Our Church Foundation institutions contain a wealth of signs and symbols, many of which I suspect go almost completely unnoticed. The original, and still primary, campus of my own institution is built on land that is part of St Augustine’s Abbey. It partakes therefore in the resonances of sacred ground which acted as a bridgehead for the re-founding of Christianity in England and which, by the latter part of the seventh century, housed an internationally renowned centre for Christian learning. Yet I would wager that despite the presence of some ruins from the later mediaeval period, and the monastic flint wall that encloses the campus, the majority of students are unaware of this heritage.
The layout of the original campus, build between 1962 and 1964, encodes a powerful symbolic geography. The central buildings form the sides of a quadrangle thus bounding shared social space with the essential monastic interlocking functions of chapel, refectory, teaching space and library. But, long before the reallocation of purpose of some of these buildings broke that unity, most people would not have possessed the interpretive tools required to unlock the potent theological claims being made by this arrangement.
I wonder too to what extent the presence of a cross, if it registers at all, is seen as more than a Christian logo, or to what extent paintings of sacred subjects or which bear theological overtones are deciphered with any success.
I worry about such things because I want to oppose the secularist myth that holds sway, even in a Church Foundation, that public space can and should be neutral. Yet there is, of course, no such thing as a value-free space. A university community is, perhaps more than most, bombarded from every direction with swaying words: the views of competing academics; advertisements; persuasive novels and films; conversations in the bar. In the midst of this array of views members of a university are entitled, of course, to exercise their own independent judgment in deciding what to accept, modify or reject. But there can be no guaranteed neutral space. Thus for chaplaincy not to find ways of presenting its own perspective and understanding out of some false respect for an alleged neutrality would simply be to tacitly support whichever voice is currently loudest; silence is not an option.
If this is correct, Chaplaincy can then be the legitimate sponsors of an awakening of the symbolic resources that lie all around us and that draw attention to the Christian metanarrative within which our institutions sit. Sometimes, it is just a simple matter of relabeling maps, or providing a suitable explanation adjacent to the symbol in question. But deeper resonances can be created if some elements of the curriculum can be linked to the wealth of signs and symbols our institutions contain. Allow me to replay one brief example for which I can take no credit.
Over the past three years my own institution has been home to the ‘Bioversity’ project: an attempt to link the university’s monastic heritage of husbandry with an awareness of the contemporary importance of biodiversity. Thus the original monastic orchard, lost in the construction of the campus, has been replaced on a much smaller scale with one that contains rare species of apple native to the South East. It is not, of course, that a person’s reflex action on seeing one of these apples will be to immediately embrace the Christian faith! It is rather that raising awareness of both the monastic past, and the notion of the wisdom it contained, serves to assist the reading and decoding of some of the other Christian symbols that lie to hand. At the very least, it helps to open up interesting avenues of conversation.
No thoughts yet on “Awakening the symbolic”