WEBVTT
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Jesus Christ our Lord.
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Amen.
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(crowd talking indistinctly)
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Several times already this weekend,
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returning as a prodigal member
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of what is generously called the Duke family.
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In groping to identify a vaguely familiar face,
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you have no doubt had recourse to the device of asking,
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where are you now, John?
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The answer usually doesn't help.
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Oh, we've just moved to White Plains.
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We like it so much.
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Little help in identifying people are
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by locating them in space.
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We are a restless breed and a migratory population.
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The addressograph in the Alumni Office
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suffers a periodic nervous breakdown of fear, fatigue.
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In earlier days, people were identified
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by their roots in a place.
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Saul of Tarsis.
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Francis of Assisi.
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But nowadays, saying John of White Plains
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would be ridiculous.
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John will live there three or four years and move on.
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A migrant worker, an Okie in a station wagon,
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he doesn't belong anywhere.
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He has no home in a set place.
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He is rootless, a nomad.
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Many analysts of our culture have noted
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that our physical rootlessness as an American people
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has important spiritual consequences.
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We are a breed from stayed custom
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and sterile conventions,
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emancipated from ancestor worship
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and old hometown ways.
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And that's to the good.
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But there are losses in rootlessness,
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in continual transplanting,
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a deep insecurity and a nervous anxiety
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of which Walter Lippmann speaks.
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Quote, virtual despair comes from being uprooted,
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homeless, naked, alone, and unled.
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It comes from being lost in a universe
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where the meaning of life and of the social order
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are no longer given from on high
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and transmitted from ancestors,
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but have to be invented and discovered
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and experimented with, each lonely individual for himself.
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End quote.
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But to be truly human, a man needs roots of some sort.
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If he be uprooted from soil, from place,
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from an ancestral home,
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he will the more anxiously seek roots sideways,
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so to speak, in all sorts of community relations.
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The organization man, John in White Plains is a joiner,
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trying to find security and stability of soul
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in belonging to this and that,
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but it won't do.
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For all these people that he's joined with are transient,
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acquaintances, quick contacts,
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here today, gone tomorrow.
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The organization, man in suburbia,
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packed close together with his neighbors
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is a frantic belonger, yet lacks roots for his soul,
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is still homesick, a stranger.
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Our text from Ephesians
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suggests another dimension of existence,
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another kind of rootedness.
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They're familiar words
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addressed to the colony of Christians at Ephesus,
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a prayer of Paul that Christ may dwell
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in your hearts through faith.
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That you being rooted and grounded in love may have power
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to grasp the range of the love of God, Christ.
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An odd, remote, archaic word,
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far from existence in White Plains,
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yet it speaks of a quality of life
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that this university honors
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and seeks to cultivate in its students.
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Returning to this campus as alumni,
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possibly, you may be led in this moment of worship
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to reflect on what in your time here as a student,
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you acquired of a spiritual sense
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that has proved strength and stay
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against weariness and despair
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and emptiness in the middle years.
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I cannot speak for you on this secret matter,
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but I would report to you as alumni
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that Duke University remains committed
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to a view of liberal education,
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which provides for a student a sense of being rooted
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and grounded in the love of God.
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When the undergraduates tomorrow are given,
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with their diplomas, copies of the Bible,
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this is not a sentimental gesture
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to a dead past or a dead God.
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It betokens a living connection
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with a taproot of contemporary culture.
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I would report to you that Sunday after Sunday
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in this place, in the beauty of holiness,
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the university service of worship,
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well attended by undergraduates,
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celebrates the love of God
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and conveys the sense of reverence and mystery
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by which the life of the mind is surrounded and sustained,
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and the moral obligation it demands.
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I would report to you that six hours
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of academic work in religion is required
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in the BA curriculum.
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And this out of the settled,
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though not unquestioned conviction
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of administration and faculty,
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that no student is humanely and liberally educated
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who is not acquainted through critical study
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with the Judeo-Christian roots of Western culture.
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A Duke student should be literate about his tradition,
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about the heritage of spirit,
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even if he choose to reject it
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in the building of his own house of faith.
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That many students respond positively to this requirement
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and are glad to discover roots they
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or their parents had forgotten
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is attested by the large number
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who elect advanced courses
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with the Department of Religion.
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What sort of persons, graduates, alumni
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does Duke hope to produce by attending to these roots?
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If rooted and grounded in the love of God,
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what kind of flower can be hoped to appear?
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The answer might be put in terms of a double image,
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opposite connotations that ring in the mind
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when we think of the word roots.
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On the one hand, roots imply stability, security.
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Person who has deep and strong
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spiritual roots is solid, reliable, sure.
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His style of life and decision is one of steady serenity.
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He's not turned over, upset, thrown.
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He can bend with a shifting wind
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without snapping or being uprooted.
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He is more likely to be a late bloomer than an early fader,
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as the academic jargon has it,
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but he's the kind of person
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on whom his neighbors count in his community,
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rooted and grounded in the love of God
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that transcends time and space.
