2007 Valedictory Address
By Patrick Gavin '07
Chief Justice Roberts, Bishop McManus, President McFarland, Senior Vice President Vellaccio, Dean Austin, Dean Freeman, Members of the Board of Trustees, honored guests, faculty and staff, parents, relatives and friends, fellow members of the Class of 2007. Good Morning. I have to be honest with you, I’m not particularly comfortable up here today. You see, I’m an actor – I usually speak the words of others onstage. But here today I have to speak my own words to a group of people who have disparate understandings of what Holy Cross is and what it means to them. How can I hope to encompass the experiences of seven hundred classmates in only a few minutes?
What have we all shared, the collective event that has been our four years at the College of the Holy Cross? I’ll tell you what stands out in my mind most prominently. October 16, 2003 – when Aaron Boone hit that fateful homerun in the late hours of the night to defeat the Red Sox in game seven of the American League Championship Series. And then a little over a year later when the Red Sox won their first world series in 86 years. That was certainly a shared experience. Even those who didn’t know a thing about baseball couldn’t say that they didn’t know what was going on. And, if someone fifty years from now were to ask me, what’s the most vivid memory you have of Holy Cross, I think I would answer immediately and unequivocally, “Well, it would have to be that night the Jesuits came down from Ciampi to celebrate the World Series win.”
But sometimes the things we remember most vividly are not necessarily the ones that prove to be the most important. Often it is the omnipresent and the subtle that play such a critical role in our continued formation that we forget to mention them. If this is the case, what has been so meaningful for us after so many years here? What is it that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives?
We have shared four years and four years is a long time to have set aside. Four years above and beyond what many others have to grow and to develop and to learn. For those not fortunate enough to attend college, what a frivolous waste this time must seem, these years on the hill, basking in the glorious Worcester weather, wandering our way to Caro St., dreaming of the lives we will have outside the gates of Holy Cross. Yet these four years have been a gift, from our parents who often footed the bills, and from a society that allows us the time to find a higher purpose, a greater understanding of our relationship to the world, to the community and to ourselves. So, now, as we journey into that world, it seems fitting that we should ask ourselves: what have we discovered? Not only what have we learned in the classroom, but also what have we discovered in our four years at Holy Cross. Are we more mature, more interesting, more engaged?
I propose that we are all more aware – that is the consequence of our four years. Through our experience at this liberal arts college, we have gained a more comprehensive view of what it means to be a human being, an awareness of others brought about not just by studying the intricacies of our chosen major, but by unconsciously studying the very art of what it means to live a meaningful life. In his Nobel Lecture delivered in 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn told his audience: “Artists can perform a miracle: they can overcome man's detrimental peculiarity of learning only from personal experience so that the experience of other people passes him by in vain… Art recreates in the flesh an unknown experience and allows us to possess it as our own.”
But what is art? Art is more than a painting or a novel or a play. For me, art is most concretely displayed on the stage and in film—I am one of that odd breed known as Theatre Majors, after all. But we can see, and many of us have seen, art in an elegant mathematical proof, the graceful power of the athlete, or the simple and solitary prayer in the chapel – that is, in a more comprehensive notion of existence. Henry James wrote in his introduction to Portrait of a Lady that the truest balance is “the perfect dependence of the ‘moral’ sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it.”
In other words, great art reveals life. So the ideal liberal arts education gives us more than training for the job market – it offers us the opportunity for a boundless and perpetual examination of the human condition not through our narrow and often blind experience but through a variety of forms ranging to the highest philosophical illumination. It teaches us to appreciate critically the depth of human experience and inspires us to carry that appreciation through every facet of our lives. And here at a Jesuit institution, the emphasis on integrating our studies into the development of the whole individual, on living for others, has hopefully fostered a mindset based on the idea that we all are bound to one another through our common humanity. This gift that society and Holy Cross have given us – four years to examine and understand – has helped to spark in us the fire of both creativity and of self-awareness, the consciousness of the vast pool of human experience to which we have only begun to contribute.
And with this gift, as with all great and selfless gifts, comes a great responsibility. From those who are given much, much is expected. If we have been made better by this gift, more than we could ever have been without this opportunity, we should be grateful. So I place a challenge before us, as the class of 2007, to give back much – much more than we have been given. If society gave us four years to grow and develop, let us help all of society to grow and develop – let us give four years to others. I don’t propose that we all drop every plan to volunteer for the nearest cause. Rather, let us consider the great gifts that we have been given in our college experience and pass that experience on to others by living lives of great ideals. Let us be houses built on hills to all those whom we meet; let us never forget the awareness we have gained, never become apathetic but rather become artists of life and take all that we have gathered from our classes, our professors, and most importantly, from one another, and mould a life that will reveal to all our common commitment to each other. As Ignatius of Loyola once wrote: “"Men of great virtue can incite others more effectively to virtuous lives by their words and example than the greatest masters of eloquence.”
Think of the many graduates who came before us, who entered college just as unsure of where they would go, who they were and who they would be, who studied and lived in the same halls and the same classrooms as we have. The graduates who, for one hundred and sixty years, have placed their indelible but invisible mark on this college, leaving their stories and experiences to enrich their classmates who would follow. Who, perhaps, on some day many years ago, were dedicated to the promise of lives of great ideals and great accomplishments. Today, let us be dedicated, let us be consecrated, as they were, to lives of great ideals and, in the words of Theodore Ryken, "… to be formed by God through the common, ordinary, unspectacular flow of everyday life.”
Congratulations, my fellow classmates, and good luck in all your future endeavors. Thank you.
Audio:
The valedictory speech is available in MP3 format for download in segments on your computer or MP3 player.