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Baccalaureate  Address
University of the South
May 12, 2007First of all let me say what a distinct pleasure and honor to be with you at Sewanee on this celebrative, but solemn occasion.  I particularly delight in being here at All Saints chapel which is rich with the experiential patina of memories that season and mellow these walls and give me the comfort of familiarity.

I remember in the 1970’s the first celebration of the Holy Eucharist by the first woman ordained at Sewanee. The whole community gathered here including the dogs since in those days, dogs could run freely on the Mountain.  And of course the chapel doors were never shut in good weather. Our recently ordained friend owned a large golden retriever which on this day she had secured over near the chaplains’ office.  But during the grand celebration, the dog somehow escaped, wandered into the nave and just as the bread and wine were being lifted up by the new chaplain, her dog poked his head out from under the frontal hanging on the altar.  The congregation could not contain our laughter and the novice priest, who couldn’t see the dog from behind the holy table, was puzzled and mortified!

I also remember many bitter cold mornings when I sneaked into this chapel wearing my Nike and sweat suit and all by myself , ran round and round the nave and the ambulatory for three or four miles.  It’s not a bad track for your body and your soul.  But I never told anybody about my “holy” workout space.

And also I hold the sad memory of bearing the ashes of my dear friend and Seminary Dean, Terry Holmes, down this aisle on a sweaty August day, as we said good-bye to one we loved and sang Easter alleluias. It is indeed remarkable to me that in four short years as a Seminary faculty member in the late 1970’s, I and my family were shaped and molded by this holy mountain with all its quirkiness and its foggy splendor.

But that was then; and this is now, and what a “now” it is for you graduates! So even though today feels vaguely like a happy homecoming for me personally, a baccalaureate address for you presented me with a problem. I had accepted your vice chancellor’s and trustees’ kind invitation months ago, and yet I had difficulty getting started.  What does one who graduated from college in 1957 have to say to folks who are graduating from college in 2007?  (You do the math…50 years!) Well, no words readily rolled into my consciousness. Try as I might – again and again- no themes or subjects jumped out in any original way.  My wife, Allison, said, “Don’t worry about it. Nobody listens to speeches at graduations anyway!”  And, of course, I knew, as usual, that she was right.
But I kept wondering anyway, why I was blocked?  Why was I resisting?  Perhaps it was because I think that you really have more to say to me – to teach me- than I have to say to you.  Or perhaps it was because I know that mere words are so inadequate to illuminate this major transition you are making from the warm and comfortable reality of Sewanee to the relative independence of living on you own.  Or perhaps it was my ambivalent feelings concerning this old battered and beautiful world which you are entering in a new way.

And then I realized suddenly what was really holding me back.  I was embarrassed. I needed to come clean with you about the mess we all know my generation has made. The journalist Bill Moyers said in a similar address last year at Hamilton College, that he was not sure anyone from our generation should be saying anything to your generation except “we’re sorry. We’re really sorry for the mess you are inheriting.”  And I think Moyers is so very right! We’re sorry for the war in Iraq. We’re sorry for the rampart mendacity.  We’re sorry for our obsession with acquiring and consuming and the huge debt both personal and national which you will have to pay back.  We’re sorry that the gap between rich and poor gets wider and wider everyday and that fewer and fewer folks have adequate health care.  We’re sorry that the rest of the world distrusts us.  We’re sorry for the cynicism which seems the only connection between polarized groups in our post modern deconstructed culture. We’re sorry for our ecological irresponsibility, our addiction to oil and for urban sprawl and global warming.  We’re sorry for the lack of decency, gentleness and good cheer.
So there you are.  I’ve said it.  We need your forgiveness. But most of all what the world needs now is your vision, your courage, your vigor … not to turn us back to the good old days which probably never were, but to lead us forward to a new day with fresh ideas and fecund energy and buoyant hope.

Recently I saw a collection of photographs taken over several years of famous people jumping or falling or dancing  --  all in mid air.  They had left the ground, but they had not landed.  They were frozen by the camera for all time in the air. It seems to me that’s  not such a bad  image for our times.  We’ve left the old ways, old assumptions, old paradigms, and yet we have not landed anywhere.  Our feet, as a society, as a world, are planted firmly in mid air.In the Pulitzer Prize winning play, “Green Pastures,” which is set in heaven, the angel Gabriel at one point informs the Lord, “Everything nailed down is coming loose.”  To some degree that is true for our world today.  And I am here to tell you that there is no “how-to” book that I know of  at least, no tested rules, ways, procedures, or actions – no proven formulae by which we can set it right, plant it firmly again, nail it down.

