Baccalaureate Address

by University Chaplain Mark R. Orten

Paying Attention: An Educated Awareness

If Commencement is the ceremony you will undertake tomorrow in which accolades are given and achievements are celebrated, Baccalaureate is that historic, sister ceremony (as the President has already said) in which perhaps some context is given — a time in which intentional, meaningful reflection is made.

I join the many others who will congratulate you seniors for your achievements, and also acknowledge the sacrifices that have brought us here, as well as the unspeakable Gift we all have been given.

Along with our graduating seniors, we reflect on such appropriate questions as “What have I just done?” “What am I supposed to do with all this?” “Does it mean anything? If so, what?”

Each of us has a role in this reflection. For parents, there is a unique pride and sense of accomplishment. It’s also your day in an important way.

For family — siblings, grandparents — and friends, you just have the best seats in the house through the whole weekend affair, observing the characters in the drama, greatly affected but not accountable! It’s a great place from which to reflect.

Our roles, all of us up here on the stage, are as co-celebrants; we are the facilitators of the ritual who put sight and sound and texture together for our collaborative reflection; what used to be a service of worship.

As a beautiful mosaic, we reflect together, we celebrate and, yes, we give thanks as we draw from the wells of wisdom accessible to us in the many traditions that comprise the Denison University community today.

As for my own role, what I want to say to you on this occasion has, in the broadest strokes, to do with what I would call an educated awareness. At the risk of sounding preachy (I am Presbyterian, after all), I want to encourage you, for the rest of your now formally educated lives, simply, to “pay attention.” For it is in paying attention, I believe, that we give context and meaning to the wealth of knowledge we have acquired here.

Why have you acquired an education? What is it for and what does it mean — if anything? Consider for a moment that it is so that you might better pay attention.

What if your education were thought of as more than a way to earn a degree, and to get a job, or even more than a means to make greater contributions to society? To be sure these are the more conventional, prevailing reasons our society gives for acquiring a college diploma, and in such times as we live, economically and politically, this cannot be altogether wrong. Such practical “purposes” do exist. We’re all paying attention to this.

But this Education, what we celebrate today, is more than your formal education only, which is merely a noble means unto these ends. The Education we celebrate may even be thought of, I believe, as an end unto itself. To be formally educated is to have some requisite body of information, as well as training to apply that knowledge, but to be Educated in a higher sense is to be more than merely equipped and ready; that’s training, albeit necessary and good. Receiving a higher education is to have the ability to apply all of your knowledge and skills in such a way as to be informed in our judgments, expansive in our understanding, and calculated in our choices. With this kind of Education, we can hope to have something more than power to exert, but also power to discern, and hopefully for the good. A higher Education may help us to see and know the Good.

Your education in the liberal arts and sciences is the very ability to notice beyond what is immediate, to be aware of what is underneath what onlyis presented, and to know not only what you are looking at, but also what you are looking for. You have been educated to pay better attention.

This is going to shock many of you I know, but if I could be anything else beside a Chaplain, I would like to be Jason Bourne. Some of you will know him: an action character who, in the movie series by his name, tragically lost his identity as a top-secret special operative for the U.S. government. Due to trauma from a failed mission, he lost all memory of who he really was. He didn’t know his name; didn’t even remember what event precipitated his being rescued at sea by a fishing crew, but inexplicably, almost as muscle memory, he knew how to escape from a building swarming with S.W.A.T., how to tie sophisticated knots, how to speak fluently in several languages, and even how to drive a getaway car!

In the first film of the series, there is this amazing scene in which he and a female accomplice, who innocently is drawn into his plight, are sitting in an obscure diner in the middle of nowhere off a rainy European byway. They are on the run from other operatives who keep appearing and trying to take them out, and he is trying to explain to her the confounding impulses that are overtaking him.

At one point in the conversation he leans over the table, lowers his voice and says (and this is my favorite part): “Why is it …

I can tell you the license plates of all 6 cars outside;

I can tell you that our waitress is left handed, and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself;

I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the grey truck outside;

and, that at this altitude, I can run flat out for half a mile before my hands start shaking.

Why would I know that?

How could I know that and not know who I am?

What a guy! Would that I could pay that kind of attention? Without knowing exactly why he was running, or toward what, Jason Bourne was employing an uncanny ability to pay attention in order to escape his pursuers. What power!

