Waldo Beach - "The Need for Roots"; Paul Knight - Baccalaureate Sermon (June 5, 1966)

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-	Jesus Christ our Lord.	0:04
	Amen.	0:07
	(crowd talking indistinctly)	0:09
-	Several times already this weekend,	1:01
	returning as a prodigal member	1:06
	of what is generously called the Duke family.	1:09
	In groping to identify a vaguely familiar face,	1:14
	you have no doubt had recourse to the device of asking,	1:21
	where are you now, John?	1:26
	The answer usually doesn't help.	1:32
	Oh, we've just moved to White Plains.	1:35
	We like it so much.	1:37
	Little help in identifying people are	1:41
	by locating them in space.	1:45
	We are a restless breed and a migratory population.	1:48
	The addressograph in the Alumni Office	1:55
	suffers a periodic nervous breakdown of fear, fatigue.	1:58
	In earlier days, people were identified	2:05
	by their roots in a place.	2:09
	Saul of Tarsis.	2:12
	Francis of Assisi.	2:15
	But nowadays, saying John of White Plains	2:18
	would be ridiculous.	2:23
	John will live there three or four years and move on.	2:26
	A migrant worker, an Okie in a station wagon,	2:31
	he doesn't belong anywhere.	2:36
	He has no home in a set place.	2:38
	He is rootless, a nomad.	2:42
	Many analysts of our culture have noted	2:47
	that our physical rootlessness as an American people	2:52
	has important spiritual consequences.	2:57
	We are a breed from stayed custom	3:01
	and sterile conventions,	3:05
	emancipated from ancestor worship	3:08
	and old hometown ways.	3:12
	And that's to the good.	3:15
	But there are losses in rootlessness,	3:17
	in continual transplanting,	3:21
	a deep insecurity and a nervous anxiety	3:24
	of which Walter Lippmann speaks.	3:29
	Quote, virtual despair comes from being uprooted,	3:34
	homeless, naked, alone, and unled.	3:40
	It comes from being lost in a universe	3:45
	where the meaning of life and of the social order	3:47
	are no longer given from on high	3:50
	and transmitted from ancestors,	3:53
	but have to be invented and discovered	3:57
	and experimented with, each lonely individual for himself.	3:58
	End quote.	4:05
	But to be truly human, a man needs roots of some sort.	4:08
	If he be uprooted from soil, from place,	4:15
	from an ancestral home,	4:20
	he will the more anxiously seek roots sideways,	4:23
	so to speak, in all sorts of community relations.	4:27
	The organization man, John in White Plains is a joiner,	4:32
	trying to find security and stability of soul	4:39
	in belonging to this and that,	4:42
	but it won't do.	4:46
	For all these people that he's joined with are transient,	4:49
	acquaintances, quick contacts,	4:55
	here today, gone tomorrow.	4:58
	The organization, man in suburbia,	5:03
	packed close together with his neighbors	5:05
	is a frantic belonger, yet lacks roots for his soul,	5:08
	is still homesick, a stranger.	5:15
	Our text from Ephesians	5:21
	suggests another dimension of existence,	5:25
	another kind of rootedness.	5:29
	They're familiar words	5:33
	addressed to the colony of Christians at Ephesus,	5:36
	a prayer of Paul that Christ may dwell	5:41
	in your hearts through faith.	5:45
	That you being rooted and grounded in love may have power	5:48
	to grasp the range of the love of God, Christ.	5:57
	An odd, remote, archaic word,	6:05
	far from existence in White Plains,	6:10
	yet it speaks of a quality of life	6:15
	that this university honors	6:18
	and seeks to cultivate in its students.	6:21
	Returning to this campus as alumni,	6:26
	possibly, you may be led in this moment of worship	6:31
	to reflect on what in your time here as a student,	6:38
	you acquired of a spiritual sense	6:43
	that has proved strength and stay	6:49
	against weariness and despair	6:52
	and emptiness in the middle years.	6:54
	I cannot speak for you on this secret matter,	7:01
	but I would report to you as alumni	7:09
	that Duke University remains committed	7:13
	to a view of liberal education,	7:16
	which provides for a student a sense of being rooted	7:20
	and grounded in the love of God.	7:25
	When the undergraduates tomorrow are given,	7:30
	with their diplomas, copies of the Bible,	7:34
	this is not a sentimental gesture	7:39
	to a dead past or a dead God.	7:42
	It betokens a living connection	7:46
	with a taproot of contemporary culture.	7:49
