Class Memorial Service at Battell Chapel
(Continued)

Hymn - The Lord 's my Shepherd
(first verse sung by the '52 Whiffenpoofs.)

Address: What Have We Done - George Dole

As the list of "those deceased" gets longer and longer, it may be appropriate to ask ourselves whether our generation is leaving this world better or worse than we found it. We here gathered are only a tiny fraction of that "world," but by virtue of our being citizens of its wealthiest nation who have been educated at one of its finest universities, we are least representatives of a significant factor in its welfare.

There is no way to begin to answer the question, though, unless we have some consensus as to what we mean by "better" and "worse," and the debates that keep finding their way into the headlines suggest that we are far from unanimous on this central issue. It is an issue, surely, that goes far deeper than anything that can be quantified in some ultimate equivalent of the Dow Jones average. It involves our fundamental values, and it brings us face to face with the fact that we tend to call "good" whatever we love.

My own thinking on the matter was brought to a sharper focus by a man named John Titus, a member of one of our churches in Michigan whom I had met a number of times. On one of these occasions, we stopped off to visit with his daughter Alicia, and I found particular warmth in the fact that she had the same name as one of our daughters and was about the same age, and that the relationship between her and John had a very familiar feel of quiet, deep mutual affection and respect. A year or so later, John's beloved daughter was a flight attendant on United Airlines Flight 175 when it flew into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

John wrote of his struggles to come to a sense of peace after this excruciating loss, and he wrote of finding peace. Two of his sentences in particular stood out for me. The first was, "I yearned for justice; not more destruction and more innocent lives destroyed." This brought to mind the deceptively simple formula in Micah, the statement that "all" the Lord requires of us is to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8). In a world where justice and mercy so often seem to pull us in diametrically opposite directions, John seemed to have found a space in his own heart and mind where they were at one.

The second sentence followed immediately: "Clarity of mind and a deep feeling of interconnectedness ensued." In a way, this simply being in touch with reality. Other people, with their supposedly private thoughts and feelings, are just as real as we are, and we are far more interconnected than it might seem. Lewis Thomas put it quite vividly:

The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds. We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion (The Lives of a Cell, pp. 166f,)

Looking back at those years between 1948 and 1952, what kind of fusion went on for us? David Brooks describes us as "social creatures whose action and views are profoundly shaped by the social fabric that binds them" (New York Times Week in Review, 10/15/06, p. 12), and somehow or other, with all our differences, we found our places in Yale's fabric during those years in this place. Whether we were near the center or on the fringes, our involvement in that fabric delineated us, gave shape to our sense of identity.

We studied different subjects, but that is not the point. While I was at Oxford, I heard of a don who had received letter from the States. The sponsor of a scholarship student wanted to know what courses the student was taking, what his grades were, and how many credits he was earning. The don, so the story goes, took a quill pen and a sheet of parchment and wrote back a single sentence: "Oxford is not a trade school." The ultimate object of a liberal arts education might well be described simply as "clarity of mind," learning not so much what to think but how to think; and clarity of mind is an essential survival skill. Without clarity of mind, a deep feeling of interconnectedness is nothing but a treacherous romantic illusion. But then again, without a deep feeling of interconnectedness, clarity of mind can be ruthless. Together, they seem to me to represent something very close to a summum bonum as far as being human is concerned, the clarity sensitive to all the subtle differences that make us the unique beings we are, and the feeling of interconnectedness assuring us that these differences are meant to enrich our social fabric rather than rend it.

This brings us to the third of Micah's requirements—to walk humbly with our God.
If we would in truth be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, there is no room for arrogance. My mind goes back to an incident from our college days that turned out to be a kind of parable for me. When I was home on one of our vacations I went to an auto dealership that had taken over what had been an auto repair shop. They had converted the service bays to showroom space and replaced the overhead doors with plate glass, and I wound up walking face first into something unseen but very, very solid. This tells me that it is entirely possible to be quite certain and quite wrong about one and the same thing, and that when we are, we tend to learn it the hard way, if we learn it at all.

We tend to reach for certainties when it feels as though things are coming apart. The trouble is that, in the words of H. L. Mencken, "For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." This suggests a further corollary to the fact that there is no necessary correlation between certainty and truth, namely that just as the quest for certainty may lead away from truth, the quest for truth may lead away from certainty.

Are we leaving our world better than we found it? Are we leaving it with greater clarity of mind and a deeper feeling of interconnectedness? The optimist in me says one thing and the pessimist says the opposite, which leaves me in a state of uncertainty; but I am fairly sure that these are the right questions.

Scripture Reading - Philip Parham

The Reading of Names of those who have died in the last five years
Read by many of our former Class Secretaries and Treasurers.

(The following poem was written by Susan Jaffer, widow of classmate Joseph Jaffer, after attending the Class Memorial Service.)