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He moves amid the losses and gains of finitude,
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the comings and goings, the roaming of his external life
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with equanimity and integrity.
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Whatever and wherever his housing, he has a sense of home.
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The ties of earth's loves may be short and transient.
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God's love is sure.
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This is the conservative, the traditional,
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the staid quality that rootedness brings to flower,
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but there is an opposite quality, too,
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without which the traditional style of life
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can become stuffy, conventional, reactionary.
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And that is the radical action
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inspired by the love of God.
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As a matter of fact,
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radical literally means going to the roots,
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to the fundamentals from the Latin, radix.
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It is the hope of this university
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that the religious roots here nurtured
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will produce radical social action
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on the part of its students and graduates,
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that the love of God will inspire quite unconventional,
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disturbing, drastic expressions
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of the love of neighbor,
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of faith active in love,
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as Luther's phrase has it.
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It cannot all be pleasant and nice and conventional
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if faithful to the love of God in Christ
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who brought not peace, but a sword,
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and called his disciples to risk daring trouble.
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You don't need to be told
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there's a deep surging unrest
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among college students these days.
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Their protests, their riots, their demonstrations
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are a rebuke against the phoniness
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of convention and respectability.
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Often they represent an authentic,
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honest search for positive values.
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And a shouting claim that we should perform as we profess.
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The action of Duke students in civil rights demonstrations,
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in anti-poverty programs,
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in community service projects in Durham,
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in Vista and Peace Corps work all are ways
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in which they are taking their religion seriously,
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radically, trying to escape the cloistered virtue
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of a gothic ghetto.
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In its strange way, radical student action is rooted
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and grounded in the love of God.
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It is a mark that new life,
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new shoots are coming from the old roots.
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It is a mark of the grace of God appearing,
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as it always has in history,
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in unconventional places outside the churches.
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To say that Duke seeks to cultivate
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and graduate radical conservatives
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or conservative radicals is not to speak
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a self-contradiction.
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Indeed, such a common grounding in the love of God
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is the shared faith that defines
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and constitutes the authentic Christian community,
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the church invisible.
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We are a pilgrim people,
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scattered and dispersed in the world,
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but one fellowship with roots deep in the tradition,
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and there from deriving the power to understand
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above ground, on earth,
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whether it be Ephesus or White Plains,
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the breadth and length and height and depth
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of the love of Christ.
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Amen.
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Let us pray.
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Now, to him who, by the power at work within us,
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is able to do far more abundantly than we ask or think.
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To him be glory in the church
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and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.
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(gentle chanting music)
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Men and women of Duke, good morning.
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I have no claim on you today
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that is not also shared by all who care for you
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and wish you well, almost no claim.
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There are a few minor matters to be performed tomorrow,
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but apart from that, I have no claims upon you.
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I speak for all those others who care for you
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and care about you.
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But I want also, if I may,
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to speak for a few minutes this morning,
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not only about your condition and my own,
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but to our common condition.
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Our scripture lesson was chosen because it implies,
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and indeed embodies three of the concerns
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to which all men are servants,
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and which we, in our own day,
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feel with a singular poignancy.
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Saint Paul himself was a man who would insist
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on that sense of relatedness
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between his words and our worries,
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for he was a great human example
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of the very things about which he wrote.
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They worried him,
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and so, he tried to say them aloud.
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He was that kind of tortured and demanding human being,
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a very difficult saint indeed.
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But then it turns out that most saints are
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when you get acquainted with them.
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I haven't known very many but,
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you smile, I know.
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I have known one or two and they are difficult.
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Thank heaven, they are.
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St. Paul was a very difficult one indeed.
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It's almost impotent to preach about this,
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the greatest chapter of 1 Corinthians,
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and yet it's crucial.
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It's a chapter that's remarkable in many ways,
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but above all because in so brief a compass,
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it relates to one another
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these three central human preoccupations
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that I've mentioned to you.
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First, the fact that our uncertain,
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and yet somehow certain human directions
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cannot be separated from history,
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from the child and the man
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and the growth from one to the other.
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Second, the fact that life's dark ambiguities
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cannot be separated from its equal sense
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of order and direction.
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And third, the fact that child cannot become man,
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nor darkness become direction
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without the active working of love
273
00:22:25.050 --> 00:22:27.483
in a very special sense of that word.
274
00:22:28.400 --> 00:22:31.330
We've had trouble now for nearly 2,000 years
275
00:22:31.330 --> 00:22:33.563
translating agape properly.
276
00:22:34.620 --> 00:22:38.793
That's the word that is used in the Greek.
277
00:22:39.800 --> 00:22:41.100
We translated charity.
278
00:22:41.100 --> 00:22:43.330
We translated love.
279
00:22:43.330 --> 00:22:46.350
We use many words for it.
280
00:22:46.350 --> 00:22:48.563
No one word is adequate to it.
281
00:22:49.410 --> 00:22:52.613
I shall try somehow to throw a net around it this morning,
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knowing that none of the words will quite do.
283
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In a sense, this chapter of 1 Corinthians is a true poem.
