Sarah Mount

Hampshire College, Box 1052

Amherst, MA 01002

March 5, 1987

March 20, 2021

Dear Sarah,

Though it may be a bit odd to get a letter from me 35 years from now, it won’t totally shock you.  You’ve been writing letters to your future self (a.k.a. letters to God) since you were very young.  This is a letter from your future self to give you some reassurance that what you have started to experience at Hampshire College, through its unique version of a liberal arts education, will serve the future you very well indeed.  You are already wrestling with Hampshire’s culture, and the ways in which you don’t seem to fit in. Some things that are being espoused in your classes don’t line up at all with the world view you came with.  And some things you encounter will be so irritating that you will worry over them for years to come.  I assure you these irritants are like sand in a clam, and 35 years later I have two pearls of knowledge.  That’s what I’m writing to show you, with hope that you will be less fearful and distressed than I was as you move through school and the world.

Hampshire is Where You Belong

First, I want to reassure you that Hampshire is the exact right place for you to be.  You were drawn here by your love of New England, and the beauty of the landscape.  What campus could be a better setting for a granddaughter of Mount Farms in Princeton than an apple orchard?  You’ve already discovered the joy of waking up on Saturday morning to walk to the top of Mt. Norwottuck and back before brunch begins!  The Pioneer Valley is much like your home in Central New York, improved by mountains and the cultural diversity engendered by the 5 Colleges. There is no place like it; a special kind of paradise.  Though you will graduate from Hampshire in four years, you will remain in the Valley for another four and it will always feel like home.

Hampshire College is the right place for you educationally as well.  You were blessed to have school teachers (in public school, no less) who embraced some of the same educational philosophies.  The practice you gained in 1^st and 2^nd grade, by signing individualized, weekly contracts for Math and English assignments gave you strong work habits. You are wisely making friends with Div. III students who will teach you about the pitfalls which cause some Hampshire students to waste time and money, or drop out altogether.  You are not yet clear where you are headed, and even after taking Andrea Wright’s Life Work Planning course in 1990 all the clarity you gain about your priorities won’t make you ready to take the next big steps toward your vocation.  That’s ok; everything you do, every person you befriend, will help you to keep learning and growing into your future self.

Hampshire’s Divisional Process will really work for you!  You enjoyed your first semester, taking one class in each of the schools.  You discovered that you have strong writing skills and completed your Div. I project for Biology of Women with no revisions. The Freshman English course you took last year let you transfer out of the H&A Div. I and you jumped into a 200-level literature course.  Brown Kennedy’s Ideas of Order ended up seeming rather chaotic as she altered the syllabus multiple times. The amount of reading was daunting and the method of literary discourse was new and hard to understand.  Yet you enjoyed reading the Odyssey and the Bible for class and looking for echoes of these texts in more recent fiction. The CCS course in Metaphysics with Meredith Michaels was fun, yet challenging as you delved into the mind body problem and questions of personal identity. There didn’t seem to be room at that table for your identity and world view as a Christian.  Similarly, the course on Island Peoples with Len Glick was wonderful as we compared cultures of the Caribbean and the Pacific islands that you knew nothing about.  Yet the topic of cargo cults and the evidence that showed Christian missionary activities support Capitalist empires is some the grit that irritates your soul.

This semester you are finishing up your Div. Is, and some older students are trying to shame you for choosing two two-course options. Don’t mind them. Enjoy your trips to UMass for the German class (10 years from now you will be studying in Bonn), and delight under the extraordinary tutelage of Jean Higgins as you explore Christian History at Smith.  Don’t worry that you are only enrolled in three classes this semester.  The observation you make at Hampshire’s preschool for Catherine Sophian’s Child Development in the Schools will open the door to your first full time job after you graduate.  And the work you are doing as Catherine’s research assistant is giving you valuable academic experience and some unexpected income.

