2020 Class Speaker: “If it is Worth Celebrating, it is Worth Preserving and Nurturing”

Audio

By Graham Crawley (’20)
Class Speaker
Commencement 2020

Bishop Barber, President McLean, Dr. Goyette, Mr. Kuebler, governors, priests and religious, faculty, family, and friends: It is my great honor to deliver this address on behalf of my beloved friends and classmates: the Class of 2020.

“Vanity of vanities. All is vanity […] I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation.”

We began our time here with these encouraging words, and in the coming months we found that Solomon was not kidding. Surely all of us have known vexation in this pursuit of the beginnings of wisdom, and surely all of us, in varying degree, have known madness, and a few of us, I’m sure, stirred up some conversation with folly. But hopefully now we can all respond to the above passage from our first theology reading, with the characteristically playful and penetrating words of Socrates from our final seminar reading: “That would have been fine to say if madness were bad, pure and simple but in fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god.”

The decision to come to this school seems mad to many people unfamiliar with it, but I think we would not have so many return from around the country for this formality if we did not hold it somewhere deep in our souls as a precious gift from God. This community is a part of us, and though we’ve moved beyond its physical location, we are still very much a part of it, that is, if we keep it close in our minds and hearts.

How unique is it that our graduation is not so much a farewell as it is a reunion. Graduation is a celebration not of what we’ve accomplished but of who we’ve become. As a real community, one ordered to a shared end, enriched by each of our participation in it, this accomplishment cannot be properly celebrated without tipping our hats to all who are a part of it. Every single one of us made this class what it is. All those here, and all those who could not make it today. And we aren’t alone. We would not be without the class before us, and the class before that, our tutors, our chaplains — all who contributed to our rich culture.

Now, we’ve left the order, isolation, intimacy and aesthetic beauty of this little community. We’ve spent a year in the world. Already, our time at TAC feels a distant memory… Imagine 10, 30. We, along with the rest of the material world, are subject to time. In 10 years, the experience we had here will seem a dream. This is the unfortunate reality of our material world, always tending toward dissolution and uniformity.

At the beginning of the Divine Comedy, Dante finds himself “midway along the journey of life,” “full of sleep” in the midst of a gnarled and savage wilderness. If it can happen to Dante, friends, it can happen to us. What, then, in light of our education here, have we become? If it is worth celebrating, it is worth preserving and nurturing.

We are rational animals. We have immaterial souls. This is the key to all lasting things. This is the key given to all those who pursue wisdom. We learned in Senior Natural Science that a distinctive trait of a living thing is that it actively resists disorder and decay. This applies to the life of the body as much as it does the life of the soul. In the same way that material tends towards dissolution and disorder, the fallen soul tends toward what is lukewarm and mundane. This is Adam’s curse.

With every breath, with every thought, with every prayer we must resist this. “We must labor to be beautiful.” We must, as Aristotle says, “strain every nerve to live by that which is best in us.” In this striving, our time here will not fade, it will not dissolve, it will not have been in vain. In this pursuit and love of truth, we become something more than mortal. Our education was not about teaching us what to think, but how to live.

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So, how ought we to live? What does the life of the fledgling philosopher look like? No matter where we find ourselves, we have all been thrust out of our warm little nest into the battlefield for Truth. We’ve left our community for a world obsessed with appearances, rather than understanding. A world dominated by mediated, virtual experience, rather than intimate, human experience. What it means to be a human being is in danger of being lost on us. It would be shameful and sad if we, who made movements toward the mouth of the cave, were to scurry back down into its depths.

We are not to lose our humanity to despondence or fear. We are not to spend our lives prodding and snapping at one another in some social-media thread. We are not to forget what it is to wake up on a crisp morning and see that white cross upon that green hill, and see those familiar figures walking across the quad to mass. We are to greet every day with a “Sursum corda!” and encounter every single individual we meet in this world with the same love that brought the universe into existence. And if we do not, we allow ourselves to be disturbed and prevented from loving the Truth and one another. We mustn’t let the world disturb our souls. And we mustn’t tread lightly when it comes to truth.

If we are to make any descent back into the cave, it should only be to rouse the others.

At the risk of ruffling a few feathers, I’d like to draw from the wisdom (or madness, depending on how you take it) of a most saintly and controversial character.

If the character provokes some disagreement, I hope at least that my point will be salvaged. I quoth, “‘There is no knight errant who is not in love,’ said Don Quixote.” Whether or not you think Don Quixote was simply misguided or utterly and harmfully insane, I think he offers us invaluable insight into the spirit with which we ought to approach our lives as true lovers of wisdom. We must be noble-minded, courageous, and to be these things, we must be madly in love. The noble-minded man lifts the minds of others from the profane to the sacred. The courageous man loves so much he is willing to die for what he loves, though he is a mad man, as far as the coward is concerned. You see, to be noble-minded and courageous is to be one who is madly in love.

We chose to come to a school ordered to a communion with the great minds. In the same way that Don Quixote became the books he read, we, in some small way, became the books we read. If we’re not careful, this inheritance living within us will die, despondent. If this gift of God is a kind of madness, then let us continue to ramble in it.

Let us see beyond mundane appearances, to the sacred and what is most real. Let us seek to know, in order that we may love all the more. We made this place our home for a little while, but we are already sojourners in this world. Then let us be knights errant, in a mad world that calls us mad.

I admit, sometimes it seems as though hell is rising up around us. Ought this change a single thing about the focus of our lives? “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee.” It would be a slavish and un-Christian thing if we were to let all that’s going on in the world impede upon this living gift.

As warriors of truth, we must love truth more than it is hated by those who persecute it, “pursuing her like a hunter, and lying in wait on her paths.” This is what it means to keep our education close to us. Choose what interests you. Reread those favorites from our time at TAC. Direct daily effort to the life of the mind. The joy we all experienced at various times in our education, this is the stuff of happiness. We lived this for four years! Are we to leave it to a fading memory?

A philosopher, by definition, is a lover of wisdom. With any luck, this is what we have become in our time at TAC. What are we if not philosophers? As children of God we were made to love truth, beauty, and goodness, and if in this life we do not pursue this to its end, then we have fallen short even of the title “man” or “woman.” Our diploma is but a participation trophy if we have not fallen in love with the Truth.

To truly graduate this place is to be welcomed into the community of those who love.

Our school proposes to give us the “beginnings of Wisdom.” The book of Proverbs tells us that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Not fear as in terror or even merely fear of punishment, but rather, that same fear that a good child has for his father: it is awe, exuberant admiration, and ardent love. If our time here at Thomas Aquinas College has provided us with anything, I sincerely hope that it has enkindled in us the fire of His Love. May we spend our lives stoking and fanning that flame. Thank you.