284
00:23:04.130 --> 00:23:06.960
It relates these three major insights
285
00:23:06.960 --> 00:23:10.823
about the hope and the necessary labor of all our lives.
286
00:23:11.750 --> 00:23:14.840
And it relates them in such a way
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00:23:14.840 --> 00:23:18.510
that no one of them can be well-understood
288
00:23:19.360 --> 00:23:20.313
without the others.
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00:23:22.000 --> 00:23:24.323
Insight leads to insight.
290
00:23:25.856 --> 00:23:28.340
And there is a beautiful symmetry in the development
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from a first awareness of love,
292
00:23:31.910 --> 00:23:34.840
through a range of the world's ambitions
293
00:23:34.840 --> 00:23:37.003
and yard sticks of progress,
294
00:23:38.240 --> 00:23:42.087
to a profound sense of human growth.
295
00:23:43.130 --> 00:23:46.580
And then finally, back again to a recognition
296
00:23:46.580 --> 00:23:51.580
of the absolute primacy of love or charity in human life.
297
00:23:55.468 --> 00:23:57.640
And, you know, I might just say parenthetically,
298
00:23:57.640 --> 00:24:00.640
that Paul's insight is particularly alive
299
00:24:00.640 --> 00:24:04.350
for a university community because we don't specialize
300
00:24:04.350 --> 00:24:08.603
in charity and love in his sense of the word.
301
00:24:09.510 --> 00:24:13.550
They come rather far down our list of virtues usually.
302
00:24:13.550 --> 00:24:16.400
And we tend somewhat to feel that judgment
303
00:24:16.400 --> 00:24:21.400
and analysis are the hardcore of the important world,
304
00:24:21.460 --> 00:24:23.790
and charity, at best, as soft
305
00:24:23.790 --> 00:24:27.160
and even squashy external coating
306
00:24:27.160 --> 00:24:29.033
to that hardcore of the world,
307
00:24:29.980 --> 00:24:31.370
which is the world of the intellect
308
00:24:31.370 --> 00:24:33.233
taken apart from the rest of man.
309
00:24:34.600 --> 00:24:38.940
Paul speaks out to tell us that we cannot separate them,
310
00:24:38.940 --> 00:24:41.970
and he will tell us why if we let him.
311
00:24:41.970 --> 00:24:44.630
In fact, he will tell us why anyway,
312
00:24:44.630 --> 00:24:47.010
because he is that kind of person.
313
00:24:47.010 --> 00:24:48.900
Because he is a hard and difficult man,
314
00:24:48.900 --> 00:24:51.433
he will tell us whether we want to hear or not.
315
00:24:52.930 --> 00:24:57.730
He wants us, first of all, to know how deeply,
316
00:24:57.730 --> 00:24:58.563
and I hope, by the way,
317
00:24:58.563 --> 00:25:01.030
you don't mind these yellow sheets,
318
00:25:01.030 --> 00:25:03.280
know how deeply we are the children of time.
319
00:25:03.280 --> 00:25:06.103
Many of you have seen things like them before.
320
00:25:11.240 --> 00:25:12.860
As you know, university presidents
321
00:25:12.860 --> 00:25:15.430
don't usually have ghost writers.
322
00:25:15.430 --> 00:25:17.260
This one certainly does not.
323
00:25:17.260 --> 00:25:20.100
I sometimes think the ghost could do better than I,
324
00:25:20.100 --> 00:25:22.640
but no ghost writer would be foolish enough
325
00:25:22.640 --> 00:25:25.200
to write on stuff like this.
326
00:25:25.200 --> 00:25:27.113
Only a mad academic would do it.
327
00:25:30.359 --> 00:25:32.540
He insists, first of all,
328
00:25:32.540 --> 00:25:37.000
to come back to that other academic content maker
329
00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:40.053
and hardworking man, first of all,
330
00:25:40.053 --> 00:25:41.833
that we are the children of time,
331
00:25:42.990 --> 00:25:44.840
even though we can be more than that.
332
00:25:46.750 --> 00:25:49.350
Through the whole chapter, which Dr. Woodall read you,
333
00:25:49.350 --> 00:25:52.390
runs a superb sense of change and growth,
334
00:25:52.390 --> 00:25:56.583
not only in the darkened mirror that becomes a clear image,
335
00:25:57.420 --> 00:25:59.493
but in the child who becomes man.
336
00:26:00.550 --> 00:26:03.900
Indeed, that whole sequence of human ventures
337
00:26:03.900 --> 00:26:08.900
against which charity is set are ventures of time,
338
00:26:08.940 --> 00:26:12.923
of the history in which we are so constantly caught.
339
00:26:15.400 --> 00:26:20.400
We, it's both a sociable and a terrifying word.
340
00:26:22.910 --> 00:26:25.053
It binds us to one another,
341
00:26:26.170 --> 00:26:28.940
but it binds us equally to all those
342
00:26:28.940 --> 00:26:30.820
who have had to live out before us
343
00:26:30.820 --> 00:26:33.503
the tragic victories of their history.
