Contagion

Because of travel associated with a conference, I’ve had the blessing of walking around three different college campuses this past week. All three were associated with students moving back and classes starting. Any faculty or staff member at Creighton can tell you that there is something magical about students returning to campus. Witnessing this “magic” on three distinct campuses really piqued my interest. What IS it about the beginning of a new school year that feels so special, so wonderful, so contagious?

Social Psychologists have long studied the phenomenon of deindividuation and how it impacts our behavior. Deindividuation occurs when we lose our sense of self and studies show this loss often leads us to behave in ways we normally find unpalatable. In one humorous study, children who felt anonymous because their costumes included masks over their faces took significantly more candy while trick-or-treating when a dish was left unattended than children without masks.1 Unfortunately for humanity, deindividuation is also one of the root causes of mobs and rioting throughout history. We feel disconnected from our true selves, get swept up in a bigger collective, and do things we thought we were incapable of.

Maybe the magical, contagious feeling of a new academic year on a college campus is also associated with deindividuation, but in the sense of acting as part of something greater, something better than ourselves. More than at other times, the first few days of a new year are not about “me.” For staff and administrators, these days are about helping students get settled in, solve problems, find buildings, rooms and professors. For faculty, these days are about lying the foundation for all that will be accomplished with students in the classroom, peers in the lab, and colleagues on committees. Even students who must figure out where to put their microwaves and whether or not to drop a course are not truly “me” focused. Freshmen attend to the feelings and concerns of parents, siblings, roommates and both old and new friends. Upperclassmen too are re-connecting with all that is positive and important in their lives.

Maybe this sense being caught up in something greater than oneself is what it is like to live as Christians. Maybe the feeling we have at the beginning of the new year at Creighton is a glimpse of what it feels like to “love one another as I have loved you” John 13:34. We may not like everyone we are dealing with now. We probably don’t feel “warm fuzzies” after every interaction. We may even be struggling with enemies, whether inside ourselves or actual people. Regardless, we sense we are part of something greater than ourselves, something bigger and more beautiful than anything we could do alone. I think this is a glimpse of what it feels like to build up and live the Kingdom. This is a glimpse of what it is like to live as Christians.

1 Ed Diener and colleagues. (1976). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33, 178-183.