Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
I Corinthians 15: 20-26
I do not have words to express the honor President Rawlings has shown me in asking me to close almost two decades of ministry here by giving the Baccalaureate sermon. This has been a growing, deepening time for me - and, it has also taken me that long to keep from drifting into my North Carolina alma mater when we sing Cornell's!
The seed for this sermon was planted as I sat in a Starbuck's cafˇ in Ottawa sipping a tall latte. The cafˇ is in a great bookstore with quotations all about of leading Canadian writers. The one that caught my eye was from Mordecai Richler of Montreal. It goes like this:
FUNDAMENTALLY, ALL WRITING IS ABOUT THE SAME THING; IT'S ABOUT DYING, ABOUT THE BRIEF FLICKER OF TIME WE HAVE HERE, AND THE FRUSTRATION IT CREATES.The knowledge of our mortality is indeed the stuff of great literature - and great religion. The fact of death wonderfully and fatefully concentrates the mind.
You may be saying to yourself, this is a mordant tact to be taking for graduating students in the prime of their life - perhaps more appropriate for retiring faculty and the retiring chaplain - but, bear with me!
There is the death of dying - which nature or accident will arrange for all us in time. And there is the "living death" which drags us all down into the "mereness" of deadly routine. The Bible speaks to both forms reminding us of our creaturely nature and of the human condition that leads to the "living death." That condition is usually denoted as "sin."
As a young boy in the South, you could hardly drive down the highway without seeing those signs: WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? and THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH! It took me many years to figure out that eternity is not something to be spent and that God doesn't make you die if you do naughty things!
That latter quote is from Paul in Romans, and it means that the condition of sin - which Luther described as "the heart curved in on itself" - that robs you of real life; it deadens your perceptions of the world around you. It leads to a flattening of experience.
As you have heard in the readings from scripture, that good book identifies death as the enemy of our well-being. It calls us to life, abundant life, eternal (that is, life with depth). The reading from Hebrew scripture puts before us life as a choice. And the letter from Paul to the Corinthians reminds the early Christians that Christ imparted to them a new dimension of life.
In our day, the late Catholic novelist, Walker Percy, understood this truth better than most. In his novel, THE SECOND COMING, he has a contemporary man on a desperate search for God. He tries to provoke God into showing himself - and that fails - but he does come to the realization that the final enemy is death - "the living death." And Percy lays out the various forms of death:
+ DEATH IN THE GUISE OF BELIEF IS NOT GOING TO PREVAIL OVER ME. FOR BELIEVERS NOW BELIEVE ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING AND DO NOT LOVE THE TRUTH, ARE IN FACT IN DESPAIR OF THE TRUTH, AND THAT IS DEATH.Each of us could add our own perceptions of the deadening of life, the absence of spirit, the closing down of searching minds and daring hearts.+ DEATH IN THE GUISE OF UNBELIEF IS NOT GOING TO PREVAIL OVER ME, FOR UNBELIEVERS BELIEVE NOTHING, NOT BECAUSE TRUTH DOES NOT EXIST BUT BECAUSE THEY HAVE ALREADY CHOSEN NOT TO BELIEVE, AND WOULD NOT BELIEVE, EVEN IF THE LIVING TRUTH STOOD BEFORE THEM, AND THAT IS DEATH.
+ DEATH IN THE FORM OF ISMS AND ASMS SHALL NOT PREVAIL OVER ME - ORGASM, ENTHUSIASM, LIBERALISM, CONSERVATISM, COMMUNISM, ( BUDDHISM), AMERICANISM. FOR AN ISM IS ONLY ANOTHER WAY OF DES- PAIRING OF THE TRUTH.
In the realm of higher education, the late Allan Bloom left us his provocative indictment of American culture and higher education (with most of the blame going to poor Mr. Nietzsche!). Page Smith wrote KILLING THE SPIRIT on the loss of substance and character in American higher education - with that chilling portrait on the cover of Jose Clemente Orozco's mural at Dartmouth's Baker Library of dead bones giving birth to dead bones, all in academic robes!
And Bill Readings gave us THE UNIVERSITY IN RUINS, in which he notes the modern university exalts the virtues of tolerance and excellence - but in its posthistorical phase has not enough to say about truth-telling and redeeming the culture.
And we see the living death throughout our culture - in the aggressive consumerism that measures worth by the toys we accumulate. We see it in the mounting numbness of drug and alcohol addiction. We see it in the belief that there is a pharmacological fix for whatever mood problem we have. (three fourths of the students in my sons prep school are on some kind of daily medication: Ritalin, Prozac, Wellbutrin). Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD is here!
We are in thrall of death and the living death. We are almost alone in the West for our addiction to capital punishment.(And fewer than 20% of today's undergraduates oppose the death penalty.) And now school children find it easy to murder their friends and teachers.
Now it's easy for me at age 70 to become a full-blown curmudgeon watching the world go to hell - but I am not alone in naming our culture as a culture of death and decadence. Witness Jacques Barzun's summing up of the last 500 years in the West - "From Dawn to Decadence." And Maureen Dowd of the Times indicts a culture that chooses
PUBLICITY OVER ACHIEVEMENT, REVELATION OVER RESTRAINT, HONESTY OVER DECENCY, VICTIMHOOD OVER PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, CONFRONTATION OVER CIVILITY, PSYCHOLOGY OVER MORALITY.But that's enough of bemoaning our plight. There are resources at hand with which to resist and renew our culture. The word from Ecclesiastes is dead right: YOU HAVE A CHOICE. CHOOSE LIFE, CHERISH LIFE, SERVE LIFE!
