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The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University and Pusey Minister in Harvard’s Memorial Church, delivered the sermon at this morning’s Baccalaureate service on the 172nd Commencement day.
I’ll read two verses to you from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the 12th chapter, verses 1 and 2.
“I appeal to you therefore by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
My text is that second verse, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may be and prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
I’m delighted to have this opportunity to speak to you on this ancient and happy occasion in the life of Lafayette College. And in the very short time that I have been here, I have done my best to accommodate myself to your peculiar ways. For example, what is to everybody else in the world “Hog” [Hogg] Hall is clearly to you “Hoag” Hall. There must be a number of other adaptations to normal usage that could be readily found here, and I’m sure that if I stayed longer than I plan to, I would learn more of these peculiar ways.
This service is one of those very peculiar things. There is a sense of great joy attached to it. There is joy on the part of parents – rightly so. You are smart to be here. You have done this before, and there are clearly more of you than of your sons and daughters. Joy among parents is understandable at Baccalaureate. It may mean at least one less tuition in your household. It may mean surprise that your son or daughter has finally finished the course. And it may be a sense that some of your deferred ambitions actually will get to be played out in the lives of your children. There is joy for you.
There is certainly joy in the faculty, who seem remarkably absent this morning. Joy in the sense that so many of their pride and joy will actually be receiving degrees this afternoon, some of whom they will miss and some of whom they will be pleased never to see again.
Joy on the part of the faculty is understandable. But there also should be a sense of joy among the candidates for degrees. For you have been able to prove the truth of the old saying, “It is still possible to fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.”
Were I speaking this afternoon, I would say that many of you are surprised to find yourselves here today, surprised because you know you don’t deserve it, that you have managed to manipulate your way through one more narrow keyhole. And you will probably spend the rest of your lives doing that. You can redeem yourselves, of course, by giving a building to Lafayette College and helping its endowment grow and you can return in the form of satisfied alumni who cluck at the decline in standards since the day you left. There is joy everywhere, joy abounding—and our joy will be complete if I stop before the rain comes.
Now I want to remind you that probably a century ago this Baccalaureate service was a very different occasion from the one in which we find ourselves today. First, I suspect candidates for degrees would have been required to attend, and I suspect they would have been treated to a much longer sermon than the one I intend to give you this morning. The Baccalaureate service goes back to antiquity in academic institutions, and it was a confession and a concession that when all was said and done, you – candidates for the first degree in arts or in sciences – needed all the help that you could get, and more help than in fact the institution alone could provide.
And so the Baccalaureate was not an occasion for congratulations, at least not yet. It was an occasion for entreaty, intercession, and a profound prayer that God would bless your enterprise, would convert your knowledge to wisdom, and that you would be looked after safely in the big bad world. Over the years some people have understood the Baccalaureate service to be very much like the chaplain’s visit to the prisoner just before he is to be hanged. It is a sense that the chaplains know more than you do and it is the sense that the chaplains are going to stay here while you must go out there.
There is a sense of anxiety and warning, as well it ought to be. For on Baccalaureate Sunday, it becomes clear that everything that the institution has tried to do may in fact not be enough. It may not be adequate to help you in the sturdy and demanding business of life. And when we come to that conclusion, even proud academic institutions such as this one are forced to appeal to a higher source, a deeper power, a greater sense of guidance and mercy. That is why among the last words that you are meant to hear while in college are religious words: words of prayer, words of warning, words of encouragement, words of Godly counsel. You should be congratulated that you are here to hear them, that you are in the right place at the right time, for sooner or later you will discover that you cannot do what you hope to do on your own or by your own power, the bachelor’s or master’s degree that you receive today notwithstanding.
And so I rejoice to be a part of that process, for better or worse, and to share with you in these happy and penultimate moments. Some of you will doubtless want some practical and useful advice. In fact I can read your minds even as I look at you, and you are saying, “What can I take away from this occasion? What will be useful for me in the world that is on the other side of this sylvan quadrangle?”
Well, to give those of you something to hold onto while I say something later, I’m going to give you three bits of practical advice. You can chew on these, and when the students who were not here come this afternoon and may casually ask you what happened, you might share some of this practical advice with them.
Here is the first of the three bits of practical advice. Perhaps the most important thing I can say to you is to remind you, it’s not who you know, it’s whom. The second piece of practical advice I might be able to give to you is that if you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t, do. And the third practical piece of advice comes from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, now long dead, and she said this: Scratch where it itches, empty what’s full, and fill what’s empty.
Now I’m sure for a number of you that is all that you need to know. You may click out, tune off, and tune into something far more interesting than I am about to be. Let it not be said that this preacher did not take care of the practical elements of Baccalaureate.
I had an old friend at Harvard who many years ago said, “The best thing I got out of college was myself.” Maybe you feel that way too today, and that is probably a wise and useful sense of accomplishment, but one should not be prematurely happy about it all. College is not the end – paraphrasing Winston Churchill – nor is it even the beginning of the end. It is, however, the end of the beginning.
