Education as a spiritual work of mercy: An interview with Professor Kyle Washut

This August, Professor Kyle Washut, S.T.L., S.T.M., was appointed fourth president of Wyoming Catholic College, a liberal arts college located in Lander, Wyoming. Wyoming Catholic offers a four year program that seeks to form the body, mind, and spirit through immersion on the Great Books, the natural beauty of the outdoors, and the spiritual heritage of the Catholic church.

A Wyoming native, Professor Washut kindly took some time to talk with Catholic World Report about the educational vision of the College he now heads.

CWR: You have said, “You can’t really be a good human being unless you’re rooted in what is.” Can you explain this concept of “the real” which permeates Wyoming Catholic?

Professor Kyle Washut: What we say about education at Wyoming Catholic College is deeply rooted in what the Church says about the fall and redemption of humanity. Catholic education is fundamentally an extension of the mystery of redemption to our fallen condition, that is why the Church has always seen education as one of the spiritual works of mercy.

After the fall of Adam and Eve, humanity began to form various barriers between the individual person and the rest of creation. John Paul II, in his Theology of the Body, sees this response as manifesting shame: a shame at oneself and a fear of the external world. This shame is manifested in how we attempt to hide and protect ourselves from the world around us, from other people, from ourselves and even from God. The first instance of artifice, of crafting raw natural ingredients to serve some human purpose (technology) were the fig leaves sewn together as a protective barrier against the broken relationships created by the fall.

Since we do not live in Eden any longer, we of course need to protect ourselves; God gave Adam and Eve garments of animal skin after all! We need to use our intelligence to create tools that help us in navigating our relationship with each other, with animals, and with the wider world of nature.

But we tend to exaggerate our response. We strive to make ourselves more and more buffered from reality; safe from relationships that could disrupt our lives. In buffering ourselves, we end up isolating ourselves from authentic relationships with fellow humans and the world around us. Wendell Berry uses the image of a path versus a road to explain the temptation to break off relationship with the world. He notes that a path is “little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity….It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.”

But, Berry adds, “A road…embodies a resistance against the landscape….Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort, and destroy obstacles in its path.” And in the case of our modern freeways such roads are designed to facilitate profit, and expensive entertainment.

CWR: So modern, technological materialism doesn’t really put us in touch with the body or physical reality at all because it does not bring us to encounter with God’s creation, but man’s artificial version of creation?

Professor Washut: There is a mode of relating to our bodily word and our fellows, embodied in a path, that involves a back and forth wherein we are mutually transformed in our interactions. But often, whether via roads, hermetically sealed windows, perpetual indoor climate control, television screens, or ever present digital technology, we adopt a mode relating to the world that not only prevents us from interacting with it, but at times often damages our relationship to it. We project a false self to those around us; we refuse to be present to the concerns of our local community as we instead comment on social media about global news; we stop hearing and noticing the natural world around us.

And that does two things: first, it makes us think that our power and pleasure are what determines the world around us and that is what measures the goodness of our actions. But more importantly, in insulating ourselves from our own bodily nature, our neighbors, and the natural world, we close off a “safety valve” that God had written into creation. God made us so that even if we broke off supernatural communion with him, we would still turn to the world and find hidden within it a testimony to the creator and his direction for us. God concealed himself within the bodily world so that even if we turned away from him, we would in fact discover him within his creation. That is what is meant by the metaphor, “God’s First Book.” He reveals himself in reality.

At Wyoming Catholic, when we talk about rooting ourselves in what is, we are talking about turning away from idolatry, turning away from human creations that masquerade as the ultimate meaning of life, and instead allowing ourselves to be measured and molded by a world that we are not in control of. A bodily world, but a bodily world shot through with spiritual meaning. While that is scary, and in fact contains real risk, it is also the way that we will grow and transcend our own weaknesses and instead be transformed day by day in accordance with God’s plan for us.

CWR: In a video on the horsemanship program, you commented that “We don’t want effete intellectuals, ivory tower intellectuals, we want men and women who are tough, who are real, who know how to have an adventure.” Do you have any anecdotes that exemplify students who are real men and women, who know how to have an adventure?

Professor Washut: There are so many! In many ways some things that our students assume as a normal series of actions out in the backcountry are themselves testimony to it. In the normal course of an outdoor trip students will redistribute the weight of an injured or sick fellow’s pack to help lighten the load. They adapt to pouring rain and snow, lost canoes, and once in a century wind storms that make trails impassible, and they carry on the trip. They do not wait for someone to bring them home, but they figure out a way around the difficulty. And they do it while caring for each other.

On a winter camping trip, a student came down with a stomach flu, and his friend spent the night out of the snow quinzee attending to him. Once an outdoor leader journeyed a five hours round trip through the night, buffeted by wind and rain to confirm that another group was okay after they had accidentally set out an SOS call on their satellite phone. One young man tied a rope to himself and a tree, waded across a very full river and then guided each one of his fellows individually across that river using the rope line he had made.

Students respond to harrowing events on a trip: boulder slides, lightning storms, mountain bike crashes, broken bones, severe stomach pain, and more, and they manage such crises (miles and miles away from the nearest help) with poise, professionalism, and compassion. Recently, the local search and rescue team flew ten of our students (via helicopter) to the rugged wilderness of the Wind River Indian Reservation to help search for a grandfather who had gone missing on a backpacking trip. They asked for our students, knowing their skill, their generosity, and their grit.

CWR: How do you see students have changed since the founding of the college? What challenges face the formation of young people more now than ever before?

Professor Washut: I think two of the biggest challenges facing the formation of young people today are distraction and the plague of low expectations.

On the distraction side of things, college students today have never known a world without smartphones. Many of them are used to being perpetually on call to friends and family, their data constantly monitored by tracking, and they are unceasingly scrolling through the internet. They have little time that is truly quiet. Everything about the digital world that is carried around in their pocket is ordered to reducing them to the easiest marketing demographic; algorithms push them into more rigid ideological groups, and their value is constantly under scrutiny by the hordes on social media.

No wonder anxiety and overall mental health is an ever increasing concern for this generation!

But on top of the reductionism and distraction that pervades their lives, young people today are often told not to attempt dangerous great things. Schools are not allowed to hold them to demanding academic standards, employers cannot demand a strong work-ethic, activities cannot be unduly risky. They are told that they are fragile, that they deserve special treatment, that the world is too harsh, unfair, and dangerous.

And while it is true that there are all sorts of injustices out there, young men and women deserve to be challenged. They deserve to not always be safe. They deserve risk. They deserve the chance to fail and the chance to respond to that failure.

CWR: Who should be interested in attending WCC—and what is Wyoming Catholic looking for in a prospective student?

Professor Washut: Wyoming Catholic College is for young men and women who are willing to confront real challenges, who are willing to strive for greatness and to risk failure, and who are then willing to pick themselves up and try again. We need zealous students, full of grit, willing to give up distraction, willing to trust the wisdom of an ancient tradition, and willing to put all of their efforts in pursuing that wisdom.

It is not an education for wimps. But it is an education for all those willing to commit themselves to its rigors and so benefit from its transformative joys.