Faiths and further education - Church of England

21The student’s interaction with others and the chaplaincy58Some of the day-to-day consequences of these differentapproaches are clear.Those who interact with students, those whobecome their friend, talk with them and try to support themthrough difficulties cannot always confidently predict the form thatinteraction will take and the vocabulary used. In the widest sense,those within the chaplaincy, be this a team or an individual, mustbe able to speak and listen in these various ‘spiritual’,‘secular’ and‘cultural’ languages. In such a way, the chaplaincy can express itsown flexibility, depth and breadth, and its open-minded promotionof key values such as tolerance, respect and transcendence. In thisway, it can act as a conduit between ‘organised’ religion andstudents exploring faith in the context of contemporary society.59But issues of spirituality do not belong only to the individual or tosmall groups. Rowan Williams (quoted in paragraph 61 below) haswritten that ‘the spiritual question arises relentlessly at every leveland in every aspect of an institution’s life’ (Williams, 2005). He goesto make a convincing statement about this wider role:‘thechaplain’s task is to say so and to go on framing the questions thatwill help transform an environment into one where the relationsthat constitute “spirit” can happen’ (ibid.).This Handbook has beenwritten to operationalise the spirit of this statement, placing itsemphasis on a chaplaincy team working together (rather than onan individual chaplain working alone).The following extracts givevisions of the work of a chaplaincy from various perspectives.Some views of chaplaincy and spirituality60This extract is from Whole People Matter (Turner and Kimber, 2003,p. 53), published as a guide to the ways in which spiritual and moraldevelopment can be introduced in the FE curriculum.[T]hose who are prepared to take on the challenge of FEchaplaincy are likely to have a strong commitment to thedevelopment of the whole person, a concern for racial and socialjustice, and an active engagement in community affairs, bothlocally and globally. Their approach to education is one shaped bya broad, rather than a narrow, perspective.61The following extract is from an address by Archbishop RowanWilliams when he was Bishop of Monmouth, about the role of theFE chaplain and the education of the Spirit, in relation to theeducation of mind and body, in an FE context.The full address isreprinted in the first edition of the Journal of Chaplaincy in FurtherEducation (Williams, 2005).Those aspects of the contemporary scene that so often provokecollective anxiety — the dance culture, the acceptance ofrecreational drug use and so on — are in fact eloquent testimoniesto a confused but quite deep acknowledgement of the gap thatappears in the disowning of bodily meanings. People look for waysof experiencing transcendence in their bodies, because the sacredwe talk about is so frequently an empty abstraction. The tragedy isthat the transfiguration of the ordinary outside the weekend eventfuelled by dance and soft drugs becomes more remote, and thephenomenon is there in the first place because the conventionalreligious discourses had already made such a prospect academicor uninteresting. Real spirituality — to use a shamelesslyjudgmental expression — has, in the long run, the job of bridgingthe gap between soul and body, rather than (as some people havethought) so widening the gap that one can fly off into theempyrean without the other. The business of educating the spirit,as opposed to education in ‘spiritual values’, is, I believe, all aboutthis reconnection. If what I have been saying is true, then thespiritual question arises relentlessly at every level and in everyaspect of an institution’s life – and the chaplain’s task is to say soand to go on framing the questions that will help transform anenvironment into one where the relations that constitute ‘spirit’can happen.