Once you find a Div. II advisor who supports your plan, the wealth of the 5 College course offerings and the ease of using the PVTA will allow you to construct a rich portfolio of classes.  You will take Adolescent Psychology with 300 students at UMass with an award-winning professor the same semester you take a one credit course in Biblical Greek with the chair of Mt. Holyoke’s religion department, sipping tea with only two other students in his office.  Both excellent ways to learn! And even when the Sociology of Aging course is frightfully dull because the professor is a statistician who fills the hours with way more numbers than stories, your Div. II contract will guide your choice of term paper topic and you’ll be able to interview three elderly members of your church to see how their lives match the data on religiosity and aging.

When you become clear about what you want to accomplish in your Div. III, but are not quite sure how, the small size of Hampshire, where “everybody knows your name,” will serve you.  Three professors will talk about you over lunch and be inspired to send you to New York City for the summer, to become a participant observer of the Catholic Workers, a group you have never heard of until then.  Learning from other’s mistakes, you will arrange to meet with your Div. III professor every week all year until you complete your thesis – with enough time to relax and sew your own graduation dress.

The other aspect of Hampshire’s particular way of offering a liberal arts education that is wonderful for you, is the empowered way students can participate in running the college.  You have just started attending Social Science faculty meetings as a student member.  Your vote is equal to a faculty member!  Right now, there are just a handful of other students, and you are wondering why, when there could be 22 students shaping curriculum and hiring decisions. You will change that next semester, using the Student Activities fair to attract a full quorum for the next three years.  In the middle of your third year, you will be one of two students on the seven-member College Committee for Faculty Reappointment and Promotion.  Your willingness to speak up, and share your perspective will create some lasting change at Hampshire.

The Grit

The irritating grit you have already starred to experience has to do with your Christian identity and world view which was challenged, reshaped and ultimately made stronger through your experiences at Hampshire College.  Hampshire’s unique design for imparting a liberal arts education may have heightened the conflict, because there was no chaplain on campus, no professors of religion, and very few people who openly practiced any faith, let alone Christian faith when you were there. But I can assure you that most European and American colleges and universities would have presented you with a similar crisis.  Going through all you did at Hampshire, prepared you very well for the Masters of Divinity program at Duke University (and it’s fun to say that after Div. III, I earned an MDiv!)

When I read Brené Brown’s ideas around “braving the wilderness” I recognize you at Hampshire. From my point of view, it was harder to be “out” (walking into Sunday brunch dressed for the worship service I had just attended) as an observant Christian than as a member of the LGB community.  Even now you recognize that you would have been too afraid to enroll at Hampshire if you had known about the drug culture or the co-ed bathroom/hallways of Dakin before it was too late.  But the precollege trip gave you enough connection to get your bearings, and you’ve already made some life-long friends in Joan, Karin, Craig and Zach. As a result of being vulnerable in a SS meeting next year, a Div. III student will introduce you to her Catholic mod mate, which will result in a lovely prayer group of three, and though Shannon will soon graduate, Michelle and you will develop a deep friendship and even enter seminary at the same time.  In your third year Dan will create the Interfaith Discussion group (“I Am Not and Atheist!” will be the heading of his poster) for anyone who believes in anything bigger than themselves. You will be in good company as you nibble lemon seed poppy cake from Atkins and find a way to share faith without anyone trying to convert anyone else.  For your Div. III community service will partner with Laura to offer a Topics in Religion course at Hampshire, bringing in an amazing group of guest speakers each week of the semester, reading and evaluating the other students’ work.

You are already so glad to be part of the Wesley United Methodist Church in Amherst.  Joyce Hines picks you up each Sunday and makes sure you get back to Hampshire in time for brunch (the bus schedule on Sundays does NOT accommodate that). It feels good to be part of an intergenerational community, singing beloved hymns, sharing communion, and attending meals.  Grandma and Grandpa have begun to drive from Schenectady to join you on occasion. What fun to discover that Mary Maeder, was Grandpa’s former parishioner at the little Methodist church in Bleeker, NY back in the 40s! Steve Newby, a UMass graduate student of Dr. Horace Boyer welcomed you into Wesley’s choir and you attended the performance of his Gospel Oratorio Be Still and Know at UMass with Wesley members. It was an extra bonus that Ann Kearns invited Steve to be guest conductor of Hampshire’s chorus last semester. You felt such comfort singing about Jesus, even while wondering if any other students actually believed the words as you did. Already, as Wesley’s youth group is focused on systemic racism within the church, the congregation is confirming what you know to be true. The Church can be a force for positive change in line with Christ’s mission to “proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of God’s favor.”  Those five young women pressed on to General Conference, making changes in the United Methodist Book of Discipline.

