Here is the text version of my Commencement address at the Graduate Theological Foundation in South Bend, Indiana on Friday, May 8, 2015:
by Rev. Dr. C. Anthony Hunt
First,
I would like to express my appreciation to Dr. Kendra Clayton, the Board of
Directors of the Graduate Theological Foundation, the faculty, students and
administration, for the very kind invitation to share with you on this
momentous occasion. It is quite an
honor for me to return to this institution that has been one of my intellectual
homes – an institution where I was a graduate student, and where I have been
privileged to serve as a part of the faculty over the past several years.
And
especially to the graduates of the 2015 class of the Graduate Theological
Foundation, I offer words of congratulations and blessing to you, your families
and the places you serve.
I
am reminded of a portion of a simple poem by the great American poet Langston
Hughes that encourages us to -
Hold fast to dreams
For
when dreams go
Life
is a barren field
Frozen
with snow. (“Dreams”)
It
is my sense that one of the things that all people of faith and conscious
wrestle with, and seek to hold to - in any variety of traditions, perspectives,
persuasions, or systems of belief – including those of the Abrahamic faith
traditions – Judaism, Islam and Christianity - is the matter of hope. The yearning to comprehend, and appropriate
hope is something that we all hold in common.
These are days
of tremendous change and challenge in our world. From the collapse of economies that affect all of us – to the wars
that are now being fought in various places across the globe - to natural
catastrophe – to the proliferation of violence that affects many people and
communities across America and the world, these are days of unprecedented
change and challenge.
And
amidst this, there is yet this yearning for hope among us. Hope is what German theologian Jurgen
Moltmann wrote about when he wrote – “Hope alone is to be called “realistic”
because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is
fraught. Hope does not take things as
they happen to stand or to lie, but as progressing, moving things with
possibilities of change.” (A Theology of
Hope)
In one of his sermons, "The Meaning of
Hope," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. defined hope as that quality which is
"necessary for life.’ King asserted
that hope was to be viewed as "animated and under girded by faith and
love." In his mind, if you had
hope, you had faith in something. Thus,
for him, hope shares the belief that "all reality hinges on moral foundations.” Hope was, for King, the refusal to give up
"despite overwhelming odds."
Indeed
hope is not easily attained to. In his
book Hope on a Tightrope, philosopher
Cornel West cautions against a false sense of security in hope, yet
unborn. He points out that real hope is
grounded in a particularly messy struggle and it can be betrayed by naive
projections of a better future that ignore the necessity of doing real
work. For West, real hope is closely
connected to attributes like courage, faith, freedom and wisdom. It comes out of a context of struggle, and
points to a future filled with the possibilities of promise and progress.
The hope that Moltmann, King, and West
wrote of is that which would beckon us to love everybody – both our enemies and
allies. This hope would help us to see
that we can (and must) resist giving up on one another because our lives
together are animated by the belief that we share in a common destiny.
In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech delivered in our Nation’s Capital
in the summer of 1963, King shared that a part of his dream was that we would
be able “to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”
What
real hope does is it moves us ever closer toward Dr. King’s notion of Beloved Community. It is a hope that beckons us to dream of a
better world. Hope for a better future
is ultimately rooted grounded in our shared sense that there is real potential
for each of us to change the world.
Perhaps this is what Mohandas Gandhi meant when he encouraged those of
his day to “be the change that you want to see in the world.”
Every
few years, I have the privilege of leading a group of scholars from Wesley
Theological Seminary in a doctoral immersion course that retraces many of the
steps of the American Civil Rights movement in Alabama. I journeyed with one group this past winter,
and will journey with another group of students this August.
The
group in January was typical of others with which I have worked over the
years. We reflected much of the
diversity of society today. We were
Hispanic, Native American and Asian, white and black, female and male, and from
multiple faith traditions. As we
traveled, we prayed, sang, and shared our thoughts together. We cried together on occasion, and we
rejoiced together.
As
we traveled in January, my memory harkened back to one of our trips several
years ago, where Dr. Eileen Guenther, a professor at Wesley Seminary who was a
part of that earlier study group, offered that it was a spiritual sung by many
choirs, “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table,” that played in her head
throughout our experience (see The
American Organist, November 2008).
Dr. Guenther said that she thought about the variety of tables that we
encountered as we traveled through Alabama (which at a time had been known as
the cradle of the confederacy and as a bastion of racial segregation in
America):
·
Lunch counters of restaurants where all
had not been welcome (in the past);
·
The dining room table in the parsonage
of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery, where we were told, the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed;
·
The kitchen table of the same parsonage
where Dr. King searched his soul and felt God telling him to press on with his
work;
·
The tables at which the people at 16th
Street Baptist Church served us lunch, tables placed adjacent to the site of
the tragic bombing on September 15, 1963 that killed four young girls;
·
The tables around which members of our
group gathered to share stories as victims of discrimination, of their
courageous work in the Civil Rights movement (and other freedom and human
rights movements), and their lament over a lack of awareness of what was going
on at that time in America’s history.
At
the conclusion of each of our doctoral immersions in Alabama, I am invariably
struck by how far we as a society have come - and yet how far we have to
go. There is a real sense of hope – and
the presence of God in our small, diverse groups - as together we choose to be
the Beloved Community with one
another. We realize that it would not
have been possible 40 years prior for 15-25 people of faith from diverse
backgrounds to travel in relative peace and safety throughout Alabama. For me, these are real signs of the stones of
hope hewn out of the mountains of despair among us.
And
so wherever we find ourselves in the world, and however we seek to find hope in
the living of these days, we are beckoned to heed, again the poetic words of
Langston Hughes –
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly. (“Dreams”)
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