If you would like to listen to my commencement address, you can do so by clicking this link, and going to the 47 minute mark. You can read it in the body of this blog post.
Good evening, Children. You know, I had to greet you like that one last time, before you leave here all grown up.
Three years ago when we first met, we had no idea where our journey would take us, except inevitably to this moment, where you would leave the cozy nest of Burris Laboratory School for big and bright futures. We did not know that we would grow together, learn together, and be intellectual together in the ways that we have been. I had no idea that I would have you in class for the better part of three years, and you probably, in that moment, wished that Humanities would be our last class together. But, here we are, and surprisingly you have put your faith in me to deliver this, the last bit of your Burris education.
First, a few things about you all: before we ever knew I would be your high school teacher, one of you learned your very first curse word from me, thus iterated when you dropped your toy truck at the hospital when you were two or three years old. One of you has submitted the craziest, most kinetic, most original, most creative film project that I have ever received. One of you has argued with me about the use of the word utilize, about which you are still wrong. One of you, rather than walking around the desks, to get to your seat, uses a chair, a desk, and another chair as your personal stairwell. One of you is the only person to have shared classroom space with me for the entirety of your last three years of high school, and for your presence in my room, I feel especially grateful. One of you has been a fabulous philosophical and theological conversationalist, challenging me in ways that some of my adult peers do not. One of you will give me my fresh cheetah print hair before school starts next fall. Several of you wrote such beautiful creative writing essays and poems, and then you were so nervous to read them in front of people, but you did it anyway, and we were all better for it. Many of you have visited my room to tell me how well your shadowing or internship experiences went; I had no doubt that you would be amazing, and you were. Many of you have invited me to events that you have been a part of, and I loved watching you do things that made you glow, in a way that sitting in our classroom did not. Several of you helped build a house for Habitat for Humanity during May Term. Many of you regularly volunteer in our community, making this small corner of our world a better place. Many of you have thrived, despite your circumstances, or in the face of great adversity, some of which we may never know about. Many of you have sought me out for help with essays, scholarship or college application help, and letters of recommendation. So many letters of recommendation.
I could go on all night long with all of the cool things that each of you has brought into my life— by which I have been truly blessed—but the convention of the graduation address requires that I give some sort of sage advice that will make you better humans. I mean, you are already fabulous, but we can all, always do better. What I am about to say, you have heard from me before. So, I am nothing, if not consistent.
When my brother graduated from college in May of 2002, I was excited to find in the program the name of a woman whose work I knew well, Sister Helen Prejean, a sister in the Congregation of St. Joseph. You, or maybe just your parents, may know who she is when I tell you that Susan Sarandon played her in a movie called Dead Man Walking, which was about Prejean’s tireless work with death row inmates. While I do not remember Prejean’s exact words at my brother’s commencement, I do remember my favorite thing that I have ever heard her say, “Every human being is worth more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.” And, I have taken her example to heart and worked hard to live by it, giving each of you a clean slate every single day when you have walked into my classroom. We are all worth more than our worst choice, and so, what I want to talk about tonight is how to make your fellow humans understand that you value them, even at their worst, and absolutely at their best.
We need to do three things in this wild and precious life to be successful: Lead with Love, Listen to Learn, Let It Be. Do not think for a minute that I am smart enough to have come up with these things on my own. I believe in being guided by the wisdom of the generations. Though I did come up with that clever alliterative mnemonic device. (I got an A in homiletics class at seminary.) By outlining the three Ls, I want to give you insight into how some of my favorite thinkers have shaped me. And, no, I am not going to discuss Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. We could apply that text here, but since you all already suffered through that last year, I will refrain just for tonight.
Before I continue, I want to make an aside here. If I have ever made you feel like I was not practicing these things I am going to talk about, please make some time to talk to me about it. I welcome feedback, because I really do desire to live this life in the way I am going to explain.
First: Lead with love. Or just love if that is easier to remember. German American Sociologist, Erich Fromm, said that “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” And bell hooks, my favorite literary and educational theorist says, “To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.” Love gives us a supernatural power to look past what makes us different and allows us to see what is the same. We identify what is in that other person, that is like us; not what we can use against them, not what they can use against us; not what separates us, but what binds us together. How many times have you been confronted with a situation in which you were required to interact with someone who you perceived to be unlike you? If that has not happened to you, it will, and it may happen a lot. You will be required to engage with people who seem to be on opposite sides of the binary from you, but when you look at every situation with love, you begin to undo those dualisms, those binaries, and you begin to see people not as adversaries on the opposite side, but you can envision them as part of your human existence, as a comrade in this life. Would you approach life differently if you looked at people with this type of love? Would you see friends where you previously saw foes? Would you look differently at the past, present, or future?
After contemplating these two quotes on my own, I did some research about love. I grew up in the Christian faith, and was even a pastor for a while. I currently practice a blend of Christianity and Buddhism in my personal life, and I have since done a lot of academic inquiry into Islam and Judaism, but I am unfamiliar with most other world religions and philosophies, so I wanted to see what other folks thought about love. I learned that every major philosophical or theological ideology holds in high esteem the idea of loving each other. Philosophies that do not ascribe to love as we might think of it, still hold to some idea of symbiosis or cohabitation, even if that belief is in a biological attraction between microscopic particles. Perhaps this is because organisms require some level of codependency to exist. Perhaps this is because we need each other in ways we cannot imagine. Perhaps this is because Fromm is right in saying that “love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” If you look around, you will see that love always wins, so lead with love.