I know now, from using the Enneagram and doing a lot of inner work, that you have been very busy through your life trying to be “good.”  The binary way you have looked at being “good” and “bad” caused you a lot of pain in high school when you stopped getting straight As.  Hampshire has set you free from bondage to grades and you are already wonderfully relieved! But you also withdrew in fear from many childhood friends when, as adolescents, they started “being bad” as you thought of them.  Now you are surrounded by people who are doing “bad” things.  The idea of Hampshire Halloween was so terrifying for you that you escaped by spending the night at the Wesley student coop house.  While you have had only tangential exposure to the Evangelical purity culture, you are really uncomfortable with sex outside of marriage, and have no desire to try the sauna.  Your parent did not raise you to be a bigot. You certainly don’t judge Jewish people or those who practice other faiths as evil. And you have a lot of compassion for people who are abused, and oppressed.  You came to Hampshire without much awareness of other sexualities, but you want to be open to meeting people where they are.  Still, it’s disorienting to be in a culture where rather “good,” being a Christian makes you suspect.

To make matters worse, the Church is by and large, relegated to the “bad” category by students and professors alike. In your classes the only time Christianity comes up is when it has participated in supporting “bad” things like slavery and the Holocaust.   Next fall, when you take The History of Post War America with Penina Glazer and Miriam Slater, you will eat up the first chapters of Let the Trumpet Sound which is all about Martin Luther King’s young life in the church, his work as a pastor and his doctoral studies, soaking up Harold DeWolf’s Boston Personalism (the brand of progressive Methodist Theology in which Grandpa was trained). And then in class you will be dismayed that the discussion skips over all that, jumping to the Civil Rights movement as if Christianity has nothing to do with it. Your survival strategy (being very quiet, and listening carefully to people in class and in the dining hall, hearing the pain underneath their anger at the Church) will serve you well.

Pearl 1 – Why Things are so Hard for Christians Influenced by a Liberal, Enlightenment Worldview

The first aspect of the grit that has transformed you and left you with great understanding has everything to do with the development of a liberal arts education in Modern and Postmodern European culture. You first began shaping the pearl with the observation that religion did not fit squarely in any of the four schools at Hampshire. Religious “modes of inquiry” were not among the list that were rattled off to us when professors were trying to help us understand Hampshire’s structure and aims.  When you begin to develop the idea of turning your Div. II into a kind of double major so you might explore how the aspects of the Church that you see as good and true are connected to the ugly aspects of the Church highlighted in Hampshire classes, the first Social Science professor will look at you as if you are proposing to study the Tooth Fairy.  From a wissenschaftlich (academic) point of view you could look at religion as philosophy in CCS, or as literature in Humanities and Arts, or from sociological, anthropological, historical or psychological perspectives in Social Sciences.   It came as no surprise that religion didn’t fit in Natural Science at all.  

When Greg Prince becomes our president and invites students to weekly breakfast all year, you will share your observation that since religion doesn’t sit squarely within any of the four schools, there is very little chance that any of them will devote a full FTE toward that field.  The best you will accomplish up until then is getting religion to be listed as part of a job description. In a Social Science meeting, in your second year, the faculty will plan to hire a new faculty member. They will start by brainstorming what fields are most in need. After hearing everything but religion mentioned you will speak up, with your heart racing. You will speak passionately for the need for someone who works respectfully with religion as a field of study.  And the magic will happen.  Not only will the faculty listen carefully in their deliberations and voting, the lines between the usual factions will shift into a different pattern, and they will include familiarity with Eastern religions in the advertisement for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Susan Darlington is still on the faculty today. 

Two years after that, Greg will see the problem of the four schools and religion from your point of view.  He will eventually introduce you to a trustee who is a Jungian psychologist, willing to endow a three-year trial chair of religion.  It will be filled by Alan Hodder in 1991 and turned into a permanently endowed position.

