Introduction
Thank you for inviting me to speak to you.  The circle of a graduating class is a special bond and I am honored that you asked me.  I would note that the invitation was delivered by George Garzon and I have learned that something of a small plot was afoot to make sure  I got here.  Not to worry--I did not go flyfishing and almost forget my task--as I once did with one of my Wilkin's speeches. And not to worry again:  I was invited by yet another of your number not to speak of certain things and of them I shall not.

I am a religion teacher,  but I have never quite gotten over [as a couple of dozen of you won't get over] having been an English major.  Although my career long since bent another way, I still find that I turn to poets for my meditations and to help me frame my thoughts. In my private canon of poets, the ones close to my heart are Donne, Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Cummings, and the Austrian poet, Rilke.  There are some poems I re-read each year:  Eliot's Four Quartets,  Cummings' 95 Poems, Rilke's Duino Elegies.

In the eighth elegy, Rilke considers the journey of the modern spirit, essentially lost in the world.  Caught in between his native soil and some unknown destination, he is beside himself in an alienation both from self and land, having lost the capacity for natural innocence and lacking the gift of spiritual grace.  Rilke's character, in desperate pilgrimage can neither own his past nor embrace his future.  On his way to the sere Land of Lamentation, he laments, "More than ever the things that we can live by are falling away..."  The effort to order the world by understanding or design fails.  He is at home nowhere and knows no community, so exists in a perpetual state of saying goodbye:

"And we:  onlookers, always, everywhere,
turned toward everything and never from!
We are surfeited.  We set it in order. It breaks.
We put it in order again and break down ourselves.

Who has twisted us like this, so that--
no matter what we do--we have the bearing
of a man going away?  As on the last hill
that shows him all his valley, for the last time,
he turns, stands still, and lingers, so we live,
forever saying farewell."
    (Duino Elegies, eighth)

This is that time in life when each of you has the bearing of "a man going away."  And at this point we pause, linger, and consider our mountain for the last time.  There is, as in the Rilkean lament, some sadness, some deep sorrow, in this.  A few of you will never come back.  Some others will see each other here for the last time in your lives.  And when some of you do come back some of us who remained will not be here.  Some of you will say goodbye and go away in delight; a few others will carry a sharp feeling away with you; and a few will go away, for now, thankful that no one noticed.  But you are going away and this dinner and the events of the next two weeks mark in different ways your saying farwell to your life here.

Like the departure of Rilke's pilgrim, the occasion bids recollection and reflection.  Let me, by way of organizing these remarks suggest to you that there is not one but several Sewanee's that rise to presence in our reverie of going away and saying farewell as we stand on this hill for the last time and look back.

I.  The Sewanee of Memory
This Sewanee of Memory is the Sewanee of brick and stone--the one you have come to love so far.  This is the Sewanee that former U.S. Senator Howard Baker, when he came for his honorary degree, described as the most natural university in America where the sandstone buildings seem to rise up from the earth. From infinite blue skies to misting fog and the unthinkable chrome yellow of the ginkos, images and colors haunt us at every turn.  You now know Sewanee in all its seasons and you are blessed to have passed time in this place and measured your own passing by the turn of seasons and semesters.

But this is also the mortal Sewanee, the Sewanee of decay and dissolution, what our sometime laureate, Richard Tillinghast, called "Sewanee in Ruins." Some the ruins of time, some the ruins of our own doings.  Surely no place so lovely has so much trash, almost as if we have to innoculate the beauty with its opposite so that it does not infect us too much.  And sometimes we have seemed at war with all that is familiar, taking away the loved and the customary as if their presence were a tincture of deceit.  Buildings pass but contracts can never replace covenants--those faithful loyalties by which we live.  This is the wounded Sewanee, carrying all the pain of her past and of the South in eroding sandstone and wind riven trees--where the buildings themselves become slowly trickling hourglasses of the past measuring out its passing as the grains of sand wash into the streams and are carried away.  This is the Sewanee that is the figure of your own mortality, a place where "the voices at last fade away into emptiness and silence."

Yet these are the things that make your memories here and that memory is sacred.  It is what you will carry with you--and your memories will be better than the "reality" and will get better with the years.  The edges will be rounded off the sharper memories and the smoothing and the forgetting will not just be the result of the passage of time but your own doing as you set aside the small and petty things.  For the task of memory is as often to forget as to remember certain things.  And when you come back for Homecoming, you will be glad that your name is remembered but thankful that your grade is forgotten or that certain incident that put the whole group of you in front of Dean P.  is now remembered with a smile and not a frown.

II.  The Sewanee of Serenity
There is another Sewanee, one that you do not know yet.  For more than four years, now, your life has been a struggle:  to find and apply to schools, the rounds of visitations, acceptance and matriculation, dorms and new friends, classes that did not always make sense, trying to decide on a major and/or a career, changing your mind and starting over, saying yes and later breaking up, thinking about transferring, sticking with it, but then comps, doing interviews as you got ready for comps and tried to maintain a semi-respectable presence in Southern Religion or Shakespeare.  And now it is nearly done. And as it all winds down, let me carefully direct your mind to something that hasn't happened yet, but soon will for you.

A few years ago, as I was doing my routines as Marshal to get ready for graduation, I was walking from Walsh to the Chapel.  I think it was Thursday or Friday of graduation week.  It had been one of those years, a lot like this one, where we thought spring would never come, where it snowed in April and the woodsmoke of evening fires could be smelled into May.  And then almost summer had come with a rush and the green world exploded and sundresses made sense again and boys with Frisbees attacked trees barefoot. Summer rose up in our hearts as much as in the sky and in one long party we turned toward Commencement.