344
00:26:34.480 --> 00:26:37.930
You feel this burden very keenly at the moment,
345
00:26:37.930 --> 00:26:38.883
just as we do.
346
00:26:40.250 --> 00:26:42.753
We who happen to be your elders,
347
00:26:43.630 --> 00:26:47.860
and so, do not always articulate our concern,
348
00:26:47.860 --> 00:26:50.830
our fear, our terror,
349
00:26:50.830 --> 00:26:53.700
precisely because we feel it so intimately
350
00:26:54.720 --> 00:26:58.110
and must live it out and are busy living it out
351
00:26:58.950 --> 00:27:03.950
in our brief, passionate moment of responsibility.
352
00:27:06.340 --> 00:27:08.930
But you must know this about us
353
00:27:08.930 --> 00:27:11.280
as you graduate from Duke,
354
00:27:11.280 --> 00:27:13.080
that often the things that haunt you
355
00:27:13.080 --> 00:27:17.839
about your world haunt us as profoundly.
356
00:27:17.839 --> 00:27:22.839
Sometimes we simply get weary living out those things which,
357
00:27:24.920 --> 00:27:27.330
without any insult to you,
358
00:27:27.330 --> 00:27:30.553
you are still freer to talk out than we are,
359
00:27:32.174 --> 00:27:36.990
though we must live out certain of their consequences.
360
00:27:36.990 --> 00:27:39.200
You are already living out some of them.
361
00:27:39.200 --> 00:27:40.463
You will live out more.
362
00:27:41.300 --> 00:27:42.860
I want you to know this morning,
363
00:27:42.860 --> 00:27:44.870
quite personally and directly,
364
00:27:44.870 --> 00:27:47.093
that we live them out together.
365
00:27:47.930 --> 00:27:50.070
Whatever the tragic victories
366
00:27:50.070 --> 00:27:53.033
of our passionate moment in time turn out to be,
367
00:27:54.040 --> 00:27:55.463
we live them out with you.
368
00:27:58.780 --> 00:28:03.440
To use language like this to you is already to imply
369
00:28:03.440 --> 00:28:05.963
Saint Paul's second major concern,
370
00:28:07.290 --> 00:28:10.000
the blindness of that very history
371
00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:11.903
from which man cannot escape,
372
00:28:13.540 --> 00:28:18.540
for the glass stays dark if men pursue only their ambitions,
373
00:28:19.160 --> 00:28:21.193
even their most noble ambitions.
374
00:28:22.440 --> 00:28:25.100
And it's striking, you know, that in this one chapter,
375
00:28:25.100 --> 00:28:27.973
Paul manages to cover almost all the noble ones.
376
00:28:29.330 --> 00:28:32.040
It would be easy and trivial to set aside
377
00:28:32.040 --> 00:28:33.710
all the conventional vices,
378
00:28:33.710 --> 00:28:35.240
and thousands of people have done it
379
00:28:35.240 --> 00:28:36.483
in thousands of sermons.
380
00:28:37.540 --> 00:28:41.630
What Paul does instead is to set aside
381
00:28:41.630 --> 00:28:45.260
all the conventional virtues and talents,
382
00:28:45.260 --> 00:28:47.513
brilliance, prophecy,
383
00:28:48.580 --> 00:28:51.840
faith of the ordinary sort, generosity.
384
00:28:51.840 --> 00:28:54.650
He cuts them down, not because they are bad,
385
00:28:54.650 --> 00:28:56.973
but because by themselves they are not enough.
386
00:28:58.470 --> 00:29:01.060
I'm afraid that popular evangelists
387
00:29:01.060 --> 00:29:03.243
often fail to understand this.
388
00:29:04.120 --> 00:29:07.490
And so, they strike at the small branches
389
00:29:07.490 --> 00:29:10.833
of our human predicament and not at its root.
390
00:29:12.410 --> 00:29:15.120
For St. Paul, at least, the root problem
391
00:29:15.120 --> 00:29:19.500
is that of finding something even more significant
392
00:29:19.500 --> 00:29:21.313
and far more significant in the world
393
00:29:21.313 --> 00:29:23.763
than conventional virtue and piety.
394
00:29:24.800 --> 00:29:27.063
Not that he scorns these qualities,
395
00:29:28.150 --> 00:29:30.873
but that he will not settle for them alone.
396
00:29:32.020 --> 00:29:35.210
There must be something to carry us
397
00:29:35.210 --> 00:29:37.710
beyond the sweet smell of virtue
398
00:29:38.780 --> 00:29:42.160
and beyond the luxury of success.
399
00:29:45.418 --> 00:29:48.607
And to speak in this way is to speak to all of us.
400
00:29:51.500 --> 00:29:54.543
Job's case is the one we more commonly preach about,
401
00:29:55.630 --> 00:29:58.083
and it deserves our respectful pity.