While you will help Hampshire creatively address the problem of including religious studies, you will still wonder where this problem came from. A theology class at Duke, study in Bonn and doctoral work at Boston University all provided pieces to the puzzle.  

The kind of academic study that belongs to a liberal arts education stems from the Universities in Europe which had been caught in political conflicts between Protestants and Catholics since the Reformation.  You can see aspects of the problem even earlier, in the case of Galileo.  As he looked with wonder at the night sky he eventually noticed that his observations did not match the Church’s teaching about the cosmos. Yet the church was so ridged and powerful they hushed Galileo up, rather than entertain the possibility that their model, placing humanity in the center of creation, and the Earth in the center of the cosmos, needed to be squished down like playdoh and reformed.  When the church splintered and conflicting doctrines were wielded by different principalities and powers the Universities found themselves caught up in these conflicts.

Out of that travail, the scientific method was born – a process of gleaning knowledge that began with “bracketing” religion, just setting all teachings about God and the cosmos aside, in favor of the five human senses. Tools were developed to increase precision in making observations.  The scientific method was developed in relation to the natural world first.  Natural Scientists learned all manner of things about the earth, it’s composition, creatures and the universe beyond with this method.  The scientific method includes formulating hypothesis, testing, and sharing data and that engender new hypotheses within a community who can constructively argue and debate based on quantifiable data.  

Seeing the benefit of no longer fighting about God, the method was adapted to look at human life, together and individually.  Social Science and Cognitive Science include their own ways of “bracketing” religion – or explaining life from the point of view of the human – rather than accepting that any god might have agency that could not be otherwise explained by some sort of natural law, or social theory.  While the arts, and the craft of storytelling might still express religious sentiments, beliefs or experience, in a liberal arts environment it Humanities and Arts are subject to various sorts of criticism.  Early work of this Enlightenment period attempted to replace theology’s “sacred canopy” with a new one.  Theorists spent their lives trying to formulate ways of understanding that were universal.  History was always told from the point of view of those who won the wars. Kant’s work in Ethics tried to boil everything down to a principle that worked for, and could be imposed upon, all human life.  The “freedom” of this liberal way of being in the world came from the place of the individual experience.  As more and more people trained in this academic way found their voices, they were able to poke holes in the grand theories.  We began to have histories told from various perspectives, including those who had never had such a voice before. This new way of being liberal is postmodern.  Much good has come from these developments.  But the problem from the point of view of religion is that the Liberal Arts, Modern and Postmodern, trains people to believe that there is nothing bigger than themselves.  While the Academy dismisses the stories found in sacred texts, they are blind to the dynamics of the liberal academic stories that function much in the same way.

A turning point of the Church was when it attempted to apply modern modes of inquiry to faith.  At the time it was a survival tactic – Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn, a champion of wissenschaft, was publicly funded. The religion departments (one Protestant and one Catholic) were central to the education of pastors in the state approved Churches.  There was much pressure to only teach wissenshaftlich in the University, and save all “practical” courses such as preaching and worship for specialized seminars for after one passed the wissenschaftlich exams and began apprenticeship as a pastor.  Scientific methods began to be applied to reading scripture (anthropology, language, literary criticism). Psychological theories were taught in pastoral care courses. Philosophy was the discourse of Christian ethics; modern historical modes of inquiry were employed for church history (and biblical studies) and a new brand of wissenschaftlich theologie was developed.  The trouble with all of this is that talking about God without naming God results in a very dense and complex discourse that does not translate well to the people in a typical congregation. In America the mainline Protestant churches embraced Modern theology.  

In the case of your faith tradition, Methodism had methods that went to the margins of society with an empowering world view and way of being that was counter cultural.  It the new land of American with its freedom of religion Methodism offered effective ways to live peaceably in the world.  At a Methodist Love Feast you could see and hear people of all sorts, old and young, sailors and grannies, illiterate, new immigrants, each testify to the transformational power of God’s grace in their lives. The Circuit Rider preachers lived in voluntary poverty and used their privilege to insist that God’s grace, freedom, and abundance was available to all.  Methodism created a priesthood of all believers, and new Methodist societies sprang up across the land as Methodists moved westward.  They would form a prayer group and then contact a Methodist Bishop or Presiding Elder and ask to be added to a circuit.

