First-year Parents Assembly for the Class of ’11                                Tuesday, August 28, 2007

 

 

            A couple of years ago we brought a witty, well-worn and wise poet from North Carolina named Coleman Barks to campus for a visit.  He’s the kind of poet who holds up the most familiar, ordinary things with his words and somehow makes you feel for a moment as though you can see through them to the heart of everything.  One afternoon during his visit he was lounging among a group of rapt students, one leg swung over the arm of his chair, being wise about things, spilling poetry right and left – and suddenly he said something I’ve been wanting to have carved over the door to the Chaplains’ Office ever since.  “Theology,” he said, in his loping, well-worn, Carolina sort of way, “is like what happens – when a bunch of fish get together – to discuss the possibility – that there might be – an ocean.”

 

            If I had to say what the Chaplains’ Office is here for, I guess I’d say that it’s here to entertain that possibility.  And other well-worn, wise possibilities – like the possibility that there might be good reasons to be hopeful – and the possibility that something like true community among us might really be possible – and the possibility that we might finally finish learning the terrible lessons of war – and the possibility that all the ways of believing that human beings have devised, with all their perplexing differences and even disagreements, might actually be part of a poem rather than part of a problem.

 

And I have to say that your sons and daughters will make it easy to entertain those possibilities.  My superb colleagues in the Chaplains’ Office and I find them, not only entertaining – though we surely do find them that! – but also teachers of possibility.  They spill the poetry of possibility right and left.  I hope that over the course of your association with Williams you’ll get to meet Cantor Bob Scherr, and Father Gary Caster, and Parvin Hajizadeh who advises our Muslim students – regardless of wherever your own deliberations stand on the possibility that there might be an ocean.  I hope the same for your children.  Our job – our piece of this remarkable picture – is to try every way we can to help these students entertain the possibilities that will help them make meaning out of their education (because an education doesn’t just automatically come with meaning) – and help them to find a sense of vocation that’s maybe a layer or two deeper than just finding a job (because a job doesn’t necessarily come with a sense of vocation) – and help them to spill their sense of possibility out into the landscape as flagrantly and joyfully as they can.  The tools of our work are listening ears and spiritual comfort, ancient words and refreshed rituals, faithful teaching and, when all else fails, food. 

 

And, thanks to you, so many of the great religious and spiritual traditions of the human family are here to help us keep the scope of the possibilities oceanic:  Baptists and Buddhists, Quakers and Catholics, Muslims and Methodists, Jains and Jews, Hindus and Greek Orthodox and Latter Day Saints, and Sikhs and even one registered Skeptic…  Plans are already in place for weekly catechism and Shabbat meals and Bible study and Mass and sitting meditation, and for celebrations of the Jewish High Holidays and Ramadan and Diwali and the Feast of All Saints.   There will be multi-faith services of worship and inter-religious dialogues and spirituality retreats; and bunches of fish will be getting together to entertain the possibilities deep into the night.  Most students, by the time they graduate, say that religion or spirituality played an important role in their time here – that they formed an important friendship with someone of different beliefs, and that they discovered some new part of the richness of their own religious identity – or found a new one altogether.  Most students suffer a broken heart at least once while they're here.  And it seems to be in the nature of this place that virtually every student helps to mend someone else’s broken heart many times while they’re here.

 

            The Chaplains’ Office is also the campus headquarters for volunteer community service – so for us it’s also about paying attention to the broken-hearted world, and trying out some of the possibilities for mending it.  So some of the other tools of the work, as we practice it, are ladles for serving community lunches in North Adams and pencils for tutoring up at the Pownal Elementary School and hammers for Habitat house-building and hoes for weeding the potatoes at our community organic farm and basketballs for pick-up games at a residence for at-risk youth and pizza for just about everything.  For almost every Williams student, part of what it turns out to mean to be here is to be out of here, out beyond the edges of campus, exploring the issues and entertaining the possibilities that swirl around in the wider community of which this College is only one part.

 

When Coleman Barks, the poet, came to Williams, he read for us from the poems of the 13th century Persian mystic Rumi – whose poetry he has been rendering into English with great sensitivity and ingenuity.  Of all the poems he brought us, my favorite was these four simple lines:

 

Let the beauty that we love

be what we do –

There are hundreds of ways

to kneel and kiss the ground.

 

Like you, we love the beauty we see in the meeting at long last of your children, this time, these people, this place.  It’s what we do.  Your way of “doing” that beauty has been to bring them to this moment in their lives; thank you for doing that.  For a moment, it’s almost as though you can see right through all the ordinary and familiar things about each one of them to the heart of everything.  Pausing here together – you about to turn toward home and us about to turn toward our work – is a little like standing at the edge of an ocean of possibilities.  And there are hundreds of ways – 540 of them, in this instance – to kneel and kiss the ground.