Graduation Address

I see that the program lists my speech as an address.  I have only remarks.  Years of teaching drama and literature have made me happier speaking from a text.  Thinking about the school, these students, and this past year, I thought that my text might come from William Blake—”Without contraries there is no progression”—from his poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Blake knows we understand through opposites.  How can we know near if we don’t know far? What is dark without light? He maintains that our struggle to reconcile opposites create progress, on both at a spiritual and a personal level.  I suspect that with the possible exception of “Tiger. Tiger burning bright,” the founders of this school could not identify a single line of Blake, but I think the school exemplifies the ideas suggested in contraries.

In a few minutes students will begin speaking and you both should and will listen to them more carefully than to me.  They will tell you of successes in the classroom, on the playing field, of the stage and they will tell you of failures to perform, to be honest, to live up to your or their standards.  They will talk of friendship and isolation, of resistance and surrender, of hating God and loving God.

As parents, our love wants our children to experience only the success and the friendships, but our own lives tell us that, that cannot be. We know in our bones Blake’s truth: without contraries there is no progression. We have grown through the stress and struggle of experience and trough our ability to take and see the contraries and work toward a new synthesis.  Our children must do the same and while we can try to guide them and teach ways of understanding and dealing with stress we can not save them from it.

Thus this school, like all effective schools, has both positive and negative consequences.  Humans seem to learn no other way.  Stress has always been part of human life. Hunting mammoths could not have been easy. Why then our school? What do we offer to help our students deal with contraries?

I heard a speaker once assert that the 12 steps were the best tool for handling stress that has been invented.  That might be exaggeration, but not by much.  In the first three steps we learn that we are not alone, that we must ask for help, and that we are responsible for working a process but not for the final outcome, which is in God’s hands.  To survive the contraries we must see them in ourselves and share that knowledge—steps 4 and 5.  Having seen those contraries we must strive to create something new in our selves,–steps 8 and 9. The last three steps help us to bring these insights to others and to keep them fresh in ourselves.

So graduates, you are stepping out into a more, not a less stressful world.  A bad economy, two wars, and world wide unrest will stress the nation.  The normal struggles of college and the work at avoiding the behaviors that got you here will stress you.  But you have skills to help you solve these problems.  Use them.  Each of you must find your path. You will not like the path that finds you!
No one will begrudge you a short vacation, but don’t chill out.  Life is stress and struggle and work which produces happiness and love and pleasure.  You cannot know one without the other.  As Blake says in the same poem,  “Energy is eternal delight.”