	I would report to you that Sunday after Sunday	7:54
	in this place, in the beauty of holiness,	7:58
	the university service of worship,	8:03
	well attended by undergraduates,	8:06
	celebrates the love of God	8:09
	and conveys the sense of reverence and mystery	8:13
	by which the life of the mind is surrounded and sustained,	8:18
	and the moral obligation it demands.	8:24
	I would report to you that six hours	8:30
	of academic work in religion is required	8:34
	in the BA curriculum.	8:37
	And this out of the settled,	8:40
	though not unquestioned conviction	8:43
	of administration and faculty,	8:48
	that no student is humanely and liberally educated	8:51
	who is not acquainted through critical study	8:57
	with the Judeo-Christian roots of Western culture.	9:03
	A Duke student should be literate about his tradition,	9:08
	about the heritage of spirit,	9:14
	even if he choose to reject it	9:17
	in the building of his own house of faith.	9:21
	That many students respond positively to this requirement	9:26
	and are glad to discover roots they	9:32
	or their parents had forgotten	9:36
	is attested by the large number	9:41
	who elect advanced courses	9:43
	with the Department of Religion.	9:47
	What sort of persons, graduates, alumni	9:52
	does Duke hope to produce by attending to these roots?	9:57
	If rooted and grounded in the love of God,	10:05
	what kind of flower can be hoped to appear?	10:10
	The answer might be put in terms of a double image,	10:19
	opposite connotations that ring in the mind	10:26
	when we think of the word roots.	10:31
	On the one hand, roots imply stability, security.	10:36
	Person who has deep and strong	10:43
	spiritual roots is solid, reliable, sure.	10:46
	His style of life and decision is one of steady serenity.	10:52
	He's not turned over, upset, thrown.	11:00
	He can bend with a shifting wind	11:06
	without snapping or being uprooted.	11:09
	He is more likely to be a late bloomer than an early fader,	11:14
	as the academic jargon has it,	11:21
	but he's the kind of person	11:24
	on whom his neighbors count in his community,	11:26
	rooted and grounded in the love of God	11:31
	that transcends time and space.	11:34
	He moves amid the losses and gains of finitude,	11:37
	the comings and goings, the roaming of his external life	11:43
	with equanimity and integrity.	11:49
	Whatever and wherever his housing, he has a sense of home.	11:53
	The ties of earth's loves may be short and transient.	12:01
	God's love is sure.	12:09
	This is the conservative, the traditional,	12:13
	the staid quality that rootedness brings to flower,	12:16
	but there is an opposite quality, too,	12:23
	without which the traditional style of life	12:27
	can become stuffy, conventional, reactionary.	12:30
	And that is the radical action	12:35
	inspired by the love of God.	12:40
	As a matter of fact,	12:44
	radical literally means going to the roots,	12:46
	to the fundamentals from the Latin, radix.	12:51
	It is the hope of this university	12:58
	that the religious roots here nurtured	13:01
	will produce radical social action	13:03
	on the part of its students and graduates,	13:07
	that the love of God will inspire quite unconventional,	13:11
	disturbing, drastic expressions	13:16
	of the love of neighbor,	13:22
	of faith active in love,	13:25
	as Luther's phrase has it.	13:28
	It cannot all be pleasant and nice and conventional	13:32
	if faithful to the love of God in Christ	13:37
	who brought not peace, but a sword,	13:42
	and called his disciples to risk daring trouble.	13:46
	You don't need to be told	13:56
	there's a deep surging unrest	13:59
	among college students these days.	14:03
	Their protests, their riots, their demonstrations	14:08
	are a rebuke against the phoniness	14:14
	of convention and respectability.	14:17
	Often they represent an authentic,	14:22
	honest search for positive values.	14:25
	And a shouting claim that we should perform as we profess.	14:30
	The action of Duke students in civil rights demonstrations,	14:38
	in anti-poverty programs,	14:44
	in community service projects in Durham,	14:47
	in Vista and Peace Corps work all are ways	14:50
	in which they are taking their religion seriously,	14:55
	radically, trying to escape the cloistered virtue	14:59
	of a gothic ghetto.	15:07
