Rev. Peter J. Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church, Harvard University
Before It’s Too Late
Text: Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable; if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.
Philippians 4:8&9
It is always a good thing to have the last word and, in this case, the next to the last word, for Baccalaureate is the next to the last of the rites through which you will be expected to proceed. I stand before you with enormous admiration of your achievements, and, I must confess, with a certain degree of rank, unadulterated envy. I envy you, not because of the long journey it has taken to achieve this moment or this particular spot in the geography, coming as I do from the east, but for all of the great potential that awaits you. This should be a moment of few, if any, regrets, for it's too late for regrets. Many of you are sitting here, I know, as do you, by the grace of God, and that is why Baccalaureate is an appropriate occasion in which to thank God for this most recent demonstration of his grace and mercy. Some of you are living witnesses of the fact that it is still possible to fool a lot of the people a lot of the time, and some of you will make a career of doing that. The time for regrets has passed. There may be that course you wish you had taken, those books you wish you had bought, let alone read, those sections in which you were prepared to speak but deferred to someone else. There are regrets all around, and I'm sure you have them, but this is not a day or a season for regrets.
So, I envy you for the blank slate upon which it is now yours to write. Think of it: after nearly fifty thousand dollars you can reinvent yourselves, for people will look upon you with a Williams degree and will not inquire too closely. That is to your distinct advantage, and you should be grateful for it. I envy you having a blank slate before you, for when I sat where you now sit, in my college now over forty years ago, I was as you are now — totally, blissfully, completely uncomprehending. I, like you today, had not a clue; and so I approach my task this afternoon with an uncharacteristic degree of modesty for a Harvard professor, because I know that what I say to you and what I hope for you will be as toast within forty minutes of the end of these proceedings, and that some of you will even so arrange it this evening that you will not even remember these proceedings. We will watch you stagger across the stage tomorrow, and will be sympathetic and empathetic. I hold out no great hope for the Baccalaureate sermon, because I know that it is as so much — dare I say it? — white sound to you, yet I hope there may be a moment in your life when, if you think about the things to which I hope to point today, it may not be too late for you to grab something of use and of value.
I can't remember who preached the Baccalaureate sermon at my Baccalaureate service so many years ago, and I suppose it really doesn’t matter, as it won’t matter on Monday when you go home to wherever it is that you go and someone asks, “Who was the Baccalaureate speaker??” “Some guy from the east,” you can reply. “What did he say?” “I haven’t a clue,” you can answer; “but he said it beautifully.” I understand that, it goes with the territory, and I accept it as one of the hazards of a profession where I earn my bread by the sweat of my jaw. The deal is this, however: I have been engaged to give you a Baccalaureate sermon, and you&38217;re required to listen to it. If I finish my job before you finish your job, I hope that we can all meet at the end, and at least enjoy the recollection of it.
There is a text upon which this sermon hangs, and it is the best Baccalaureate sermon that I know of ever preached by anybody anywhere to anyone. It also happens to be the oldest. It is the reading from Philippians, which Mr. Vaughan gave us at the beginning of this service. Let me read it again:
“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable; if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.”
Did you notice that there is a felicitous misprint [in the Baccalaureate program]? ‘Whatever is pure’ is printed twice, and I don’t know if that has a special relevance to candidates for degrees from this college, but purity is not a bad thing, you can’t have too much of it, and I suggest you take it to heart.
The Baccalaureate service has a distinct function in liberal arts colleges of old foundations such as this one; the Baccalaureate service is meant to provide for you a final word about unfinished business. Think of that, if you will, as a self-consciously paradoxical notion, a ‘final word about unfinished business.’ Tomorrow will celebrate finished business: it is done, it is over, complete, kaput. “Achieved is the glorious work…” You will have a document to show for it, proud parents to take your pictures, and a registrar to satisfy all doubts. Some of you may open your document to make sure there is something in it, but I have every reason to believe that there will be, and that your diploma will certify the completion of requirements, the achievement of distinctions, and the discovery, to a degree, of new knowledge. For some it will be a certification of merit, for others a record of attendance, but for all it will conclude your formal relationship as an undergraduate at Williams College. I’m sure the Alumni Office has already begun to say to you that you never end your relationship with Williams College; for even in heaven, and certainly in the other place, there are representatives of the Williams Alumni Association. They will track you down, and there is no point in trying to avoid them. Give early and often, and save yourselves a lot of trouble.
