In Praise of Wonder
by David L. Weddle
Baccalaureate — May 18, 2008
Scripture: Mark 9:14–24
Dear friends, graduating seniors of the class of 2008, relieved parents and encouraging friends, my esteemed faculty colleagues, Marshalls Davis and Giuffre, Dean Ashley, President Celeste, munificent members of the Board of Trustees, Great Teachers of the arts and sciences standing in illumined splendor on either side of us (in the north transept Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, and Mendel; in the south Alcuin, Roger Bacon, Petrarch, Erasmus, Cŏlĕt, Loyola, Melancthon, Comēnius)—some of you we remember well, while others, alas, have faded from our collective memory—and some of us wonder what happened to Luther and Shakespeare—but the traces of your genius still mark our way. In the words of Stephen Spender, they were “truly great” and “left the vivid air signed with their honour.”
Beyond them, I invoke the entire cloud of witnesses whose gaze narrowly measures our efforts. To the invisible communion of saints—keep the Treasury of Merit open, some of us need to make some large withdrawals! To innumerable Bodhisattvas in Pure Lands beyond this world—we could use your wisdom and compassion right now! To the guardian spirits of the North, South, East, and West—you made a path in the wilderness, and we paved it. I call upon you all!
I
Well, this is a solemn occasion and one can’t be too careful. (Call it the Bruce Coriell rule.) Besides, inverting the conventional funnel of salutations reminds us that we are stepping into the midst of a conversation that started long before us and will continue long after we are gone. The ultimate justification of liberal arts education is to acknowledge that fact. We teach you so that you can be competent participants in the conversation that makes history. It will require all your wisdom and courage to speak up, “nerved,” as Whitehead put it, “by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past”—and “without adventure,” he warned, “civilization is in full decay.”1 Your voice is the sound of the future: the word in the beginning of the rest of history.
But let’s not get too heavy too soon. Today is a day for congratulations. You have successfully completed a grueling regimen of learning—we know it was difficult because we made it as tough as we could. It is a time-honored tradition. Practically every culture develops rituals to mark the passage from youth to maturity. In some settings adolescents undergo painful ordeals—rigorous fasting, seclusion in caves, facing wild animals, abandoned in dark forests, and set impossible tasks by frightful elders who exact a toll of blood, sweat, and tears.
The parallels to college life are close, but not exact. For one thing, your ordeal has lasted four years, much longer than any tribal people would consider humane. But with this gathering we acknowledge the truth of traditional rites of passage: there comes a time when the young pass all the tests and are welcomed into adult life. For four years you have been students; now I ask the faculty and staff to join me in saluting you as colleagues. [Applause]
II
While we are in the midst of this ceremony, let me point out a few of its elements. First, the costumes: our long flowing robes which mercifully reveal little of the physical beings beneath, but are marked by the colors and tokens of expertise and rank. They express an idealistic hope: that the only distinctions of consequence to you will be those based on merit. We are committed to the principle that creative talent is not the sole possession of any gender or ethnic group, religion or nation. Our robes are a moral and political, as well as a fashion, statement.
The robes not only reveal, however; they also conceal. What is most important about us, the strength of our character, is not immediately visible. The same is true for you; the formative trials of your personal integrity lie ahead. Before that point, the essays you composed on ethical questions are mere words on paper—written, as it were, in Hadleyburg, that poor town of Mark Twain’s imagination which learned the hard way, as he wrote, that “the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.” Prepare yourselves to be burned.
Second, there is tomorrow’s long walk. Crossing the stage is what scholars call a performative ritual, like stepping over a threshold, an action in archaic religions that marked both a boundary between sacred and profane space and also a passageway between them. The movement across the stage is a symbol; but at the same time it is an irreversible transition from the embrace of the CC womb into the shadowed vale of tears. It is an echo of antique ritual to say that you will be reborn into a world of great powers capable of nurturing peace and justice or destroying human dignity. The question before you is: with which powers will you ally yourselves on the far end of the stage?
Third, at the threshold between two worlds you will receive a scroll, an emblem of your triumph in the arena of language: written and woven, spoken and spun, pronounced and performed. The paper will declare you a bachelor, holder of a baccalaureate degree. The term once designated a knight errant or a feudal tenant capable of supporting a family and thus eligible for marriage. By extension, and apart from gender discrimination, a bachelor’s degree indicates a young person prepared for adult responsibilities. Along the way from the medieval university the term got tangled up with a phrase meaning “laurel berry,” referring to the garlands scholars were once awarded. Tomorrow, however, you will not be festooned with a wreath but handed a diploma.
The word diploma is from a root meaning “to double.” The certificate replicates in words what you achieved in deed. The paper duplicate/diploma will be given to you by President Celeste, the head shaman of our tribe. In giving you the diploma, he will also touch you in the secular ritual of shaking hands that is an echo of the primordial act of priestly blessing. Accept his hand as our collective touch, ordaining you to enact what you have learned here in the world awaiting you off-stage.
III
So we welcome you to the ongoing conversation the topic of which is the future of the world. Four years ago you stepped into the midst of a conversation about the human story—about beliefs and practices; histories and prospects; art, literature, drama and dance; sciences and religions that have occupied the energy, intellect, and imagination of men and women across the world for millennia. It is a conversation conducted in scores of languages, in hundreds of cultural contexts, with nuances and codes and jokes you only faintly detected.
The problem is that just when you have become interesting people to talk to we graduate you! Tomorrow you will step out of this brief episode of the story and into the sprawling, chaotic main narrative. Are you ready? If so, the credit is yours. If not, the hesitation may be our fault.
We have taught you to be critical thinkers, skilled practitioners of the hermeneutic of suspicion. By now, you know the litany by heart: no theory is innocent, no politics harmless, no love disinterested. No story is just a story—or perhaps what amounts to the same thing—every story is a story. No laboratory is free from ambition. Artists have agendas and often the skill to keep them quite hidden. Universal claims belong to the discourse of imperialism; reason labors in the service of power. Sacred texts are inscribed in blood, and otiose divinity perches on the outskirts of history. You have learned these lessons well: the curriculum of post-modern critique.
Yet—and isn’t there always another side to consider?—yet, while systems of religious and moral absolutes are often imposed with an arrogant sacrifice of life and freedom, the most horrific violations of human dignity in the past century were inspired by secular visions of utopia. Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot wrought apocalyptic destruction without benefit of religious sanction. It is true that with God much is prohibited, but without God it seems everything is permitted.
Consequently, the world that awaits you is about to test severely your commitment to the “core values” of Colorado College: to honor the life of the mind, to value all persons, to practice intellectual honesty, to live with integrity, and to take social responsibility. Fulfilling those “core values” is a challenging mission, especially when we have warned you about all the ways good intentions can pave the way to fresh hells.
So you leave this fortress of critical thought prepared to spot the catch in every proposal to gain your vote, your pocketbook, your time, and your bed. You enter the world with your defenses up and your eyes narrowed, resolved to do what is right, but without going broke or being taken for a sucker. Not a bad way to start.
IV
But now, as you are leaving, let me recommend another stance toward the world, not to replace critical awareness, but to complement it: a wide-eyed attention to everything that presents itself to you, a receptive hospitality to the new, the different, and the other, a disposition philosophers call “wonder.”
Descartes defined wonder as “a sudden surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it unusual and extraordinary.”2 He regarded wonder as a “primitive passion” because it precedes moral interest in its object, the awareness of what benefit the object might yield us. Wonder is sheer surprise at whatever is “unusual and extraordinary.” Like an unexpected blow, the wondrous is striking.
We might say it is a response to the intrinsic value of another. The response of wonder is not to ask what is it good for, or how can I use it, or how does it threaten me, but simply what is it.
A student once asked a Zen Buddhist master what is ultimate truth. The master replied, “The tall bamboo is tall, the short bamboo is short.” In other words—unnecessary words of explanation—in whatever state you find bamboo it is fine. The short bamboo does not need to be made taller through genetic engineering; the tall bamboo does not need to be made useful by turning it into a fishing pole. The bamboo is good as it is, a truth we miss if we do not begin with wonder.
Wonder is the passion that awakens compassion at the sight of a new face or provokes reflection in the encounter with a new idea or evokes responsibility in the presence of a new need. Wonder alerts us not only to knowledge of the unusual, but also draws us into a relationship that requires a response faithful to the new.
V
Thus the companion to wonder is faith. Granted, the prestige of faith has been diminished in the modern age, when confidence in the human capacity to achieve individual and social perfection seemed justified as parliaments and democracies replaced monarchies, entrepreneurs replaced aristocrats, individual interests replaced traditional values, and politics replaced religion.
The sustaining theme throughout all these changes was faith in the power of human reason. So whatever order was sanctioned by reason—whether scientific or political or aesthetic or moral—was prescribed for all rational beings. Thus buried deep in the ethical idealism of the modern age was a disposition for tyranny.
In 1912 the modern view of the world held firm when the majestic ocean liner called Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. It was the biggest, fleetest, and most luxurious ship ever built! But the Titanic was also a floating protectorate, with the Italians and Irish and lesser peoples below decks. The ship carried within itself the corrosive distinctions of modernity—gender, class, race—building resentment against barely held power.
The point is dramatized in the film, directed by James Cameron, when in the rush for the last lifeboat the first mate shoots an immigrant from steerage. It was a routine act of maintaining order in the colonies. But in the apocalyptic destruction of the ship and its fragile order of tradition and privilege the mate realizes he has been a pawn in an illusory order of cultural superiority. With the blood of his victim reaching his feet, he puts the gun to his own head.
Though no one at the time could appreciate its prophetic warning, the wreck of the Titanic was a sign of the horror to come. Neither rational forms of Christianity nor sentimental forms of humanism could keep the modern dream from darkening into atavistic nightmare. The world wars culminated in the flesh-crawling and spirit-aghasting spectacle of the Holocaust. In the midst of the most cultured nation of Europe arose the Beast. He promised rational order, imposed without pity, as clear and cold as the point of a bayonet. The Beast always uses reason cunningly.
Thus reason—in science and politics, philosophy and religion—failed the test of history. It could not by itself construct or maintain a humane civilization. So, in the post-modern age, faith is making a comeback. But every comeback is a remake, a variant on the original. This time faith returns wary of universal rational order, whether insisted upon by religious institutions or national governments. The spirit of post-modern faith is that of the father who pleaded with Jesus to heal his son: “I believe; help my unbelief!”
The father’s anguish is understandable: he has heard of Jesus’ power; he is desperate for his son to be cured, but he is not prepared for his son’s life to depend upon his own confidence in this unknown healer. What a terrifying word Jesus addresses to him: “All things can be done for the one who believes.” Who would not declare faith under such circumstances? Most of us would claim to believe in the Jolly Green Giant if our child could be saved!
But this man refuses to be deceptive; he admits that his faith is mixed with doubt: “I believe; help my unbelief!” He trusts that Jesus will not require him to pledge more than he can say with integrity. So he cries out, “immediately”—risking all—“I believe; help my unbelief!”
The story comes to us from two millennia ago, but it expresses our ambivalence between trust and suspicion exactly: “I believe; help my unbelief.” We have seen enough horrors wrought by faithless reason, just as we have seen enough tragedies produced by irrational faith.
We need no more unfeeling applications of logic that disregard effects on human lives. Nor do we need any more unthinking loyalties to various fundamentalisms. Somewhere between the rationalistic monster and the religious fanatic are ranged thinking believers and faithful thinkers. That is the range in which we hope you find yourselves today as graduates of Colorado College.
Each morning we set out with intentions, trusting that they will be fulfilled, knowing that the odds are against us. Indeed, the more noble our plans, the less certain are their fulfillment. When we project ourselves into the future by hope and imagination, we “walk by faith, and not by sight.” And as we walk, we question. What can I believe to be true or real? Whom can I trust? To whom do I owe loyalty? What can I have confidence in? To answer those questions you will need the defense of suspicion, the adventure of wonder, and the courage of faith.
So we come full circle. You are too discerning an audience to have the moral of the story crudely drawn for you. Just this final, borrowed exhortation: be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.
For all that I have learned from you, graduating class of 2008, thank you.
Adventure of Ideas, 278.