What is a university chaplain good for?
“Totally without hope, one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: ‘Leave behind all hope you who enter here.’”
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope
I am a Christian minister serving a Baptist church in our campus community. I love Jesus and I love students so I regularly encourage ministers from a variety of faith traditions to join their local multi or interfaith chaplaincy on campus. A dynamic and thriving university chaplaincy will pursue the common good. In that pursuit and in service of the wholistic health of the person in front of them, chaplains reach into their lives and their traditions in order to offer hope to students who come to campus looking for community or who are at times being squeezed by their loneliness and angst. After serving with the Multifaith Chaplains Association for eleven years on campus at the University of British Columbia I’ve landed on four words to describe what might be one of the most important things chaplains do: Chaplains offer H.O.P.E.
Hospitality
Almost every tradition of faith and spirituality welcomes people and invites them to move from stranger to friend. Chaplains serve the university or college by offering a wide welcome to students, staff, and faculty. When students arrive on campus from home for the first time they often look for the familiar. If they are seeking to connect with their familiar communities of faith, it might be a chaplain from their tradition, or any chaplain who is part of the chaplaincy that points the way and welcomes them into campus life. Hospitality opens the door to the hope found in friendship and community.
Orientation
Change and growth is often preceded by disorientation — a sense of not quite getting it or knowing the way. I prefer the term discombobulated! No doubt, life in university can be discombobulating! However, a chaplain can assist a student wrestling with the big questions of life by giving them language to formulate what they are feeling or ruminating on. Chaplains are able to introduce the basics of their traditions and point students to resources that will aid them in their own hopeful journey of discovery and change.
Personality
Some chaplains have BIG personalities. But most of us are regular persons without a lot of flash or hype who have had to reckon with aspects of ourselves in relation to family, the stuff of earth, and even our failure to live up to a transcendent vision of maturity. Hopefully each chaplain has some wisdom to share, a question to ask, or a story to tell that could unlock a door to growth. Universities and colleges are not just communities where some truth out there in the universe is being uncovered and manipulated for wealth. Hopefully universities and colleges can be communities where people become personable, flourishing humans, who are full of compassion and kindness.
Encouragement
After a string of bad days people lose courage. Sometimes in college or university the string of bad days becomes a week, a month, or even a term. Chaplains listen. They offer language and processes for metabolizing loss and grief. By asking questions they may help a student discern or begin discerning what they truly want. Having lived just a little longer the chaplain offers the hope that “it does get better.” We too have had to face our fears. We too have had our catastrophes. But we have learned that the catastrophe of the day is not necessarily the defining moment of our whole lives. We’ve had the experience of benefiting from counselling, from community, and from honesty. Chaplains, I’ve noticed are also pretty good at recognizing what is pretty good in another person, so they see the possibilities. Chaplains are encouragers, ready to speak an apt word that releases courage into the heart that had lost it. Chaplains can help students name the dementor lurking in darkness and sucking away their hope; having named it they can face it.; facing it they can take their next step forward with hope. That step could be the one that makes all the difference in their university experience and blazes a path full of courageous struggle but also full of blessings.
“Even though high-hope people are goal directed, they enjoy the process of getting there as much as the actual arrival. This is one of the seeming paradoxes I initially had difficulty disentangling when talking with high-hope people. Goals certainly capture the attention of high-hope people, but this largely seems to be true because such goals offer a marker for progress or mastery occurring along the way.”
Charles Snyder, pioneer hope researcher, The Psychology of Hope.
