Morristown College - Red Knight Yearbook (Morristown, TN)

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1 V I R G T I E Nl X A AND WEST VIRGINIA Kg. '

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NEVVJERSEY D- w-7 M A R Y L A N D AND DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

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Mission Statement ln the Mission Statement we find the following expression: The College is committed to the Christian faith and ministry. lt is open and honest about this commitment and encourages each person to participate fully in the religious life of the community. Often there is a great relief in being able to put into words the quality or the very expression of need and suffering. To suffer in dumb silence, to be able to find no words capable of voicing what is being expe- rienced, seems degrading to the self because it pushes the individual back into a vast feeling continuum from which he has emerged into a personality, self-conscious and self-aware. Man was a feeling creature long before he was a thinking creature. The mind is younger than the body and younger than the emotions. When we are able to be articulate it means that detachment from immediate experience, however great, has been achieved. A context of obiectivity has been established, from within which the individual is able to look on his experience and name it. This seems to characterize the divine act always. When the individual is thus able to voice his profoundest feelings, he sees himself quite unconsciously presenting God with a com- pulsion on his behalf. There is added challenge in the words if they name what is happening. The idea that God is responsible for ills in life is a great safety valve for the spirit of man. And yet it is much more. lt springs out of a deeper insight, at long last there must be no distinction between the God of life and the God of religion. All events in life take place somehow within the divine context. The tendency to fix responsibilty is inescapable. lf the responsibility for ills can be pinned down, then the possibility of attacking and uprooting them is real. This possibility is grounded in the profound confidence that a struc- ture of moral integrity bottoms all of life, that such a structure is basic in the totality of all experience. Things do not merely happen, they are part of some kind of rationale. If the rationale can be tracked down and understood, then the living experience, however terrible, makes sense. Yet even when that is not possi- ble, one cannot down the confidence that the logic of all ills is knowable. A man traces them as far as he can, until at last he seeks no longer to understand the ills but rather to understand God's understanding. Lacking this, he rests himself in the assurance of God's presence and sovereignty in him and in life about him. He sees the travail of his own soul and is satisfied. The orderly process seems to be ever at the mercy of the disorderly. Weeds do not have to be cultivated, but vegetables must be. Those things in life which make for disintegration seem ever alert, taking advantage of every situation to turn it to their account.