Trust in the Fundamental Connectedness of Things

Graduate Commencement Remarks
May 25, 2002

In many ways, this day marks a great shift in identity—all those years of being a student, and now, finally, your apprenticeship is over. We stand here together, our gowns and caps and academic stripes marking us formally as colleagues and friends committed to the pursuit of knowledge and its application for the public good. You have worked so hard for this day, and you deserve every measure of respect and approbation for a job well done. The degree granted today affirms that you have built a rich base of inquiry and practice, a rootedness which will give you great reach for your work in the world.

Yet there’s something I need to tell you. For those of you, like me, who will be teachers or parents--and especially for those of you who may be both!—there’s a curious realization ahead: we succeed when others don’t need us anymore. Teachers succeed when their students don’t need them anymore; parents succeed when their children don’t need them anymore. I believe our task is to guide others with a generosity of heart that gives away all the confidence, capability, and authority others need to function successfully on their own.

And so, on this day when we celebrate your accomplishments, we also acknowledge the paradox that you will continue growing and enabling others, by becoming less and less important yourselves.

As we preside over our declining purposes, it is important for us to open diverse windows onto the wholeness of things. In whatever work we do, and especially for those of you who will continue to work in the academy, I believe we must champion multiple ways of knowing, resist the lure of rigidity and convention, insist on a plurality of truths, while trusting in the fundamental connectedness of things.

Ultimately, there are no accidents. Over and over in my life, I have been confronted with synchronicities I could not explain…with apparently random events that only later became visible as integral components of a larger pattern of meaning. Over and over, met by an unexpected coincidence, I have found myself saying, I don’t know what it means; only that it means.

As you go forth from here, I encourage you to pay attention to what happens to you, to be mindful of those strange fragments of experience that seem to speak of a partially hidden wholeness, a wholeness that desires to reveal itself in the fullness of time.

I believe it is no accident that you came to this campus to study. Building on the life’s work you brought here, the research you conducted and the relationships you formed in this community will continue to weave together a wholeness that is waiting for you to discover. And you will discover it most vividly, I believe, in service to others. As you enable others to live fully and dream richly, the coherence at the heart of life will manifest itself ever more powerfully.

In becoming less and less important, we grow closer and closer to the wholeness of things. Trust in that, and go well from here.

Congratulations to you all!

Marcellette G. Williams
Chancellor