May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.
Thank you to the Rev’d Brad Tharp for his kind words of introduction, and to Senior Pastor P.T. Wilson for his invitation to preach today. It is a joy and honor to be here and to see so many alumni faces.
A week ago were the graduation ceremonies for the six departing eighth graders of Saint Thomas Choir School. Saint Thomas Church, New York City, where I have served as Rector since 1996, has a full time, residential Choir School for boys from grades three to eight. It is a Choir with a School, not a School with a Choir, and its purpose is to house, nurture and educate, in loco parentis, the forty boy choristers of the Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys. For the children, it is a once-in-a lifetime experience in which they attain professional singing standards, sing five choral services at Saint Thomas each week, and perform as guests in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Westminster Abbey. At graduation, the departing eighth graders give speeches or performances of singing or instrumental music. One star boy chose to speak last Saturday, and he gave me my starting point for today. He said his five years at the Choir School would be a “permanent point of reference” for him for the rest of his life. I was never a choirboy, but each year, as I watch these eighth graders leave Saint Thomas, I do envy them.
I was never a choirboy, and I never served in the military. Since mine was the generation to serve during the Vietnam War, I was at the time grateful I was not drafted and had deferments as a seminarian preparing to be an Episcopal priest. Sometimes I wonder if I missed out on something important, a “permanent point of reference” I notice most military veterans seem to have. When I raise this question, those same veterans tell me to banish the thought; but I still wonder.
The four years of college are a permanent point of reference for me; I suspect they are for most of you. For me and the rest of the first baby-boomer graduates of DePauw, the Class of 1968, it has been forty years. We were a remarkable Class in both positive and negative ways. We thought and argued and were very serious about the issues of life, especially politics. We were pressured, as I have already noticed, by an unpopular war and by great matters of race and civil rights and domestic policy. Some of us (such as yours truly) became “New Left” radicals, virtual Marxists, for a time - supported, of course, by our hard-working parents. During one vacation my mother had to referee a fight between my father and me. “You’re nothing but a Communist,” my exasperated Dad said. “I won’t pay for this! Get out of my house!” His argument felt, and was, unassailable. I said, with bravado, “I will get out,” wondering what I would do next, since my little jobs paid for only the extra stuff. “Stop it, both of you! Be quiet,” cried Mom. “You’re being foolish and you’ve lost your tempers!” I think Dad was as relieved as I to back down.
The Class of ’68 was self-absorbed. Baby boomers still carry, and in large part deserve, the rap on this score. Many of us, whose parents had endured the Great Depression and World War II, were told as youngsters, as I was by my father, “You’ll never have to go through what your mother and I did,” as though a vaccination against the Depression and the War had been achieved. I believed it, and was shocked to discover that there could be a war after all, and that many people did not have the privileges, even the rights, that I took for granted. This unwelcome discovery had great impact, as I began my career here at old DePauw in 1964.
In what follows I hope to speak in some way not only for the self-absorbed Class of 1968 but for many of the rest of you, especially those also having significant reunions beginning five or ten years out of this University, to which I remain grateful for my four years, my permanent point of reference ever since. What happened here, that I keep referring back to? I have put them under four headings: 1) self-governance, 2) the city as the place to live, 3) the value of busyness and stress, and 4) college as the community in which one is (or should be) challenged to think - think radically.
1) Self governance. First, there was the Greek system of fraternities and sororities. We, the men of the Class of 1968, were temporarily housed for our first week, rushed, and funneled into either fraternities or independent halls of residence. It was a little more merciful for the women; they lived in dormitories as freshmen and were rushed later in the year. So my first experience was, for a 17-year-old who was a late-bloomer and about four inches shorter than I am even now, the hope of acceptance and the fear of rejection. Both fear and hope were powerfully fulfilled for me. I pledged Delta Chi, put on my green freshman “pot” cap, and endured “pledge training” with two dozen other “brothers in the bond” as we called ourselves. Most of my Class of 1968 fraternity brothers still connect when these reunions come up. Almost half of us have been here this weekend.
There were many good things that happened in my three years living in the Delta Chi house. I can no longer remember all the secret words and handshakes. But the friendships, the discussions and arguments amongst us that came with the challenges of self-governance, were unforgettable. There were elections for office, the whispering campaigns, open campaigning, divisions over issues, personal loyalties and betrayals. At one memorable house meeting, a house officer declared, “A little hypocrisy is good for everyone.” I have meditated on that sentence for forty years. I am not sure what it means exactly, but that officer described what many of us professional types very often are, or fear we are.
Things came to a head at the house for my fellow classmates when, in the school year 1966-1967, some of us wished to pledge one of the few African-American members of our class, a most attractive and intelligent person. After quite a debate, it was clear that not all our members consented, and that the effort to pledge our friend, even if successful by vote, would be a victory that he would be unwilling to accept for understandable reasons. It was a moment of truth and sadness, and about a third of my class decided it was time to move out in town. None of us who left, to my knowledge, rejected Delta Chi per se, but we were in a different place after that meeting. In retrospect, I credit Delta Chi for facing the issue in those difficult days.
