James T. Cleland - "A Love That Wanted Re - Renewing" (June 2, 1968)
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| (Church choir singing) | 0:06 | |
| ♪ Hallelujah ♪ | 0:08 | |
| ♪ Hallelujah ♪ | 0:13 | |
| ♪ Hallelujah ♪ | 0:19 | |
| ♪ Hallelujah ♪ | 0:25 | |
| ♪ Hallelujah ♪ | 0:31 | |
| ♪ Hallelujah ♪ | 0:36 | |
| ♪ Hallelujah ♪ | 0:44 | |
| (Church choir singing "Hallelujah" continuously) | 0:57 | |
| (Church choir increases tempo) | 4:27 | |
| (Church choir increases tempo) | 4:43 | |
| (Church choir reverts to normal tempo) | 5:23 | |
| (Church choir music ends) | 6:22 | |
| - | Let us pray. | 7:18 |
| Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts | 7:21 | |
| be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, | 7:26 | |
| our strength, and our redeemer. | 7:31 | |
| Amen. | 7:36 | |
| In the dull and commonplace occurrences | 7:46 | |
| of day-to-day academic living, | 7:50 | |
| there are occasional happenings and events | 7:55 | |
| which carry with them an element of wondering surprise: | 7:59 | |
| defeating Georgia Tech in football, | 8:05 | |
| developing an Olympic runner, | 8:13 | |
| nurturing a Rhodes scholar, | 8:18 | |
| organizing a vigil with the concern of a Quaker meeting, | 8:23 | |
| and the discipline of a regiment of the guards, | 8:30 | |
| graduation. | 8:36 | |
| Now, what does want to say at such times beyond, | 8:39 | |
| "Jolly good? Three hot cheers? Well done." | 8:43 | |
| I do not know if you who are graduating are in this chapel | 8:52 | |
| voluntarily or per force, | 8:57 | |
| the door into the chapel today used to be the one-way | 9:05 | |
| into the indoor stadium on the morrow. | 9:10 | |
| I am here by order. | 9:15 | |
| The president is sidetracked by illness. | 9:22 | |
| The invitation to me to take his place was not a request | 9:27 | |
| conveyed by the university marshall, but a command. | 9:32 | |
| It was a proper command. | 9:39 | |
| I obeyed. | 9:43 | |
| My Calvinistic blood being not entirely | 9:46 | |
| thinned out by transfusions of Methodism. | 9:50 | |
| (Crowd laughing) | 9:53 | |
| What do I say to you who probably have no desire to be here | 10:00 | |
| looking upon the baccalaureate service as but | 10:08 | |
| the second last hurdle to be overcome before graduation. | 10:11 | |
| Now I promise you I shall deal with nothing new. | 10:19 | |
| You are in no mood to hear anything new. | 10:24 | |
| Let us begin right here at Duke, | 10:30 | |
| undergraduate Duke, | 10:33 | |
| in the field of literature, | 10:36 | |
| in the area of American poetry with Robert Frost. | 10:39 | |
| In his poetic soliloquy, "A Lone Striker," | 10:47 | |
| Frost has given us a picture of a prodigal son | 10:52 | |
| in the far country of factories and time clocks. | 10:57 | |
| But before he became a mere cog in the machine, | 11:03 | |
| he came to himself by remembering what he had once loved | 11:08 | |
| and lost a while. | 11:16 | |
| And so headed back for another place, a wood, | 11:19 | |
| here's the poem about a textile worker | 11:27 | |
| in a New England mill town | 11:30 | |
| who was late for his shift and was therefore | 11:34 | |
| locked out for 30 minutes with his pay docked. | 11:38 | |
| The poem is called "A Lone Striker." | 11:45 | |
| The swinging mill bell changed its rate | 11:51 | |
| to tolling like the count of fate, | 11:54 | |
| and though at that the tardy ran, | 11:58 | |
| one failed to make the closing gate. | 12:01 | |
| There was a law of God or man | 12:06 | |
| that on the one who came too late | 12:11 | |
| the gate for half an hour be locked, | 12:14 | |
| his time be lost, his pittance docked. | 12:18 | |
| He stood rebuked and unemployed. | 12:24 | |
| The straining mill began to shake. | 12:31 | |
| The mill, though many-many-eyed, | 12:35 | |
| had eyes inscrutably opaque | 12:38 | |
| so that he couldn't look inside | 12:42 | |
| to see if some forlorn machine | 12:44 | |
| was standing idle for his sake. | 12:48 | |
| He couldn't hope its heart would break. | 12:53 | |