402
00:29:59.300 --> 00:30:02.050
To endure, as William Faulkner pointed out
403
00:30:02.050 --> 00:30:03.633
in many of his great novels,
404
00:30:04.690 --> 00:30:07.963
to endure is to be already on the road to greatness.
405
00:30:09.790 --> 00:30:12.670
But most of us at the moment face more subtle,
406
00:30:12.670 --> 00:30:15.190
though equally relentless demands
407
00:30:15.190 --> 00:30:17.143
than the demand of sheer endurance.
408
00:30:18.570 --> 00:30:20.283
We must endure of course,
409
00:30:21.670 --> 00:30:26.670
but we somehow transcend the very pleasures and delights
410
00:30:26.780 --> 00:30:29.650
that make up the traditionally good life.
411
00:30:29.650 --> 00:30:34.223
And in doing that, we have shown a new kind of endurance.
412
00:30:35.360 --> 00:30:38.660
We must have you see the toughness
413
00:30:38.660 --> 00:30:41.703
and the strength to live with our privilege.
414
00:30:42.560 --> 00:30:44.810
And that's another kind of demand
415
00:30:44.810 --> 00:30:46.453
than the Lord made upon Job.
416
00:30:48.130 --> 00:30:49.310
Now, when I say this,
417
00:30:49.310 --> 00:30:51.560
I would not want you for a moment to mistake.
418
00:30:53.210 --> 00:30:55.990
Few of us can resolve the problem I'm talking about
419
00:30:55.990 --> 00:30:58.630
in the fashion of Thoreau, for instance.
420
00:30:58.630 --> 00:31:02.070
We cannot simply set the world aside
421
00:31:02.070 --> 00:31:06.893
and go and create our own simplified final universe.
422
00:31:08.150 --> 00:31:09.980
Certainly, I would not pretend to you
423
00:31:09.980 --> 00:31:11.400
for a moment that I could.
424
00:31:11.400 --> 00:31:14.173
And if I did, my family would rise up and laugh at me,
425
00:31:15.100 --> 00:31:18.780
or that I commend this negative resolution
426
00:31:18.780 --> 00:31:22.560
of the problem of living in a privileged
427
00:31:22.560 --> 00:31:24.563
and successful human community.
428
00:31:26.260 --> 00:31:29.873
After all, I do have the right to remind myself and you
429
00:31:29.873 --> 00:31:32.940
that this solution worked for Thoreau
430
00:31:32.940 --> 00:31:35.143
only because Emerson paid his taxes.
431
00:31:36.460 --> 00:31:39.940
And I'm not sure that if we all did this,
432
00:31:39.940 --> 00:31:41.963
we would've resolved a thing.
433
00:31:43.220 --> 00:31:45.063
And yet, the problem remains.
434
00:31:46.730 --> 00:31:51.403
The good life taken by itself is not good enough.
435
00:31:52.650 --> 00:31:54.983
And Saint Paul tells us why.
436
00:31:57.090 --> 00:31:59.830
Beyond man's bondage to history,
437
00:31:59.830 --> 00:32:02.103
beyond time and beyond death,
438
00:32:03.240 --> 00:32:07.190
and equally beyond the seductions of traditional success
439
00:32:08.660 --> 00:32:11.290
stands a quality in human life
440
00:32:12.790 --> 00:32:14.770
that must still be reached for,
441
00:32:14.770 --> 00:32:16.913
must constantly be reached for.
442
00:32:20.640 --> 00:32:23.500
The deceptions of childishness,
443
00:32:23.500 --> 00:32:25.393
the mirrors of childishness,
444
00:32:26.250 --> 00:32:29.340
beyond all the immediate glories of country,
445
00:32:29.340 --> 00:32:32.483
which are also, at times, mirrors of childishness,
446
00:32:33.510 --> 00:32:36.980
beyond pride in family, beyond material possession
447
00:32:36.980 --> 00:32:38.840
stands the quality of heart
448
00:32:39.920 --> 00:32:44.833
that is neither charity nor love,
449
00:32:45.760 --> 00:32:49.883
but protects of our common meaning for both those words.
450
00:32:50.930 --> 00:32:53.670
And it's that quality that St. Paul
451
00:32:53.670 --> 00:32:58.073
is reaching so hard to explore for himself and for us.
452
00:33:00.240 --> 00:33:02.703
And, you know, precisely because this is so,
453
00:33:03.750 --> 00:33:08.750
because he is reaching so hard for this difficult quality,
454
00:33:11.840 --> 00:33:14.490
we have found it easy to ignore what he really meant.
455
00:33:15.590 --> 00:33:18.530
He really meant much the same thing that Christ meant
456
00:33:18.530 --> 00:33:22.190
when he reminded us that the second great commandment
457
00:33:22.190 --> 00:33:25.993
laid upon us was to love our neighbor as ourselves.
458
00:33:27.080 --> 00:33:29.670
In that deceptively simple phrase
459
00:33:29.670 --> 00:33:33.200
lives not only the heart of Paul's great chapter,
460
00:33:33.200 --> 00:33:35.720
the one you've heard this morning,
461
00:33:35.720 --> 00:33:39.280
but the heart of much that brings us back to the university
462
00:33:39.280 --> 00:33:43.463
and back to the hard demands of our own world.
