The Philosopher Kings

I was in Indianapolis this past weekend as an undergraduate Higher Education and Leadership Ministries (HELM) of the Christian Church Fellow. Our theme was Inter-religious Dialogue, which works fantastic with my work with the Eureka College Interfaith Challenge. Leading our weekend is Dr. Kang from Brite Divinity School, and truly a citizen of the world.

The movie was called "The Philosopher Kings" and the film looked at the lives of university and college custodians or janitors- generally, the lowest rung on the ladder concerning higher education staff.

The movie was about their lives as humans. It was about their journey as twenty-first century pilgrims. It was about not only their humanity, but mine, and yours.

As many of you know, I am a sucker for the story. They had τους καλλιστους λόγους, the most beautiful stories. There was  a tale of a man who loved art, a woman whose mother was in a coma due to a botched delivery for eleven years until the ultimate death of the mother. There was the recount of a man who was shot in the back in Vietnam, but he was also the man who opened for the Beach Boys as a musical artist.  Story after story poured out of the documentary, story after story representing so much that is right in our world.

There was a Hispanic janitor who was walking along the road one day and was hit by a car.  He lost his arm in the accident.  He asked if he had the right to sue the driver, and it turns out that he did have the right.  So the man investigated into the details, and it turns out that the driver was a father with no insurance and suing the man would send the family’s principle breadwinner to jail.  Demonstrating the highest form of compassion, he walked away; starving children would not get his arm back.

What struck me on the deepest and truest level was their commitment.  They would not have traded their job for the world.  They were “philosopher-kings,” the people who had such love for knowledge, but passion for the world which they served.  The title comes from an idea from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who believed the world should be ran by “philosopher-kings.”  Maybe the world should be ran by passionate janitors?  I don’t know.  However, I would like to live in a world that is regarded with as much love as they regard their work. 

As I finished the movie, I was left with a few ideas.  Some of these ideas I will visit some other time, but the one I want to visit now is their rank in society.  Often, far too often, we put a class system into place and we put, not only a faulty system, but a system based on all of the wrong ideals.

Janitors do not make much; they’ll most likely never be the presidents of the colleges they work at.  If the janitors were lucky, they were able to attend some of the classes they clean up after.  But I dare anybody to tell me that they are lower or even middle class.   Their love for this world, the communities they served, and simply the lives they lived made them citizens of the highest class.  A rank not judged by bank account, skin color, sexuality, religion, family, nationality, or even on traditional human terms.  Rather, they rank the highest on a scale based on the heart, a rank mere mortals can only achieve in our wildest dreams. 

Do all janitors feel such compassion and zeal?  Probably not.  Neither does any other profession. However, if we can learn from this set of janitors (or real estate agents, or teachers, or bankers, or ditch diggers, or…) we will soon realize that we can be higher, we can go farther and we can go better, but… we have to care, and not just care once or frequently or a lot.  Rather we have to obtain a daily system of gratitude and passion to carry us through to the level of a “philosopher-king.”