Curing the Body and Healing the Soul

The day begins over coffee and doughnuts at the student lounge in Rockefeller Hall. People sit casually at the tables, talking or studying. There is no cashier to take the money--instead students are expected to place the correct sum in a bowl on the counter. This is the Divinity School: the system is based on trust.

Most people's image of the Divinity School is one of somber, musty, religiosity. Indeed, the long walk up Francis Avenue to the Divinity School campus reinforces this image. One is struck first by the school's geographic isolation and then by its architecture; the looming Gothic presence of Andover Hall, the school's central building, evokes images of monks poring over their scrolls in centuries long past.

The students sitting in the lounge defy this description, though. Most wear jeans or slacks, few have long flowing beards, and none have been reported to talk to themselves in Latin. In fact, Divinity School students defy any unified description.

Fewer than half of the students intend to be ordained. Many come to the Divinity School to study comparative religion, or to complement their work in other fields, such as law, history, and social work. Some, on the other hand, are already ordained, and have returned to fill gaps in their knowledge. A full quarter of the student body is non-denominational; the rest represent 46 different denominations, with the largest group--13 percent--Catholic. More than half are women, many of them attracted by the school's unique Women's Studies in Religion Program. The median entering age is somewhere in the 30s.

Of all the University's graduate schools, the Divinity School probably contains the most extremes. It is the oldest, established in 1816; it is the smallest, with 380 students; it receives the least funding from the University, has the lowest tuition, and devotes the highest porportion of its budget (20 percent) to financial aid.

Sitting at one of tables is Kate Stevens, a first year Master of Divinity (MDiv) candidate, one of the many who entered the school with more questions than answers. Her decision, at 35. to enter the Divinity School was a sudden and powerful one. "If anyone had told me two years ago that I'd end up studying religion. I would have told them they were many," she says now. The idea first came to her one holiday when she went home to visit her family in Pennsylvania and was dragged along with them to services at the conservative Presbyterian church she had attended as a child. Watching the minister, Stevens began to contemplate the multi-purpose role he held within the community: teacher, counsellor, administrator, tending to the needs of both young and old. She realized also that she had been performing all these functions since she left school.

As she pondered over this, she says, she felt "a call" to study religion. She followed it and enrolled in the Divinity School soon after, but has yet to choose a denomination; she is considering being ordained as a parish minister in either the United Church of Christ or the Unitarian Universalists. "It changes every week," she jokes.

Stevens began her day long before breakfast. She stays over every Wednesday night at Renewal House, a shelter in Roxbury for battered women, providing counselling and advocacy for women at the shelter. The work fulfills the MDiv requirement of two years of field education. In addition to her Div School responsibilities, she is director of a Quaker summer work-camp for 15-17 year olds called Tamarack Farm, located near Philadelphia.

At 8:30 a.m. Stevens is in the lounge interviewing a woman who wants to be a counselor at the camp this summer, fitting her into a morning's schedule which is extraordinarily heavy even for her. "I never have the time to study," she says, wistfully. By 10 a.m. Stevens is on her way to her first class of the day, a discussion group (the Div School's equivalent to section) for "Introduction to the New Testament." She is cross-registered for this course at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) located just beyond Radcliffe Yard. The next 50 minutes are devoted to close textual exegesis of several New Testament passages on dominance hierarchies--the relations of master and slave, husband and wife, and society to individual. The class seems less than inspired. The professor pays close attention to the form of these passages and the original Greek, until finally a student brings up the content. One woman asks on whose authority Timothy based the subordinate place of women in the Chruch, to which another woman jokes. "He made it up," After class, a fellow student turns to Stevens and asks. "Did he say anything?"

Stevens spends the next hour running errands and grabs an apple and a bag of potato chips to chips to tide her through the day: she has to fly out to Philadelphia directly after her last class to work on the summer's plans for Tamarack Farm. Her next top is a class she audits. "Issues in Liberation Theology." Which centers on the philosophical and theological roots of war and nonviolence by examining the current struggle against militarism in Europe and North America. In response to students' requests. Assistant Professor of Theology Sharon Welch today reviews the history of the arms race, running through detailed technical information on weaponry. Even with this highly technical lecture, students participate frequently.

Stevens' weekly discussion group for this course focuses on civil disobedience, and on Good Friday the 14 students in the group joined forces with the Yale Divinity School and other Northeastern theological schools to stage a non-violent "witness" or vigil outside the Electric Boat Co, in Groton, Conn., where Trident submarines are manufactured. More than 30 students lashed their arms crucifix-style to the fence and were arrested, and four Harvard students were arrested for planting flowers outside a memorial to the individuals who gave money for the Trident project. Kim Harvie, a second year MDiv students and one of those arrested, points to the symbolism of staging the witness on Good Friday, a time of renewal and re-birth, both of the earth and, for Christians of Christ.

In "Perspectives in Urban Ministry," taught by a Black woman visiting lecturer, a representative from the City Missionary Society (CMS) has come to talk to the class about the economic poor, lecturing them not to neglect the poor when they establish their parishes.

In assuming their ignorance on these issues, the visitor painfully underestimates his audience, many of whom have already spent years devoted to social work. When he concludes his summary of the various CMS programs, a woman raises her hand and says. "But you still haven't said why the poor are poor, what the economic causes of poverty are." A Black student criticizes him for not emphasizing the fact that Blacks do not compromise the majority of welfare recipients in America. A journalist who has spent much of his time in South American challenges the role of the multinational corporations in the exploitation of labor in the South American countries. Another student, a puerto Rican woman, adds that in America the system is set up to play minority groups off against one another, citing competition between Puerto Ricans and recently immigrated Cubans. Another students voices the need to correct "a theology that makes oppression okay." No twelfth-century monks these.

The class ends on an emotional note with a student's presentation of "Fragments of Faith"--different images he recalls from his neighborhood in Dorchester, his experience at the Good Friday witness, and his reflections on the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The scenes he describes are highly personal, highly charged with-emotion, some evoking despair, some inspiring hope and faith. When he finishes there is a hushed silence. The practice of ending each meeting with a student presentation began on the first day of class, when a student asked if she could try a sermon out on the class which she had prepared for that Sunday. Since then, students have presented brief plays, monologues, dialogues and poetry.

Students at the Div School do more than just "take" classes, Stevens notes. Because of the nature of the program, students in class find themselves probing their own experiences and beliefs to find solutions to their questions on the nature of God, their relationship to God and to others. Outside of the classroom, they work to translate their beliefs into action in the world at large.

For many students, this often necessitates direct challenge of religious institutions and assumptions--the sometimes frightening task of having to either reinterpret or reject much of what they grew up believing.

For instance, by rejecting the concept of a male God and the subordination of women to men--concepts deeply embedded in both the Old and New Testaments--feminists in particular have had to create new religious models, Stevens says. Drorah Setel, a Master of Theological Studies candidate who plans to be ordained as a rabbi, told a class on Feminst Theology that she had to reconcile herself to the possibility that, in applying her feminism to her Judaism, she might come up with something that was no longer Judaism.

For Stevens and many of her fellow students, religion is not a contemplative but an active force in implementing social change, both through religious institutions and outside them. They are aware that many religious institutions must change to meet these needs. Their viewpoint is politicized, but their commitment is moral. It is the difference, at the student pull it, between concern and compassion. Concern, he says, is when you see something awful happen to someone said "That's wrong." Compassion is when the shine thing happens and you say "I won't let the happen someone and say "That's wrong"; composition is when the same thing happens and you say "I won't let that happen to a fellow human being.Inside the Divinity School's Andover Hall