Saturday, May 24, 1997

College a time of questioning, chaplains agree

By Richard C. Dujardin / The Providence Journal-Bulletin

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - As chaplains, they've prayed, cried and celebrated alongside the students.

Now with the school year ending, they find they must say adieu to young men and women who have been part of the campus community these last one to four years.

But for the chaplains it's not really over. For even if the chaplain doesn't have an invocation or benediction to deliver or a baccalaureate service to organize for commencement, he or she still knows a new batch of students will arrive in the fall, bringing old and new questions about life's meaning and about religion and God.

On one thing most of the chaplains agree: College is a time of questioning, when old beliefs are sometimes put up for grabs, to be cast aside or reaffirmed.

"It can work both ways," says the Rev. John P. Soares, the University of Rhode Island's Catholic chaplain. "I've seen lots of students who stop going to church when they get to college. For them, college is an opportunity for exiting the faith. Yet I've also seen many students who have been reawakened in their faith here at URI."

How religion is faring these days on college campuses frequently depends on who you're talking to.

In an Episcopal Church-sponsored forum on the future of college chaplaincy at URI several weeks ago, the Rev. Jack Fitzelle-Jones, Protestant chaplain at Community College of Rhode Island, voiced dismay at how few students have any understanding of the various faith traditions, including their own. "I don't think it can be exaggerated how unchurched young people really are," he says. "The basic literacy isn't there."

But the Rev. David Ames, the Episcopal chaplain at Brown University, says he thinks students today are not really that different from their predecessors. Students have always asked a lot of questions about faith and religion, he says, and it's the same now. What's different, he says, is the spectrum. No longer is it just Christians and Jews. At Brown today, he says, one finds many students who are Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or Baha'i.

"I wouldn't say it's harder to minister in this kind of situation," he says. "Ministering as a chaplain has always been a challenge. But it's different now because the mix is so much richer. The diversity has made it more difficult to build a sense of community and more important that we try to build community. It's made dialogue much more important."

But is all well? At URI, some of the chaplains and administrators say they detect a generalized "anger" among students not found in earlier generations.

"If we compare students then and now, I have to say there is a good deal more anger, less restraint and more reckless behavior," says URI president Robert Carothers, who has had to deal with the problem of violence by members of the football team against one school fraternity last October. "I see a lot of desperation that isn't being articulated."

The Rev. William Bartels, the university's Protestant chaplain, says he detects it, too, though not quite as much as a few years ago.

"I think part of it comes from the demands on their time,' says the chaplain. "With many working a large number of hours a week to pay for their education, to all the social demands, you can see why the level of frustration is high,"

Bartels, who this semester has been teaching a course on comparative religion in addition to completing his ninth year as a URI chaplain, says he finds students deeply interested in religious and spiritual issues. At the same time, he sees a strong dislike for institutional religion running through the student body.

"Father Soares and I have occasion to speak to groups, and often you will hear a student say, 'Funny, I never heard the priest at home say anything like this when I was growing up.'

"Of course, it's nice when you get a breakthrough like that. But the dominant attitude - apathy and even dislike of institutional religion - is still there. Look at the numbers. The main student Mass at URI, at Christ the King Church, draws about 500 Catholic students on Sunday evenings. When you consider there are 13,000 undergraduates at URI and 60-65 percent of them are Catholic, you quickly realize there are many more students who aren't in church."

So how do chaplains break through?

At URI, the administrators and chaplains refer to what they call "teachable moments." One such moment, says Carothers, came in 1992 when black students occupied the university's Taft building as a way of calling attention to their concerns. The event offered an opportunity for the chaplains, and others in the university community, to address the issue of racism in society and in their midst.

Similarly, says Father Soares, the crisis surrounding the football players who smashed their way into a local fraternity and beat up some of its members provided an opportunity for the whole campus to explore the evils of violence. "One of our goals is to get students to realize that any violence affects us all, not just a few fraternities or the football team." Still, Soares, a former assistant pastor at St. Francis Xavier Church in East Providence, says he has found many more teachable moments taking place in the one-on-one counseling that takes place between himself and a student.

It was with listening in mind that Bartels several years ago set up a booth near the entrance of Memorial Union, to give students an easy way to meet with chaplains and to go over concerns large and small.

During the past year, he and Soares have been sharing the booth, with Bartels taking the Thursday afternoon spot noon to 2 p.m., and Soares taking Thursday mornings from 10 a.m. to noon.

It is, both men agree, important to allow students that kind of space where a student of any faith can feel safe and free to talk about any issue of faith, be it personal or general. For as Episcopal Bishop Geralyn Wolf put it recently at the chaplaincy forum, a college chaplain's primary responsibility is to men and women between the ages of 17 and 25 who are trying to sort everything out.

Listening is important, she said, because students at a secular university don't always see many places on their campus where they express their deepest spiritual concerns.

Soares takes the same view. "We need to be able to show the student there is a place they can go to, that they can find people on campus who care."

Still, other approaches can be used too.

Guy Bermel, URI's Jewish chaplain, thinks it's difficult to sell any organized denomination or religion to a typical university student. All the more reason, he says, even at URI, where as many as 20 percent of the students are Jewish, to look for "creative new ways" for Jewish students to express their Judaism, he says. "The traditional Jewish programs," he explains, "don't go down at all."

And what has he tried?

Well consider this. This spring URI Hillel put on a Passover Chocolate Seder.

"The program takes the traditional text of the Passover meal and rewrites it to incorporate chocolate in every part," the chaplain explains. "For example, instead of dipping a green vegetable in salt water, you dip a green M & M into chocolate syrup."

The students, by Bemel's account, thoroughly enjoyed it. "It was familiar and comfortable, but not too serious."

Bemel, a native of New Zealand, also encouraged the students to raise money for a homeless shelter in Peacedale by making a 42-pound matzah ball. "Right now, as a group I think we have a very positive image. We have become very visible. But I still feel we are trying to sell them something they don't want at this point in their lives."

Soares, looking at the Catholic students, takes a different view. He observes that this past semester, nine members of the Newman Club, URI's Catholic student association, went on an "alternative spring break" in Lawrence, Mass., working among the homeless at several agencies there, including St. Christopher's House for people with AIDS.

"I think we are going back to a time when students are becoming service oriented rather than 'me first.' It doesn't necessarily mean they are going back to mainstream churches, but I think it shows they are searching for a spiritual element in their lives."

At Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Sister Francis Murphy says she, too, finds more students who are searching. One of the chaplain's roles, she believes, is to encourage students to stand strong for what they believe, particularly when others may try to ridicule them.

As she puts it: "We use scripture, and bring it into their lives, so they can strengthen the values they've already been taught."

Sister Francis, who is also director of campus ministry for the Diocese of Providence, says she thinks a listening stance is a must. And she finds increasing numbers of students, not just Catholics, making their way to her office to talk about faith.

"It's really marvelous. Sometimes they don't go to church, but they want to know more about God. One young man told me the other day, 'You know, I really love God.' I believe that, in time, they will go back to their respective churches. We are forming them to be leaders in ministry, so that when they go back to the parishes, they will be leaders."

(c) 1997, The Providence Journal-Bulletin.

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