Oxen Crossing

For some time, Muslim universities in Spain held the educational torch for the continent, leading the way for fresh discovery in science in the humanities. The English sent scholars to these beacons to study and return with new knowledge to help the kingdom to flourish. When they returned, many settled in at Oxford, aptly named as a crossing point for oxen and wagon. The growing town handled significant traffic on two major rivers and along both east-west and north-south trading routes. Many scholars initially boarded at inns attached to pubs in the town center. As scholars collected peers and pupils, the boarding spaces expanded, soon filling larger halls and buildings and transitioning into what we better know as colleges.

Today, Oxford University houses about 30 of these colleges and continues to add schools in developing fields. For over 600 years the town has attracted the brightest thinkers from Britain and can claim to have produced 25 of her prime ministers.

I’m not much for reverence when it comes to educational institutions (no institution knows this better than Davidson). Even as an educator, I’m much more drawn to unorthodox techniques and dynamic learning environments. Oxford, however, reshaped my mind on this perspective. I’m not changing my tune altogether, but tooling around the medieval town and thinking about all the people who have walked, thought, discovered and inspired in this small piece of land reminded me that centers for individual and collective discovery truly delight me. In fact, there are few things that get me more excited than people coming together to be creative, study and develop new ideas for society (at its best, this is what kept me engaged at Davidson).

It’s with some interest I learned about a community that formed here in the 1920’s called the Oxford Group. This crew would go onto to establish two major spin-off groups, the first being AA and the second being Initiatives of Change. The man who started the group, Frank Buchman, believed that every person had an important role to play in turning the world for the better. As a Lutheran preacher, he suggested taking daily time in quiet reflection to find guidance for living life. He also suggested examining one’s life in terms of morality, believing that moral decisions/actions and a better world walked together as partners.

It’s with this simple strategy that he arrived in Oxford in the 1920’s. World War One had just ravaged the continent and the school. Nearly 15,000 Oxford men fought in the trenches and almost a quarter of them died in battle. They returned home to an emotionally illiterate society that could not compensate for their needs. Disillusionment ran rampant among veterans who were promised glorious victory “by Christmas”, but spent years suffering chemical warfare in devastated cites and scorched countryside. Men carried significant guilt for those left behind on the battlefield, many wondering why they had lived while their friends perished.

This proved to be fertile ground for a message that focused on each individual finding his (Oxford had just started to accept female students) purpose in life while seeking to live with integrity. The disillusioned rediscovered hope. The guilty found grace.

It’s hard to know the overall impact of this work, but I’m interested. Much of what I do with the Action for Life program focuses on this task of helping young people to ask the questions that will help them discover meaning and vision for their life. From there, it challenges them to identify their core values.

It’s from a sense of purpose and values that I believe all human action is shaped. Whether we value love, survival, money, food, faith, family, cars, job, security – these values add into an equation that shapes our decisions. Our decisions guide our actions and our actions make up the sum total of our lives. As my old friend says, “action is everything.” We’ve been trying to lead our lives with that principle in mind for some time.

Do you agree? I’m welcoming all thoughts on the values to action to life theory. I’ll fill you in on my latest revelation to this sometime soon. In the meantime, please feed back.