By: Daiyu Tang
Photos: Daiyu Tang ((No AI))
Let’s get one thing clear, while Sunday may be the best at what we’re about to cover… Wednesday is better at most other things. Facts. 😉
But, since Wednesday doesn’t work at Columtreal and Sunday does, it’s probably best to focus instead on him and what he can offer to the students, while still being one himself.
As we’ve started to cover and many of you have probably seen, Columtreal University (‘CU’) is rebuilding itself in the obvious ways first. New rooms. New staff. New ways to get smashed (new bars and strip clubs)… This, as we saw with our profile of Lucian and Nara are all part of the concentrated attempt to convince students that the place is not simply a degree-granting rumour mill, but in fact a place of learning. Campuses are not however only built with lecture halls, timetables and people arguing about whether business students are allowed to have souls (and whether Lucian is collecting them for rent). They are built through the stranger, softer infrastructure too… the person students can talk to when they do not know who else to ask, the place they can go when the problem is not exactly academic, not exactly medical, not exactly disciplinary, but still heavy enough to follow them around like a weight/wight on their shoulders. As we saw with Nara, there’s really a growing focus on this pastoral side and that is where Sunday comes in.
Making Spirituality Mean More
I met him near campus while still in yoga clothes from an earlier morning that had somehow turned into a police scanner initiated booty article. Sunday was sitting out on campus with Maya, his partner, who politely kept herself mostly out of the interview and even more politely complimented my writing, which naturally means she is a woman of taste and should be protected from bad grades. Sunday, meanwhile, was very willing to talk.
“With the overhaul of campus, it’s almost a whole new university,” he said. “So many things have changed. And now, maybe more than before, the students need some place they can go that’s not going to judge them for wanting some sort of spiritual guidance.”
CU has never exactly lacked drama, but drama is not support. Gossip is not guidance. A crowded campus can still leave someone very alone, especially when their problem is tied to faith, fear, identity, grief, purpose, sexuality, or the particular existential dread of being a student on the edge of Hathian and wondering whether any of this is supposed to make sense and why CU keeps organising trips to Laveau and expecting ‘different outcomes’.
Sunday describes himself as an initiated Voodoo priest and an ordained minister through the Universal Life Church, which he described as wholly nondenominational. That could sound like a lot, especially to students who hear ‘spiritual support’ and immediately check for pamphlets, chanting, or someone trying to sell them salvation through three easy steps (down into a dungeon).
He was clear that is not the point.
“I’m not looking for converts,” Sunday said. “I’m just a resource. Students are welcome to come to me, or not. I’m here to help build a community, not a congregation.”
Advisor Not Teacher
His role is advisory rather than professorial. Sunday is still a student himself, minoring in theology, and said the arrangement that allows him to hold this position also prevents him from teaching classes. Instead, he hopes students will reach him through by phone, email, Discord and, eventually, through office hours at the church once construction and renovations are completed.
There may also be services, scheduling permitting, for students who want something more structured. “I know a few students are avid church-goers,” he said, “and something like that can give them a sense of stability.”
Students here are not only trying to pass classes. They are trying to survive bad relationships, bad habits, family wreckage, poverty, pressure, identity crises, and the charming local hobby of making every private difficulty somehow public by Friday (we’ve not met them yet either).
“I’m here to offer guidance or counsel to any students who have…..questions that can’t, or won’t, be answered by traditional school advisors,” he said. “Anything from crisis of faith, existential dread, or even having faith, but struggling with things like realizing an alternative and not church accepted sexuality.”
Sunday seems to understand that support can look different depending on who is asking for it.
“I’ve always been called to service,” he told me. “With all the tragedy in life, I’ve always felt the urge to try and give people some form of peace. Whether thats through funerary services, religious comfort, spiritual guidance, a dumb joke, or just a shoulder to cry on.”
It felt honest. I really did think so. Sometimes people do not need an answer carved onto a stone tablet (and Hathian’s ten would be fucking awful!) Sometimes they need someone to sit with them until the panic drops a little. Sometimes they need something sacred. Sometimes they need someone to make them laugh before they walk too close to the wrong edge. Sunday put it more darkly, and perhaps more accurately. “College is tough enough,” he said. “Add to that we’re on the edge of what sometimes seems like hell itself in Hathian, so its not unreasonable to need a little help keeping your head on straight. With any luck, we’ll have less students trying take the short flight home off the clock tower.”
Perhaps Columtreal does need someone like Sunday. Not as a preacher standing above students. As a resource. A listener. A guide. Someone who can talk faith without demanding it, talk doubt without punishing it, and remind students that needing help is not proof they are failing. When asked what he would like to be remembered for in five years, Sunday did not offer some grand legacy statement. He laughed and said that being remembered at all would mean he had made a difference for at least one person.
As for the quote I asked for, the one he wanted students to carry with them, he went with an old classic from home:
“Laissez les bons temps rouler.”
It means (as my GCSE French suggests) ‘Let the good times roll’.
Not the Clock Tower
At Columtreal, that may require prayer, therapy, caffeine, better choices, worse choices, and at least one person willing to listen when the good times stop feeling good. It might sometimes involve Pepper Spray, but hey, we’re tough cookies here as well, right?
Sunday says he is here for those bad times and even though Maja thinks I’m… well, all I can say is talking is better than the Clock Tower. So go hit Sunday up as needed.
((For RP contact: Sunday (uvaer) ))