| And yet he thought he saw the scene: | 12:57 | |
| The air was full of dust of wool. | 12:59 | |
| A thousand yarns were under pull, | 13:02 | |
| but pull so slow, with such a twist, | 13:05 | |
| all day from spool to lesser spool, | 13:10 | |
| it seldom overtaxed their strength. | 13:14 | |
| They safely grew in slender length. | 13:18 | |
| And if one broke by any chance, | 13:22 | |
| the spinner saw it at a glance. | 13:26 | |
| The spinner still was there to spin. | 13:29 | |
| That's where the human still came in. | 13:34 | |
| Her deft hand showed with finger rings | 13:38 | |
| among the harplike spread of strings. | 13:40 | |
| She caught the pieces end to end | 13:43 | |
| and, with a touch that never missed, | 13:46 | |
| not so much tied as made them blend. | 13:48 | |
| Man's ingenuity was good. | 13:54 | |
| He saw it plainly where he stood, | 13:59 | |
| yet found it easy to resist. | 14:04 | |
| He knew another place, a wood, | 14:10 | |
| and in it, tall as trees, were cliffs, | 14:15 | |
| and if he stood on one of these, | 14:19 | |
| 'twould be among the tops of trees, | 14:21 | |
| their upper branches round him wreathing, | 14:24 | |
| their breathing mingled with his breathing. | 14:27 | |
| If he stood. | 14:35 | |
| Enough of ifs. | 14:38 | |
| He knew a path that wanted walking. | 14:41 | |
| He knew a spring that wanted drinking. | 14:45 | |
| He knew a thought that wanted further thinking, | 14:50 | |
| a love that wanted re-renewing. | 14:56 | |
| Nor was this just a way of talking | 15:00 | |
| to save him the expense of doing. | 15:02 | |
| With him it boded action, deed. | 15:05 | |
| The factory was very fine. | 15:09 | |
| He wished it all the modern speed. | 15:14 | |
| Yet, after all, 'twas not divine, | 15:19 | |
| that is to say, 'twas not a church. | 15:23 | |
| He never would assume that he'd | 15:27 | |
| be any institution's need. | 15:30 | |
| But he said then and still would say, | 15:32 | |
| if there should ever come a day | 15:36 | |
| when industry seemed like to die | 15:40 | |
| because he left it in the lurch, | 15:44 | |
| or even merely seemed to pine | 15:47 | |
| for want of his approval, why, | 15:50 | |
| come get him | 15:55 | |
| they knew where to search. | 15:57 | |
| There are four lines there that have haunted me | 16:02 | |
| ever since I heard Robert Frost read that poem | 16:03 | |
| when we were colleagues at Amherst College. | 16:07 | |
| "He knew a path that wanted walking, | 16:12 | |
| he knew a spring that wanted drinking, | 16:15 | |
| a thought that wanted further thinking, | 16:20 | |
| a love that wanted re-renewing." | 16:23 | |
| You see the idea I want to play with. | 16:28 | |
| Is there anything in our lives, | 16:33 | |
| particularly in your lives, members of the graduating class, | 16:36 | |
| which will always be there because of you? | 16:41 | |
| Leighton, or Peyton, | 16:46 | |
| to be forgotten for a while and to be rediscovered | 16:49 | |
| unexpectedly, unintentionally, | 16:54 | |
| for better or for worse? | 17:00 | |
| Let's think about Duke, not the Duke that will be, | 17:05 | |
| but the Duke which surrounded, and nurtured. | 17:09 | |
| and angered, and excited, and bored us | 17:14 | |
| these past years. | 17:19 | |
| The chapel, the stadiums, the libraries, | 17:22 | |
| the auditoriums, the labs, the gardens, | 17:27 | |
| the union, the Chronicle, the faculty. | 17:33 | |
| Allen building. | 17:38 | |
| The coffee shop, the theater in the round, | 17:46 | |
| the singing groups, the cabin parties, the classrooms, | 17:50 | |
| picketing, the vigil. | 17:54 | |
| Is there anything there? | 17:57 | |
| Any path that's worth walking again, | 18:00 | |
| any spring to slate the thirst? | 18:05 | |
| Any thought which merits a second thought? | 18:09 | |
| Any love worth re-renewing? | 18:15 | |
| Let's think about some paths and springs | 18:19 | |
| and thoughts and loves. | 18:21 | |
| It's a fair supposition that most of you had to sit through | 18:25 | |
| some English course, even as elementary | 18:28 | |