	In its strange way, radical student action is rooted	15:11
	and grounded in the love of God.	15:16
	It is a mark that new life,	15:20
	new shoots are coming from the old roots.	15:22
	It is a mark of the grace of God appearing,	15:27
	as it always has in history,	15:32
	in unconventional places outside the churches.	15:35
	To say that Duke seeks to cultivate	15:41
	and graduate radical conservatives	15:44
	or conservative radicals is not to speak	15:50
	a self-contradiction.	15:55
	Indeed, such a common grounding in the love of God	15:57
	is the shared faith that defines	16:06
	and constitutes the authentic Christian community,	16:11
	the church invisible.	16:16
	We are a pilgrim people,	16:20
	scattered and dispersed in the world,	16:23
	but one fellowship with roots deep in the tradition,	16:28
	and there from deriving the power to understand	16:34
	above ground, on earth,	16:40
	whether it be Ephesus or White Plains,	16:45
	the breadth and length and height and depth	16:50
	of the love of Christ.	16:57
	Amen.	17:02
	Let us pray.	17:03
	Now, to him who, by the power at work within us,	17:15
	is able to do far more abundantly than we ask or think.	17:20
	To him be glory in the church	17:26
	and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.	17:29
	(gentle chanting music)	18:37
-	Men and women of Duke, good morning.	19:12
	I have no claim on you today	19:19
	that is not also shared by all who care for you	19:23
	and wish you well, almost no claim.	19:29
	There are a few minor matters to be performed tomorrow,	19:32
	but apart from that, I have no claims upon you.	19:35
	I speak for all those others who care for you	19:41
	and care about you.	19:44
	But I want also, if I may,	19:48
	to speak for a few minutes this morning,	19:50
	not only about your condition and my own,	19:53
	but to our common condition.	19:55
	Our scripture lesson was chosen because it implies,	20:00
	and indeed embodies three of the concerns	20:05
	to which all men are servants,	20:09
	and which we, in our own day,	20:13
	feel with a singular poignancy.	20:15
	Saint Paul himself was a man who would insist	20:22
	on that sense of relatedness	20:27
	between his words and our worries,	20:30
	for he was a great human example	20:34
	of the very things about which he wrote.	20:38
	They worried him,	20:42
	and so, he tried to say them aloud.	20:45
	He was that kind of tortured and demanding human being,	20:49
	a very difficult saint indeed.	20:55
	But then it turns out that most saints are	20:59
	when you get acquainted with them.	21:02
	I haven't known very many but,	21:03
	you smile, I know.	21:07
	I have known one or two and they are difficult.	21:08
	Thank heaven, they are.	21:13
	St. Paul was a very difficult one indeed.	21:15
	It's almost impotent to preach about this,	21:18
	the greatest chapter of 1 Corinthians,	21:20
	and yet it's crucial.	21:24
	It's a chapter that's remarkable in many ways,	21:26
	but above all because in so brief a compass,	21:28
	it relates to one another	21:32
	these three central human preoccupations	21:34
	that I've mentioned to you.	21:37
	First, the fact that our uncertain,	21:40
	and yet somehow certain human directions	21:46
	cannot be separated from history,	21:49
	from the child and the man	21:52
	and the growth from one to the other.	21:54
	Second, the fact that life's dark ambiguities	21:57
	cannot be separated from its equal sense	22:03
	of order and direction.	22:07
	And third, the fact that child cannot become man,	22:11
	nor darkness become direction	22:18
	without the active working of love	22:21
	in a very special sense of that word.	22:25
	We've had trouble now for nearly 2,000 years	22:28
	translating agape properly.	22:31
	That's the word that is used in the Greek.	22:34
	We translated charity.	22:39
	We translated love.	22:41
	We use many words for it.	22:43
	No one word is adequate to it.	22:46
	I shall try somehow to throw a net around it this morning,	22:49
	knowing that none of the words will quite do.	22:53
	In a sense, this chapter of 1 Corinthians is a true poem.	22:59
	It relates these three major insights	23:04
	about the hope and the necessary labor of all our lives.	23:06
	And it relates them in such a way	23:11
	that no one of them can be well-understood	23:14
	without the others.	23:19
	Insight leads to insight.	23:22
