Submitted by Jacklyn Snoek
May 2015
Rainn Wilson walked across the stage to the podium, donning a sweater vest and a venti Starbucks coffee, and moved the audience to tears with the single line, “Wow, I could make so many jokes about your university’s name.” He then asked the audience to pull out their cameras and take pictures while he posed, making silly faces and contorting his limbs.
While Rainn Wilson is an actor best known for his role as Dwight Schrute in the NBC classic “The Office”, he is also a philanthropist, web-designer, and author. His masterpiece, SoulPancake, is a direct reflection of his personal growth overtime. SoulPancake began as a website which then turned into a phone app, book, and then eventually a YouTube channel. The website is a hodgepodge of topics such as art, culture, science, philosophy, humor, and spirituality.
Wilson’s discussed redefining spirituality, a play on Ball State’s slogan. There are two misconceptions about spirituality: 1). Spirituality is all about religion and church. 2). Spirituality is new age with healing crystals and yoga. However, in the words of Wilson’s beloved character Dwight: false. Spirituality is a journey to find what brings a person joy.
From here, Wilson discussed his own spiritual journey. Greatly contrasting from his character Dwight, he was raised in the Baha’i faith, which taught equality between gender and race. He was very involved in high school. Wilson participated in theatre, debate, Model UN, chess club, and a pottery club. Finding his calling in acting, he went onto college to perform. In college is where Wilson began to rebel. He became an atheist and denounced the religious concept of morality. Years had passed and he gotten married and became an actor, however, Wilson was greatly unhappy.
Wilson had given into a “myth of culture”; once a person achieves their goals a person will be happy. This is the point of the media and advertisements, to make a person believe they need things to be happy. This is where Wilson began his spiritual journey. He began to question whether there was a god or not, and he began to read spiritual texts (not Wikipedia pages like the “wikipediots”). This is when he rediscovered the Baha’i faith. The faith has a pillar called the “investigation of truth of the universe”. This pillar is all about self-discovery and finding out life truths without the influence of parents and culture. Baha’i also has an aspect that art and faiths are the same.
This rediscovery of faith and himself lead him to create SoulPancake. This website, application, book, and YouTube was specifically created for lost souls like himself trying to discover what brings them joy and share their experiences. Wilson then concluded by quoting Buddha, “Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.”
While this does not directly relate to education, the topic of spirituality can be applied to education. Teaching is an art. As a teacher, we need to find out life our purpose and what part of education brings us joy. We also need to discover our teaching styles for ourselves. We are taught how we are to teach in college and by other more tenured teachers in our field, however, once we gain experience we need to make our own opinions and create our own style.
