Reverend Milton Schwantes, Ph.D.

I didn’t have a mystical experience like many young people have because I’m too much inside the Church. I understood from theology the radical difference that God makes in life. The capacity that God has to reveal himself to us in another stage, level, of life—this was to me, the decisive moment, because to be a pastor is not very interesting. It’s a little tiresome. To be a professor or teacher is more interesting. You have more adventures. 

A pastor does not have many adventures. You have somebody who lost someone in the family and you work on the meaning of life with him or her. It’s not very interesting because it doesn’t touch people that much. It’s not very interesting to get a couple together after they have fought. Only you know why they got into the argument. They don’t even know why they had an argument. It doesn’t move the world. These are very elementary things, very basic things. The large majority of the clergy gets tired. So, what’s interesting? 

I had to make an effort to get inside the student so I could understand him deeply. Why couldn’t he write a sentence? And how might I help him to write a sentence? When the student starts to make sentences and thoughts, I see the flower blooming. Now he’s going to become autonomous and will walk through life, because he couldn’t write. So he wasn’t the owner of the words that he wrote. 

His professor said one thing, and he repeated whatever was told to him, but it wasn’t him who was writing. He wrote ‘others.’ So, my effort is to teach that you write ‘you,’ or what ‘you’ like, or how ‘you’ like to do things. This is an enormous exercise for culture. I actually know who is my student and who is not. My student is not the one who repeats me because he didn’t get me. When he finds himself and creates his life, that’s my student.