	And there is a beautiful symmetry in the development	23:25
	from a first awareness of love,	23:28
	through a range of the world's ambitions	23:31
	and yard sticks of progress,	23:34
	to a profound sense of human growth.	23:38
	And then finally, back again to a recognition	23:43
	of the absolute primacy of love or charity in human life.	23:46
	And, you know, I might just say parenthetically,	23:55
	that Paul's insight is particularly alive	23:57
	for a university community because we don't specialize	24:00
	in charity and love in his sense of the word.	24:04
	They come rather far down our list of virtues usually.	24:09
	And we tend somewhat to feel that judgment	24:13
	and analysis are the hardcore of the important world,	24:16
	and charity, at best, as soft	24:21
	and even squashy external coating	24:23
	to that hardcore of the world,	24:27
	which is the world of the intellect	24:29
	taken apart from the rest of man.	24:31
	Paul speaks out to tell us that we cannot separate them,	24:34
	and he will tell us why if we let him.	24:38
	In fact, he will tell us why anyway,	24:41
	because he is that kind of person.	24:44
	Because he is a hard and difficult man,	24:47
	he will tell us whether we want to hear or not.	24:48
	He wants us, first of all, to know how deeply,	24:52
	and I hope, by the way,	24:57
	you don't mind these yellow sheets,	24:58
	know how deeply we are the children of time.	25:01
	Many of you have seen things like them before.	25:03
	As you know, university presidents	25:11
	don't usually have ghost writers.	25:12
	This one certainly does not.	25:15
	I sometimes think the ghost could do better than I,	25:17
	but no ghost writer would be foolish enough	25:20
	to write on stuff like this.	25:22
	Only a mad academic would do it.	25:25
	He insists, first of all,	25:30
	to come back to that other academic content maker	25:32
	and hardworking man, first of all,	25:37
	that we are the children of time,	25:40
	even though we can be more than that.	25:42
	Through the whole chapter, which Dr. Woodall read you,	25:46
	runs a superb sense of change and growth,	25:49
	not only in the darkened mirror that becomes a clear image,	25:52
	but in the child who becomes man.	25:57
	Indeed, that whole sequence of human ventures	26:00
	against which charity is set are ventures of time,	26:03
	of the history in which we are so constantly caught.	26:08
	We, it's both a sociable and a terrifying word.	26:15
	It binds us to one another,	26:22
	but it binds us equally to all those	26:26
	who have had to live out before us	26:28
	the tragic victories of their history.	26:30
	You feel this burden very keenly at the moment,	26:34
	just as we do.	26:37
	We who happen to be your elders,	26:40
	and so, do not always articulate our concern,	26:43
	our fear, our terror,	26:47
	precisely because we feel it so intimately	26:50
	and must live it out and are busy living it out	26:54
	in our brief, passionate moment of responsibility.	26:58
	But you must know this about us	27:06
	as you graduate from Duke,	27:08
	that often the things that haunt you	27:11
	about your world haunt us as profoundly.	27:13
	Sometimes we simply get weary living out those things which,	27:17
	without any insult to you,	27:24
	you are still freer to talk out than we are,	27:27
	though we must live out certain of their consequences.	27:32
	You are already living out some of them.	27:36
	You will live out more.	27:39
	I want you to know this morning,	27:41
	quite personally and directly,	27:42
	that we live them out together.	27:44
	Whatever the tragic victories	27:47
	of our passionate moment in time turn out to be,	27:50
	we live them out with you.	27:54
	To use language like this to you is already to imply	27:58
	Saint Paul's second major concern,	28:03
	the blindness of that very history	28:07
	from which man cannot escape,	28:10
	for the glass stays dark if men pursue only their ambitions,	28:13
	even their most noble ambitions.	28:19
	And it's striking, you know, that in this one chapter,	28:22
	Paul manages to cover almost all the noble ones.	28:25
	It would be easy and trivial to set aside	28:29
	all the conventional vices,	28:32
	and thousands of people have done it	28:33
	in thousands of sermons.	28:35
	What Paul does instead is to set aside	28:37
	all the conventional virtues and talents,	28:41