| a semester survey as From Chaos to Kipling. | 18:34 | |
| But surely some folk have been introduced to you | 18:42 | |
| that you would gladly meet again, | 18:46 | |
| a few with whom you would like to become better acquainted. | 18:49 | |
| They're our Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims | 18:53 | |
| who made even a Scottish Presbyterian wished that he | 18:57 | |
| were a Roman Catholic. | 19:01 | |
| (Crowd laughing) | 19:03 | |
| What if Hamlet with his spiritual crap, | 19:08 | |
| "To be or not to be?" | 19:11 | |
| Then our Falstaff, that rotund and genial rascal, | 19:15 | |
| and Porsche, smart, no doubt, | 19:21 | |
| but with good stuff in her mind and heart that she | 19:25 | |
| successfully challenged male supremacy. | 19:28 | |
| Think of Rip van Winkle, Prince of Sleepers, lucky beggar. | 19:33 | |
| And Mister Pickwick, a Sunday school edition | 19:41 | |
| of Mr. Falstaff. | 19:45 | |
| And Diana Vernon, Scott's only real heroine | 19:47 | |
| and Martin Adersmith in whom the scientific spirit | 19:53 | |
| became flesh. | 19:57 | |
| And Nat Turner, a new Negro folk hero | 20:00 | |
| created by a Duke man. | 20:06 | |
| There are places you will visit because you saw them | 20:10 | |
| in fancy here, | 20:13 | |
| old New York and old London, | 20:15 | |
| the Catskills and the Lake District, | 20:20 | |
| Chicago, hog butcher of the world. | 20:24 | |
| And Venice, Copenhagen, Paris, and even Edinburgh. | 20:28 | |
| Oh, I say that in the subdued tone. | 20:37 | |
| Finest thing that ever came out of Edinburgh | 20:43 | |
| was the 10 o'clock train to Glasgow. | 20:46 | |
| (Crowd laughing) | 20:49 | |
| Some of you are acquainted with the literature | 20:57 | |
| of other tongues with Greek tragedy | 21:00 | |
| and it's interweaving of fate and freewill, | 21:03 | |
| that old new riddle | 21:08 | |
| with Latin auditory, heavy, but shrewd, | 21:12 | |
| with German drama and the problem of every man in Faust, | 21:17 | |
| with the imagery of Dante | 21:23 | |
| and the logical despair of Camus. | 21:26 | |
| Oh, continue in that literary fellowship. | 21:30 | |
| Teach them all again, drink deep of some. | 21:35 | |
| There is refreshment and satisfaction at these springs. | 21:40 | |
| And then there's the whole range of scientific pursuits. | 21:48 | |
| You've been exposed to physics and chemistry, | 21:52 | |
| to botany and zoology, to geology, to astrophysics, | 21:55 | |
| bio-mathematics and neuro-anatomy. | 22:02 | |
| Is it wonderful that the Greeks had words in readiness | 22:08 | |
| for these new subjects? | 22:12 | |
| (Crowd laughing) | 22:14 | |
| Some of you, like me, are appalled by the ramifications | 22:20 | |
| of science. | 22:25 | |
| Others of you are fascinated. | 22:26 | |
| Some of you have just creeped through | 22:29 | |
| the required number of hours. | 22:32 | |
| Others of you are so happily and lively immersed in science | 22:36 | |
| as to make it both your profession and | 22:40 | |
| your avocation for the rest of your lives. | 22:43 | |
| I hope that you are all impressed with its method, | 22:49 | |
| to weigh and to measure accurately, | 22:54 | |
| to cut and to carve my nuclei, | 23:00 | |
| to discover and lay bare secrets with confidence. | 23:06 | |
| I hope that we appreciate the faith of the scientist | 23:13 | |
| to seek the truth, | 23:17 | |
| come whence it may, cost what it will. | 23:20 | |
| I hope we know the saints of science, | 23:27 | |
| Bacon, Kepler, Newton, | 23:30 | |
| Faraday, Darwin, Einstein. | 23:35 | |
| Make up your minds that there is a path | 23:40 | |
| which you will often walk, | 23:43 | |
| recalling over and over again, | 23:45 | |
| the perspectives you learned from your scientific studies, | 23:47 | |
| a passion for truth, | 23:52 | |
| a commitment to honest objective study | 23:56 | |
| and above all, | 24:01 | |
| a puzzled humility when you realize how little man knows | 24:03 | |
| and how much there is to be known. | 24:11 | |
| But for others of you, | 24:16 | |