463
00:33:45.370 --> 00:33:47.040
We often misunderstand
464
00:33:47.040 --> 00:33:49.673
that second great commandment laid upon us.
465
00:33:50.770 --> 00:33:52.600
And you will remember that Christ said
466
00:33:52.600 --> 00:33:55.000
there were only two great commandments.
467
00:33:55.000 --> 00:33:56.853
He was not long on commandments.
468
00:33:57.820 --> 00:34:01.920
He was simply concerned to articulate the two
469
00:34:01.920 --> 00:34:04.020
that happened to be infinite in their meaning
470
00:34:04.020 --> 00:34:05.877
and include all the others.
471
00:34:07.889 --> 00:34:11.563
And that include us no matter what our creed,
472
00:34:12.820 --> 00:34:15.483
our sect, our way of life.
473
00:34:17.120 --> 00:34:20.920
When he says that we should love God with all our mind
474
00:34:20.920 --> 00:34:22.880
and all our heart and all our strength,
475
00:34:22.880 --> 00:34:25.430
he's saying what we can understand,
476
00:34:25.430 --> 00:34:27.723
even if we cannot practice it very often,
477
00:34:28.580 --> 00:34:32.883
but to love our neighbor as ourselves, we do not understand.
478
00:34:33.930 --> 00:34:36.220
We commonly take the statement to mean
479
00:34:36.220 --> 00:34:39.650
that we should love our neighbor instead of ourselves.
480
00:34:39.650 --> 00:34:41.083
We smile politely.
481
00:34:42.020 --> 00:34:45.760
And after paying lip service to the remarkable, the divine,
482
00:34:45.760 --> 00:34:48.920
the unrealistic selflessness of the remark,
483
00:34:48.920 --> 00:34:52.143
we go our own way, knowing that it is not for us.
484
00:34:53.780 --> 00:34:57.190
I am certain that this is so.
485
00:34:57.190 --> 00:35:00.020
This is the way we treat that passage.
486
00:35:00.020 --> 00:35:02.230
At least I'm certain it is so for me,
487
00:35:02.230 --> 00:35:03.670
because it took me many years
488
00:35:03.670 --> 00:35:06.870
to read that one sentence properly.
489
00:35:06.870 --> 00:35:10.270
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
490
00:35:10.270 --> 00:35:12.730
That is like yourself,
491
00:35:12.730 --> 00:35:15.690
with the energy you give to all your own ambitions,
492
00:35:15.690 --> 00:35:17.753
your own dreams, your own hungers.
493
00:35:19.120 --> 00:35:21.500
That lends a good deal of power to love,
494
00:35:21.500 --> 00:35:24.680
to say, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
495
00:35:24.680 --> 00:35:28.680
And that we can understand whether we like it or not.
496
00:35:28.680 --> 00:35:30.980
Again, it's not easy, but it's understandable.
497
00:35:33.330 --> 00:35:36.833
And the commandment tells us, just as Paul tells us,
498
00:35:38.330 --> 00:35:42.463
that though faith and hope and love all abide,
499
00:35:43.340 --> 00:35:45.280
it is not remotely surprising
500
00:35:45.280 --> 00:35:47.993
that love or charity or agape,
501
00:35:48.890 --> 00:35:51.243
to use the untranslatable word again,
502
00:35:52.090 --> 00:35:56.633
is bound to be at the center of the whole human venture.
503
00:36:01.472 --> 00:36:04.970
To say this in its turn is to come right back
504
00:36:04.970 --> 00:36:07.270
to the heart of the university,
505
00:36:07.270 --> 00:36:10.923
and right back to your own deepest hope for yourselves,
506
00:36:12.300 --> 00:36:15.023
as well as to your fears about your world.
507
00:36:17.350 --> 00:36:19.560
Many of you, in addition to the traditional
508
00:36:19.560 --> 00:36:22.230
and proper awards of life to which you look forward
509
00:36:22.230 --> 00:36:23.823
are looking for something more.
510
00:36:24.730 --> 00:36:26.080
We call it involvement.
511
00:36:26.080 --> 00:36:27.630
We call it commitment.
512
00:36:27.630 --> 00:36:30.470
In the language of French existentialism,
513
00:36:30.470 --> 00:36:31.623
we call it engagement.
514
00:36:32.900 --> 00:36:34.880
There's been a lot of nonsense spoken
515
00:36:34.880 --> 00:36:38.100
and written on the subject in the last 20 years,
516
00:36:38.100 --> 00:36:40.513
as there always is about anything fashionable,
517
00:36:41.580 --> 00:36:43.630
but there's been a lot of profound sense
518
00:36:43.630 --> 00:36:45.613
written in thought and talk, too.
519
00:36:47.340 --> 00:36:49.203
I would remind you this morning,
520
00:36:50.210 --> 00:36:53.303
simply to define this sense of involvement,
521
00:36:54.150 --> 00:36:55.760
which so many of you,
522
00:36:55.760 --> 00:36:58.917
like so many of your elders, deeply yearn for.