	brilliance, prophecy,	28:45
	faith of the ordinary sort, generosity.	28:48
	He cuts them down, not because they are bad,	28:51
	but because by themselves they are not enough.	28:54
	I'm afraid that popular evangelists	28:58
	often fail to understand this.	29:01
	And so, they strike at the small branches	29:04
	of our human predicament and not at its root.	29:07
	For St. Paul, at least, the root problem	29:12
	is that of finding something even more significant	29:15
	and far more significant in the world	29:19
	than conventional virtue and piety.	29:21
	Not that he scorns these qualities,	29:24
	but that he will not settle for them alone.	29:28
	There must be something to carry us	29:32
	beyond the sweet smell of virtue	29:35
	and beyond the luxury of success.	29:38
	And to speak in this way is to speak to all of us.	29:45
	Job's case is the one we more commonly preach about,	29:51
	and it deserves our respectful pity.	29:55
	To endure, as William Faulkner pointed out	29:59
	in many of his great novels,	30:02
	to endure is to be already on the road to greatness.	30:04
	But most of us at the moment face more subtle,	30:09
	though equally relentless demands	30:12
	than the demand of sheer endurance.	30:15
	We must endure of course,	30:18
	but we somehow transcend the very pleasures and delights	30:21
	that make up the traditionally good life.	30:26
	And in doing that, we have shown a new kind of endurance.	30:29
	We must have you see the toughness	30:35
	and the strength to live with our privilege.	30:38
	And that's another kind of demand	30:42
	than the Lord made upon Job.	30:44
	Now, when I say this,	30:48
	I would not want you for a moment to mistake.	30:49
	Few of us can resolve the problem I'm talking about	30:53
	in the fashion of Thoreau, for instance.	30:55
	We cannot simply set the world aside	30:58
	and go and create our own simplified final universe.	31:02
	Certainly, I would not pretend to you	31:08
	for a moment that I could.	31:09
	And if I did, my family would rise up and laugh at me,	31:11
	or that I commend this negative resolution	31:15
	of the problem of living in a privileged	31:18
	and successful human community.	31:22
	After all, I do have the right to remind myself and you	31:26
	that this solution worked for Thoreau	31:29
	only because Emerson paid his taxes.	31:32
	And I'm not sure that if we all did this,	31:36
	we would've resolved a thing.	31:39
	And yet, the problem remains.	31:43
	The good life taken by itself is not good enough.	31:46
	And Saint Paul tells us why.	31:52
	Beyond man's bondage to history,	31:57
	beyond time and beyond death,	31:59
	and equally beyond the seductions of traditional success	32:03
	stands a quality in human life	32:08
	that must still be reached for,	32:12
	must constantly be reached for.	32:14
	The deceptions of childishness,	32:20
	the mirrors of childishness,	32:23
	beyond all the immediate glories of country,	32:26
	which are also, at times, mirrors of childishness,	32:29
	beyond pride in family, beyond material possession	32:33
	stands the quality of heart	32:36
	that is neither charity nor love,	32:39
	but protects of our common meaning for both those words.	32:45
	And it's that quality that St. Paul	32:50
	is reaching so hard to explore for himself and for us.	32:53
	And, you know, precisely because this is so,	33:00
	because he is reaching so hard for this difficult quality,	33:03
	we have found it easy to ignore what he really meant.	33:11
	He really meant much the same thing that Christ meant	33:15
	when he reminded us that the second great commandment	33:18
	laid upon us was to love our neighbor as ourselves.	33:22
	In that deceptively simple phrase	33:27
	lives not only the heart of Paul's great chapter,	33:29
	the one you've heard this morning,	33:33
	but the heart of much that brings us back to the university	33:35
	and back to the hard demands of our own world.	33:39
	We often misunderstand	33:45
	that second great commandment laid upon us.	33:47
	And you will remember that Christ said	33:50
	there were only two great commandments.	33:52
	He was not long on commandments.	33:55
	He was simply concerned to articulate the two	33:57
	that happened to be infinite in their meaning	34:01
	and include all the others.	34:04
	And that include us no matter what our creed,	34:07
