SACRED SPACE AND HOLY WISDOM

a sermon preached at Williams College
for the Alumni Memorial Service
in Thompson Memorial Chapel on its Centennial

June 12, 2005

The Rev. William A. Clark, SJ, Class of 1980

Perhaps some of you can understand when I say I came to Williams in 1976 for all the wrong reasons. There are a million different anecdotes about that fact that I could tell, but let me get straight to this particular point: I came here to collect knowledge, not to seek and pursue Wisdom.

Wisdom. We’ve have just heard her declare in the eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs: “To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live…. Whoever finds me finds life…. All who hate me love death.” Wisdom: not just the knowledge of particular things, but the Ground and Beauty and Truth of all that is. The Christian tradition easily equates this Wisdom, personified in passages like the one we heard, with the Holy Spirit, the presence of God’s own self among us. By whatever name or image, she’s been acknowledged since ancient times as the true goal of an educated person. But, as I say, she is not what I came to Williams in search of. In fact, I thought I already possessed her. I came armed with a large bronze pectoral cross (this is actually true!), a well-thumbed Bible, and a mission. I came to save, not to be saved.

The story of how Wisdom’s never-ending call finally got through to me can be told through the sacred places on this campus. You know the kind of places I mean: the places you’ve been feeling the tug of all weekend, the particular spots you’ve revisited openly or quietly; where professors surprised you, or challenged you; where relationships, likely or unlikely, started to blossom or took some crucial turn; the places where you best recall the friends whose memories we honor in this service; the places where ideas as different as those of Thomas Aquinas and Sigmund Freud wrestled you to the ground, or where you fought back. Wisdom has dwelt in all these places, and we seek her again when we acknowledge them.

Now, I must admit that my own sacred places here at Williams , which range from Stone Hill to Driscoll Lounge with many stops in between, barely include Thompson Memorial Chapel. In fact, I had rarely thought of this place in a personal way, until Rev. Spaulding invited me to preach today, and mentioned the centennial of this building. He posed the question, “What is the significance of an intentionally sacred space on an intentionally secular campus?” Then I started to remember – I actually had been here, many times, and had experiences that, thinking back, are emblematic of how, here at Williams, I finally began to learn what it is to seek for Holy Wisdom.

I remembered three such experiences, although not the order in which they happened, or all the details. One was at a Christmas Lessons and Carols service. The choir, of course, was excellent, but they sang a series of beautiful lullabies, and one included a phrase something like this: “May the gods protect you as you sleep.” The gods?! Wasn’t Christmas a Christian celebration? I “went ballistic,” but wherever I turned, even among my most spiritual friends, I got only very sane admonitions to calm down! And largely because of these, I let go of my initial resolve to lodge some sort of formal protest, and was left instead with a bundle of new questions. Experience Number One.

Another moment was at an interfaith Thanksgiving service: along with other prayers led by Protestant ministers and a Jewish rabbi, I heard, for the first time in my life, the hymn Te Deum chanted in Latin by Father Gus Graap, the Catholic chaplain at the time. My experience of my own tradition was deepened for me, amidst offerings of similar depth and beauty from other traditions. Experience Number Two.

The third occasion I recall was a Parents’ Weekend service. I was asked to perform a song that I had written, which was an energetic cry for justice based on passages from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. One of my friends said it made me sound like the classic “angry young man” – something of a theme for me in those days, as you might have guessed by now. But this time, just before I sang, on the spur of the moment, I offered an apology for having so little heeded myself the message I was about to sing.

These moments illustrate baby steps on my own journey, still in progress, from narrowness, frustration, and anger, through a deepening of my own identity and a growing reverence for those of others, to a recognition both of Wisdom’s call and of the smallness of my own response. But these memories also illustrate a possible answer to Rev. Spaulding’s question: “What is the significance of an intentionally sacred space on an intentionally secular campus?” For unlike our private little sacred spaces all over the campus, Thompson Memorial Chapel is a clearly recognizable shared space, with fairly obvious pretentious to the status of a sacred place. What could this mean at the beginning of its skeptical, relative, plural, diverse, global second century? Perhaps it could be this: to continually remind those who see it, whether from the inside or only from outside (or even from what I’m sure I heard Professor Whitney Stoddard once suggest was its best angle: “From the Taconic Crest on a cloudy day”) – to remind all who see it that the Wisdom which Williams students are invited to pursue is not a mere piling up of particular knowledge. It is not simply a tool to reinforce my predetermined worldview, not a profane glance at this year’s passing phenomena. Rather, it is Wisdom that is holy because it is always bigger than what we have already grasped, always in some ways buried deeper in what we’ve already received, always best honored by the humility that knows it must go on seeking, asking the next question, continuing the pilgrimage.

There are dangers old and new in the world that can threaten this role of sacred space. Perhaps it is some of these that Jesus meant to address by his shocking and potentially confusing action of overturning the sellers tables in the Jerusalem temple (Matthew 21:12-16). Among them are the tendency to substitute the routine for the holy, to forget that what happens here changes minds, changes lives, changes humanity. They include the temptation to turn Wisdom into a commodity that can be owned and manipulated, bought and sold, traded. They express the hidden desire, by all these means, to cover disturbing questions with skin-deep tolerance, and so to avoid Holy Wisdom’s challenges to our common routines, to our structures of power, to our failures to seek and to offer hope and healing to one another as we wrestle with it all.

Thompson Chapel is not, by a long shot, the only sacred space on this campus. But if we think about the depth of all that happened to us here, and how much it relied on the unfamiliar perspectives and different questions of others, perhaps it can stand as the sign of the one thing we’ve all had in common: that here in this place we were called by something bigger and more lasting than ourselves. May Thompson Memorial Chapel continue, in its second century, to say to those arriving at Williams : “Holy Wisdom dwells on this campus. If you seek her, and neither try to grasp her nor run from her – if you don’t ignore her or try to own her, to buy or sell her, to trade her like a commodity – then she will dwell with you, too, not just for four years, but for a lifetime.”