523
00:36:59.870 --> 00:37:02.290
To find this involvement or fulfillment,
524
00:37:02.290 --> 00:37:05.120
to use an older word, or love,
525
00:37:05.120 --> 00:37:07.943
to use the word which has concerned us here today,
526
00:37:09.350 --> 00:37:11.770
you do not need far away places
527
00:37:12.670 --> 00:37:17.670
and romantic ventures and all the stamp of the new.
528
00:37:22.180 --> 00:37:26.000
Great work is to be done in those far away places.
529
00:37:26.000 --> 00:37:29.023
Great discoveries made about the human spirit there,
530
00:37:30.560 --> 00:37:33.830
but those same discoveries, those same ventures
531
00:37:33.830 --> 00:37:38.043
exist just as well in the hospitals of Durham,
532
00:37:39.180 --> 00:37:41.473
in the classrooms of South Chicago,
533
00:37:42.700 --> 00:37:45.093
in the laboratories of DuPont,
534
00:37:46.540 --> 00:37:48.553
in the engineering firms of Charlotte.
535
00:37:50.360 --> 00:37:53.643
When Christ says the kingdom of heaven is within you,
536
00:37:55.072 --> 00:37:58.283
he is not speaking to a location or a sect,
537
00:38:00.060 --> 00:38:03.223
not even to those who call themselves Christian.
538
00:38:04.820 --> 00:38:07.410
He is speaking to an active state
539
00:38:07.410 --> 00:38:09.453
of the human mind and heart,
540
00:38:10.650 --> 00:38:13.033
a direction within each of us,
541
00:38:13.990 --> 00:38:18.450
but also, may I say, a direction in a university
542
00:38:18.450 --> 00:38:21.520
if it's truly itself, because after all,
543
00:38:21.520 --> 00:38:23.930
universities are people too.
544
00:38:23.930 --> 00:38:25.803
They are organic, as you are.
545
00:38:27.320 --> 00:38:30.350
No institution is more diverse.
546
00:38:30.350 --> 00:38:33.663
None must make room for more varieties of idea.
547
00:38:34.650 --> 00:38:37.610
None must struggle to do so much justice
548
00:38:37.610 --> 00:38:39.653
to legitimate differences of opinion,
549
00:38:40.720 --> 00:38:43.810
but what we must constantly teach you
550
00:38:43.810 --> 00:38:46.620
and our world and ourselves,
551
00:38:46.620 --> 00:38:49.690
because remember, we are in this with you,
552
00:38:49.690 --> 00:38:51.040
those of you who graduated.
553
00:38:52.290 --> 00:38:54.400
What we must constantly teach
554
00:38:54.400 --> 00:38:56.320
and what makes us truly a university
555
00:38:57.490 --> 00:39:02.490
is that we manage this variety, this diversity,
556
00:39:05.250 --> 00:39:07.750
not an indifference,
557
00:39:07.750 --> 00:39:10.370
not through the smugness of tolerance
558
00:39:10.370 --> 00:39:13.000
with which we really cloak indifference
559
00:39:13.000 --> 00:39:14.790
because tolerance is an acceptable
560
00:39:14.790 --> 00:39:18.890
and seemingly a noble word, while indifference betrays us,
561
00:39:18.890 --> 00:39:21.850
but all too often, mere tolerance means mere indifference,
562
00:39:21.850 --> 00:39:22.950
and no more than that.
563
00:39:24.120 --> 00:39:27.250
We meet this problem in the university with the warm,
564
00:39:27.250 --> 00:39:32.250
definite involved response to other ideas and other people.
565
00:39:33.680 --> 00:39:37.723
That response we call love in St Paul's sense of the term.
566
00:39:39.580 --> 00:39:43.423
The mandates of a university are many,
567
00:39:44.790 --> 00:39:48.203
and they are bound to change from decade to decade.
568
00:39:49.740 --> 00:39:53.470
The one mandate, the one single mandate
569
00:39:53.470 --> 00:39:55.223
of a university is clear,
570
00:39:56.670 --> 00:39:59.470
to give each of us, not just each of you
571
00:39:59.470 --> 00:40:01.983
who graduate tomorrow, but each of us,
572
00:40:03.060 --> 00:40:06.140
some enduring sense of what it means
573
00:40:06.140 --> 00:40:08.933
to live in true community with one another,
574
00:40:10.320 --> 00:40:12.820
community which can only exist
575
00:40:13.840 --> 00:40:16.513
if we love our neighbor as ourselves,
576
00:40:17.860 --> 00:40:21.323
and so come to understand what he really is.
577
00:40:22.674 --> 00:40:24.790
Not what we would force him to be,
578
00:40:24.790 --> 00:40:27.100
not what we would like him to be,
579
00:40:27.100 --> 00:40:30.170
not what would be convenient for us,
580
00:40:30.170 --> 00:40:32.913
but for what he really is.
