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+ | ====== 1981 Commencement Speech: Rev. Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., Theologian ====== | ||
+ | **Source:** // | ||
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+ | At Georgetown, where I hang my theological hat, a consensus is growing in graduating classes: commencement calls for a comedian. Not a politician, with a major policy statement; not an educator, brown-nosing private schools; not even an astronaut, invading your inner space. No, a comedian: someone to poke gentle fun at your four-year comedy, and ease your entry into this vale of tears while the corks pop. It calls for Bob Hope thanking Georgetown for his son's education: "He can wire me in five languages asking for money." | ||
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+ | Now even the weirdos among theologians will never rival Garry Trudeau or Woody Allen. In the popular mind, a theologian is a shadowy intellectual who builds an ivory tower, sits there studying dusty tomes or contemplating his navel, and occasionally descends to earth to make abstract pronouncements unconnected with real life, or to emit inflammatory noises that contradict the catechism, confuse the Christian, bait the bishops, and burn a little more of Rome. | ||
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+ | What can this kind of character offer you to justify fifteen minutes of your Miller time? Fifty years in the Jesuits doesn' | ||
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+ | I | ||
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+ | First, death stalks the earth because minds are closed. That is all too obvious where death is bloody. Hungary and Czechoslovakia lie in chains, Poland lives uneasy, because the colossus that bestrides Eastern Europe is closed to every philosophy save dialectical materialism. Many a Filipino or Salvadoran is rotting in jail because his ideas are at odds with the prevailing structure. One third of the world' | ||
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+ | But the death I have in mind is not always bloody; it can be terribly subtle, its effects unnoticed. There is a certain deadening quality, a form of homicide, in any narrow mind. I fear much for the lawyer whose only life is corporate tax, the doctor whose whole existence is someone else's prostate, the business executive whose single responsibility is to his stockholders, | ||
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+ | I don't know how much you've learned at Marquette; I like to think that you exit with an open mind. Not a mind without fixed points, not a mind that accepts everything (Marxism and capitalism, Christianity and atheism) as equally good or bad, absorbs all ideas like a sponge and is just as soft. I mean rather a realization that the life of the mind is incredibly open-ended, if only because reality is a participation in God, a reflection of Him who cannot be imprisoned in a definition. | ||
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+ | If you are open-minded, | ||
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+ | Only if you are open-minded do you choose living over dying; only thus will you bring the excitement of living to a small world that already has too much of death in its bones. | ||
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+ | II | ||
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+ | Second, death stalks the earth because hearts are self-centered. A recent survey in Psychology Today brings disturbing news. From your own responses, a central passion between 18 and 25 is money--at times second only to food. In consequence, | ||
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+ | You can justify this passion if you give ear to a distinguished sociologist. Philip Rieff sees a fresh character ideal coming to dominate Western civilization. Over against the old pagan commitment to the polis, to public life, over against the Judeo-Christian commitment to a transcendent God, over against the Enlightenment commitment to the irresistible progress of reason, today' | ||
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+ | This ideal of human living I call deadly. I'm aware of the seductive arguments. To serve others responsibly, | ||
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+ | I am moved but not convinced. A world where a billion go to bed hungry and human rights are blasted, where war rages ceaselessly and panic walks the streets, where pope and president can be shot within six weeks and atomic destruction hangs overhead--this world cannot wait for you to get your whole act together. | ||
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+ | I am not asking you to man the soup kitchens, to picket the Pentagon, to scatter the slum landlords. I am saying that if Marquette' | ||
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+ | I like to think that you exit from Marquette with sensitivity and compassion. For if you do, then the competence and skill that are yours--in law or liberal arts, in business or dentistry, in education or engineering, | ||
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+ | The paradox is, only in this way can you get your act together: not in isolation only in relation. You will become yourself to the extent that you go out of yourself. You will find your life in the measure that you are ready to risk it. When you can say, to a single person or to an acre of God's world, "Your life is my life," then you will begin to come alive. And beneath the touch of your love, someone else will come alive. | ||
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+ | III | ||
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+ | Third, an outrageous affirmation: | ||
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+ | By imagination I do not mean the fantastic, the grotesque, the bizarre. I mean the capacity we have "to make the material an image of the immaterial or spiritual."< | ||
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+ | I am not downgrading abstract thought, conceptual analysis, rational demonstration, | ||
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+ | But if your spirit is to come alive, a seat in the loges is insufficient. Imagination is not simply a spectator sport. The image should evoke imagining, call forth your own creative response I cannot tell you how to do it--show the dentist how to find the cavities in the world, the surgeon how to cut his way to creativity. I can only say that within each of you is a power to reach reality we rarely mine, a capacity to grasp the true, the beautiful, and the good that has no limits. I do not predict that without imagination you will be unhappy or unsuccessful. I do claim that without it you may miss much of the thrill in human living, that you run a greater risk of finding existence unexciting, that x-number of the dead and despairing will not be quickened to life by you, that you may fail to touch in love a living God whose glory challenges not so much our logic as our imagining. For, as metaphysician Jacques Maritain insisted, the culmination of knowledge is not conceptual but experiential: | ||
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+ | Open minds, compassionate hearts, imaginative spirits—this is my way of reading the threefold ideal that sums up your centennial: knowledge, justice, faith. Knowledge? Why, open minds! Justice? Why, compassionate hearts! Faith? Why, imaginative spirits! This, Marquette graduates of ‘81, is what I would like to read between the lines of your diplomas. For this, I submit, is what our topsy-turvy globe expects of the educated, needs desperately from you. And if these hoary words of mine are too silvered with Geritol to touch you where you live, allow me at least the comfort of Rod McKuen: | ||
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+ | I make words for people I've not met, | ||
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+ | those who will not turn to follow after me. | ||
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+ | It is for me a kind of loving. | ||
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+ | A kind of loving, for me.< | ||
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+ | **__Footnotes__** | ||
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+ | from Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: | ||
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