“We’ve done nothing here. No accomplishments, no progress. Three years wasted!”
Is the voice of a recalcitrant group of students coming to their senses after the shock of particularly bad final exams? No, thankfully not. It is in fact the words of Elias Sandoval a character in the Star Trek episode This Side of Paradise first aired on March 2 1967. Elias has just awoken from a state of state of bliss and perfect health induced via a symbiotic relationship with spores of a particular plant on an alien world he and his group came to colonise. Now restored to his right mind, the gift of bliss that had been enjoyed is viewed as nothing more than a waste of time and foolishness. Here we come up against the work ethic espoused especially by the original series of Star Trek, presumably as component part of the ‘American Dream’.
What then is the essence of life: gift or performance? The notion of life as performance lies close to hand in a university as a seductive possibility. For students, life can be seen as a linear progression from one level of achievement to the next. One’s whole self can be summed up in a mark: he’s a II.1 we might say, or she’s a I. What matters is how well one can do en route to a successful career. For staff, a carefully constructed pay scale of achievement and progression is there to annotate one’s advancement. Work well and you will be rewarded, not least by the admiration of others.
But there are other experiences in life that speak of a different order of things: arresting natural beauty; the experience of love; an unexpected kindness; the birth of a child; a meal with friends; riding a bike for the sheer fun of it. None of these could be considered the well-deserved rewards of effort and achievement. And to attempt to consign them to the category of light relief, a welcome distraction, in a world essentially about production, striving and reward, seems wholly disingenuous.
What does the Gospel of grace (justification by faith) have to say to universities, especially Church Foundations, shaped by the demand for excellent performance (justification by works)? What does it mean for a person’s sense of identity, for the conception of a person’s worth, for notions of equality?
According to the Christian understanding, God’s life exists as gift, gift given and received in endless reciprocal generosity. The engendering love of the Father is met by the responding love of the Son in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. There is no sense in which the life of the Trinity is held to be shaped by struggle or effort, achievement or the requirement to perform (this is part of what is meant by the philosophical designation of God as a necessary being). All is gift. This having been established, we go very seriously wrong if we assume that God’s actions ad extra, that is in creation, reconciliation and redemption, are of any other character. God’s act, as has been understood from Augustine to Barth, is God’s life. To put it in a nutshell God saves (and creates) by being God’s self. When God’s life takes root in the world in the person of Jesus, this is not a one-off act to get us out of trouble, a performance of God’s power to save us. This is God extending what God is always doing in eternity into the realm of time and space. Christmas is not God’s performance, but the opening of the gift of his life to us, the gift of loving relationship.
Performance, especially in a university context, is not wrong; it is just that it should not be the only or even the dominant category of life. Performance needs to be helped to resume its place as part of life, but not the decisive meaning of life. Performance is perhaps best conceived as a gift offered to others in response to the gift of God’s life to us.
Performance dominates, it has to be said, in an atheistic understanding of life. For in this world-view, where the universe is the random product of chance, accident and absurdity, there is a need to create meaning for oneself through one’s ability to perform that meaning, to make and sustain meaning out of nothing. But within a theistic perspective, meaning is offered to us as gift. One no longer needs to be a self-creator with all the attendant anxieties and impossible responsibilities that follow, one can be a created co-creator. One can still play with the possibilities of a contingent universe but one’s place and purpose are assured. This gift of identity from God leads to a deep security of self. By comparison, if meaning is only the meaning I create for myself, then my value is directly the value of my performance – and its meaning is as precarious as my own frailty and fallibility.
Chaplains are to witness to and make present “a transcendent reality not within the power of our plans, projects and targets” (Shakespeare, 2007, p.132) and witness to the end-in-itself character of the Gospel: to divine love; to the sacred worth of people; and to the possibility of forgiveness (p.132) . For too many contemporary students, “[t]he self becomes the site for frantic achievement after another, rather than life experienced as sacred, entrusted gift.” (Hong, 2013, p.241)
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