Wednesday, September 2, 2009
I live off campus this year, which requires a daily navigation up the hill, around the cigarette butts and plastic red cups, on my way to campus.
Finally when I reach the top, I pass by Spooner Hall, the oldest building on the campus. She whispers to any passersby aware enough to pause, turn down their headphones and listen.
The old inscription across the building reads, “Whoso findeth Wisdom findeth life.”
The quotation is a paraphrase of an old Jewish proverb in which personified Wisdom calls out to be found.
Each semester, students come to the University from a myriad of places for a myriad of reasons to answer that call.
In recent years, we have sought her in databases, PowerPoint projects and Blackboard documents.
But more than a century ago, when Spooner Hall housed the University’s first library and Naismith was off somewhere pinning up a peach basket, students may have approached the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge with a slightly different understanding.
Their search is ingrained across campus. Twente Hall’s bas-relief features the ancient Saint George, the doorway to the Campanile is engraved with the word, “Faith,” counseling all who walk beneath to “Look to the stars through difficulty,” and in front of Smith Hall kneels Moses before a burning bush, the very seal stamped on graduate’s diplomas every spring.
In the minds of many who first founded and attended the University, the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge went hand in hand with the idea that such a journey led not only forward, but upward.
For them, seeking wisdom meant wrestling with the possibility of an unseen truth and whether such a thing could exist just beyond our scientific methods and measurements, somewhere between the scholarly and the sacred.
Academia often intersected with the divine in the search for what is true about ourselves and our world.
So what does this all mean? There was a time in the University’s history when big questions about truth, beauty and the divine were asked during the academic’s pursuit of wisdom.
Though students still purchase paperback copies of the Koran for western civilization courses and appreciate religious art at Spencer Art Museum, the conversation about faith and spirituality seems fairly hushed on the hill. Political discussion is no longer taboo, so what about discussion on faith?
Certainly we are all going to answer and confront these questions about faith — or lack thereof — differently, but perhaps the greatest tragedy would be to not ask these questions at all, and miss out on the life that finding wisdom might bring.
— — Hafner is a Great Bend junior in journalism.
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