Tomorrow marks the end of a great and worthy enterprise, and I hope that tomorrow you will have an opportunity to give credit where credit is due — to your teachers, your professors, your families, your roommates, your classmates, and your friends. Today, we celebrate and take note of unfinished business, the incomplete work that each of you is and represents and has to do, because at Baccalaureate we celebrate the ever-unfinished business of virtue, of wisdom, and of goodness. These are the ancient truths that we trot out on this occasion before it's too late. Lest you leave tomorrow thinking that you are finished and completed persons, whole in everything that matters, certified by letters and numerals and computations, the Baccalaureate service from ancient times serves to remind you that you are not completed, you are not whole, you have not yet achieved perfection, but that there remains for you for the rest of your life the unfinished business of virtue, wisdom and goodness.
When last I looked at the Williams College Catalogue there were no majors in virtue, wisdom, or goodness, no specific requirements in those things, and perhaps even members of the Philosophy and Religion Departments would hesitate to say that their specialties were virtue, and wisdom, and goodness. That is why, within twenty-four hours of your departure, before it is too late, a total and complete stranger from ‘away’ is brought in to talk to you about virtue, wisdom, and goodness. That is my task, and that is the function of the Baccalaureate service, and that is why it is as solemn as it is, both in effect and in substance. This is pretty much the end of the line; this is the last time, in some real sense, that you and the College will be on these intimate terms. Tomorrow will be a splendid circus; it will be crazy and slightly out of order, wonderfully chaotic, and you'll all be performing on a large stage. That is what Commencement is about, and that is why it is opened by the High Sheriff, in order to give the illusion of order, if not the fact. We still open our Commencement in Cambridge in the highest form of hilarity in the part of the ceremony when the Sheriff declares that the meeting will come to order, all of us recognizing the high theater of the occasion.
This, however, my dear young friends, is not high theater. This is as close as you are likely to get, in this guize and on this planet, of truth-telling — both the truth that comes from words beyond mine alone, and the truths that you face as you contemplate what you have done, what you hope to do, and the strength you need in order to do it.
Most of you have read somewhere, in your psychological histories and studies, about what is known as the ‘imposter’ syndrome. You know what it is, such as when you were a freshman in college during those first two or three weeks here in Williamstown, and you actually did believe that you were that one Admissions Office statistical error that very quickly would be discovered. Someone would knock on your door, or send you an e-mail, or stop you in the street and say, “Ah, my dear Miss Brown, my dear Mr. Jones, I’m terribly sorry to inform you that you’ve been admitted to Amherst and not to Williams;” and you would have to pack up your bag and baggage and depart into that great unknown between here and the Atlantic Ocean.
We all have the sense of being not what we pretend to be, or even what people expect us to be. Your parents, seated in these galleries, look down upon their very expensive progeny arrayed in cap and gown in the illusion of wisdom and scholarship in the appearance of what everybody would hope a college is about, and they actually believe all of this; but you know what they don’t know, and you know better. Now, I’m not suggesting that you are an imposter, but I am suggesting that you know that the person sitting next to you most likely is; and therefore there is something of a holy charade, if you will, about this enterprise.
The other side of the charade, however, is the great and wistful, almost poetic, desire that, ‘O, if it could only be true! If only I could be the person I appear to be, the person I aspire to be, the person my parents and my college and perhaps even some of my friends believe me to be; if only I could live into the ideal, the hope, the myth of my experience before it’s too late, then this time will not have been in vain.’