| the wide range of the social sciences: | 24:18 | |
| history, political philosophy, government, | 24:20 | |
| sociology was your major. | 24:24 | |
| A few of you have taken part in the various domains of | 24:27 | |
| student government in your campus Tammany Halls. | 24:31 | |
| You've become sensitive to the interaction of theory and | 24:37 | |
| practice and you've run across ideas | 24:42 | |
| which keep repeating themselves down the centuries. | 24:45 | |
| There are the insistent difficult words, | 24:50 | |
| like "freedom." | 24:53 | |
| From what, to what? | 24:55 | |
| "Loyalty." How much, | 25:00 | |
| how wide and to which, what? | 25:05 | |
| "Justice." For whom, from whom, by whom. | 25:10 | |
| There's the even more interesting and vexing problem | 25:19 | |
| of the interrelatedness of words | 25:22 | |
| and the ideas which they convey. | 25:24 | |
| This is particularly true when two norms | 25:27 | |
| seem to come in conflict like liberty and law. | 25:30 | |
| Does one cancel out the other? | 25:36 | |
| Do they complement each other? | 25:40 | |
| Does law implement or restrict freedom? | 25:43 | |
| When? Where? How? | 25:49 | |
| what about patriotism and what old brotherhood? | 25:56 | |
| Is my loyalty to the United States hampered or sublimated | 26:00 | |
| by my allegiance to the United Nations? | 26:06 | |
| Can a man have two citizenships? | 26:12 | |
| Oh, that was the problem facing the Christian. | 26:17 | |
| As Paul put it, "My citizenship is in heaven." | 26:21 | |
| All right, what happens then | 26:25 | |
| when you come before an earthly court? | 26:27 | |
| The vigil has pointed out the clash of loyalties, | 26:32 | |
| or the classroom has but introduced you to thoughts | 26:37 | |
| that want further thinking to questions which will never | 26:41 | |
| be answered in any tidy fashion, | 26:46 | |
| which will haunt and fascinate us as long as we live. | 26:50 | |
| And think, you see where this last consideration | 26:56 | |
| is leading us? | 26:59 | |
| Let's do the area where basic questions are asked | 27:01 | |
| or should be asked to religion. | 27:04 | |
| It is important, maybe inevitable to ask about | 27:09 | |
| the quince and the quiver of life | 27:13 | |
| and how one should journey from birth to death. | 27:19 | |
| That came home to me again a few days ago | 27:24 | |
| when one of our medical residents died | 27:29 | |
| and his widow gave birth to their second child | 27:32 | |
| 12 and a half hours after her husband's death. | 27:38 | |
| Death and life. | 27:43 | |
| Two rooms in the same house. | 27:46 | |
| When is death the last enemy, as St. Paul called it? | 27:52 | |
| When is death Sister Death, as St. Francis called it? | 27:59 | |
| Does it make any difference to how we live now | 28:04 | |
| if we believe that death is finny | 28:08 | |
| or if we believe that death is a doorway to another, | 28:13 | |
| but continuing life. | 28:18 | |
| One of the obvious facts of contemporary life, | 28:22 | |
| a frightening commonplace, | 28:25 | |
| is the awesome advance in man's mastery | 28:28 | |
| of his physical environment | 28:32 | |
| without a corresponding progress in spiritual sensitivity | 28:34 | |
| so as to discipline and direct that mastery. | 28:42 | |
| Science with its resolute will for discovery | 28:48 | |
| with its courage to discard outworn hypothesis | 28:52 | |
| with its exuberance in achievement has given us | 28:57 | |
| almost unimaginable power. | 29:00 | |
| But we do not know even theoretically | 29:06 | |
| what to do with that power | 29:13 | |
| for our salvation, | 29:17 | |
| that is for our good health. | 29:19 | |
| Oh, it's not enough that you all must graduates | 29:23 | |
| be as good as your fathers. | 29:27 | |
| You probably are as good as your fathers and mothers. | 29:30 | |
| I think you're better. | 29:36 | |
| But better enough for survival? | 29:40 | |
| Does our religious heritage offer us any guidance? | 29:46 | |
| Our spiritual heritage is the Judeo-Christian faith, | 29:51 | |
