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Antioch’s spiritual studies program not afraid to invoke God in search of sacred service

By Larry Lehnerz*

Soul. Spiritual development. Sacred service. These are not the themes of a typical secular education. But Antioch University Seattle is not your typical secular school.

Located in Belltown within blocks of the Seattle Center, Antioch caters to adult learners, many who at mid-life feel called to sacred service. The new spiritual studies track of the liberal arts program is designed to help them match their personal vocation with the world’s needs.

“The program in spiritual studies assumes we have a calling,” says Randy Morris, Ph.D., who is a core faculty member in charge of the Spiritual Studies program. “Part of the work is coming to awareness of what that calling is. The other part is enacting it. When you have clarified your vocation and enacted it, you are doing God’s will.”

During a redesign of the Bachelor of Arts program at Antioch in 2005, Morris, a liberal artist influenced by depth and transpersonal approaches and a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal church in Seattle, proposed the spiritual studies program. Previously, all B.A. programs were designed individually by the student. Now B.A. students can also select from one of seven pre-designed areas of concentration.

Antioch Seattle is one of six campuses of Antioch University, founded in 1852 in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Antioch Seattle offers B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. programs in various disciplines to 1,000 students. Classes are small, typically meeting during the evenings.

In the spiritual studies concentration, students study religious traditions from East, West and indigenous cultures, along with spiritual disciplines and the intersection of psychology and spirituality.

When students at a secular university come from diverse religious and spiritual backgrounds, how does Morris cultivate open-mindedness?

“At the beginning of the course, we stress the idea of deep ecumenism,” says Morris. “We agree that everyone is welcome so long as they acknowledge the mystery at the heart of being.”

For Morris, education itself is a sacred process. He recalls dreaming of Mother Theresa addressing him some years ago. “Randy, the point is not to save people,” she told him in the dream. “The point is to create the conditions for the possibility of grace.”

That dream has become a mantra for Morris.

“Invoking something unseen like grace reminds me that the classroom is a sacred place and teaching is sacred activity,” says Morris.

He strives to design classes balancing theory, experience and reflection. The goal always is to explore the soul for clues about each individual’s unique self.

“When you are doing deep soul work, you are already working on vocation,” he says.

Current Antioch student Gordon Baxter who is a long-time member of St Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Auburn, considers the Spiritual Studies program to be a preliminary to possible graduate studies in ministry. He sees his degree process, which will last another year, as a period of discernment.

“Antioch offers a fertile ground for an exchange of spiritual ideas,” says Baxter who believes his Christian faith has grown deeper through studying and sharing with students of different faith perspectives.

“The more I learn about a variety of spiritual practices, the more I’m convinced we are more alike than different,” he says. “We share certain commonalties when it comes to the creator.”

After studying ritual practices in one course, Baxter, along with each student, designed his own personal ritual. He credits the experience with deepening his understanding and appreciation of Christian rituals.

Sue Marro of Laurelhurst graduated from the B.A. program in 1999, before the spiritual studies emphasis had been enacted, but spiritual studies were at the heart of her program.

“There is a spirituality that underlies the whole experience,” says Marro who feels her learning at Antioch has expanded the ways in which she does bodywork in her massage therapy practice.

She fondly recalls an off-campus weekend retreat as part of a course exploring dreams from multiple perspectives including depth psychology. The class camped out together, and created a mask of a personal dream character, each student sharing the mask in a silent activity meant to bring the character to life in the circle.

“Randy teaches a lovely way of working with dreams,” says Marro, who considers the dream she worked with during that course to be one of the most profound of her life. “It’s not dream interpretation, but holding the dream and sharing the images in a way that gives dreams a living quality.”

Through her experience at Antioch, Marro, who remains close friends with many people she studied with, found the quality of her work shifting. “I’ve come to see all individual healing in the context of healing the world,” she says.

Kathie Gillet grew up a Catholic dreaming of performing sacred service as a nun. She recalls a sense of the presence of God as a child, but by adulthood was living “a life of hell, as far from God as you can get,” she says. By the time she enrolled at Antioch in 2003, she had overcome her addictions and was already working as a drug and alcohol counselor.

Courses at Antioch gave her a framework for deepening her interest in spiritual psychology through a combination of theory, experience, reflection and what she calls, “listening to the soul, the voice of God.”

“I don’t know any other way to discover the truth of what you’re supposed to do,” says Gillet who is in the process of applying to Antioch’s graduate psychology program.

For her final thesis, she wrote about the meaning, intelligence and application of compassion and she has put her learning into practice with clients.

“When your life and work are infused with compassion,” she says, “they become sacred service.”

Morris, who teaches that enacting one’s personal calling is sacred service because it puts one in accord with the world’s needs, smiles when he thinks of the impact of his current and former students who exemplify for him the goals of education.

He recalls a story told by author Joanna Macy about mythical Shambhala warriors armed with compassion and insight whose mission is to heal humanity.

“That’s what we do here at Antioch,” he says. “We train Shambhala warriors, individuals following their calling in a way that changes the world.”

*This article appeared in the December 2006 edition of The Source newspaper, and is reprinted here by permission of The Source.

Read more about the Spiritual Studies option in the Liberal Arts B.A. Program at Antioch here.

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