Pass or Fail: Lessons at Chung Chi

In our conversations with the seminarians at the Divinity School of Chung Chi College, we learned that the students are protesting the plans to build a new chapel for the divinity school. They are not building a new sports stadium like UCB, but they are in fact demolishing quite a large chunk of the greenery currently on site in order to make room for a new chapel. It's not that they don't already have a chapel. The reason is couched in roundabout terminology, but it's all about control issues. The Chapel belongs to the entire university/college, and the Diviniy School would like its own chapel in order to have its own services and make its own liturgical decisions.

While the students are not treesitting to protest the destruction of large oaks, what is at stake is almost as precious as an entire ecosystem. In light of Hong Kong's ever changing landscapes, growing towards the highrises of metal and concrete of course, there is precious little remaining of greenery, nature, and beauty. In fact, what the students are fighting to keep is in fact artificially constructed "nature" but it is, nevertheless, a section of the campus covered with bamboos, hibiscus flowers, ban trees, rock-strewn paths, ponds, bridges, etc. Articially made and preserved, but still better than tall buildings of metal and glass. A space where students can roam and forget their student-life woes, a place to find themselves, or to lose themselves. A sanctuary which they are dedicated to maintaining.

If they had oak trees, I'm sure they would be sitting in them, too. But the students' efforts don't seem to have any effect, for the construction has already begun. Petitions are useless. Protests are futile. In the face of theological education's changing needs, much much more is being stripped away. It's not just the seminarian's ability to discern for themselves what the Church and World requires of them that is being stripped away by the institutional, by the System. Students are there to learn about theological education, to be equipped for ministry in fast-paced, complicated, and demanding worlds. And the institution that is telling them to think about society, world, environment, community, and responsibilities -- it is that institution that strips them of their voices, that ignores their presences. If that is a lesson in practical theology, what grade is fitting for such student responses?