But as the denomination grew, and the members became wealthier, they began to fall back under the grip of the dominant culture.  The call became louder and louder to be “respectable.” And in part that meant Methodists wanted their preachers to be educated.  So, Methodists formed Academies, Universities and Seminaries. Warry of the Calvinistic theology espoused at places like Harvard and Princeton, the wealthy Methodists who brought the seminary to Boston sent their professors to Europe.  When they returned, they created a Methodist brand of Modern theology called Boston Personalism, leaving the old methods of training pastors behind.

When you write your dissertation, you will come to understand Methodism as a counter culture, supported by weekly class meetings, and energized by Quarterly Conferences.   Camp Meetings functioned as emersion experiences in this whole other way of being and doing, complete with unique language, rituals and world view.  When Methodist leaders embraced Modern theology they punctured a hole in that empowering culture.  Methodism has slowly declined ever since.

The name of this pearl is “Why things have been so hard for Christians since embracing a liberal, Enlightenment worldview.” It explains why key elements of faith – particular the experience of and participation in the work of God – are both unwelcome in the halls of the academy, and very hard to find in a great many United Methodist congregations.

Pearl 2 – The Church Needs to Be Its True Self

So far, I have outlined for you a rational for why religion does not fit logically into Hampshire’s original structure.  This pearl was formed by puzzling over the structure of the four school while at Hampshire and learning more about the development of the Enlightenment world view that produced the Scientific Method on which liberal arts education is based.

The second pearl comes from the emotional vehemence that came with the rejection of the Church among so many people you met at Hampshire.  What you will start to realize, even in the next few semesters, is that the Church has done harm to people.  And when the Church has been tied to governments (strongly, like in Europe, or somewhat less officially, as in much American ideology) the harm has been even greater.  Hampshire College is a counterculture of education, students and faculty are living and thinking outside of boxes.  The Church, it’s theologies and practices have been used by the powers to enforce uniformity, punish and threaten those who do not conform to the norms set by the powerful.

Right now, you are encountering many people who have been harmed by the church.  Your professors and fellow classmates are Jewish, nonconformists, communists, feminists, queer, black, Latinx, ex-Catholics, ex-Evangelicals.  They have found a haven at Hampshire from pedophile priests, Christian prayers in public schools, clergy who tell women to simply forgive their abusive husbands, unbearable social situations that result in unwanted pregnancies with no true support for mother or child.  They witness to great inequity reinforced by church leaders who create new theological rationales to support slavery, allowed the Nazi Party’s genocide, and supported Apartheid in South Africa.  The strong negative emotions you will experience here as a representative of the Church come from all the ways in which the Church, when tied to the powers of state, have abused.

Yet, you also know, from experience that the best of Christianity is centered around the God who creates each human in divine image and calls each one, “Beloved.”  When you practice “kingdom living” at camp each summer you have been breaking down the images of hierarchy – for when Christ is truly king, we are all siblings.  You’ve been welcome to call the adults at camp by their fist name all, and they have spoken to you with respect even as a young child.  Imagination and play, trying on the metaphors of royalty and saints as we dance, paint, squish clay and write poems are all part of kingdom living.  And we pray – we talk to a living God who talks back to us – not just in letters to God, but in a variety of ways – shared by the main speakers each year, and by the campers.  You have heard stories of Christians like E. Stanley Jones whose way of sharing his faith in India broke down class barriers, Corrie Ten Boom, whose family hid Jews in their homes and were sent to the concentration camps too, of George Washington Carver who combined prayer with science to benefit Southern agriculture.  You have earnestly joined in the world prayer broadcast each year as we prayed for an end to war, poverty and injustice. You have heard stories of miracles and healing, where grace breaks out in all manner of places.

