Living in Service to Life

ROTC Commissioning Ceremony Remarks
May 25, 2002

I am honored to be with you today and share a few brief reflections in recognition of your commitments to learning, service, and life-affirming values. These are the kinds of commitments our world needs today, the commitments that mark you as leaders for our time.

Leadership for our time means leadership in the service of life. And as you know well, military service, perhaps more than most other professions, provides constant reminders of the preciousness of life and our duty to protect it.

To illustrate, I want to share with you a few images from my own experiences during the 1980s when I spent time traveling and working in many places throughout Asia:

Motoring across the South China Sea in a lawn-mower powered banca boat from Manila Bay to Corregidor with its overgrown battlements still in evidence. Once there, going a few feet into Malinta Tunnel and into the "mile-long barracks" on whose outer walls are etched the names and serial numbers of the men who knew they were going to die…and walking the length of that barracks, letting my fingertips be instructed by their lives. I felt connected to lives lost, yet living still.

Walking a short distance onto the bridge over the River Kwai, behind me a small preserved Quonset hut of the death camp containing memorabilia of the prisoners who struggled and died there and the three small cemeteries where they rest. And in front of me in the distance, the hills of then Burma, now Kalimantan, though I didn’t know at the time that civil war had just broken out there.

I share these recalled images with you, as a way of commemorating the fragility and preciousness of life. Being aware of the preciousness of life, I believe it is our duty to live intentionally, to live as leaders in service to life.

Service is an essential element of leadership for our time. In service, we experience the full currency of our humanity. As you embark on careers of leadership and of service—to country, to community, to family—I would ask you to practice the habit of reflection on your values and the ways in which you are serving life.

Some questions to consider:

What are the values you hold most dear?

What do you do to prevent yourself from falling victim to cynicism, despair, and pettiness?

How do you encourage and enable optimism, trust, hope, and conviction?

What do you do to hold with certainty before you a firm sense of life?

What do you do to encourage in others the growth necessary to sustain the vitality of life?

Take these questions with you as you begin the next phase of your careers. Living in service to life, the answers will take care of themselves. Thank you and congratulations.

Marcellette G. Williams
Chancellor