Charge to the Class of 1993
We congratulate you, College, Seminary, and pioneer MBA graduates on your safe arrival, at last, in this temporary harbor. You have sailed through fair weather and foul, high seas and flat calms. But here you are, all washed and robed, looking remarkably distinguished. Your families and friends, your mentors and long-suffering bankrollers, are breathing a sigh of relief, and quietly reassessing their budgets. And you are thinking of the world out there waiting for you, of embarkation on new voyages, and of the road ahead and hoping that I will be brief.
This is, for you, and indeed for all of us who wish you well, a tender moment. You are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, come here today to wish you well and to pray for your future. More than fifty of us from the Class of 1943, robed in gold, sit here as a sign of our solidarity with you. Those with spiritual eyes to see and ears to hear, will sense the presence of another host, robed in white, cheering you on, a century of North Park graduates standing together with the ancient saints of the Church.
The stakes for you — for all of us — are very great. At a moment in our global experience when individual lives appear to count for very little, we uphold the North Park conviction that every individual is infinitely precious, a message from God to the human future. What you choose to do with yourself involves all the rest of us, generations past, generations to come.
Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek epic poet of the 20th century, reported his dream of meeting with his grandfather, high on a mountain in Crete:
You looked at me, and as you looked at me I felt that this world was a cloud charged with thunderbolts and wind, man’s soul a cloud charged with thunderbolts and wind, that God puffs above them, and that salvation does not exist. Lifting my eyes, I glanced at you. I was about to ask, Grandfather, is it true that salvation does not exist? But my tongue had stuck to my throat. I was about to go near you, but my knees gave way beneath me.
At that point you held out your hand as if I were drowning and you wished to save me.
I clutched it avidly. It was spattered with multicolored paints. You seemed to be painting still. The hand was burning. I gained strength and momentum by touching it, and was able to speak.
“Give me a command, beloved Grandfather.”
Smiling, you placed your hand upon my head. It was not a hand, it was multicolored fire. The flame suffused my mind to the very roots.
“Reach what you can, my child.”
Your voice was grave and dark, as though issuing from the deep larynx of the earth. It reached the roots of my mind, but my heart remained unshaken.
“Grandfather,” I called more loudly now, “give me a more difficult, more Cretan command.”
Hardly had I finished speaking when, all at once, a hissing flame cleaved the air. The indomitable ancestor with the thyme roots tangled in his locks vanished from my sight; a cry was left on Sinai’s peak, an upright cry full of command, and the air trembled:
“Reach what you cannot!”
He goes on:
... God is the most resplendent face of despair, the most resplendent face of hope. You are pushing me beyond hope and despair, Grandfather, beyond the age-old frontiers. Where? I gaze around me, I gaze inside me. Virtue has gone mad, geometry and matter have gone mad. The law-giving mind must come again to establish a new order, new laws. The world must become a richer harmony. (Report to Greco, 21-22)
To shake your heart, then, I charge you, first: “Reach what you cannot!”
Deep inside the human spirit is the urgency of creation. We make children and paintings and satellites and world systems because we must. It is the very image of God in whom we are created beings. A life which denies this creative passion for frontiers is a crippled life, a denial, finally, that any of us human beings is more than a biological accident.
Life, true life, is much more than a forty-year job with an assured pension and an insurance policy to cover the costs of a nursing home.
But the passions of the heart must live in balance with the mind.
Listen to some familiar words from Abraham Lincoln, writing to the Congress of the United States during the dark days of late 1862, as he sent along the text of his Emancipation Proclamation:
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history . . . . The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation . . . . The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present . . . . In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free . . .. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Our present is stormy, but our past has not been quiet. The dogmas we shared in 1943 were mostly ripped away by the press of astonishing events: the bloodiest war in world history, the Holocaust, the bomb, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, men walking on the moon, and desktop computers, to name a symbolic few. If we as the class of 1943 can report any firm consensus to you graduates, I am certain it would be this: Prepare yourself to be surprised. The vast forces for change transforming us and our world during the past century appear to be accelerating.
When did you last hear someone say, “What goes up must come down?” That may still be true of home runs and pop-ups, but it is not true of spaceship Magellan, circling the planet Venus and mapping its geology. How many other truisms have turned hollow in the wake of our experiences, good and bad?
Does this mean that you have wasted your lives here in the search for reliable knowledge? By no means and in no way, on the single condition that you remain critically aware that no body of knowledge is complete in itself, or comprehensive of all reality. What Newton did to Aristotle’s physics, quantum mechanics has now done to Newton’s system. All three are brilliant achievements, awesome to contemplate as intellectual syntheses; but all, alas, subject to still another revision tomorrow. What Freud revealed about the human unconscious has been revised and extended by Adler and Jung and Viktor Frankl.
The essence of disenthralling ourselves lies in this — that we make the daily effort to remind ourselves how temporal and how temporary our intellectual certainties really are. My classmates of fifty years ago would agree, I think, that we were never in greater danger of doing a really dumb thing than when we were uncritically certain of our position. As Cromwell shouted at his fellow Puritans in Parliament, “I beseech you brethren, in the bowels of Christ, to consider that you may be wrong.”
We call this virtue humility, the capacity to bow before the vast uncertainty of life without thereby inhibiting our full participation in it as mature adults. It is the nature of life that we must act if we wish to live. Understanding and accepting that we almost always act out of incomplete knowledge liberates us from the foolishness of pretension and the pressures of ego, and this in turn liberates what we do know to enable us to make a more balanced judgment. The giants of thought are particularly marked by this king of humility, as Viktor Frankl reminded us last Thursday evening, because they know better than the rest of us how little they really know.
This then is my second charge to you: “Disenthrall yourselves.”
But no passion and no intellectual clarity can be had without a base. Long ago in Syracuse, Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to place it on, and I can move the world.”
At North Park, from the beginning, we have proclaimed the unmoved rock on which all things depend, Jesus the Christ who is Lord and Companion and Friend. Our ancestors, who were simple greenhorn immigrants, built this place for us in that immovable faith, and we proclaim it today as our faith.
Almost two millennia ago, an elderly rabbi sat in prison in Rome, knowing perfectly well that he faced execution. He called himself “the prisoner of Christ,” and wrote a letter to his old friends in the garrison town of Phillippi which contained the following lines:
Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Phil. 4:8).
Fifty years ago, an elderly British historian, a serious Christian, delivered his own judgment on his own stormy times:
I have nothing to say at the finish except that if one wants a permanent rock in life and goes deep enough for it, it is difficult for historical events to shake it. There are times when we can never meet the future with enough elasticity of mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us the maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted. (Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History, 146).
I have charged you: “Do what you cannot!”
I have charged you: “Disenthrall yourselves!”
And now I charge you: “Hold to Christ and live life!”
And the spirit of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit rest upon you all, now and forever. Amen.