Melissa Smith
As you can see from the picture accompanying this order of service, which is a picture from the Vindicator in 2008 where I carried the ceremonial mace in the YSU graduation procession, I am a successful product of the American educational system. This mace bears the insignia “Animus liberatus” “The spirit having been made free.” My modern spell check, like most of today’s YSU community, apparently doesn’t know Latin, for it tried to auto-correct this phrase to “animus liberates,” which is not the same message, but might be appropriate for anyone carrying a mace.)

So it would seem to me that religion and education seek to serve the similar ends. And the question I pose in the service is the one that I have struggled as I prepared my remarks:

As UUs, we are committed to a lifelong journey of putting our faith into action. How does the educational process, as a component of our commitment to lifelong learning, serve this faith?

One of my favorite Russian authors, Chekhov famously wrote to his editor who was demanding a literature that provided answers to the pressing questions of his day was that literature, or story-telling, was not meant to provide answers, but to pose the questions properly. So our work, in worship, is to come together to pose questions properly.

This of course, was the preferred teaching method .of arguably the first great teacher of historical record, Socrates. Socrates also famously said: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” So I invite you to introspection as well as reflection on today’s service.

Education is my love. My profession until 2016, definitely a value I hold as sacred. But is education my religion? Is a question that comes naturally to me that may resonate differently for each of us.

Access to education is a struggle for many nationally and internationally, for political and economic reasons, as well as a struggle for those among us with access to an education that never seems to deliver on its promises.

Our theme this month is “becoming, becoming ourselves.” Along with white privilege, educational privilege has accompanied me throughout my life. Affiliation with educational institutions preceded my birth, for I must have been begat in environs of Columbia University where my father, thanks to the G.I. Bill which we now know very disproportionately favored whites, enrolled in graduate studies following World War II. My birth in 1952 must have figured in his decision to take a teaching and coaching job at the New Hampshire prep school where his father was headmaster rather than accept the graduate teaching assistantship at Columbia that he had been offered. My father’s never completing his PhD dissertation was the ultimate motivation for me to finish mine, and end up in a tenure-track position at Youngstown state university in 1986, with a concomitant joining of the UUYO congregation. So Youngstown and YSU were until my retirement the major locus of my educational mission, and UUYO Is my focus post-retirement as I seek to become a Commissioned Lay Minister.

My current housemate, 19-year-old Travis Bland, my home health aide, and in-loco education advisee, may have white privilege, but precious little of it. He strikes me as true believer in the power of education, and I fear the weight of life that can extinguish the power of the spark that drives him. Born in what he himself calls “red-neck” Conneaut, he came to live across the street from me at the age of 13 and navigated the local schools with their rampant bullying and drug culture, through high school graduation. Last year, after becoming a National Technical Honor Society inductee, Travis found his first term at YSU, with its switch to nearly exclusive on-line learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, his chosen major in Biological Technologies made him missing hands on component that he had at Choffin. He decided to switch to a for-profit program in EMT, but has faced mounting financial costs, as well as other decisions that go beyond well beyond any I faced as a 19 year old.

So Travis Bland is offering me new questions, and there are more Travis Blands in Youngstown alone then was dreamt of in my philosophy.

Before I retired, I was the lone professor of Russian in the department of foreign languages at YSU.. So studying “otherness” comes naturally to me. Although I majored in French as an undergraduate one of my most influential undergraduate courses was “Concepts of Religion.” My professor, Theodore Gaster, liked to preface his course by stating that the word “educate” comes from the Latin EDUCO – “to lead out, lead forth.” Reinforcing the link of the purposes of education with the loftier mission of religion.

My colleague in Classics at YSU, however, pointed to the true etymological root EDUCARE -“to bring up, nurture”, and introduced a more formal aspect to the educational process.

So while in my mind, the foremost concept of leading out, the liberation of the spirit “animus liberatus “ is complicated by atheism realization that in creating a system of education we often stifle the very spirit we purport to make free. Being in Youngstown but not of it for me clearly presents, and has presented its own challenges.

While the then-YSU Dean of Arts and Sciences, on our first encounter asked “what’s it like to have a real job?” I still naively thought of my position teaching Russian language and literature as bringing an opportunity to get students to “think globally.” That is hard enough. But acting locally?

So what ARE the questions?

Is education my religion? That is a yes no question. Question #1 becomes …or what? What are the alternatives?

At age three we begin to ask Why? Thereafter, as Mary Oliver puts it in today’s reading:

…you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do

Determined to save the only life you could save.

To a New Englander, moving to Pittsburgh for grad school and on to Ohio for a teaching job is pioneering. I thought of myself as on a pilgrimage. Clearly, I had a lot to learn. As my educational mission seeks to redefine itself, I turned to the mission of our church, as it was formulated during the ministry of Suzanne Frederick Gray.

“Our mission is to build a diverse and transformative spiritual community, help people live lives of wholeness, and promote justice, peace, and religious freedom.”

The where question’s answer is HERE, and the when is NOW. Which leaves us with the question HOW?

My answer today though? Worship, bringing together sharing our stories, thinking globally etc.

However as missionaries often discover, the natives can do very well without you, thank you. In every American university and college I knew of, departments routinely offered courses in Russian Soviet culture and English to boost their enrollments. I never got more than 12 students in any such class, so I took to studying my students and the needs of the institution YSU.

As I enter the years traditionally occupied with saving one soul before it’s too late, I have embarked on the role you see me in a candidate for commissioned Lay Ministry in our church.

In a graduate course on the history of Russian philosophy, I learned that Russian philosophy was anthropocentric. Parenthetically, a latter-day student of Russian philosophy was Ayn Rand, whose philosophy I do not subscribe to. Later, studying old Russian literature, I read 13th-century Kievan Rus’ Metropolitan Hilarion’s discussion on the Old and New Testaments “Sermon on Law and Grace.”

As a university professor, I always hoped that my education was being put to action, although I certainly have my doubts. In living beyond the university institution, I turn to the church as ballast in my journey out — and, of course, inward. But do I serve? That is our law, as we state in our covenant. But we still need grace, as much as we can get!

Genealogically speaking, I am a purebred WASP. I have been drawn ever onward, as I had the educational privilege to do so; to studying the other. But living with, joining in action with, is a lifelong struggle.

In the UU church, we have no saints to emulate, but as we try to bring the better part of ourselves together in church service, we find in each other a saintly inspiration, and drive to bring forth the saintly seed within ourselves. We look to historical figures, contemporaries, and to the sacred teachings of other religious traditions. Here at UUYO we recite our covenant “love is the spirit of this church and service is its law.” We create our grace together. If you are looking for answers to your church fit, I recommend the Belief-O-Matic® quiz. When Russian friends clammered for me to be baptized Orthodox I took this online quiz repeatedly and I always got 94% or more for Unitarian Universalism and 16-20% for Orthodox.

I turn to Metropolitan Hilarion on law and grace. As we strive to serve the law, we fall short; it is through grace, amazing universal grace, that we hope to guide our earthly vessels safe harbor.