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Commentary: No pity for Class of 2005 … just real love

 


Commentary: No pity for Class of 2005 … just real love

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The Rev. Thomas V. Wolfe

May 24, 2005

A UMNS Commentary
By the Rev. Thomas V. Wolfe*

As I contemplated our commencement ceremony this year, I realized that I have been writing my invocation for the past four years.

When I stepped up to the podium May 15 to offer the opening prayer, I thought of how life changed for this generation of students—the last to matriculate before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In those few, short, terrible minutes, only days into their undergraduate careers, four hijacked aircraft collided with the students' assumptions about the global rules of engagement.

On that day, I had to function as a dean of a university chapel and as a dad. My daughter was one of those first-year students. Our campus at Syracuse University was like all of the others. We were hanging around television monitors for updates and horrified by the images. We were all afraid and stunned. The campus went into response mode. Meetings were called, and emergency plans were made.

In the midst of the business, I found myself saying to each one I encountered, "Don't forget to check in with your family." I stole a moment for myself and called my daughter's room. She answered.

"Are you watching television?" I asked.

"I am," she replied. There was silence for a moment … (a crack in her usually confident and strident voice) …"It's scary," she said.

LINK: Click to open full size version of image
Courtesy of Syracuse University

Students at Syracuse (N.Y.) University participate in a blood drive in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The confident poise of her generation skipped a beat that day. This technologically savvy group—wonderfully certain in all things—found itself pausing, observing, feeling and reassessing. The students also lived up to their reputation as a generation who puts their most deeply held convictions into action. "What can we do?" became their mantra.

They didn't wait for us to answer.

They started doing on their own. Expressions were written on sheets that covered the entire quad. Lines formed at blood donation centers. Candles were lit, and the collective became a blaze of light, remembrance and possibility. Their vigil absorbed the impact with a silence that was beautiful. If the meaning of it had had a sound, it would have been deafening.

I remember thinking about how I was witnessing a kind of awakening and embracing of a new world landscape. Diversity in all of its religious and cultural aspects had urgent relevance.

LINK: Click to open full size version of image
A UMNS photo courtesy of Syracuse University

The Rev. Thomas Wolfe, chaplain at Syracuse (N.Y.) University, addresses students following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

We educate in order to sharpen our students' intellects. We struggle not to protect our students from the "feeling, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing" that are learning. We hope that the motivation to learn somehow involves the activated senses. But that day, our senses were overwhelmed, and if we stopped to register a feeling, it most likely was fear. Fear sharpens our awareness, but it never substitutes successfully as a motivation for learning. This is why my hat is off to this class of graduates. My fear was that they would become numb, hardened and cynical. But they engaged a world that changed without their permission.

My daughter and her cohorts graduated May 15. My invocation at commencement was both a lament and an offering of thanksgiving. A lament is an utterly honest declaration of what is. That's the work we have yet to do. Thanksgiving is for these wonderful graduates that imprinted themselves on my heart with their compassion and undaunted spirits.

It is true that the world has changed. It is also true that the class of 2005 has changed. Part of it is real change born out of necessity. But some of that which appears as change is really a set of collective gifts and insights that the students already possessed but were called forth on that day, and which have grown with them while they have been here.

Through all this time, this dean has never forgotten that he is also a dad. I have never been able to look at this class without feeling my "dadness." I always enjoy commencement. But forgive me for being a little more invested than usual this year. My daughter is among these graduates, and we all have had a lot to get used to since they arrived.

No pity for this class. Just real love.


*Wolfe is dean of Hendricks Chapel at United Methodist-related Syracuse (N.Y.) University.

News media contact: Linda Green, (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.

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