Never again will an entire civilization be organized to subsidize your education. Never again will people prepare your meals or cut the grass or teach the courses or orchestrate the whole universe to make learning as agreeable as possible. Never again will you live in an environment such as this, totally designed for your every comfort and stimulation.
That is why those of us who have tenure enjoy staying in places like this, and it is why we wish you well as you make your way out there. Because this is unreal; it is unbelievable, and you’re only paying a fraction of what it costs. Being in a place like this can spoil you for the rest of the world. You might actually think that there are people out there who are interested not only in ideas, but might be remotely interested in your ideas. It is not so, my dear young friends. They are not interested in you or your ideas. You will have to make your way as best you can. And if you are fortunate enough to become a professor, you will know what I mean.
There is to all of this a sense of an ending. Frank Kermode, who used to be a professor of English in the University of Cambridge in England, wrote a juicy little book called The Sense of an Ending, and in that Sense of an Ending he makes the point that “ending” has two useful meanings, at least. It means the conclusion of something and it also means the purpose or the objective of something. And this occasion fits both of those meanings wonderfully well. It is indeed the end of your undergraduate career. You will never, ever be able to be an undergraduate again. So that has come to a close (and for some of you, mercifully so): it is over, it is done, it is finished. But there is also the sense of an ending that is the objective of your career is to be now met: the end toward which everything has been leading, the objective of your life, the objective of the life of the mind, the purpose for which all of this has been put together in some sense.
This is what St. Paul is referring to in that Letter to the Romans, in the 12th chapter. He says that the purpose of your life is not to be conformed to the world as it is. He does not say that it is your job to transform the world. You must read that text very carefully: it doesn’t say that you shall transform the world. There will be a lot of nonsense uttered at commencements all across the country about your ability to transform the world. And that’s what it is – utter and rank nonsense. You will not transform the world. But Paul says you yourselves are meant to be transformed, and you were meant to be transformed one person at a time by the renewal of your mind. Your mind is the thing that will help effect your transformation from callow youth into seasoned citizens. Now, ultimately, of course, if everybody is transformed, the world will be transformed, but we have been celebrating commencements for hundreds of years – you, nearly 200 years here – and the world is still the same rather sorry place that it has always been. It suggests that there remains a great deal of work to be done. And therefore there is some reason to be confident in you, that by your own transformation, by the renewal of your mind, something good and possibly useful may occur.
Now, along with this nonsense about changing the world will be said a great deal about your ability to exercise excellence. Now I know I trespass on a tender boundary here, for I have been sent practically every publication that Lafayette College produces with the merciful exception of your term papers. I have read everything, and everywhere it talks about “excellence this” and “excellence that.” Now I have a good word for excellence, I think it’s very nice when you can get it, but I have a different word that I would apply to you. We heard so much about excellence – how about a little goodness thrown in just to mix things up? Excellence is all right. Al Capone was an excellent mobster. Adolf Hitler was an excellent dictator. But something was missing in both of those categories, and I think we might say it was goodness.
So as you contemplate how you exercise the transformation of yourselves by the renewing of your mind, you might pay a little attention to goodness and not quite so much attention to excellence. I can say that because in a few hours I shall be gone and the powers that be here can do nothing to me, but maybe a little of this will hang about, so that goodness takes its rightful place in the center of the college and university curriculum. This means that if any of you take at all seriously this notion of goodness and transformation you are likely to be regarded in the world you are about to enter as a little peculiar, a little eccentric, a little different, somebody who does not blend in easily with the crowd. My hope for you is that you will be very peculiar, very eccentric, very different, very much out of the common herd: that there will be something about the way you conduct your life, the way you interact with others, the way you affect the affairs of wherever it is you are that will cause people to say, “What is the matter with you?”
How naive you may very well appear, that truth is better than falsehood, that virtue is better than power, and that compassion is far superior to mere worldly influence. Now I suspect that among you there are people who to this very minute truly believe they will be President of the United States. Well, it is very clear to anybody that anybody can be President of the United States. You should have a higher ambition than that, and I hope some of you will achieve it. I hope it means that you might aspire to be a good neighbor, an honorable colleague, a decent citizen, a respectable manager of affairs, or – heaven forfend – if you can’t run everything and enter the leadership class that you can be a creative, responsible, and critical follower. I have the view that if we had better followers we might have, in fact, better leaders, but that is the occasion for another address in another place.
As I look out at you and hope for you, I am reminded of the great line of William James, who said many years ago, “The greatest use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.” The greatest use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it: who could ask for anything more than that on the morning of one’s commencement from college?