	our sect, our way of life.	34:12
	When he says that we should love God with all our mind	34:17
	and all our heart and all our strength,	34:20
	he's saying what we can understand,	34:22
	even if we cannot practice it very often,	34:25
	but to love our neighbor as ourselves, we do not understand.	34:28
	We commonly take the statement to mean	34:33
	that we should love our neighbor instead of ourselves.	34:36
	We smile politely.	34:39
	And after paying lip service to the remarkable, the divine,	34:42
	the unrealistic selflessness of the remark,	34:45
	we go our own way, knowing that it is not for us.	34:48
	I am certain that this is so.	34:53
	This is the way we treat that passage.	34:57
	At least I'm certain it is so for me,	35:00
	because it took me many years	35:02
	to read that one sentence properly.	35:03
	You shall love your neighbor as yourself.	35:06
	That is like yourself,	35:10
	with the energy you give to all your own ambitions,	35:12
	your own dreams, your own hungers.	35:15
	That lends a good deal of power to love,	35:19
	to say, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.	35:21
	And that we can understand whether we like it or not.	35:24
	Again, it's not easy, but it's understandable.	35:28
	And the commandment tells us, just as Paul tells us,	35:33
	that though faith and hope and love all abide,	35:38
	it is not remotely surprising	35:43
	that love or charity or agape,	35:45
	to use the untranslatable word again,	35:48
	is bound to be at the center of the whole human venture.	35:52
	To say this in its turn is to come right back	36:01
	to the heart of the university,	36:04
	and right back to your own deepest hope for yourselves,	36:07
	as well as to your fears about your world.	36:12
	Many of you, in addition to the traditional	36:17
	and proper awards of life to which you look forward	36:19
	are looking for something more.	36:22
	We call it involvement.	36:24
	We call it commitment.	36:26
	In the language of French existentialism,	36:27
	we call it engagement.	36:30
	There's been a lot of nonsense spoken	36:32
	and written on the subject in the last 20 years,	36:34
	as there always is about anything fashionable,	36:38
	but there's been a lot of profound sense	36:41
	written in thought and talk, too.	36:43
	I would remind you this morning,	36:47
	simply to define this sense of involvement,	36:50
	which so many of you,	36:54
	like so many of your elders, deeply yearn for.	36:55
	To find this involvement or fulfillment,	36:59
	to use an older word, or love,	37:02
	to use the word which has concerned us here today,	37:05
	you do not need far away places	37:09
	and romantic ventures and all the stamp of the new.	37:12
	Great work is to be done in those far away places.	37:22
	Great discoveries made about the human spirit there,	37:26
	but those same discoveries, those same ventures	37:30
	exist just as well in the hospitals of Durham,	37:33
	in the classrooms of South Chicago,	37:39
	in the laboratories of DuPont,	37:42
	in the engineering firms of Charlotte.	37:46
	When Christ says the kingdom of heaven is within you,	37:50
	he is not speaking to a location or a sect,	37:55
	not even to those who call themselves Christian.	38:00
	He is speaking to an active state	38:04
	of the human mind and heart,	38:07
	a direction within each of us,	38:10
	but also, may I say, a direction in a university	38:13
	if it's truly itself, because after all,	38:18
	universities are people too.	38:21
	They are organic, as you are.	38:23
	No institution is more diverse.	38:27
	None must make room for more varieties of idea.	38:30
	None must struggle to do so much justice	38:34
	to legitimate differences of opinion,	38:37
	but what we must constantly teach you	38:40
	and our world and ourselves,	38:43
	because remember, we are in this with you,	38:46
	those of you who graduated.	38:49
	What we must constantly teach	38:52
	and what makes us truly a university	38:54
	is that we manage this variety, this diversity,	38:57
	not an indifference,	39:05
	not through the smugness of tolerance	39:07
	with which we really cloak indifference	39:10
	because tolerance is an acceptable	39:13
	and seemingly a noble word, while indifference betrays us,	39:14
	but all too often, mere tolerance means mere indifference,	39:18
	and no more than that.	39:21