Well, I suggest to you that there are some ways in which it is possible for you to live into the myth, to become what you have aspired and perhaps presumed or pretended to be, to fit legitimately into the great and splendid succession of your predecessors who, in years long gone, sat on occasions of this sort where you now sit. Before it’s too late I am going to offer you a way into your myth and into your dream, because it will make a difference in the way you will live the rest of your lives. There are no further courses, classes, sections, or lectures at Williams that will provide this information for you, and this therefore is your last free tutorial, your last opportunity to take advantage of subsidized wisdom.
Remember Mr. Churchill, who always has to be quoted on these occasions, when he had watched the modest turn-around in World War II in the Egyptian front, and said, “This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.” That has a certain Churchillian elegance and efficiency about it, and it also happens to be an apt theme for this particular moment. This is the end of the beginning, and Baccalaureate has to do with the things that we should tell you and about which you should know before it is too late. So, as has every preacher in the land, I have three things to say to you on the subject of the things that you should know before it’s too late. Have you ever noticed that every preacher, rabbi, minister, and priest always speaks in three points? It’s not because we have three points, as we usually have only one point, but it takes three different ways, three different pitches, three different attempts to get it across. I concede this at the beginning, so your job is to try to figure out how well I am doing with my one point in three chapters.
The first thing that I wish for you before it’s too late, is that you will, each in your own fashion, grow into your vocation. Some of you may wish I had said that I hope you will get a job, and I hope you do, if not for your sake then for your parents’ sake. I hope that if a job is in your future you will find one, and that it will be a job worth doing, and that you will give and get some pleasure from it and maybe even a salary along the way, but that's not really what I’m talking about. I’m not simply functioning here as an elegant placement office. When I speak of vocation I speak of that which has to do with your true calling, that for which you have been created, that for which God has endowed you with talents, skills, and aptitudes; and only you will know when you have met your true vocation, and in most cases your true vocation will have very little to do with what it is that you do for forty or more hours a week.
A vocation, as Fred Buechner describes it, is “Where your great joy meets the world’s great need.” The two critical elements there are your joy — that which gives you joy, satisfaction, and pleasure — and the world’s great need — where your satisfaction and pleasure actually contribute to the well-being of a well-felt need. Many people spend their lives looking for that conjunction of joy and need, that conjunction of skill and opportunity. You will have to work while you’re doing that, but the worst thing you can do is to confuse your work with your vocation. Happy are those whose work is their vocation, and when you meet them you recognize them, and understand that magic conjunction.
You all know too well people who are slaves to their work and take no joy in it and give no joy from it, for those people are far too familiar and far too plentiful. Rare is the one, and you are among the rarities, for whom vocation — in that real sense of that which gives you joy and pleasure and is capable of doing so for others, and does so in conjunction with meeting an important need in the world — is their work, and you will be among the happiest persons on earth, and I could not wish anything better for you than that. With that wish, however, goes a counsel of patience, for it will not happen to you at the snap of a finger, it will not respond to those of you with such short attention spans as are notorious among your generation. You will have to wait. You will have to wait to recognize when that moment of vocation comes, and grow into it. It will not happen at twenty-two, or necessarily at twenty-five, or even at forty-five or fifty. There are people threescore years and ten who for the first time have discovered the joy of living. I don't want you to postpone it for that long; I just want you to understand that you grow into that sense of vocation. So it is that that I wish for you first, that you grow into your vocation and take joy from it. Growth is slow, but it is always sure and it can be wonderfully redemptive.
There is that wonderful account, if you have read anything of Henry David Thoreau, about the bug in the table. I don’t know if you know this, but it’s a wonderful story of a farmer who chopped down a tree and shaped the wood from it into a useful thing, a table in his house, thinking of nothing more than of the function that the table would perform. Yet, within the tree, before it was chopped down, was a bug, and the bug was somehow preserved through the trauma of being chopped down with the tree and being fashioned into the table. Eventually, as Thoreau puts it far more elegantly and briefly than I, something — whether it was a hot pot of coffee or a warm pie tin — placed on the table woke up the bug and the bug came into new consciousness. It had been trapped until a moment of awakening, it had served an apparently useless purpose until it was summoned to be what it was meant to be. Now, obviously that is an analogy; or is it a metaphor? Can you tell the difference? It is either an analogy or a metaphor that has a life of its own, and it’s not to be followed too closely. Some of you are wondering, ‘Well, what happened to the bug? What are we to do with the bug? Should the bug have been allowed to flourish?’ Don’t go into all of that. Take, please take the metaphor at its level. Some of you will be fashioned into what will appear to be useful things, and at some moment, by God’s grace, you will be awakened to your true identity. Go with it, think about it; go read Thoreau if you don’t believe me.