2) This brings me to my second heading: the city, or rather the community of the polis, whether city, town or village, as the place to live. I had my first moment of urban consciousness in this small rural Indiana town. I recall bounding down the stairs of the house where a half-dozen of us were now living out in town, just up the street from the Student Union. I walked out onto the front porch, down the front steps, and took the ten yards to the sidewalk, where - Bang! - there I was, right in the center of the campus. Car free, bike free, ride-free! It was all right there. That wonderful feeling of being a “city person,” of experiencing and believing that the polis, the urbs (city, town or village), not the suburbs, is the historic, natural living place for most all people except for those who till the great fields and farms or live in other exceptional conditions: that came to me first here in Greencastle in the fall of 1967. My father had fled a village, my mother a big city, for the post-war suburbs. I fled the suburbs for the polis, whatever its size. I have had that same exhilarating feeling with my wife and our two children (who join me in this urban (or village or town) opinion in most places I have lived since: New Haven, Narragansett, Oxford, Boston, New York. The two times I have been in (albeit very pleasant) suburban settings, I have felt myself to be a stranger and pilgrim in an alien land, having to start the car every time I turn around and need something. So thank you, Delta Chi, DePauw, and Greencastle, for the urban insight gained by the privilege of living in the middle of the campus. Give me the city!
3) Third, in college I learned the value of busyness and stress. At DePauw I discovered that the busier you are the more productive and successful you are. Pressure can be very good for you. I struggled with my courses my first two years with mediocre results. By my junior year, when I felt more comfortable with the opposite sex, declared a major and elected classes that attracted me, and became very active as an editor at The DePauw, I was ready to have, and did have, my first (and so far only) Panic Attack. The DePauw came out three times, then two times in larger editions, a week in those days. Deadlines were a constant, menacing reality. In the meantime there were quizzes and exams and papers of various sizes due for all the classes. One afternoon, standing between the Publications Building and the Roy O. West Library, I seized up like a car engine throwing a piston rod. I can’t do this. I am drowning. I want to die. Worse than dying, I am failing. Miraculously, sweet reason came to me. What do you have to do by an hour from now? By this evening? By tomorrow morning; by the end of tomorrow? By week end? First things first. One thing at a time. Take a breath, and remember to keep breathing. I survived the crisis. Sweet reason has spoken to me in that way ever since. Amazingly, even as The DePauw came out on time, so my grades for my classes (which I enjoyed more and more) went up. Perhaps, at age 19, I was also finally growing up. Anyway, junior year was a good year. Which brings me to my fourth and last heading.
4) Fourthly and finally, college is or should be a community where one is encouraged and challenged to think, to think radically. It was at DePauw that I really began to think, not just about how to do first things first, but about first things in and of themselves. There was a course we were encouraged to take in those days for which I am still grateful, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and Religion. It was called “Basic Beliefs of Modern Man.” The course required reading provocative texts in the essential canon of western thought: a novella, The Death of Ivan Illych, by Tolstoy, a story, Notes from Underground, by Dostoyevsky, a treatise, The Communist Manifesto, by Marx, an anti-communist novel, Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler. There were short stories by Sartre, essays by Saint Augustine, questions and answers by Thomas Aquinas, Letters and Papers from Prison by Bonhoeffer. And so forth. I recall Professor William Petrek’s opening lecture in Basic Beliefs. It was entitled, “The Nature of Radical Thinking.” We were challenged not only to think, but to think drastically, right down to the roots of things. It is very important to say that this thinking was caused by the work of reading and reflecting on the hard-won wisdom of those who have thought before us; of thinking along with them and in their wake. It was not simple self-expression and navel-gazing.
My own thinking led me to become what I am now. But I did not always believe in God. For three painful years from high school to one night in that good old Roy O. West Library, I did not believe at all. A short story by Sartre, of all authors, got the rediscovery of my faith, in which I had been reared by my God-loving parents, going. Then there was an essay by Paul Tillich on Saint Augustine. I recall thinking that, even though (like Sartre) I did not believe in God, it was possible for a reasonable person (such as Tillich or Augustine) to believe. So I decided to study the texts of The Enemy Himself. I took a course in the New Testament taught by Professor John Eigenbrodt, whose teaching was respected for its even-handedness, even though he occasionally stunned us by showing up in class dressed up as the Episcopal priest he was. One night in my library carrel, preparing for a quiz, I lost track of the time. I left the library that night a believer, not only in God, but in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For a Methodist college foundation it was a fitting Wesleyan moment: my heart was [in John Wesley’s words] “strangely warmed.” My quest in one sense ended and in another sense began all over again; as in the Old Testament’s dictum: “The fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom.” I have not been the same since, and what was begun at DePauw was what I believe has been a continuous vocation of often painful thought and growth: for, as John Henry Newman said, growth is the only sign of life; and growth seems always to mean growing pains.
My political passions did simmer down, and in fact my left-wing orthodoxies suffered atrophy because the politics of this world seemed to me to lose some of their eternal urgency. I discovered not only Christ but later on some of his disciples down the ages such as Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, the high Anglicans of the reformation period and the nineteenth century, Cardinal Newman, and that most extraordinary soul, Kierkegaard. I still enjoy politics. I have moved from left to right, and now perhaps a little back again. I never preach politics, either secular or ecclesiastical, if I can help it. I try to leave that to the common sense and good judgment of my parishioners, who are all over the map on the issues which try our nation, The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, and whom I love whether I agree with them or not - for we all go to church to hear Christ in the word and to receive Christ in the sacrament. I will say that, whatever the outcome of this year’s fascinating presidential election, I am thrilled and thankful that an African-American is a viable candidate to lead a country where he couldn’t have been pledged by a fraternity forty years ago.
So those are the four headings, four reasons I am grateful for this wonderful University and why my four years here remain, in the words of an eighth-grader, a permanent point of reference for me. 1) Self governance, 2) the city as the natural and historic human habitat, 3) the creative value of busyness and stress, and 4) the community in which one is challenged to think, to think radically. Thank God for these. Thank God for the experience of college. Finally, thank God for God - to whom I offer these words with grateful affection, and in God’s Triune Name, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