	We meet this problem in the university with the warm,	39:24
	definite involved response to other ideas and other people.	39:27
	That response we call love in St Paul's sense of the term.	39:33
	The mandates of a university are many,	39:39
	and they are bound to change from decade to decade.	39:44
	The one mandate, the one single mandate	39:49
	of a university is clear,	39:53
	to give each of us, not just each of you	39:56
	who graduate tomorrow, but each of us,	39:59
	some enduring sense of what it means	40:03
	to live in true community with one another,	40:06
	community which can only exist	40:10
	if we love our neighbor as ourselves,	40:13
	and so come to understand what he really is.	40:17
	Not what we would force him to be,	40:22
	not what we would like him to be,	40:24
	not what would be convenient for us,	40:27
	but for what he really is.	40:30
	That is the great single privilege	40:35
	of the educated mind and heart.	40:38
	And that is the enduring center	40:42
	of a true university, a great university.	40:45
	All the other things are secondary compared to this.	40:49
	Now about that subject, I might say much,	40:58
	but let me put it to you, as I close,	41:01
	in of all things, a brief poem,	41:06
	which is today, I hope, a poem of today.	41:09
	At least I've been writing it in the last few weeks.	41:15
	So I assume it belongs to today in some sense of the word,	41:18
	but is also our hope and our dream for you,	41:22
	something of our dream for ourselves,	41:28
	seen in the light of St Paul's own flaring insight.	41:31
	And you know, I didn't realize	41:36
	until the poem was pretty well underway	41:38
	and the voices were talking to me	41:40
	that I was writing about 1 Corinthians 13.	41:42
	I started to write about something	41:46
	I was told to write about.	41:48
	I can't say more to you than that.	41:49
	The voice spoke to me like Socrates' daimon.	41:52
	It spoke and I had to listen.	41:56
	And eventually, I discovered that the voice was making	41:59
	quite a bit of use of St. Paul.	42:01
	And that's why I have the impudence	42:04
	to close this morning with a poem	42:07
	which is for you and for us all.	42:10
	I see times dance, the tango of your youth,	42:19
	poised like an arrogant flower	42:25
	perilous in all its tempo and its clear end.	42:30
	I see you through a glass,	42:37
	dark yet true.	42:40
	The heirs of all, possessors of our dreams	42:44
	and all too near them.	42:47
	Will you learn as little as may be of our dark unrest,	42:50
	but something that can displace it?	42:57
	Will you learn before the flower turns fruit	43:01
	and dust to serve no lusted lights,	43:05
	but sharp, well-tempered, unrelenting love	43:13
	that turns our bones to fire	43:19
	and brings our crooked back straight to the high altar.	43:23
	So will your wisdom flourish with your age,	43:30
	and God in you breathe his clear image.	43:36
	And so, may he, for each of you in your own way.	43:43
	And so, may he, for us all.	43:50
	And will you come to us soon again?	43:53
	And may we be with you always.	44:00
-	There is one necessary message which must be given	44:28
	to one member of the congregation.	44:31
	If Dr. Susan Dees of the Department of Pediatrics	44:35
	is in the congregation, she is being paged.	44:40
	Will she come immediately	44:45
	after the benediction to the vestry?	44:47
	And now, let the congregation rise	44:52
	and receive the blessing of God.	44:54
	Unto God's gracious mercy and protection do we commit you.	45:03
	The Lord bless you and keep you.	45:12
	The Lord make his face to shine upon you.	45:18

Item Info

Title:

Waldo Beach - "The Need for Roots"; Paul Knight - Baccalaureate Sermon (June 5, 1966)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4fn14t1x

Date:

June 5, 1966

Speaker:

Beach, Waldo

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0340
ref5885_g8p
uachapelsermaud
duke:628018
dcrau002337
ark:/87924/r4fn14t1x
b7312832-633c-44de-b428-abebe084b418

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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Waldo Beach - "The Need for Roots"; Paul Knight - Baccalaureate Sermon (June 5, 1966)

Transcript

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Duke University Archives

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