Second: Listen to learn. Or just listen. Most of you will recall that I really have only one “rule” in my classroom, and that is not to talk while someone else is talking, and that rule’s offshoot is listen to learn, not to respond. During an IMPACT unit this year, I was made aware of a lawyer named Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. We watched his TED talk, and in it he tells this story: “I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks. And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then, and she would get together with two of her dearest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott –amazing African-American woman — and Virginia Durr, a white woman, whose husband, Clifford Durr, represented Dr. King. And these women would get together and just talk. And every now and then Ms. Carr would call me, and she’d say, “Bryan, Ms. Parks is coming to town. We’re going to get together and talk. Do you want to come over and listen?” And I’d say, “Yes, Ma’am, I do.” And she’d say, “Well what are you going to do when you get here?” I said, “I’m going to listen.” And I’d go over there and I would, I would just listen. It would be so energizing and so empowering.” When we are face to face with someone else—whether that person is world famous or someone who lives on the streets of our hometown or a person who is in prison for a horrific crime— one of the most intelligent, respectful, and compassionate things we can do is listen. Not only are we telling that person we value them, but also we are learning ideas and concepts that we are unable to learn in the exact same way from anyone else in this world.
Another person who discusses this type of listening is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a South African Episcopal priest and scholar. He said, “We live in an era of radical brokenness. In all our relationships, everywhere we look in the global family, we see disconnection and fear of one another. [It is] an increasingly noisy era. People shout at each other in print and at work. The volume is directly related to our need to be listened to.” Most of you know that I love silence. Silence, creating space for another, is what allows us to listen well in this incredibly noisy world. If you want to be a person who can bridge brokenness and fear, you need to be someone who listens. I do not know about your upbringing, but in my big Greek family, sometimes meals used to get so loud that if you were one of the youngest ones in the family, you never even got the butter for your roll, because no one was listening when you asked for it, because they were all shouting over each other trying to be heard. Tutu is talking about that sort of cacophony on a global level. If we think of this in connection with hooks’s words about dualism, we can combine love and listening into one solid concept. A way to love is to listen, and to listen is love, which erases the dualisms; thereby healing some of the brokenness of this world, because we all need to be listened to; being heard or seen is a basic human need.
Another thinker whose work has been meaningful to me is Thich Nhat Hahn, a Buddhist monk and scholar. He puts it this way: “Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his or her heart. [. . . ] For now, you don’t interrupt. You don’t argue. [ . . . ]One hour like that can bring transformation and healing.” If you can, think of it this way: leading with love allows you to listen in a way that radically transforms another person’s life. You can relieve the suffering of another simply by listening, and if you are paying attention, you can also learn from this act of listening. Notice Hahn says, “YOU DON’T INTERRUPT.” Give the other person your silence. You simply listen. Listen and learn. And love.
Third: Let it be. Or just let. One of my favorite songs is “Let It Be” by the Beatles, and I want to share my favorite part of that song with you: “And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be. For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see, there will be an answer, let it be.” The first two parts of this speech were about leading with love and listening to learn, and they both contribute to this last part: let it be. When you have listened and worked hard to meet people with love, and there is still no sense of connection, or a way to see eye to eye, or to compromise, you may find that it is best to just let it be. Letting it be does not mean that you have acquiesced to the other side, or the other person. Letting is be does not mean you have lost. You may still be parted, but there still is chance for an answer, so let it be.
In the words of Jack Kornfield, a meditation teacher, “To let go does not mean to get rid of. To let go means to let be. When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own.” So, while it may seem like you are allowing someone else to “win,” you are, in fact, simply allowing both their truth and your truth to coexist, and things will come and go on their own. You are not trying to force someone to your way of thinking, but you are also not allowing them to force you to agree with them. You are letting it be. I will tell you, honestly as always, let it be is the most difficult of these concepts for me. I want people to hear me, to understand me, to love me, to agree with me, and when I meet someone with love and listening, and we cannot see eye to eye on issues of great importance to me, well, I wrestle with letting it be, because I never want my letting it be to be mistaken for silence, which then may be interpreted as agreeing with someone or something I think is morally or ethically wrong. This is why letting it be comes after love and listening. And after a lot of deep conversation.
In the moments where I have to let things be, I remember the words of my favorite meditation instructor Sebbane Sallassie, “Although we are not one, we are not separate. And although we are not separate, we are not the same.” We are part of each other, interconnected, but we are not the same person, identical. I can see myself in you, but I am not you. I am not you, but I can see myself in you. In recognizing how we are separate but also connected, we can learn how letting it be is also a way to undo binaries and dualisms. Sometimes, just being able to let dissension be, to disagree and let it be, allows a fresh perspective to return to the conversation later with a renewed interest in finding an answer.
I want to end with a quick recap: love, listen, let. Lead with love, listen to learn, let it be. These strategies, when I can pull myself together to practice them strategically, have never lead me wrong in this world. This collective generational wisdom has always put me on a good, solid path. Leading with love has allowed me to meet some pretty interesting people, listening has allowed me to really see and hear them in order to learn from them, and letting it be allows me a certain type of peace when I do not get others to understand—or agree with—me. Remember from the beginning of this address what Sister Helen Prejean said, “Every human being is worth more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.” People need our love, our listening, and our letting it be. We need to love, to listen, to let it be.
Parents, as I have ended almost every email I have sent you, thanks for sharing your students with me over the past three years. Teaching them, and learning from them, has been my great joy.
And, graduates, as I have ended almost every class period we have shared over these years, I love you. Peace.
Reason Breeds Insanity 