W. Arthur Kale - "Then and Now" (June 4, 1967)

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-	Now we will see if this microphone is still working.	0:05
	I haven't any idea of whether it is or not.	0:08
-	World.	0:34
	Men and women of Duke, good morning.	0:39
	For next to the last time in this relationship,	0:44
	good morning.	0:47
	As the years go on, I find myself more and more conscious	0:49
	at commencement time of meanings in the ceremony and ritual	0:54
	which I'm afraid didn't carry	1:01
	very much weight for me as an undergraduate.	1:02
	These meanings may be largely in the future for many of you	1:06
	and it's hardly a criticism to say so,	1:11
	but they are present for your parents today	1:16
	as they are present for me,	1:19
	and I want to say a particular	1:22
	and very personal welcome to them.	1:24
	Each one is as close to us as a heartbeat,	1:28
	even though many of them	1:32
	must be outside the chapel at this moment.	1:34
	This is not a building that lends itself	1:39
	to casual modification.	1:42
	Though I may identify with your parents in many ways,	1:49
	including my age, which is an easy identification	1:52
	for all of you to make, my concern this morning is for you.	1:55
	Not only because you are the center of a weekend	2:02
	around which the rest of us revolved giddily	2:05
	and at times wearily, but because the intricate	2:08
	national and world life we share,	2:13
	that all of us share,	2:16
	seems to bear down on you	2:19
	with a particular suddenness and force	2:21
	that can shock, depress, and even confuse you at times,	2:25
	able as you are.	2:31
	This is not to say that we who honor you today	2:34
	aren't often just as baffled,	2:37
	just as confused as yourselves,	2:39
	by the darkness and uncertainty of our time,	2:42
	or that we have resolved its known secretors,	2:46
	its failures to satisfy the soul	2:49
	or give guarantees to the flesh.	2:52
	Perhaps if we have lived longer,	2:57
	we've simply had to learn to see in the dark a little better	2:59
	even though we haven't found the wise ways	3:03
	to lighten the darkness.	3:07
	Perhaps, indeed, a generation gap	3:10
	which the country has discussed so tirelessly	3:14
	and so tiresomely this year is really to be measured	3:17
	by the degree of darkness and frustration	3:21
	one can endure without losing his faith in the light.	3:24
	If we measure it this way, however, then the gap vanishes,	3:29
	for in fact, many of you	3:35
	have all already learned better than your elders	3:38
	to endure the tears of things, as Virgil called them,	3:42
	without losing your own power to act	3:47
	in conviction and in faith and with courage.	3:50
	That at least is my own belief about you	3:56
	as I talk you today.	3:58
	The reality of the burden and privilege we all have	4:02
	as we try to reckon with our world	4:05
	is the strongest force which binds us to one another.	4:07
	And the subject of this brief sermon this morning	4:11
	is really the nature of what we share.	4:15
	Above all in and through a university community,	4:19
	which by its very diversity does not	4:24
	and cannot often speak with one voice,	4:28
	and yet in its vision of purpose must	4:33
	and does talk together constantly.	4:37
	Constantly.	4:41
	What are the demands that hedge us about?	4:45
	That we would solve with simple answers if we could?	4:49
	And there's nothing wrong with simplicity, you know.	4:53
	It's the final logic of mathematics	4:57
	and the foundation of the structure of art.	5:00
	It is only human to ask for a clear voice	5:04
	and a straight road.	5:07
	Even Christ in the garden asked for a simple answer,	5:09
	but he was denied it.	5:14
	First, as I look at the demands	5:19
	placed upon us on this commencement Sunday morning,	5:23
	I must recognize the worldwide tragedies	5:28
	of political power and social failure.	5:31
	As we look out from our place of temporary light,	5:36
	for who but God could say, after all,	5:41
	what the centuries will do to us here,	5:43
	right here in this one spot.	5:46
	As we look out, we see the engulfing unresolved violence	5:49
	of south Asia and the middle east,	5:53
	and just as frightening in its own way,	5:57
	the erosion of order in India	6:01
	or the collapse of economic strength in England.	6:04
	This lasts the most subtle kind of loss,	6:09
	perhaps the most haunting in a way	6:12
	to many of us who owe our blood and our past	6:13
	and therefore our present For the British Islands.	6:17
