Holy Cross Winter Convocation 2003

Keynote Address: Rev. Howard J. Gray, S.J., honorary degree recipient

Michael Frayn opens his novel of childhood during World War II London with a poignant adult reverie.

The third week of June and there it is again: the same almost embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I am a child again and everything's before me-all the frightening half-understood promise of life (Spies, p. 5).

Childhood memories caught in adult life and history attract Frayn as they do so many of our storytellers in novels and films because childhood memories give them artistic permission to make dreams an adult occupation. Much of education is also about storytelling and making images-the narratives of scientific breakthroughs, the images that dramatize the meaning of mathematics, the characters from literature who become as intimate to us as our friends from daily life, the sweep of history that makes us part of epochs centuries before us, the wrestling with great questions and their fragile resolutions that characterize the myths within philosophy and theology. The efforts to give urgency to our mission as a school return us to the narratives that explain our foundation and catch our inspired moments. We need our institutional visions that ask us anew: Where did we come from? What do we wish to become? These days we are called to remember and to honor the power of vision. "I have a dream," Martin Luther King proclaimed. In 1963 the country heard that dream and shared its vision, "When we allow freedom to ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, free at last.'" We remembered then as we remember now that without vision, the people perish. This is an afternoon about vision, the finding of meaning in history and life. There are three realities in every wholesome vision. First, the vision is about me. Second, the vision is about you. Third, the vision is about us.

The vision has to touch me - my ambitions and my talents, my heart's desires and my limitations. The vision has to challenge me not to grind me down. If the vision grinds me down, then it is a nightmare or a hallucination, not a vision because visions give life to reality. In describing what we mean by vocation, a sense of personal call, Frederick Buechner focuses on the essentials, "where my deepest joy meets the world's greatest need." Notice the emphasis is on joy, not hilarity, not facile happiness, but the self-awareness of what brings me the peace of knowing and accepting myself before the Lord and finding his challenge in the needs of my world.

The Lilly Endowment Project on Vocation invites faculty, staff, and students together to read their own heart's desires and to treasure these desires as sacred ground, a privileged place where God calls me to know and to cherish who I am. Education calls me similarly to the labor of self-discovery: to know my talents, to be realistic about my limitations so that I know when and where to ask for help, to honor my imaginative explorations and to learn how to test these against the reality of life, against those explorations of other people and cultures. Every vision is first a labor of accepting myself, of knowing who I am.

But vision also involves a you. We live in a world of human contacts, friendships, and partnerships. The people who have been part of my history and who now form part of my life have a purchase on my time, my energy, my presence, and my heart. Every vision includes the intimacy of a you. This openness to another makes conversation happen, invites the surrender of love and the trust of friendship, and brings a partnering in something greater than oneself. In the efforts we took in the initial stages of the Boston College implementation of the Lilly grant, we asked students to name the defining relationships that gave identity to their past and direction to their future. Who were the[people who believed in you, trusted you, rejoiced in your gifts but who also reminded you that you were part of their lives but not their obsession? Every vision has to leave room, like the Samaritan of Luke's parable, to transform the stranger on the road into the neighbor, into the companion of my journey. Who are the people who have made life's detours for me? Who are the people who challenged me to compassion and care? Who were my Good Samaritans and who allowed me to become a Good Samaritan?

Third, every authentic vision, as the drive to find meaning in history and in life, has to be about us. Beyond me and beyond honored relationships of family and friends, colleagues and partners, there is a world that engages and enlarges my vision. The Samaritan had to resume his ordinary life, to continue to his destination, to complete his own journey. But before he left behind the neighbor he had created out of compassion, he created yet another wondrous relationship. The Samaritan created an us, calling on the least auspicious of partners, the innkeeper, to continue the compassionate work that he had begun. Every vision must include the community that will be its environment and its support.

This convocation symbolizes the embrace that must be part of the Holy Cross vision. It is a vision that enfolds a neighborhood, a city, a country, a world. None of these will become a place of peace and justice, of environmental responsibility, of human solidarity unless they become part of our vision as a people and as a school. The professional life I lead, the family I nourish, the Church I will rebuild-all these must have room in your vision-but so, too, must the world we share or there will be world.

But there is a caveat in this vision. Christ promised that in his Father's dwelling place there were many mansions. The world I embrace is not one I make from scratch. The vision I share will come in many languages and from many cultures. This vision will be filtered through a variety of colors and shapes. It will call the God I worship by many names. But it will still be the world I am called to serve. My vision has to be big enough and generous enough to hold all the treasures of history and life.

The vision that gives meaning to our history and life can frighten us. We may feel that we are not capable of such labor. We may feel not strong enough, not clever enough, and, maybe, just not good enough. Martin Luther King knew these feelings too. "I want you to know," he said, "that I am a sinner like all God's children. But I want to be a good man. And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, 'I take you in and I bless you because you tried.'"

Convocation means "to call together." The vision we share belongs to all of us. We lean on one another's courage and goodness and intelligence. Holy Cross is a community working out its shared mission. Therefore, let's call together that we can live with our personal visions and our shared vision. Let's call together that we might be women and men, courageous enough and humble enough to have tried to labor to make the vision come to life. Then we, too, will know the blessing of having tried. And having tried, we will also be a blessing.