Open doors to excellence
Part II

Of course the challenge to new ideas is also the challenge to service. For sublime thoughts, as you know, lead to deeds. Thoughts lead us to concern for the ills of the world; great thoughts redirect education toward the attack on poverty, war, injustice; thoughts lead us to commit out lives to the improvement of our planet earth. So here at Silliman ideally, we seek to foster the habit of "loving God with our minds", then using our learning for doing things that improve the texture of our society.

There is another door that is flung wide open in a University such as ours: It is the open to creative human relationships. My daily visits with colleagues, with students, teachers, with those who tend our grounds, with security guards, do inspire me to speak in terms of meaningful relationships.

You see, we live in a world in microcosm. And we want this world to be inhabited with open and creative people though often widely different from one another. Some years ago when I was Silliman dean, then Vice President, I wrote a former professor of mine "the one who taught me Syriac, a language close to the language which Jesus spoke. Dr. David Alexander was serving as President of Pomona College. I said: "David, we who have doctorates in biblical studies, what is your business doing administration in academes like Silliman and Pomona?" And his answer set me to thinking. He said: Don't you realize, Proceso, that the people you relate to each day on your campus are the same ones you meet in the Bible?" How true! For here we have the doubting Thomases and the scholarly Pauls, the impulsive Peters and the impatient Jobs; we have the anxios Marthas and the born-again Magdalenes, the prayerful Lydias and the lovable Elizabeths, the attractive Bathshebas, the sons-of-thunder brothers James and John, hoping not the Judases!

So what is your motivation in living in such an interesting world?

You probably all read Peanuts, the most theological cartoon in the comics sections of the dailies. In one of the cartoons, Charlie Brown and Linus are engaged in an academic dialogue. Charlie Brown says: "When I grow up, I'd like to study people" To which Linus says: "Ah, you want to study about people so that with your knowledge you could be equipped to serve them?" To which Charlie Brown says: "Oh no, I just want to gossip about them!"

That's the rub. That's the whole trouble when our motivation in relating to people is not in the right place. We sometimes relate to people, just as long as we can relate to them on our own terms, just as long as we could treat them as things, just as long as we can make personal profit from our relationship. You see, has it ever occurred to you that every other person, including the one you dearly love, is a potential adversary? How true! But we can reverse that. Here at Silliman, we can have creative interlinking of life with life. We can nourish characteristics of openness, developing a readiness to give allowances to the other person, and to share. If we do so, we can realize the other potential: the potential foe collegial relations, for friendship, for pakikisama in the noblest sense of which we as a people are admired by others. (To be continued)*

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