A Cornell education rightly gives you a pass to the good life - for generous salaries, for cars and boats and swimming pools, The world is your oyster. And I wish you all of that and more: strong families, good health, faithful friends.
And yet, you know and I know that all that may not bring you life. Success can be a numbing death. As Walker Percy said, YOU CAN MAKE ALL A'S - AND STILL FLUNK LIFE! That is critical knowledge to have at this stage of your life because from now on the clock is ticking and its message is loss, loss, loss - unless you give your heart and mind and soul to its opposition. It will be a daily option to choose life and in your faith and in your learning you have powerful resources at hand.
In the humanistic imagination from Dante to Camus to Percy, there are pointers to another dimension of life that nourishes compassion and justice and caring. Buddhists would call it "mindfulness"; Jews and Christians "the Kingdom of God." Whatever you call it, when you experience it, life has a newer, deeper dimension.
Cornell's own Vladimir Nabokov, has a character watching an old woman of the streets being given a cup of coffee, a simple act- and yet, for the observer, it is a moment of awakening:
I BECAME AWARE OF THE WORLD'S TENDERNESS, THE PROFOUND BENEFICENCE OF ALL THAT SURROUNDED ME, THE BLISSFUL BOND BETWEEN ME AND ALL CREATION, AND I REALIZED THAT JOY..BREATHED AROUND ME EVERYWHERE, IN THE SPEEDING STREET SOUNDS, IN THE HEM OF A COMICALLY LIFTED SKIRT, IN THE METALLIC YET TENDER DRONE OF THE WIND, IN THE AUTUMN CLOUDS BLOATED WITH RAIN. I REALIZED THAT THE WORLD DOES NOT REPRESENT A STRUGGLE AT ALL, OR A PREDACEOUS SEQUENCE OF CHANCE EVENTS, BUT SHIMMERING BLISS, BENEFICIENT TREPIDATION, A GIFT BESTOWED UPON US AND UNAPPRECIATED.Moments like that redeem time, put off the living death, and open our heart to life. That is grace; that is faith. Faith is not the opposite of doubt; certainty IS! Faith involves risk, struggle, doubt - and CHOICE. In those moments of epiphany, you catch a glimpse of life - and you seize it!
We all live by such moments. They break the power of death. They affirm the created goodness of this world and our place in it. That is the power of the Biblical story and the creeds of the Church.
A great son of Cornell, Elywn Brooks White, '21, gave us such a story. We've all read it to our children but it's for grown-ups too. CHARLOTTE'S WEB is about death - and life. White gives us eyes to see the wonder of life on Mr. Zuckerman's farm:
EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK IS LIFE; EVEN THE LITTLE BALL OF SPIT ON THE WEED STALK, IF YOU POKE IT APART, HAS A GREEN WORM INSIDE IT.Wilbur the pig loses his wondrous friend, Charlotte the spider. He learns the sweet, hard lesson we all must learn that life is a bittersweet interlude, that we don't live forever, that we have this brief flicker of time.
And yet knowing this, Wilbur knew - and we can know, that life and love can be affirmed;
LIFE IN THE BARN WAS VERY GOOD - NIGHT AND DAY, WINTER AND SUMMER, SPRING AND FALL, DULL DAYS AND BRIGHT DAYS,. IT WAS THE BEST PLACE TO BE, THOUGHT WILBUR, THIS WARM DELICIOUS CELLAR, WITH THE GARRULOUS GEESE, THE CHANGING SEASONS, THE HEAT OF THE SUN, THE PASSAGE OF SWALLOWS, THE NEARNESS OF RATS, THE SAMENESS OF SHEEP, THE LOVE OF SPIDERS, THE SMELL OF MANURE, AND THE GLORY OF EVERYTHING.Those words are now on a memorial plaque in the choir loft of Sage Chapel, where "Andy" White sang in the choir. The original manuscript is in the Olin Library where you can see how White pared down all non-essential words.
Wilbur, you remember, was like most of us, subject to fits of depression and anxiety. In such a fit, Charlotte comforts him with a lullabye:
SLEEP, MY LOVE, MY ONLY,E.B. White lays out for us a profound natural theology. He gives us a world cradled in love, a love that moves us to creating, nurturing, encouraging, teaching, sharing. The late Scott Elledge, White's biographer, saw CHARLOTTE'S WEB as a vision of arcadia, a pastoral view that frees us from the clutches of time and gives us an innocence that also embraces the wisdom of experience.
DEEP IN THE DUNG AND THE DARK.
BE NOT AFRAID AND BE NOT LONELY!...
PRAISE THE WORLD FROM THE WOODS AND THE RUSHES.
REST FROM CARE, MY ONE AND ONLY.
White held a remarkable humane vision of life. He knew inherently that we can't have it all; that all of us have to come to terms with loss, with mystery, with defeats. He gave us this profound bit of free verse:
THIS IS WHAT YOUTH MUST FIGURE OUT:
GIRLS, LOVE, AND LIVING.
THE HAVING, THE NOT HAVING,
THE SPENDING AND GIVING,
AND THE MELANCHOLY TIME OF NOT KNOWING.THIS IS WHAT AGE MUST LEARN ABOUT;
THE ABC OF DYING.
THE GOING, YET NOT GOING,
THE LOVING AND LEAVING.
AND THE UNBEARABLE KNOWING AND KNOWING.
That is wisdom we can take from this moment.
It all comes down to this: The bad news is that you can't have it all. The good news is that in your lifetime you can know the glory of everything!
So you sons and daughters of Cornell, go forth from this place. And when those moments of mortality, those times "deep in the dung and the dark" strike you, don't succumb to the living death. Those "brief flickers of time" are an opening to new life. Don't lose the moment! Choose life! Cherish life! Serve life!
L'chaim!!!