Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson wasted no time letting members of the Class of 2011 know that they should be living to this country’s highest ideals as she began delivering her address at the College’s 165th Commencement Exercises held on May 27.
“I will tell you something you may not hear elsewhere or often: You live at a wonderful time in a wonderful, flourishing country,” she said. Although there is room for improvement, “we have cultivated an ethic of civil peace which has allowed for the flourishing of a great many wonderful communities and institutions. At the moment, this ethic is under great stress, a fact that makes it all the more important to acknowledge it and recognize its value.”
A total of 691 men and women were awarded bachelor of arts degrees before an estimated 6,000 people — family and friends of the graduates, Holy Cross faculty, administrators and staff, as well as honored guests such as Most Rev. Robert J. McManus, bishop of the Diocese of Worcester. The intensity of Robinson’s address was matched by temperatures that reached into the mid-80s.
“You have enjoyed a strong education here on this beautiful hill. Now you are ready and able to enrich other lives as yours have been enriched and to make this interesting country better and wiser. It needs you and it deserves you,” Robinson said.
An institution like Holy Cross, she said, “continues and exemplifies the unique historical importance of religion in learning and the love of learning, celebrating in the beauty and wealth of resources that typify American higher education.”
She ended her speech by saying, “Who you are, what you do, what you make of yourselves — through learning, prayer, reflection and service — all this will matter. Your lives are the light of this civilization. Your hopes are its great hopes.”
The valedictory address by Miriam Westin, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, carried a similar tone. A studio art major with a self-designed minor in architectural studies, she asked her classmates to reflect on who they were when they arrived on campus in August 2007, and who they have become.
“I could not have known upon acceptance what was in store for me: being led and having the absolute honor of leading and serving alongside the brightest and most generous people,” she said. “Learning the art of rejection and of letting go. Praying for strength and rejoicing over incredible accomplishments. Being taught that what I did not think was possible, sincerely is. Being open to incredible beauty found in most unlikely places. Learning about the struggle toward justice, but simultaneously being given the strength, support and tools to engage in that struggle.”
The undergraduate, Jesuit, liberal arts education they have received, she said, helped shape their identities and brought forth their individualities. It also means that they must answer the Jesuit call to be “men and women for others.”
“No matter who we are, in what field we find ourselves or with whom, we have found that integrity is always at stake. After our four years here, the choices between avarice and altruism, between despair and hope, and between cynicism and wonder, will now always be conscious ones to be made,” she said.
“These people who we have become in the past four years must not remain here while we are whisked off this hill,” she said. “Rather I challenge you to continue asking the questions you have been asking here, and to demand an explanation for unjust realities facing so many, in systems of which we often find ourselves a part.”
In addition to delivering the commencement address, Robinson received an honorary degree. Honorary degrees were also conferred on Rev. Francis X. Clooney, S.J., of Harvard Divinity School
Parkman Professor of Divinity and professor of comparative theology, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, and Henry I. Smith ’58, professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