When I was in college – and I know this is usually the point at which people stop listening, but hang in there for a few more moments – when I was in college, I remember only one thing out of four years of required chapel. (It’s amazing that I believe anything today after four years of required chapel.) But the one thing I remember was a preacher who coined a wonderful epigram in which he asked that we as students might become familiar with “loving minds and thinking hearts.” Think of that: loving minds. We all know minds as razor-sharp and with a whip-like crack, we know minds as very, very incredible tools of discernment and in judgment, but we often do not think of the mind as a loving organ. Maybe we should aspire in our educated lives to cultivate loving minds, which means that we also ought to cultivate thinking hearts. Hearts tend to be large, squishy undiscerning sorts of things, the home of powerful feelings and emotions, but a thinking heart is one that deploys its passions carefully. It strikes me as a good formula for life, loving minds and thinking hearts, and I commend that notion of the self to you as you make your way from this College Hill.
Now, I ask students on a day like this, without any shame, “Do you have a job?” Sometimes they resent the question, and especially those who don’t usually show that they are not particularly happy with it. But I say, “Your mother and I want to know: do you have a job?” Now by a job I do not necessarily mean a gainful source of employment. That will come. Even the dumbest college graduate will get a job somewhere, and sometimes, alas, it will be a very important job.
That’s not what I mean by job in this sense, and perhaps the word I should use instead of job is vocation. Do you have a calling? Do you have something to which you are prepared to give your life, to give your thinking heart and your loving mind, and for which your “job” job is simply the means to an end? You may not have a vocation just yet, but it ought to be the ambition of your life to find one and devote your life to it. And the best definition that I know of vocation is one by Fred Beauchner which goes like this: “A vocation is where your great joy meets the world’s great need.”
This combination of joy and need is what it is that will rescue our tired and weary old world from the mediocrity and mendacity which is on every hand. Your vocation is to find that joy in your life that will help meet some of the world’s great needs. And if you spend the rest of your life looking for it, it will be a journey and expedition worth the making. So my great hope for you is that you will find that joy that will help meet some of the world’s great needs and that will in fact be your vocation. Will you be successful in this? Well, I am not paid enough to speculate on that subject. You will be the best judges of how successful you will be. But if you want a useful definition of success, I’m about to give it to you. Success does not consist in doing what we want to do, doing what we set out to do, or even doing what we are good at. Success consists of doing that which is worth the doing. And my hope is that each of you somehow, somewhere, sooner or later will find that which is worth the doing and that you will do it with joy, and that in doing it with joy you will begin to meet some of this world’s great needs.
Now, a hundred years ago I suspect that religion played a much greater role in the life both of this college and of its graduates than it does today. I understand that. Times have changed. We live in a very different kind of world today. But yet the truth remains. There is a great deal of criticism of religion these days. All you have to do is go into a bookstore to be faced with a book by Richard Dawkins or turn on the television and listen to Christopher Hitchens railing against those poor malefactors of belief. I love what someone said about Christopher Hitchens. They said, “He is a self-made man who worships his creator.” There is some sad degree of truth to that. I hope for you much more than that. I hope for you, ultimately, happiness.
That may seem like a bit of a counterpoint to the substantial matters of a day like this. Happiness? Aren’t you all happy now? Aren’t you just happy to be getting out of here? Well, as I look at you, you don’t look very happy. You look rather grim, as a matter of fact, as if you believe you’re going to get an empty envelope this afternoon or one with a traffic ticket or a library fine or a nasty note from a course which you did not attend but in which you were enrolled.
But happiness is not just a warm, woozy feeling usually induced by a bottle. Happiness is something else, and, to conclude, I give you a definition of happiness which should not be discounted just because it is by a dead, white male. The dead, white male happens to be Aristotle, of whom some of you may have remotely heard during your years here on this hill. Aristotle defines happiness as the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope. Now, of course, Aristotle was talking about aristocratic, free, young white men of leisure in ancient Greece. We can forgive him for his parochial vision, but the truth of what he says applies to us and in our wonderfully different time. The exercise of vital powers: what a sense of vitality the young have. Such a shame it’s wasted on them, but they have it anyway, this sense of incredible capacity and enormous potential. Do you know that in the period between 17 and 21 you have already achieved both your sexual peak and, to some degree, your intellectual peak? You’ve experimented freely with the one; the other you are still waiting to try on for size. Happiness: the exercise of these vital powers along lines of excellence – you should be familiar with that, but in a life affording them scope. It is that scopeful life into which very shortly we shall send you. And it is in that life, exercising those powers as best you can, that you will acquire that happiness which you so richly deserve and which is so terribly elusive in this world.
So I remind you, young men and women of Lafayette, do not conform yourselves to the easy standards of this world, but, in Paul’s words, be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove to be the extraordinary and exceptional people we hope you are and, for most of the time, we believe you to be.
I close now with the only clean limerick I know. We all know about the man from Pawtucket and the various other forms that the limerick has taken, but this is a serious limerick and it has to do with you. And this is how it goes:
Blessed Lord, what it is to be young:
To be of, to be for, be among,
Be enchanted, enthralled,
The caller, the called,
The singer, the song, and the sung.
May we always have cause to sing about you – the enchanted, enthralled, the caller, the called, the singer, the song, and the sung.
God bless you all, and more importantly than that, God help you all.