As I walked I was hailed by a young woman, a former advisee now graduating senior who came running up to me.  With gown swirling--she would not give up wearing it, even to parties--she hugged me and with laughing but tear-rimmed eyes said, "Oh, Dr. Smith, please make it always be the time between last exam and graduation." She had entered that wonderful world of the Sewanee of Serenity-- a time when there is no time, where all seems to stand still and nothing happens:  no papers due, no meetings, no committees, nothing but beer and parties--the kind of place you always knew Sewanee could be.

For this few days [or hours for a few of you that we are still trying to track down transfer credits on], this is the most wonderful Sewanee you can know.  You will be here , for the first time in your career, with absolutely no responsbilities; and none of what will come after is yet the case.  It will be that delicious time in between.  This is the time for goodbyes, for visiting places for the last time, or the first--as one senior told me three years ago when I  finally shamed her into going to the cross at sunrise and who, in four years,  had never had a class earlier than 10:00 and had never seen first light in Sewanee:  "I had no idea.  This is the most beautiful place on earth," she said.  At least she discovered that two days before she graduated.

For those moments, you will be at what Eliot calls--

"...the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless.
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.  And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.  Neither movement from nor
 towards,
Neither ascent nor descent.  Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there  we have been:  but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time."
      (Burnt Norton)

Those few days in May will be for now Sewanee's best gift to you.  Use them well.  Your soul will need and treasure them in the days and years ahead.  From the Monday after Graduation, perhaps even from that Sunday afternoon, your life will become terribly and sometimes terrifyingly linear.  You will become responsible for the befores and the afters: the plans and the consequences.  And in those consequences of family and job and marriage and turns of career will begin that long forgetting that makes you an alum and not a student.  Your life will move from care to care, to rising obligation, and perhaps some despair--and a few of you will long to come back and will say, as some have, "Oh, let it be those days between last exam and graduation."  But even if you do, you cannot come back.  The Sewanee of Memory and the Sewanee of Serenity are but once, and you are embarked upon a river that never flows backward.

Yet, those few days in May will prefigure for you another Sewanee.

III.  The Eternal Sewanee:
There is another Sewanee, the Sewanee like an alabaster city, set on a hill, undimmed by human tears, where the waters of life flowing fresh and clear as God's own trout stream, pour down on this mountain purifying it of all decay, all that is mean-spirited and small, all that is ignoble.  This is the Eternal Sewanee, the Sewanee of all the Ages.  This is the Sewanee that is the genius of itself and has no limited form, nor is the imitation of anything else.  Not the Sewanee of manifestation but the Sewanee of transcendence.  When all our players are done with changing and in the evening of their labors, rest, this is the Sewanee that cannot be changed.  The Sewanee that endures not only all the years but beyond the years.  It is the Sewanee that cannot be touched by improvement or decay, that does not trickle out in grains of sand washing to the sea.

This is the Sewanee beyond Sewanee--
Beyond all cracks in the walls,
Beyond all the mud and gravel,
Beyond all the dorms and too small rooms,
Beyond all classrooms with falling maps and shredded floors,
and beyond all dining halls.
This is the Sewanee beyond both plan and foible, beyond our small failures and limited successes.

This is the Sewanee that can never die but is born again and again:
--in the heart of every prospective who gets an acceptance letter,
--in the heart of every freshman on the night before first class
--in the heart of every Sewanee parent whey they go out the gate and leave you here ,
--and in the hearts of those same parents when they leave home to come back here for your graduation
--in the heart of every bride [and her  mom] when she cannot imagine any place in the world to get married except All Saint's Chapel.
--in the heart of every alum when the little plus sign turns pink

And this is the Sewanee, Eternal Sewanee--that we sometimes see in the faces of widows when we bear some old son of Sewanee to final rest in the university cemetery. Or when we see a tottering alum we know is making his last visit to the campus.  This is the Sewanee that can never die but in which we and all our dreams live.  This is the Sewanee of all the Ages  and you are about to graduate, not from it, but into it.

Conclusion
In The Dry Salvages, the third of his Four Quartets, Eliot teases out the themes of time and eternity under the figure of travel and voyage, glimpses in the contradictions of time and flesh, that which overcomes time and its losses.  The philosophical problem is the same as for Rilke's pilgrim but the perspective and the prospect are different.  Eliot writes:

"You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer:  the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
...
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you,
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
...
Fare forward you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark."

Time and the journey turn us all into pilgrims in life, but know that pilgrims neither travel nor arrive.  The journey is within and not to any place.  And though we pass, time does not.  You will be leaving Sewanee, this Sewanee, soon.  While you can, before the culture of distraction overcomes you,

"Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind."

(The poem is echoing the discussion over duty  and action between Arjuna and Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita.)

Neither hope nor regret, neither gain nor loss.  In the coming moment of serenity, know that Sewanee never changes, and that though you travel, you leave nothing behind. And though you stand in the Quad or at the Cross and like Rilke's pilgrim, see all your valley and say farewell, the real Sewanee is before you, not behind.  For you have gained what Rilke's pigrim could not, what the discontent child of modernity can never find:  you will have seen the celestial city and it's vision will carry you to the end of your days.

And now, so near the end of your time that passed here, recall the Sewanee of Memory, the Sewanee of Serenity,  the Eternal Sewanee .  And as you slip the sullen moorings of this dark wharf for brighter places, as Eliot bid his travellers, "...not farewell, but fare forward."

Fare forward and Godspeed.  Ecce Quam Bonum.

Gerald L. Smith
April 1998