When you go to Duke you will be deeply impressed by Stanley Hauerwas.  One of his oft repeated phrases that he uses when he points to all manner of harmful behavior within Christianity is, “The Church isn’t being the Church.” It took years after graduation from Duke for you to consciously realize that the Hampshire community was basically giving you the same message.  When the church isn’t being itself it does great harm. Yet you will finally become grounded enough in the language of the church (theology) to contribute a confession to the Interfaith worship service at Hampshire College’s 25^th Anniversary.  Finally, you had been taught enough of the language of the church to name so many of the ways that the Church had done harm, ways that Hampshire had been pointing to, and say “yes” the Church has done harm. 

What I understand now is that the Church got pulled into the Domination Culture by the Emperor Constantine.  Before that Christians were as much on the margins as anyone, and persecuted alongside others who did not conform.  But when the Emperors called themselves Christian, they simultaneously warped the religion to support their domination.  Baptizing people by sword point did not make true disciples of Jesus Christ. Requiring property owners to pay taxes to support Massachusetts churches (a law that wasn’t changed until 1830) does not necessarily mean one also follows the precepts of God’s kingdom.

The history of the church has repeated.  St. Benedict made reforms, then St. Francis, then Martin Luther, then John and Charles Wesley, then the Catholic Workers and the Center for Action and Contemplation.  Each time the leaders move out to the margins, calling us to drop the pretense and the abuse of power.  And it works for a time, a new structure is created.  And then we struggle to continue resisting the dominant culture.  Revolutions aren’t so hard once there is enough momentum. What is hard it to not revolve 360 degrees, and simply enthrone a different tyrant who uses the same violent tactics (shame, blame, fear, rewards and punishments) to force their way.  You will be entering a new period of reform, marked first by an continued and ever more drastic decline in church membership and participation. What you learn at Hampshire will be integral to your process of helping to reform the church yet again.

Non Satis Scire

I’ll end this epistle with Hampshire’s motto.  Now that these pearls of knowledge have been formed, what can we do with them?  How can they be used to help make things better?  What actions can we take to create change in the things that do harm to others, without doing more harm in the process?

These are the essential questions you will wrestle with at Hampshire as you encounter some who would X you, or your faith which you believe to be essential to who you are, out.  They are questions you will continue wrestling with as you become a pastor and try to help congregations and the United Methodist Church, and the Church universal find it’s true self.  And they are the personal questions you will wonder about yourself as you seek to discern your true self as well.

One way to look at it that I offer to you is my understanding of the work of God as a Trinity.  There are three main types of work God does (each person participating in each type).  There is the work of creation, or the political work of making order out of chaos. There is the work of connecting, the priestly work of building friendship with God and friendship between humans. There is the work of courage, or “braving the wilderness” as Brené Brown calls it.  Stating clearly when either the present order, or the present relationships are doing harm.  You are already in an age when the Conservatives (people with a lot of political and economic power) are trying to maintain an order that doesn’t fit, and the Liberals (people who also have a great deal of influential power) are trying to make changes in the order.  What is greatly missing in this is the connection – the ability to see other people as people, with needs and feelings rather than as impersonal enemies who must be condemned and forced to change.

Though it always can be risky to try and change the past, one resource that has helped me immensely in recent years, and is available to you now, if you just know where to look, is the teaching of Marshall Rosenberg.  His “Nonviolent Communication” is a way of working with people who do harm to us through believing that 1) “everything everybody ever dose is to meet a need,” 2) all humans have the same set of basic needs, 3) there is an abundance of ways for anyone’s needs to be met, 4) what we fight over most are strategies for meeting needs, not the needs themselves and 5) learning to pay attention to our feelings is the key to recognizing our met and unmet needs, 6) human beings love to contribute to one another’s needs being met when we can do it freely.

But even if you don’t get trained in this now in your 20s, you are experiencing the importance of real friendship in the process of transformation.  Become friends with the people around you and they will teach you that love, is love. They will also teach you about the pain they bear from living with stereotypes from communities that refuse to let them belong as they are.  Stay curious, and open hearted, and your compassion for their stories will turn you into a more effective ally.

I’m sure you have a big pile of reading to get through.  Know that I’m rooting for you and appreciate all of your work, grit, faithfulness and love.

Your future self,

Sarah