Wittenberg Community,
This month marks the end of the academic year and for our seniors, the end of their career as Wittenberg students and the beginning of their life as alumni. It is also the first anniversary of my appointment as the 16th president of Wittenberg. I recently had the opportunity to write an essay for The Buechner Review, a monthly journal celebrating the writing and life work of the author, preacher, and theologian Frederick Buechner (July 11, 1926 – August 15, 2022). In writing the essay, I found myself reflecting upon this personal anniversary and, more specifically, on the nature of discerning a call.
At the heart of Wittenberg’s mission is that we will help our students “to discover their callings,” and it was that commitment as much as anything that led me to consider coming to Wittenberg. As we note in the mission statement, this commitment to developing “responsible global citizens” who “discover their callings” and serve with compassion and integrity is rooted in our Lutheran heritage. For many, the language of “calling” seems very religious, rooted in the notion that it is God who calls one to particular roles and responsibilities in life. Certainly, that is the Lutheran conviction, but one does not need to be a part of the Lutheran tradition or any faith at all to recognize that each of us has a place where our particular abilities and passions meet with the needs of the world. Wittenberg is committed to helping our students, and all our community, to think through, to discover, to discern, where those things meet.
This notion of figuring out what we are supposed to do with our lives is something that Buechner wrote about frequently. “The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done.”[1] In less theological language, we might think of it as matchmaking. While I hope our graduates are starting on this next phase of their lives with a clearer sense of what they most need to do and what the world needs, I also recognize that this matchmaking work never really ends, because we never stop growing and changing, and neither does the world.
This is really the heart of a liberal arts education. Rather than becoming adept at any particular skill or technology, through a liberal arts education, we learn creativity and critical thinking, self-reflection and compassion for the world. Then, as life and the world we live in changes, we are capable of adapting and developing in new ways with integrity. This requires an openness of mind and a strength of spirit that I find in abundance in Wittenberg University.
So it was that just over a year ago, as I reflected upon a new opportunity, a “calling” if you will, that I found the work that I was most prepared and needing to do at this point in my life, met with the needs of Wittenberg University at this time in its history.
Now another generation of Wittenberg students takes its light into the world, on a journey to discover their own callings, to live their lives with grace and compassion. I am confident that as they do that work that they most need to do, they too will find, as our founder Ezra Keller did, that “the more toil, the more grace.”
Yours,
Christian M. M. Brady, DPhil (Oxon.)
President
[1] Wishful Thinking, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 95.