African man, and one Latino man. I met Ushi deep into her tiredness. She had been at this school for five invasive years. It is never easy being the first or only woman of color on a predominantly white faculty, but Ushi was not prepared for the strange intimacy she experienced at her school. Her female colleagues were kind and caring but assertively familiar. They touched her. They touched her constantly with their hands and their words; neither felt like caressing care, but control. They, however, listened to her ideas, positions, and arguments selectively, hearing the words that sounded like them and dismissing the words that reminded them of her difference.
The breaking point came after a particularly difficult faculty meeting in which she spoke a lot but was heard very little. It was at the social hour after the faculty meeting that she surrendered to her anger. She stood in a group of colleagues trying to reiterate her point and announce her thinking but getting the same nonresponse and paucity of respect. As this informal conversation continued, they began again with the touching—hands reaching for the back rub, other women leaning into her body as though her space was their space, as though her body was their pet’s body. Ushi felt herself squeezing the wine glass until it started to shake in her hand. Then she yelled loudly, her voice filling every cubic inch of that large room, “Stop touching me, goddammit!” She put down her glass of white wine and left the white room.
My visit came a year later, in the aftermath. Ushi recounted this story at our breakfast, just me and her, and told me of her new life at the same institution. Now she was streamlined. She taught her classes, met with her advisees, did her committee work, and left the campus seconds after her work was done. No social events, no wine, no cheese, prayers, worship, talks, events, panel discussions: to all she said, “No, thank you.” Ushi disappeared into the silence that was already made for her in the school where she had a voice that was rarely heard. She simply hid her body in that silence as well.
A good preacher dreams / bodies swaying in full tilt / wide open to the eager wind-emotion, pulsating. She sees hands flowing / together in a sheet of sound / layered broken piercing / many and different / all gathering into sensing / Spirit complete the moment / when all feel the knowing / and then death gives way to victory / in a living that moves through walls / of histories that refuse doors. Now with eyes made stubborn by hope / we see a crowd’s new route into each other / flowing from need to want / this will be, they think, what she waited for, tipping over the horizon, desire revealed.
Caught in the powerful currents of a history that moves through us, we inhabit a social world constricted through whiteness that has left us with limited options for imagining how we might be with each other. That social world, to be clear, does not need the presence of peoples of European descent to be active, strong, and destructive. It only needs desire deformed by colonialist urges to control bodies, aimed toward their objectification and exploitation. The distorted erotic power that fuels that world must be freed from its captivity to whiteness and turned back toward its source in divine desire.
We can start again. The “again” being a gift from the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Theological education exists in the “again.” This is education that has as its fundamental resource erotic power, and that power finds its home in the divine ecstasy in which God relentlessly gives Godself to us, joyfully opening the divine life as our habitation. As Wendy Farley says, “The power of Christ is erotic; it is divine yearning and zeal.”12 This is power we enter through participation. The crowd surrounding Jesus gathers in the desire of God. The crowd gathers, and this is already on the way to being good news. The crowd is not Christian, but the gathering is in Christ. I am not suggesting by this a sort of sanctified event planning or an anonymously Christian crowd. This crowd forming gives witness to one who has yielded his life to divine desire. Jesus gathers in God—divine desire permeating his life and work—and now in him we see what God wants: communion.
Formation in theological education at its best is a showing of this communion.
By reframing theological education and Western education more broadly through a formation within the erotic power of God to gather together, I am turning attention to the original trajectory of a God who has ended hostility and has drawn all of creation into a reconciliation that we do not control. God offers us an uncontrollable reconciliation, one that aims to re-create us, reforming us as those who enact gathering and who gesture communion with our very existence. We end hostility.
This, of course, is a dream, but it is God’s dream.
Education formed in this dream is yet to emerge. Theological education is closer to this emergence, but we have blocked our own way to it by constantly erecting an image that captures our imaginations and drains our energies. Western education has offered us a distorted vision of what an educated person should look like, and we theological educators have accepted it. My entire adult life has been spent in and around educational institutions watching a formation that leaves its greatest treasure untapped, a treasure that would move us toward a true maturity that is a way of life together, a way that forms new life together.