Think of the education, the training, which gave him that ability. What if such a power to notice things could be wielded for goodness, and the prioritization of some details over others were not generated by fright, but rather by wonder or curiosity… or what if simply by caring? To pay this kind of attention is the epitome of Compassion.

What if, by our Education, we paid that kind of attention not for what it helped us to achieve, but in order to make better sense of why people are mean or desperate or sad? What if our motivation to apply mathematics or physical principles were to satisfy a pure want to understand, for the satisfaction that that brings; some innate appreciation for the asymmetry of data and the fluctuations in temperature over time? Who wants to unravel the mystery of Beginnings? That kind of attention is priceless beyond anything that we can know or name.

It comes of instinct, the same instinct that precipitates our sense of Beauty. It sets in motion the power we know to make Poetry, and Music.

Somehow it seems inadequate to ascribe pure utility to such things. It is said, to be sure, that Beauty ensures the propagation of the species, if you want to think of it that way. Poetry, for its part, can win the heart of the beloved, the object of one’s desire. That has some value. But can anyone satisfactorily say to what end, really, is Poetry invented or Music made? Likewise, how may Education be given a pragmatic value only; what of its power to help us better to pay attention?

Yes, education can make you more marriageable or employable, and even useful to society. It can make any of us more wealthy, all of us more healthy, and might evenjust might — dismantle a Racism or cure a Cancer or extend the life of this planet.

Inscribed in huge letters across the brick auditorium wall on the side of the elementary school here in Granville, right across the street from my house, is the statement: “Education Safeguards the Nation.” Think about that. How might education stack up against military might or economic power to actually keep us safe? It can if it is applied to more than increasing both; a high and lofty claim, no doubt.

It has something to do with what your education has taught you to pay attention to.

Could not every class you ever took here have been started with the teacher saying, “Now, pay attention! And the following is what I want you to pay attention to:”

That’s just in the classroom. What of the other stuff; the rest of your Denison education?

So you joined the poker club or the College Republicans or the Lacrosse team? Good for you. You had an experience and you learned something. What did you learn? Not just when to call or raise a bet, or when not to tax and spend, or when and what to eat before a game.

Did you learn to look around and notice what other kinds of people joined you in your activities? Did you learn to ask what place society gives to those who do these things? Did you learn to ask what portion of a budget goes to support your activity as opposed to others? Did you learn to ask how your activity is portrayed in the media, or researched and developed by drug companies or lobbied in congress? Did you learn to ask what recreational pleasure or human worth it gives you to engage in such activity? Did you learn to ask how important anything you do is to a displaced person in Pakistan? Did you?

When you passed a person on Swasey walk on a morning’s trek to class, did you ever notice whether that person wanted to raise a family some day, or would have joined the Navy if his eyesight were better? Did you notice that your professor’s father was just told he has Alzheimer’s disease? Did you notice that usually talkative person in class was quietly relieved that she just got an offer for a job? Probably not. How could you? These aren’t things that you can see. At least, not if you aren’t paying attention.

Not even Jason Bourne would’ve noticed such things. Unless, of course, either his life depended on it or else he just couldn’t help his self.

He would have noticed if he cared beyond all limits of excuse and rationalization that these details were not more important than what his pants looked like on him that day, or what reason he might give for not having done the reading. What priority do we give to the attention we have to pay?

Two men were walking side by side in rush hour traffic on a busy downtown street (horns blaring, trucks rumbling by and car stereos blasting) a native city dweller and a visiting friend from the mountains out in the country, who happened to be Cherokee. As they spoke congenially the rural friend hesitated for a second, paused, and turned to a small tree that grew in one of those square cement boxes that line the sidewalks. As his city companion watched, gently the country man bent and offered his finger to a tiny cricket who was excitedly singing his cricket song to the world. Astounded, the first man asked his friend, “How in all this traffic noise did you hear that tiny cricket?” Smiling, the mountain dweller reached into his pocket and pulled out a few coins, and tossed them mildly onto the pavement. Several passers-by turned their heads at the sound as they kept walking. “See,” the second friend said. “It all depends on what you are listening for.”

You have learned so much here. We have held your attention for long enough. Now it is time for you to turn your attention.