Christian's Corner: The Great Battle

It is Spring, and there is much about which to be cheerful: the end of the semester is but a month away, trees are deciding whether today would be a good day to unfurl their hidden glory, and Easter with its puzzling mixture of resurrection and fertility is already whetting its lips in eager preparation to sound a note of victory. Life is triumphing over death, Spring's green over Winter's brown, and warm closeness over cold distance. The fact that we have seen it all before gives us the pleasure of believing that the world we live in today is the same as the world we lived in yesterday. But that may be a fantasy that we can no longer afford.

The front cover of Time magazine this week says, "Be worried. Be very worried." Our world is in danger. "Polar ice caps are melting faster than ever, more and more land is being devastated by drought, rising waters are drowning low-lying communities... by any measure, earth is at the tipping point." It seems that climate change or global warming is disrupting the biological world and pushing it to a point beyond which it may not recover. Many species are becoming extinct and others are migrating to escape the rising temperatures but in so doing they are becoming pests.

Yet Harrisonburg seems so removed from all of that. Maybe so, but temperatures are rising here too...

EMU is quietly undergoing a socio-political revolution. In its affirmation of a faculty senate, we are moving from the ancient regime of God and King towards a more modern constitutional monarchy, perhaps with the re-introduction of a modified tenure system. Make no mistake: this is about power. It is about the power to fund and the power to fire. Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

And there are other contestations being negotiated on campus. Is education a commodity to be purchased or an apprenticeship to be undergone? Are students to be thought of as consumers or disciples? Are we a factory or a workshop? Are faculty practitioners of a craft or workers on the assembly line? The contest between the two images is like a growing black hole whose gravitational pull threatens to suck in everything: papers, projects, grades, syllabi, distinctions, committees, evaluations, accreditations, and admissions. And for sake of completion we should add the ongoing prioritization process. Will these forces push EMU to a point beyond which it may not recover? Will some of us become extinct and will others of us migrate and become pests elsewhere?

The world's struggle for survival is in some sense also our struggle for survival. We are the polar bear searching for another float to carry our weight. Without windows and TVs and magazine pictures to protect us, we are sometimes startled to discover that the "there" a glacier's retreat is the "here" of EMU. It is our world that is in danger. In discussing the transition that we make when we enter our place of work or study, Michel de Certeau says, "hand to hand combat begins again with a reality that dislodges the spectator." If prioritization did anything, it dislodged the spectator.

But it is also in this world and for this world that Jesus of Nazareth died. In raising him up, God speaks a simultaneous "no" and a "yes." No to the forces bent on sacrificial killing; yes to a different way of being human together, which does not depend on scapegoating the other to maintain social cohesion. Here is the true tipping point of the story of our world.