| which faith Duke University has symbolized in this chapel. | 29:56 | |
| This religious tradition environment is recognized this | 30:02 | |
| very day in the fact that an alumni service, | 30:08 | |
| this baccalaureate service, the Hippocratic Oath ceremony, | 30:12 | |
| the pinning ceremony for graduating nurses | 30:18 | |
| and the Divinity School closing service of | 30:22 | |
| Holy Communion are all taking place today in this building | 30:24 | |
| erected to the glory of God | 30:32 | |
| in the name of his son, Jesus, the Christ. | 30:35 | |
| Now Jesus was a Jew. | 30:39 | |
| I've told you before that my mother | 30:44 | |
| could never understand that. | 30:45 | |
| How could Jesus have been a Jew when God was a Presbyterian? | 30:50 | |
| (Crowd laughing) | 30:54 | |
| I'm sure the first question she asked | 31:00 | |
| when she got to heaven, | 31:02 | |
| and I'm sure she was disappointed with the answer. | 31:02 | |
| She may have left, in fact. | 31:05 | |
| Jesus was a Jew and when he summed up his creed | 31:10 | |
| in one sentence, | 31:14 | |
| he did what Frost's lone striker decided he should do. | 31:17 | |
| Jesus took two thoughts that wanted further thinking, | 31:24 | |
| combined them and gave them to his disciples | 31:31 | |
| as a love that has to be constantly renewed. | 31:37 | |
| He took the central thought of Israel, the Shamar, | 31:43 | |
| the Lord, our God is one Lord and thou shalt love the Lord | 31:49 | |
| like God with all thy heart, soul, mind, | 31:55 | |
| and strength, | 31:59 | |
| or as the medics would put it psychosomatically. | 32:02 | |
| (Crowd laughing) | 32:05 | |
| But the new thing that Jesus did was to link that | 32:10 | |
| with another verse, not from Deuteronomy, | 32:15 | |
| but from Leviticus, | 32:19 | |
| thou shalt not avenge nor bear any grudge | 32:21 | |
| against the children of thy people, | 32:27 | |
| but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself | 32:29 | |
| and having indissoluble united them, | 32:34 | |
| Jesus added, "There is no other commandment | 32:39 | |
| greater than these." | 32:45 | |
| These two now made into one. | 32:48 | |
| But Jesus did not complete the job of rethinking. | 32:54 | |
| He left that to his followers in every generation. | 33:01 | |
| Those of us who take him seriously, | 33:06 | |
| though not literally, have to ask, | 33:09 | |
| and so seeking questions, | 33:13 | |
| "What is the meaning of love? | 33:16 | |
| How can love be commanded? | 33:19 | |
| What is the relation of love to truth? | 33:26 | |
| Which has the priority, when? | 33:31 | |
| Who is my neighbor? | 33:38 | |
| How wide is the neighborliness, which is brotherhood? | 33:41 | |
| Does love include both justice and mercy, | 33:49 | |
| and which is stressed when? | 33:55 | |
| How far is my personal freedom subordinated to goodwill | 34:00 | |
| for the brethren? | 34:05 | |
| Can they ever be one and the same? | 34:07 | |
| Is self-love assumed or denied by Jesus?" | 34:11 | |
| Now these are thoughts that want further thinking. | 34:21 | |
| And then more thinking after that. | 34:26 | |
| If you think on them, | 34:32 | |
| you may decide to discard them and seek elsewhere | 34:34 | |
| for your guidance in your pilgrimage | 34:41 | |
| between birth and death. | 34:44 | |
| If you wrestle with them until they bless you, | 34:47 | |
| you may find here a love renewed, | 34:53 | |
| a spring that gives us the water of life. | 34:58 | |
| And so, goodbye, | 35:05 | |
| and good luck to you all. | 35:10 | |
| In the name of the Lord. | 35:14 | |
| And now let the congregation rise | 35:18 | |
| and receive the blessing of God. | 35:21 | |
| Unto God's gracious mercy and protection | 35:32 | |
| do we commit you. | 35:38 | |
| The Lord bless you | 35:41 | |
| and keep you. | 35:45 | |
| The Lord make his face to shine upon you | 35:48 | |
| and be gracious unto you. | 35:52 | |
| The Lord lift up his countenance upon you | 35:55 | |
| and give you peace and joy | 35:59 | |
| this day and forevermore. | 36:04 |
