Welcome from the Director of Religious Life

*the hospitality motif is borrowed from John Henri Nowen's book, The Wounded Healer, from which this quotation is paraphrased.

Philosophy and Identity

I have thought about this topic before, sometimes in the context of teaching, or of ministry, most often in the context of my own internal search for identity. Some of the images I use to talk about who I am as a person and as a professional educator are borrowed, and some are my own. The questions of philosophy and identity are very complex; they are at the core of who I have come to understand myself to be, what I think and feel about the world and other people, and how I envision the role of the chaplain.

Any encounter between persons involves at least three variables -- two people and the common context in which the interaction or dialogue takes place. Books can be (and have been) written about the nature of the "I-Thou" interaction, but most people who have given the matter much thought could agree that the central experience of communicating with another person is at the heart of what it means to be a human being as well as what it means to be an educator. My job as a chaplain/educator is to provide a particular kind of context so that a person-to-person encounter may occur, and so that growth, communication and caring may be shared. The best metaphor I have discovered for describing this process is that of hospitality.* I think of my work as a chaplain as being like inviting someone into my house for a visit, or several visits. I am the host, the student or faculty is the visitor--in most ways a stranger, and a stranger who may have come asking for help. Some thoughts about education-as-hospitality come to mind.

1. I must first have a home before I can offer hospitality to another. However shabby or disheveled my abode may be, I am "at home" in it, and my visitor is not. I have to be somewhat clear about myself--what I call home and what I have to offer visitors--before I can extend much hospitality to others.
2. I need to have at least provisionally finished erecting my house before I can officially (professionally) entertain guests there. I can't be holding up the roof, or asking my visitor to help with repairs while I am trying to attend to the needs of the guests.
3. In a university, we visit with sojourners temporarily, helping equip them for more traveling. They decide where they are going, and we offer what help or supplies we can for their trip. We do not invite them to move in with us, nor do we let them take things from our house that we are unwilling to share.
4. We keep the windows on the house as clean as possible, and we travel ourselves when we can. We need to be able to see the other houses in our own neighborhood as well as to get a glimpse of where our visitors have come from.

5. We do not extend hospitality to only one person at a time, but to many; we sit down together at the table of learning. The key ingredient in the mission of a university is community, a network of learners--students, faculty and staff--who discover and create different kinds of knowledge together. The more diverse our backgrounds and life stories, the richer the education we can offer to each other.

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Religious Life
2417 West End Avenue
Nashville, TN 37240

Phone: 615-322-2457
Fax: 615-343-8355
Email: gay.h.welch@vanderbilt.edu

Detail of The Vow: A Mother by Francesco Paolo Michetti