2008 Valedictory Address
By James Michael Brennan '08
Good morning Bishop McManus, President McFarland, Senior Vice President Vellaccio, Dean Austin and Dean Swigert, members of the Jesuit Community and the Board of Trustees, Honored Speaker, and today’s honored guests. Welcome also to the dedicated faculty and staff who flank us today, who have been our role models, mentors, and friends these past four years; to our parents gathered here, who, I assume, are overjoyed that we’re all moving home for a few…years; and to my fellow classmates, I’m glad we’ve made it – there were some moments over the last few months where things started to look a little iffy.
There’s a grammatical construction in Russian that is quite distinct from anything found in English. Rather than having just the “I” focused sentence – “I go with you to the store,” for instance, Russians will often subordinate the “I” to the collective – “We with you go to the store.” Today, my invitation is this: We with you, the entire Holy Cross community, our classmates and friends, our parents, our families, not only men and women for others, but men and women with others, We with you celebrate this day not only to recognize our individual achievements, but to give thanks for the indispensable support and love and encouragement each one of us has received.
It has been four years since we, the Class of 2008, arrived at Mount Saint James on that blistering August morning; four years of syllabi and midterms and final exams, of office hours and study guides and late nights with cups of Coolbeans coffee, perhaps with a shot of espresso (or two!), of books and textbooks and ERES articles, of ideas and theories and counter-theories. Four years of these and other things, four years after which I can unequivocally say, much to the chagrin of my parents no doubt, that I know only one thing for certain –I know that I know nothing – absolutely nothing.
But wait, I claim, it’s not just me, but my classmates, too. They don’t know anything either.
But wait, I exclaim, you misunderstand me! Let me explain - at Holy Cross I have learned much, we have learned much, in facts and figures, tables and charts, philosophical approaches and ethical perspectives, and from this we have certainly benefited. But Holy Cross has also been cruel to us, for through the courses we study, through the professors with whom we interact, through the service we do, through the experiences we’ve had abroad, through reflection on the Cross itself, we have approached the unknowable, with bated breath and a slow tread we have drawn near the mountain of Truth, the great mystery of our being. Because of the limits of our human knowledge and perception, we cannot see what lies at the summit, and we are left in the shadow of that great mountain, cognizant of its existence, grasping for its revelation, yet still knowing nothing.
Herein lies the paradox of human existence: the more we strive for knowledge, the more we realize how far we are from it. The paradox leaves us unsettled. As does the one we encounter in the Book of Genesis. The serpent tempted Adam and Eve with the promise that they could acquire the knowledge of good and evil, and to become therefore like God. The desire for knowledge, however, only earned them separation from the divine, and they were chased from paradise by an angel armed with sword and fire. We have called this story The Fall of Man, and we attribute to it the wretched condition of humankind in all its bloody history.
Before The Fall, however, Adam and Eve lived, but were unconscious of their own lives. In that state of unconsciousness, they could never have truly known the divine. The Fall then is not the worst moment in human history, but the moment in which we made the greatest movement toward the divine, and thus became fully human. When they bit that apple, they desired to know. And suddenly we with them became endowed with the cognition and the soul to choose the divine, to pursue the Truth through the desert, to approach that mountain and remove our sandals before the burning bush, to embody the very human longing for transcendence.
Holy Cross is our Eden, our paradise, our garden of fecundity. Before Holy Cross, we, like Adam and Eve, just didn’t know that we didn’t know. But four years ago when we gathered on this campus as a class, we were shown a small apple that did not look particularly appetizing at the time, but as we grew, as we matured, it increasingly enticed us with its promise. At one point or another, whether during a seminar, in the depths of the library, in the silence of retreat, in the words of a book, or during a late night talk with a friend, we took a bite of that bright, shiny apple, for we also desired, we also yearned, we also longed to know.
That first bite tasted so sweet and delicious, but with its digestion, a strange thing happened – we realized we were naked. No longer were we clothed in our ignorance; no longer were our eyes shut to our fallibility, nor to our prejudices and presuppositions that we had confused for truth. No longer were we content with the isolation and protection of our beautiful but small gated island. We saw that there existed a beyond, an outside, an other. We knew that we did not know. And at first we hid because we were very afraid of our not-knowing, and we desired to return to our blindness – at least there we were unaware of the dark world that loomed beyond and outside. But there could be no return. And we felt incomplete.
A classical liberal arts education guides us towards that completion, towards that wholeness, as it seeks to form the free person for one is not born free, but becomes free through seeking knowledge in the study of mathematics, the physical and social sciences, the arts and the humanities. In that tradition, the tradition of the ancients, of all those who have sought faith, of Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits who continue his ministry into the new millennium, in that tradition we have now partaken of that apple to acquire the knowledge of good and evil. We have made the choice. Now, with a will that is free, with the freedom to choose what we see as the best life, filled with the yearning to be completed in the divine in the multiplicity of its forms, we no longer wish to hide our nakedness. Rather, with humility and longing we begin our journey out there, taking with us the memory of our dear friends Ann Whalen and Kurtis Wilkey – to hear what we can hear, to see what we can see, to learn what we can learn, to seek what we do not know, to become free men and women. We are the inheritors and now the vanguard of that utterly human movement toward the divine.
Thus, the opening of our eyes, the realization that we know nothing, is not the end point. It is not the conclusion. It is not intended to disillusion or to paralyze or to eviscerate faith. Instead, it is a grand beginning; it is a grand opening of our souls; it is the grand challenge to face our humanity.
And so we, the Class of 2008, are not expelled from this place, but choose to leave and enter fully into this world, we choose to seek the divine, the unfathomable mystery of the universe, to achieve our freedom in each moment and with every breath we take, reveling in the complexity that is human existence and hoping for the day our souls take flight.
Congratulations to all you learned non-knowers – and good luck and Godspeed – tomorrow a new seeking, one that is out in that world, will begin. Thank you.
Audio:
The valedictory speech is available in MP3 format for download in segments on your computer or MP3 player.