Education is an endeavor deeply inside desire. This I have also learned through many years in the academy. We gesture desire in everything we do in educational space, all of it gesturing a willingness to yield one’s life in mind and body even if that yielding is extremely tentative and episodic, all of it aiming at what we want to be and become. That wanting has been intercepted by the wanting of another—an old man that haunts us—redirecting our wanting toward his blinding light so that we will not see even as we are educating people to see.
He blessed it and broke open his dream, one part in each hand.
To those on his left and those on his right, he said the same thing
as he handed them his dream, “Eat this dream,
and it will kill the dream that kills.”
Hands trembling, they wondered which of their dreams
would die and which would grow stronger.
Theological education is in the midst of an epic struggle. This is not a struggle to educate the masses or the elites of this world, nor is it a struggle to bring formal education to those who function without it. And it is not the struggle to survive as a financially viable endeavor. This is a struggle against this old man and the world he has created for us. If there is a nexus of most of the massive problems of the world, then the wanting of this old man is that nexus. There we find massive operations—economic, geographic, political, social, and intellectual—that point to one relentless goal: dominion.
A microcosm of that nexus is found in the academy, which means what happens in the halls of educational institutions, whether those halls are in physical or digital space, intertwines with the energies that are carrying forward the designs of the old man. The idea of the academy as an ivory tower removed from the world has always been a dangerous illusion that hides the work of forming people to enter willingly into the wanting of that old man. The old man’s wanting is inseparable from the coming of the white self-sufficient man, an arrival that is always a becoming. But it is the dreaming of his arrival that allows the old man to press himself into our future imaginings. This is the true horror of seeking possession, control, and mastery as fundamental characteristics of being the finished man, resting in an educated state of self-sufficiency: it never comes, but you live your life always aiming at it, dreaming the old man’s dreaming.
He dreams in the academy and through the academy, his eternality manifest in our bodies and for our own good. To struggle against him is to struggle against ourselves and our desires turned in dismal directions. Our desires can be turned in a new direction, and they must be if we want to end the quiet suffering and the acute resignation that flows through educational systems in the West and all the places that follow its pedagogies, all the places where people with the privilege of going to school also enter the problem of a troubled journey.
Theological education could mark a new path for Western education, one that builds a vision of education that cultivates the new belonging that this world longs to inhabit. But we cannot give witness to that newness if we imagine that our fundamental struggle is one of institutional survival, or the challenge of educational delivery systems, or the alignment of financial modeling with our desired outcomes, or the expansion of pedagogical models. All these matters are important, but they are not where the struggle meets us or from where the vision of our futures will come.
My last year in seminary, I was invited with a small group of African American men and women to represent the school at an interreligious gathering of students training to be Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim clerics. We met at a mountain retreat in Southern California for four days and three nights. We talked and laughed together, sang and worshiped together, each in our own religious world yet sharing that world with all the rest of us. On the last day, as we were leaving, a few of us from each group kept talking and sharing stories in the parking lot. We did not want to leave that moment because we felt the thickness of its unique joy. Finally, with the sun descending and only our few cars in the parking lot, we knew it was time to depart. So the hugs began. Everyone hugged everyone else until only the sound of our words of good-bye held us together. Even as our time drained away like water poured on the ground, we wanted to linger together on the mountain.
The mountain waits—this is the promise of theological education—as people cross the thresholds of our institutions to be prepared to face the struggles of faith and the struggles for faith in this world. They see the mountain. But the mountain is more than an endurance, or a journey marked by hardship and dedication. The mountain is a place where we can linger in a surprising desire for one another, where stories and hopes bound up in dreams might be shared and we have time—that precious gift—to learn more deeply of a God who dreams a mountain for us all to make a home together. It is the mountain that orients our work and heals our souls, because there on the mountain, according to the prophet Isaiah, a stream of people from every tribe and clan will finally reach our destiny in God, and the education we have anticipated with all our institutions and all our teaching and learning will finally begin.