The second thing that I wish for you is that you both discover and submit to your talent. I read the stuff that comes out about you, for it is my job to know a little bit about it, and I read what the College publications office says about your class. It’s almost as fantastical and whimsical as what it said about you when you were freshmen, all these remarkable talents, achievements, and accomplishments, but it should be a sobering thought, my dear young friends, to realize that they say that about every freshman class; and so by the Williams standard you are at this moment at the bottom of the heap of talent, achievement, and accomplishment. The brightest class in the history of Williams will take your seats in September. Now, I recognize that that is a disquieting thought and all the more reason to get out of Williamstown as fast as possible without leaving any traces, but the fact is that you all have remarkable talents, whether they are artistic or athletic, computational or analytical. Whether you have a talent for friendship or a talent for management, you have remarkable talents; but the thing to remember about talent is this: your talent is not something to be commanded but something to be obeyed, and placed at the service of a mysterious force.
Think of Mozart, that incredibly compulsive overachiever who, when asked how he wrote his magnificent music, answered, “I do not write my music, I take it down; it is dictated, I write it as it is given to me.” He was in service to the muse. He didn’t command the muse, he obeyed the muse, and became the great composer that we all know. There may be a Mozart or two among you — I certainly hope there is not and don’t expect that there is — but there is somebody among you who has a talent waiting to be submitted for a great and glorious purpose, and somebody who is prepared to obey that talent and to place it at the disposal of a great and mysterious force. That somebody is going to know the true joy of talent, and I pray that that will be the gift for each and all of you.
The third and final thing that I wish for you may seem very odd on an occasion such as this, particularly as I take in the view from up here, but what I wish for you first, last, and foremost, is happiness. By that I don’t mean just joy, fun, and delirious delight; you’ll find that in one fashion or another and some of you have worked terribly hard to create fun, joy, and delirious delight and are absolutely fatigued by the effort. I understand that. That’s not the kind of happiness that I wish for you, and as I look out at you at the moment you don’t look all that happy. Perhaps it’s because you’re not sure when this is all coming to an end. It is coming to an end; I have the best seat in the house because I can see the clock and you can’t, so don't worry about that. Happiness is something that I wish for you, and happiness is something that is in short supply in this sad, tired, weary old world. I actually think that happiness is not the opposite of industry, but the means by which industry is put to valuable and creative use. Lest you think that this is an abstract form of happiness, however, I must give you your money’s worth and define happiness for you. I do so in the words of one of those dead white men whom some of you presumably still study here in these enlightened halls. I speak of Aristotle, and it is he who defined happiness in this way:
“The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope.”
Think of that; it says all that needs to be said. “The exercise of vital powers”: the thing that I envy about you so much is that you are at the height of your vital powers. Everything that you possess is at its most acute right now: your brains may absorb more stuff over the coming years, but your brain will never be as sharp an instrument as it is right now. So too your body, but let’s not get into that. You are at the peak of all of your powers — in fact, you’re less vital now than you were when I began — so you should recognize that you are on the cusp of this incredible vitality and there is nothing that you cannot do. You may not do it well, but you can do it; you may choose to do the wrong thing, but you can do it; you are at this most remarkable moment, and if you think that there is a frozen period where you will stay this way all the rest of your days and will always be like this, oh, my dear young friends, I just ask you to look in the galleries. We too were once as vital as you, we too thought it would last forever, and look at us!