	But this lasts a subtle loss	6:21
	because it's taking place with so much grace	6:23
	and so much sophistication and has such clear origins	6:25
	in the devastation of two world wars.	6:30
	And even, you know, though it's not fashionable to say so,	6:34
	grows in part from the renunciation of those colonies	6:38
	who cannot now seem to find	6:43
	their own independent way in the world,	6:45
	and themselves are crumbling in chaos and civil war.	6:48
	Second, I must recognize today the crises of democracy	6:56
	which is a high vision	7:02
	led to the end of that old colonial world.	7:04
	Now I happen to believe passionately in democratic order,	7:09
	so long as it knows that there is nothing easy or automatic	7:14
	about its own life and its own virtue.	7:18
	I see our world dilemma	7:23
	of democratic government today simply as this.	7:25
	We cannot seem to reconcile our fear of authority	7:30
	once it is questioned by a loud populous void,	7:36
	and yet our yearning for authority, our hunger for it	7:40
	is a force to reconcile the hopes and terrors	7:43
	of every individual who makes up that populous.	7:48
	We reject imposed order, we detest it, we war upon it,	7:52
	and yet when our own interest, safety,	7:58
	or future are involved, we yearn for it.	8:01
	We are more irrational than we ourselves like to admit.	8:06
	Right here and right now.	8:10
	And while there may be no magic in reason,	8:13
	the rule of the majority,	8:17
	the wise rule of the majority,	8:18
	cannot long survive without reason.	8:21
	This, as I see it, is a clear and present danger,	8:25
	for us and for many others in the world today.	8:29
	Next, I must remind you of certain social pressures	8:36
	that may seem peculiar to our society,	8:41
	though I see them present everywhere in some shape or other.	8:45
	These, curiously enough,	8:51
	are the pressures of leisure on the one hand	8:54
	and responsibility on the other.	8:57
	We ourselves in the United States are having to learn	9:01
	to live with a peculiar form of this pressure.	9:04
	A steadily shorter work week for the tens of millions	9:07
	who produce food or machines or personal services,	9:11
	and a steadily longer week	9:15
	for those who must guide and make the pattern,	9:19
	which in its turn gives strength to our unique economy.	9:22
	But what can one say of a new African nation	9:30
	with four million citizens and 30 college graduates?	9:32
	It is no different from ourselves in this particular way	9:37
	that the final burdens fall upon so few,	9:40
	and may affect the lives of so many.	9:43
	We have not yet learned to diffuse wisely	9:48
	the burden of responsibility,	9:51
	and the is crisis of social order	9:55
	is simply one part of the dilemma	9:58
	of the democratic vision itself,	10:00
	and a part of it that together	10:03
	we are going to have to resolve in the next 10 to 20 years.	10:06
	From these three confusions	10:13
	which I've just mentioned to you,	10:16
	follows relentlessly our final bafflement.	10:19
	The seeming loss of the individual person,	10:24
	the unique and single self.	10:26
	This sense of lost identity	10:31
	has been most tragically immortalized	10:33
	by Franz Kafka, I suspect, and in weak hearts,	10:35
	it can turn into a sentimental self pity as it has	10:40
	in so many of the synthetic folk songs of our time.	10:43
	But the perception is real in its two chief forms.	10:49
	A genuine concern for the submerged man,	10:54
	the man lost in structures	10:57
	that care nothing about his nature,	10:58
	and make no creative use of it.	11:01
	An equal concern for the alienated man	11:04
	who is not even submerged, but instead cut off, isolated,	11:06
	nonsignificant rather than insignificant.	11:12
	As you can see, each of these four	11:18
	major stresses in our world is linked to the others,	11:21
	and all involve some aspect of the person and his value.	11:25
	We judge great failures	11:31
	in the public use of power so harshly,	11:32
	not because resources are wasted,	11:36
	but because people are destroyed.	11:39
	We are concerned about leisure and leadership	11:42
	because each involves the wise development of human beings.	11:45
	We are concerned about the crises of democracy today	11:50
	because we know our failures all too well,	11:54
	but see no better kind of government	11:58
	through which to guarantee	12:01
	the essential freedoms of each one of us,	12:03
	and we believe all of us	12:07
	in that guarantee of the essential freedoms	12:10