So what do we do?  How do we live?  I think the truth is that we’ve got to loosen up, to develop a radical flexibility, and to be open more and more to all that is around us.  To some degree, we’ve got to relax and fly together by the seat of our intuitive pants.  Perhaps that looseness – that – openness – that potential creativity – is the way that the Spirit of God does in fact lead us – the way the Spirit of God does in fact guide us. Jesus said one time in Matthew’s Gospel that when you find yourself in an alien territory, don’t worry so much about exactly what you are to say or to do because when the time comes the words and deeds you need will be given you by the Spirit.
 And I believe that that kind of openness...that kind of faithfulness…only comes when one relaxes into trusting God’s Spirit.  Maybe that could be your greatest gift to this uptight, over planned, overworked, superhighway world, that is up in the air about where its ultimate meaning lies.  So don’t fret so much about getting it exactly right, just worry about being open and creative…about being present to life in all its colors and tones, with all its various textures, with all its dimensions, with all its agony and its ecstasy. 

Now I am sure that I don’t have to tell you there is much “unfulfillment” in this life – a great deal of life is spent on the verge, at the door, but not over the threshold.  So much of the business of life is unfinished…up in the air.  If you don’t know that now, you will begin to know it rather quickly as you get older.  We are all full of aspirations and dreams, but life itself seems to have a way of changing our plans and altering those dreams.  Getting a little older, or some sort of dramatic change in health or income, or even this significant transition from college can provide circumstances that jerk us around and we have to improvise and to change our dreams. And we begin slowly to learn that nothing in life is without limits. Most of the time we don’t like to deal with changed dreams. We want stories with happy endings:  Boy meets girl. Girl gets boy. They live happily after. The war is over. The flag is waved. Mission accomplished! We all stand and sing the Alma Mater and march out of graduation with no regret.  Onward and upward. We love clean endings…satisfying last scenes….Conclusive commencements.  But that’s just not the way life tends to be.  Maybe in the old movies…maybe in the fairy tales, but not in real life. Things tend to get messier in real life.

Over the last twenty years or so, some sociologists have suggested that your generation is inclined to postpone adulthood, graduating from college, not marching into the future, but meandering through an extended adolescence…unable to make commitments … even to leaving home…afraid to invest in the future.  One writer even called your recent peers “the postponed generation”, and postulated that your crowd is suspicious of risking anything and of making any commitment until you know for certain that it will turn out right.

Well, I’m not sure these assessments are completely accurate.  But, alas, I do know that the perfect job and the perfect mate are not life.  Life is an accumulation of decisions that could have been made differently, a lot of baggage called regret, faces you will not see again, words that come out wrong, actions that don’t work out as you planned them.  Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about it and that’s probably pretty good, because accumulated regret and obsessive second guessing leave tomorrow in paralysis.

So I don’t think your generation is paralyzed with caution so much, but rather you are acutely aware of limits – ecological limits, political limits, economical limits.  Compared to my generation with Age of Aquarius optimism, perhaps your awareness of limits may be one of your greatest virtues – a profound middle stance between sentimental optimism on the one hand and cynical despair on the other.

And that’s the major challenge that I believe you face in this world.  Here is your challenge: how to live with life’s limits without being paralyzed. Or put another way, how can I move on understanding that I do not have all the right answers to my own or the world’s needs, that I am limited in my vision, that things may not work out as I had planned or expected.  And yet still live with purpose, with imagination and humility, and have some fun along the way! I believe it takes deep wells of hope to do that…an audacious hope that whoever we are and whatever we are called to be, God knows ultimately what it all means… a living hope that God knows where it all leads…a sustaining hope that God really does put us to good purposes on behalf of all people everywhere, even though we may make terrible messes along the way. The American poet, Emily Dickinson, put it well when she wrote:
Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops --  at all. So sing, you class of 2007!  You don’t have to know all the words.  But sing in hope, byhope and with hope… and never stop at all!  God bless you!  Amen..

Comments? Contact Harry at: hpritchett@stphilipscathedral.org

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