First-year Parents Assembly for the Class of ’12 Tuesday, August 26, 2007
I have to tell you that this gathering is one of my favorite occasions in the whole rhythm of the year at Williams. Recent studies have shown that this room, during this hour, and the 10 or 15 acres adjoining it, contain one of the highest concentrations of hope anywhere in the hemisphere.
As you were moving boxes and suitcases into Sage and Williams and Mission this afternoon, maybe you noticed a little gift that was waiting in the room. This year it occurred to us, in the Chaplains Office, that this little book might make a good room-warming present. The pages are blank – waiting to catch the stories of this year. This is a little counter-cultural, I admit – in the sense that life at Williams tends to be more about filling time full to overflowing with living the stories than it is about opening up a little space in the midst of time so you can tell yourself a bit of the story. But someday if any of these students should find themselves leafing back through these pages, maybe they’ll re-discover some of this feeling of a time when all the doors were open and every neuron was tingling and anything was possible.
I was leafing through a book like that this summer – the Confessions of St. Augustine, whose blank book ended up being one of the great spiritual treasures of the world. There’s a page on which Augustine wrote, “I have become a question to myself.” It got me thinking…
As they leaf through the stories of life and learning here, day by day, maybe part of what will turn out to be happening is that they’ll be becoming questions to themselves.
What the Chaplains’ Office is here for, I guess, is to help pose that question. And other questions – like the question of what it takes to build something worthy of the name “community” – and the question of when we will finally finish learning the terrible lessons of war –and the question of how all the perplexing differences between us in the human family can become part of a solution rather than part of a problem.
In the Chaplains’ Office, we’re sort of co-conspirators to the process of helping your sons and daughters to become questions to themselves, and to each other. I hope they’ll each have a chance soon to meet my superb colleagues Cantor Bob Scherr, and Father Gary Caster, and Parvin Hajizadeh who advises our Muslim students. I hope the same for you during the course of your association with Williams:– regardless of where your own spiritual roots are (or aren’t). Our job – our piece of this remarkable picture – is to try every way we can to help them find their way to the questions that will help them make meaning out of their education (because an education doesn’t just automatically come with meaning) – and questions that will 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 questions that will help them to spill their own high hopes out into the landscape as flagrantly and joyfully as they can. The tools of our trade 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 questions wide: 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 meditation sittings, and for Ramadan and celebrations of the Jewish High Holidays and Diwali and the Feast of All Saints – at our Jewish Religious Center, and Thompson Memorial Chapel, and the Muslim Prayer Room, and even our own zendo. There are sectarian groups and non-sectarian groups and omni-sectarian groups multi-faith services of worship and inter-religious dialogues and spirituality retreats. 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 student volunteerism and community engagement – so for us it’s also about opening up a little space for stories of the broken-hearted world. 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, letting the part of the wide world that touches them here become a question to them, too – and seeing what happens if they spill a little hope on it, along with the gallons of super-concentrated energy and intelligence and imagination that they’re each storing.
It seems to me that, wonderful as it is to have all these hopes super-concentrated here and now, generally speaking the even better thing to do with them is to take them out and plant them.
So they’re off to plant all of those high hopes in the waiting furrows of time.. And so are you. You’ll water those hopes of yours with your tears and pride and patience and exasperation and questions and, I’m sure, a lot of phone calls as the pages of the story of these years start to fill up. What a blessing to Williams to have such people here. And what a blessing to the world when the harvest of all those hopes comes in.
Safe journeys home.
The Rev. Richard E. Spalding
Chaplain to the College