So, my counsel to you is to remember that happiness is the exercise of the vital powers that you now have, along lines of excellence — that is, doing the very best that you can — and that there is no excuse for second-best. You cannot be an indifferent, unsympathetic, un-nuanced, uncritical thinker, believer, server, or worker; you have to exercise these powers at your very best, otherwise this Williams enterprise is a complete waste of time. “The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope.”
You have scope. You may not have a job, you may not have much at this moment, but you have scope. Think of what you can do with the long empty years ahead of you, the blank pages upon which to write, the empty slate upon which to make your impression. Aristotle knew that happiness was not a goal but a consequence, a consequence of these qualities, these abilities; and they are yours in double interest. That is the one thing we can say to you today, that these vital powers are in your hands, and that the rest of your lives will be the occasion for exercising them as best you can.
Well, there you have it: vocation, a sense of your great opportunity; talent, and its appropriate use; and happiness, which should define your experience. All of this fits into that encomium of St. Paul, in that perfect Baccalaureate sermon:
“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, [whatever is pure,] whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable; if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” … before it’s too late.
Be sure not to neglect that little coda at the end of Philippians 4, where Paul says:
“Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace be with you.”
Paul is speaking to one of his young apostles, but the same thing could be said to you. Think about what you have heard, received, and seen in those who have been your teachers, your mentors, your models; and keep on doing what you have been doing, because the most remarkable thing is that you have already been doing that which we hope that you will do. You are already far wiser, far smarter, far nicer people than you appear to be, and that is to be remembered because you have already demonstrated in moments great and small the qualities that will sustain you for the rest of your lives. That means that you have been well taught, you have sat at the feet of wise mothers and fathers, wise teachers and mentors, and that you have been good teachers, each to the other.
If you remember these things before it is too late, no harm will come your way. You will have trouble, you will have difficulties, you’ll have failures, but no harm will come your way, because harm is defined as that which destroys the soul, and if you remember these things, come what may, no harm will come your way.
Well, as I look out at some of you, I think that I am casting so many pearls before swine, that this is a wasted effort, and that some of you are beyond any assistance of prayer that I or any of these chaplains can invoke on your behalf. It’s all over for some of you; but for most of you there is this one last chance, before it’s too late, to think about these things, about how to make a life and not just a living, and how to make a life that is worth living. When all has been said and done, that is the whole duty of Williams College, to teach you how to make a life worth living. No matter what else is forgotten, and most of you, alas, will forget most of the important things that you have learned here in a very short time, what remains is how to make a quality life for yourself and for others.
Baccalaureate is designed to remind us of that great unfinished business of virtue, wisdom, and goodness. We began with Churchill’s “The end of the beginnng,” and we end with T.S. Eliot’s “The end is where we start from.”
As you prepare for your great unfinished work of living, the business of virtue and wisdom, I am going to offer a prayer on your behalf, and this is a different kind of prayer and one to which I ask you to pay some attention. Don’t pretend to devout piety by bowing your heads and closing your eyes: do not fake it, listen to this prayer! It has your name on it, and before it’s too late you may be very grateful that somebody is prepared to pray for you. On Wall Street nobody will be praying for you, in Washington nobody will be praying for you, in L.A. nobody will be praying for you, but here at Williams College today, someone is praying for you, and this is the prayer that I offer, written long ago by a Confederate soldier:
The Ways of the Lord
I asked God for strength that I might achieve;
I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health that I might do greater things;
I was given infirmity that I might do better things.
I asked for riches that I might be happy;
I was given poverty that I might be wise.
I asked for all things that I might enjoy life;
I was given life that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for, but everything I had hoped for.
Despite myself, my prayers were answered:
I am among all people most richly blessed!
My dear young people, it is my prayer that that prayer be your prayer and that it fit you for the unfinished business of life, which consists of virtue, goodness, and wisdom. May all the possibilities that abide in each of you so gloriously today be realized in that great unfinished adventure, until you yourselves are no more. To that I can only say amen, good luck, and God bless you.
June 5, 2004