By Amy McCreath
This is my last semester as Episcopal Chaplain at MIT. After nine years for which I am outrageously thankful, it is simply time for me to move on to whatever God has in store for me next (which is TBA — a good lesson in trust.). The corridors of a world-class engineering school is a fascinating vantage point from which to watch for the Holy Spirit. So before I go, I want to share some of the most important things I’ve learned at MIT.
Matter matters: I slid through the science requirement in college by taking botany and social psychology. Not my thing, or so I thought. MIT students steadied my gaze on the outrageous beauty and mystery of the material world. From the night sky to neutrinos to the laws of physics, the MIT crowd have an innate cosmic sacramentality, and the ones I love have a passion for using “stuff” to do peace and justice in ways abstract theories can’t touch. As an example, read about the tremendous Amy Smith.
The merits of meritocracy: At MIT, no one cares what you look like, where you grew up, or who your father is. It’s all about one thing: Can you help us solve a problem? Now, there are theological problems with this rather utilitarian ethic, but compared to most communities I’ve encountered, and many corners of the church I’ve passed through, it has been refreshing. And it has kept me on my toes, as resting on laurels or credentials or personal charm is simply undoable at the ‘Tute.
In the footsteps of St. Anskar: Campus ministry is mission work, pure and simple. That is increasingly true, as a smaller percentage than ever of the students grew up with any religious practice. And because the public face of Christianity during the lifetimes of most of today’s students has been largely strident and self-righteous, the students who do affiliate with our ministry are reticent to come out as Christians on campus because of what their friends would (wrongly) assume about them. I am so thankful to have learned in seminary that blessed St. Anskar, missionary to Scandinavia, had his first convert after 36 years of work. It has helped me keep going, feel like I’m actually doing pretty well, and see my work as part of a worthy tradition.
How to identify left-brained prayers: Engineers pray best without words. They build flood warning systems in river basins in Honduras, to save lives in real time. They make furniture out of used boxes and whip up a nice offertory-collection basket out of a piece of paper during the peace (see photo). Physicists pray in labs, giddy with amazement at the workings of the world, and computer scientists pray by creating networks to help students in the developing world get a good education in the face of poverty and restricted freedoms. Read about the IDEAS competition, where outlandish prayers take flight. (http://web.mit.edu/ideas/www/)
The trickiest problems are non-technical: Early in my time at MIT, I attended the memorial service of a graduate student who had taken his own life. He was known and loved all over campus – a genius and a truly beautiful person. He had eaten Christmas dinner with me and the brothers at SSJE in Cambridge just months before. But he had carried inside wrenching turmoil as he tried to reconcile his own dreams with the hopes of his family. He could not reason or engineer his way out of this inner knot. In the following years, at times when I was tempted to think that what I had to offer was not enough or not relevant, when I was tempted to be intimidated by the Nobel prizes and the cutting edge research and the fancy labs where they were working on things I could not pronounce, I remembered this young man. And I kept going, kept speaking, kept offering what I could.
No apologies: an apology: My nine years at MIT was Time Well-Spent. That is so clear to me, despite comments I’ve gotten periodically from clergy colleagues who say things like “When are you going to move up the food chain?” (Not kidding). As a chaplain, I had to recreate leadership every year, do the same programs over and again as our congregation kept walking off in mortar boards, give 100% to both my diocese and the Division of Student Life. It was pretty humbling being “the priest of one religion in the temple of another,” as one of my predecessors put it. But I leave wiser, amazed, and blessed.
The Rev. Amy McCreath is the Episcopal chaplain and coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the Council of Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission.