A Way in the Wilderness
Kindred Spirits is the title of one of the most famous paintings in the country at the time this college opened its doors. The artist was Asher Durand, and the painting was a tribute to the friendship of the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant.
Today is, in large part, about friendships and kindred spirits.
Class of 2009, what we told you is now coming true: the people to your left and to your right have, together with you, have come to the conclusion of your journey in this place. You have done this together, and if I were to ask you to name your kindred spirits, many of you would name someone within the range of your gaze. So take a moment and look around.
Tomorrow Dean Wood and President Dunlap have the high privilege of proclaiming you to be Wofford graduates. And then you will join the ranks of others, like our guests from the Class of 1959, who are known as Wofford alumni.
Class of ’59, welcome. Class of ’09, look at them. Some day you will look like that! Allow me to tell you a bit about each other.
• Their senior year (’59) the first air-conditioned residence hall, Wightman, was opened. They complained that the rooms were too small. Imagine complaining about housing! You lived in the Village.
• You enjoyed Fun Funds (’09) during your Wofford years. They had the “pleasure fund,” which made loans to juniors and seniors who were passing all of their classes.
• An Old Gold & Black article from Nov. 21, 1958 was entitled, “College is Renovating Trees.” “We realize that the trees are the most important part of our campus beauty,” said newly installed President Marsh, “and we intend to protect them as much as possible. A program of mass fertilization of old and new trees is planned.” You (’09) spent your Wofford days in the shade of a national arboretum.
Class of ’59, your senior year:
• Alaska was admitted as the 49th state.
• The Antarctica Treaty, setting aside that continent for “peaceful purposes and scientific investigation” was written in 1959. One of the Class of 2009 spent January studying climate change there.
• The Dalai Lama, fled Tibet and was granted asylum in India. A group of the Class of ’09 boarded a bus in front of Old Main their junior year and spent the day listening to him speak in Atlanta.
• Your senior year two monkeys, Able, a rhesus monkey, and Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, became the first living beings to successfully return to Earth from space aboard the flight Jupiter AM-18. The Space Station has been occupied by humans virtually every day you (’09) have been here at Wofford.
Elvis was in the Army the spring of your senior year(’59), but A Big Hunk O Love was on the radio. And you gathered to listen to Mack the Knife, Put Your Head On My Shoulder, and 16 Candles. And you might have gathered ‘round the television to watch The Donna Reed Show, or Dragnet, or Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Remember?
Class of 2009, the year you were born:
The cost of a gallon of regular gas was $0.84. The Simpsons was seen on TV for the first time. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and South Park premiered when you were 10. Gray’s Anatomy premiered when you were seniors in high school.
When you arrived on campus (’09), you were listening to Mariah Carey, Gwen Stafani, Kelly Clarkson, Kanye West, Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Faith Hill, GreenDay and 50 Cent. Remember?
The very day you appeared here for Orientation and The Summit, Hurricane Katrina pounded Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Many of you visited that area to help with home repair during your time here. Remember?
When I asked several members of the Class of 2009 what they would like me to speak about today, the theme of hope emerged again and again. It is an understatement to say that these are extraordinary times in which we live. The way ahead -the future-- is a wilderness, both inviting and daunting. Unknown. Anxiety about the future is everywhere. I turned on Gray’s Anatomy Thursday evening just in time to here Meredith Gray say:
We spend our whole lives worrying about the future, planning for the future, trying to predict the future.
As if figuring it out will somehow cushion the blow, but the future is always changing. The future is the home of our deepest fears, and our loves and our hopes. But one thing is certain: when it finally reveals itself, the future is never the way we imagined it.
When Warren Dupree traveled the north in 1855 to purchase scientific equipment for Wofford --there were no science classes here that year— I doubt he could have imagined what this place and these people would become. While he was there, studying at Yale, surely he heard of, and perhaps even met, Asher Durand. That year Durand was painting using a newly developed technology: the tin tube. The tube enabled painters to take their paints outside and paint landscapes as they saw them. That year Durand painted a marvelous landscape entitled “A Way in the Wilderness.”
Isn’t that something for which we long? A path into the future; a way into the wilderness.
The prophet Isaiah,--or Isaiah—depending upon the scholar with whom you studied, addresses this in a peculiar way: “Do not remember former things.”
It’s a curious passage. Do not remember the former things? That’s not what counselors tell us. They have a word for someone who refuses to deal with the past: “denial.” It’s more than a river in Egypt, and it is not a quality you especially want.
Do not remember the former things? That’s not what professors tell us. “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana’s quotation has become a cliché we easily remember.
Those of us who try to lives as people of faith have traditions, sacred stories and scriptures that we read over and over and over.
We aren’t in the business of forgetting. We try to remember. Do not remember the former things? What’s up with that?
Today’s reading is a letter written to a community of exiles and captives in Babylon 2,500 years ago. They had run out of options. They didn’t have hope. They had no army, no leaders, no temple.
You can just imagine those people spending most of their time remembering the good old days, how it used to be. David was King, the army was feared, there was food enough for everyone in the good ol’ days. Then the prophet, speaking on behalf of God, says:
“Stop it!”
“Get over the good ‘ol days; I am about to do a new thing.”
One theologian puts it this way: “There are two ways of looking at time—Is the source of time behind us… Or is the source of time ahead of us, pulling us out of history into the future.” If the latter, then “the present always has within it the seeds of hope.” (Cadbury Lectures in Theology at the University of Birmingham, John V. Taylor.)
It’s an odd promise God makes, when you think about it. But, as Flannery O’Connor once said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.”
God’s odd promise is not to subdue the wilderness; only to make a way through it. Even Jesus, as he merged from the Jordan, entered a wilderness of temptation.
God’s odd promise is not to take away the desert, or take you out of it, only to find some water in it. God’s odd promise is not to tame the wild animals.
No, the only promise is to make a way and to find the water.
That is the promise for us, for all of us. God will do a new thing. No matter how wonderful-or weird-- things seem to us today, God will do a new thing.
And it isn’t clear what that will be; there is no promise to fix or mend or make everything right. There is only the promise to make a way in the wilderness.
People of faith believe time inhabited by God. Wherever we go, God will be there. Whatever happens to us, God will be there. God will do a new thing.
While God is doing a new thing, there are two practical things we can do—not simply believe, but do, as well. We can do these every day. One is to laugh. The other is to give.
In Apache tradition there is a myth that the Creator made people able to walk and talk, see and hear, taste and smell. But the Creator wasn’t satisfied. Finally he made man laugh, and when man laughed and laughed, the Creator said, “Now you are fit to live.”
In Navajo culture, there is something called the First Laugh Ceremony. Each Navajo baby is kept on a cradle-board until she or he laughs for the first time. The tribe then throws a celebration in honor of the child’s first laugh. That moment is considered the child’s birth as a social being. Laugh!
A wise woman was traveling in the mountains and she found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was very hungry. She opened her bag and began to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone.”
What we give is precious; that we give is even more precious.
If, when you leave this place, you are attentive to laughter and generosity and the presence of God, then you won’t be shattered by failure or seduced by success.
My prayer is that you will rise each and every day and say, “Today, God is about to do a new thing.” Then I hope you’ll go out and look for it. And I hope that somewhere in the course of that day, there will be an opportunity to laugh, and an opportunity to give. If you find these things, you will have found your way.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Read the Blessing of the Graduates