	of each one of us.	12:14
	Under the pressure of the time, however,	12:18
	we may be threatening the very ends we have in view.	12:21
	Now you have enough voices of doom around you	12:25
	and there's really no need for me to join that chorus.	12:28
	At the same time, I see, I think, certain dangers	12:32
	which those loud voices do not always talk about,	12:37
	and I would like simply to mention two of them to you.	12:40
	First, I see the simple danger	12:45
	of running away from the complex world	12:49
	we feel we cannot control.	12:51
	There's no sin in this, of course,	12:54
	even if there's no wisdom.	12:56
	Perhaps the worst thing	12:59
	about our flights from reality indeed	13:00
	is that we have so many ways to hide them from ourselves.	13:03
	Not just drugs or dreams or conventional ambition	13:07
	which happen all to be ways	13:10
	of hiding the truth about us from ourselves,	13:12
	but the yearnings for perfection, for a utopia	13:18
	without which we say we have been cheated by life.	13:20
	One of you wrote me during the year to tell me	13:26
	how miserably my generation had managed the world.	13:29
	Maybe more than one of you.	13:34
	I sympathized it happened.	13:37
	I didn't condescend, but I sympathized.	13:40
	Both because I agreed in part, I had to agree,	13:43
	and because I remembered feeling	13:48
	much the same resentment toward my elders.	13:50
	I had to recognize, however, that the friend who wrote	13:54
	had missed the inescapable nature of certain of our problems	13:58
	and that he did hold in view a universe	14:03
	which would be wonderful if wars, blinded power,	14:06
	and the evil of men did not in fact exist.	14:10
	Now, I'm not saying to you that because they exist,	14:15
	we can therefore do nothing about them.	14:17
	I'm saying only that no matter how unpleasant	14:20
	the facts of evil and mortal failure are,	14:23
	we cannot abolish them by turning our backs or our hearts,	14:27
	nor can we somehow wipe them out with a stroke of the pen.	14:33
	It is folly, as a result,	14:39
	to put our faith in men with simple answers,	14:42
	whether they come from the left or from the right.	14:46
	There is a way, I think,	14:51
	of recognizing these particular tyrants of the spirit,	14:52
	and you have all had some training in it.	14:56
	It's been part of your education.	14:59
	The language of a simplifier gives him away.	15:02
	At his extremes, he talks	15:08
	of imperialist deviationism on the one hand,	15:09
	that remarkable phrase,	15:13
	or the national communist conspiracy on the other.	15:15
	Those voices are easy enough to spot.	15:20
	Subtler ones may speak	15:23
	with the tongue of democratic liberation,	15:25
	or free enterprise without the encroach of government.	15:29
	A phrase sometimes, I'm afraid,	15:33
	used by those who would go bankrupt	15:35
	without the government contracts that sustain them.	15:38
	The phrase is a many, but if you listen,	15:42
	you can hear the falsity clicking away inside	15:46
	like the tumblers in a combination lock.	15:48
	Language like life itself has not been created	15:52
	merely to serve as cliche.	15:56
	It is one of the great ways	15:59
	by which we search out and embody the truth.	16:01
	Some fragment of the truth.	16:05
	And I have never yet seen the truth stand still	16:08
	for a stock phrase, for a simplified view.	16:12
	When you read the gospels,	16:18
	you are constantly aware of the impatience	16:19
	that Christ felt for the scribes and Pharisees,	16:21
	and he was impatient above all	16:24
	because they were so sure that they had the word.	16:26
	His own miracles of language, and they were,	16:30
	were designed to break open that smugness,	16:34
	and to make men look again at the sins and glories	16:38
	of the world and of themselves.	16:41
	Both sin and glory,	16:44
	but not the self-satisfaction of an easy answer.	16:46
	What I am suggesting to you	16:51
	is that we can neither run from the world	16:53
	nor shape it to our private image.	16:55
	The burden that we carry is harder,	16:58
	more exciting, more precious	17:01
	than any simplistic view of life could even imagine,	17:05
	but to carry it we have to have a certain kind of faith.	17:09
	And as I conclude,	17:15
	I want to try to describe that faith to you.	17:16
	In the full understanding that I myself	17:21
	have just talked about the snares of language,	17:23
	and that I am looking through my words	17:27
	only at one little spot of reality.	17:29