581
00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:38.280
That is the great single privilege
582
00:40:38.280 --> 00:40:40.483
of the educated mind and heart.
583
00:40:42.127 --> 00:40:44.830
And that is the enduring center
584
00:40:45.740 --> 00:40:49.113
of a true university, a great university.
585
00:40:49.970 --> 00:40:54.970
All the other things are secondary compared to this.
586
00:40:58.220 --> 00:41:00.583
Now about that subject, I might say much,
587
00:41:01.920 --> 00:41:04.883
but let me put it to you, as I close,
588
00:41:06.200 --> 00:41:09.870
in of all things, a brief poem,
589
00:41:09.870 --> 00:41:14.870
which is today, I hope, a poem of today.
590
00:41:15.730 --> 00:41:18.120
At least I've been writing it in the last few weeks.
591
00:41:18.120 --> 00:41:21.493
So I assume it belongs to today in some sense of the word,
592
00:41:22.810 --> 00:41:27.123
but is also our hope and our dream for you,
593
00:41:28.130 --> 00:41:30.193
something of our dream for ourselves,
594
00:41:31.450 --> 00:41:36.450
seen in the light of St Paul's own flaring insight.
595
00:41:36.860 --> 00:41:38.370
And you know, I didn't realize
596
00:41:38.370 --> 00:41:40.440
until the poem was pretty well underway
597
00:41:40.440 --> 00:41:42.830
and the voices were talking to me
598
00:41:42.830 --> 00:41:46.410
that I was writing about 1 Corinthians 13.
599
00:41:46.410 --> 00:41:48.130
I started to write about something
600
00:41:48.130 --> 00:41:49.350
I was told to write about.
601
00:41:49.350 --> 00:41:51.653
I can't say more to you than that.
602
00:41:52.650 --> 00:41:56.730
The voice spoke to me like Socrates' daimon.
603
00:41:56.730 --> 00:41:58.253
It spoke and I had to listen.
604
00:41:59.340 --> 00:42:01.880
And eventually, I discovered that the voice was making
605
00:42:01.880 --> 00:42:04.860
quite a bit of use of St. Paul.
606
00:42:04.860 --> 00:42:06.610
And that's why I have the impudence
607
00:42:07.670 --> 00:42:10.880
to close this morning with a poem
608
00:42:10.880 --> 00:42:15.193
which is for you and for us all.
609
00:42:19.960 --> 00:42:24.293
I see times dance, the tango of your youth,
610
00:42:25.717 --> 00:42:28.340
poised like an arrogant flower
611
00:42:30.100 --> 00:42:34.823
perilous in all its tempo and its clear end.
612
00:42:37.320 --> 00:42:39.313
I see you through a glass,
613
00:42:40.400 --> 00:42:42.493
dark yet true.
614
00:42:44.100 --> 00:42:47.330
The heirs of all, possessors of our dreams
615
00:42:47.330 --> 00:42:48.713
and all too near them.
616
00:42:50.780 --> 00:42:55.183
Will you learn as little as may be of our dark unrest,
617
00:42:57.050 --> 00:42:59.113
but something that can displace it?
618
00:43:01.090 --> 00:43:04.650
Will you learn before the flower turns fruit
619
00:43:05.920 --> 00:43:10.920
and dust to serve no lusted lights,
620
00:43:13.570 --> 00:43:17.490
but sharp, well-tempered, unrelenting love
621
00:43:19.060 --> 00:43:21.640
that turns our bones to fire
622
00:43:23.310 --> 00:43:28.173
and brings our crooked back straight to the high altar.
623
00:43:30.490 --> 00:43:35.233
So will your wisdom flourish with your age,
624
00:43:36.980 --> 00:43:41.083
and God in you breathe his clear image.
625
00:43:43.799 --> 00:43:48.377
And so, may he, for each of you in your own way.
626
00:43:50.120 --> 00:43:52.163
And so, may he, for us all.
627
00:43:53.890 --> 00:43:58.613
And will you come to us soon again?
628
00:44:00.480 --> 00:44:03.067
And may we be with you always.
629
00:44:28.300 --> 00:44:31.420
There is one necessary message which must be given
630
00:44:31.420 --> 00:44:33.713
to one member of the congregation.
631
00:44:35.120 --> 00:44:39.400
If Dr. Susan Dees of the Department of Pediatrics
632
00:44:40.330 --> 00:44:44.273
is in the congregation, she is being paged.
633
00:44:45.370 --> 00:44:47.500
Will she come immediately
634
00:44:47.500 --> 00:44:50.073
after the benediction to the vestry?
635
00:44:52.320 --> 00:44:54.650
And now, let the congregation rise
636
00:44:54.650 --> 00:44:56.653
and receive the blessing of God.
637
00:45:03.850 --> 00:45:08.850
Unto God's gracious mercy and protection do we commit you.
638
00:45:12.000 --> 00:45:16.333
The Lord bless you and keep you.
639
00:45:18.360 --> 00:45:21.213
The Lord make his face to shine upon you.