They Have to Want to Leave the Ship...

“How do you get two hundred soldiers to want to get off a submarine? How do you get two hundred soldiers want to get off a nuclear submarine?” These questions mark the moment of insight for Jack Ryan, CIA analyst who found himself on an operations mission in The Hunt for Red October. He spends most of the film thinking out loud, finding his way into and out of a counter-intuitive but narratively logical, action-thriller plot: the cat-and-mouse hunt for a Soviet submarine skipper who has decided to defect to the USA by means of delivering a Russian nuclear sub built for one purpose—to start and finish, in stealth, a nuclear war. As Ryan asks himself the question, sleepless but tenacious, shaving and thinking, he intuits the plan: a mock sabotage, a radiation contamination of the ship.

I’m hearing a voiced-question in my head more and more regularly these days, having to do with a much less action-thriller plot but an engaging conundrum for me all the same. How do you get hundreds of seminary students to see interreligious engagement as fundamental to their faith in God? How do you get hundreds of seminary students—and their professors, for that matter—to see formation as a traditionally-rooted and traditionally-transcendent inquiry-activity-task absolutely necessary to being a good Christian? If our tradition-centric way of doing things is the nuclear submarine, well-equipped to start wars in stealth and fundamentalisms, how do you get two hundred seminary students want to get off a nuclear submarine? They have to want to get off…

We could begin by itemizing the various attachments we develop as people of faith, those things that accord our life meaning, purpose, direction. Attachments in this sense are not bad, per se, just limited and limiting. They serve their purpose and then must be relinquished with grace (or not, usually, in my case). Things like “who God has been for me” or “what faith practice looks like, feels like, in the communities of which I’ve been a part.” Not only do these things offer meaning, but they structure experience. They provide boundaries within which we know who we are, how we do things, what we’re supposed to do. One could say, impishly, well then let’s all become Buddhist, but Buddhists have just as much, or more, difficulty with relinquishing attachment as the rest of us. They’re simply helpful in naming the phenomenon (in my view). Besides, even if we itemize each attachment—like that’d be possible!—there’s no help in the listing-knowledge for actually releasing them, being free of them. Life wouldn’t be human without the gift and burden of attachment. We would never learn freedom without captivity, bliss without yearning, life without death.

We could return to the modernist’s approach, developing a rationality suitable for each setting and practicing the rhetorical flair to persuade others of truth, beauty, goodness available in more traditions than just our tradition. The difficulty here, however, is that it creates fundamentalists of every stripe—those whose structures or orders require just their rationality, truth, goodness, beauty. Then we get the platitudes that grate my nerves more and more these days. “I know Jesus is the only way, but we can still be friends.” “It’s all relative, so why bother.” “Let the competitions begin and we’ll see whose faith tradition is [true, right, just, whatever] in the end. I know it will be mine.” This approach imposes a literary or mind-body distance—whether through texts, rationalities, “religions” or “traditions”—that simultaneously absolutizes and diffuses human relationships. It also disregards and then over-emphasizes power relations, usually in some form of power-over instead of power-with.

In the first instance, our seminary students would need to develop a preference for disorder over order, free-fall from meaning/purpose/direction over tentatively held “humble absolutes” that feel inconclusive (because they are). Anyone coming to seminary these days—whatever reason they come for—does not come for that. Those that are here at seminary already pretty much live in the second instance, at least where I teach and learn. We have increased attention to textual precisions and disregard—without awareness of the disregard—of collaborative, relational centers within which texts matter.

The pivot point of the action-thriller is probably not a good model for this vocational conundrum, in the end, though I still find it lively and compelling. At root, Ryan has the privilege of watching an intentional deception from the outside, figuring it out, and responding to meet the skipper (and his submarine) with open-arms and sanctuary. I’m not interested in stewarding an institutional effort for self-deception for our students—at least at this stage (though talk to me in a couple years). Anything grown in faith must have its organic, stewarded integrity in the power of Spirit.

On the other hand, how is what we’re offering now not a bit of institutional deception? To use this metaphor, we are inviting spiritually-seeking folks onto a nuclear submarine that seems to lean toward war—interreligious war, intercultural insensitivities, my-way-or-highway kinds of understandings of traditions’ wisdom, information-transmission teaching built on old power-hierarchies of teaching/learning. How is invitation onto such a ship not part of the problem we face today?

I guess the question becomes, as I head out to the gym to work out what my body knows, can the invitation from seminaries today be part of the solution…? Granted the systemic realities of higher education, are these the best we’ve got so we keep tweaking the ship…or is it time to think about smaller boats, smaller cohorts of seekers, seekers who are weary enough to risk real work that makes a difference in uncharted waters yet in Spirit’s tether…?