	If I pretended more to you this morning than that,	17:33
	I, too, would be one of the simplifiers,	17:36
	and I have no wish to be,	17:40
	even though it would make my life, at times,	17:43
	an easier one than it is.	17:46
	I have no wish to be one of the simplifiers.	17:49
	It seems to me that the faith	17:53
	I am talking to you about this morning,	17:55
	the faith you heard about in your scripture lesson,	17:58
	is recognized by two qualities.	18:02
	The power to face life at its worst	18:06
	and the power to give reverent and joyous	18:09
	even though tragic celebration to it at its best.	18:12
	This double and yet single insight	18:19
	has for years been given fearful immediacy to me	18:22
	by two of the great men of our heritage.	18:26
	Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln.	18:30
	At one level of judgment,	18:34
	they differed as completely as two men can differ.	18:36
	At another, they may have been the only two men	18:40
	from that hideous and yet creative time in our past,	18:44
	in our heritage, who had the right	18:48
	to talk to one another at all.	18:51
	At least I am clear	18:54
	that no one else had the right to talk to them.	18:56
	And for years, since long before	19:00
	I myself became a southerner,	19:02
	I've tried to understand why this had to be so.	19:06
	A small poem that I'm going to read you	19:13
	is an attempt to say why.	19:15
	One that relates to the complex faith in human life	19:19
	and all that lies beyond it.	19:23
	The complex faith	19:24
	which we are exploring together this morning.	19:27
	I call it "Gettysburg Pastoral."	19:32
	He was the unpretentious one of the group there,	19:38
	yet what final prescience spoke to him on that ridge?	19:42
	Looking across the smoke of a gentle valley,	19:48
	into the hell of his blue enemy,	19:51
	who was himself deployed against the sky.	19:54
	We might come to love it,	20:01
	he had said earlier of a perfect battle.	20:02
	Now the almost won became the completely lost.	20:06
	When he turned south, he carried defeat,	20:12
	but infinitely more.	20:16
	Accepted duty, the power of self denial,	20:19
	and all that turns grave failure into triumph	20:24
	through the long weavings of a century.	20:27
	Only one friend or enemy	20:32
	could perceive or speak the occasion's immortality.	20:36
	Homer says at one point in "The Odyssey"	20:44
	that men suffer to make a song for the gods.	20:47
	A complex, savage insight,	20:51
	but only part of what Lee and Lincoln saw,	20:54
	and only part of what I want to say	20:57
	and what I want you to see.	20:59
	It is not that we suffer to make a song for the gods really,	21:01
	but that out of our struggles and our failures	21:06
	and our confrontation by realities we would gladly avoid,	21:08
	there grows an understanding	21:12
	and then an order which are a song	21:14
	to the gods and to the one God.	21:17
	A hymn of praise where one might have expected	21:20
	only to defeat, only lamentation.	21:22
	Now we must be careful when we say this.	21:28
	As I suggested of Lee and Lincoln,	21:32
	we have to earn the right to say it.	21:34
	It is glib to praise defeat	21:37
	if we have never even run the risk of failure.	21:41
	But our own risks do not have to be	21:45
	as immortal as Gettysburg.	21:47
	In fact, for most of us, they cannot be, will not be.	21:49
	Just as full of meaning	21:56
	and of the demand which leads to new insight	21:58
	are the experiences of our own university world	22:02
	where the constant stress	22:04
	between old ignorance and new vision	22:06
	is not only the measure of our achievement,	22:09
	but the measure of our understanding about life itself.	22:12
	Here we have the dynamic of history	22:17
	and the growth of ideas rather than the clash of armies.	22:19
	And we might, if we look about us,	22:23
	see that same historic triumph in a third form.	22:26
	In individual lives which are so handicapped	22:31
	that suffering itself becomes a definition of history,	22:34
	and personal courage turns into a public achievement,	22:40
	those of us who have not been there cannot know directly.	22:45
	But we can sense the meaning of such lives	22:49
	and their impact on us.	22:52
	Once we have seen a man endure deformity without cynicism	22:55
	and triumph over it without arrogance,	23:00
	we ourselves are transformed.	23:03
	And so the world is changed a little bit for the better.	23:07
	This pattern of movement through the pain of suffering,	23:14
	ignorance, or uncertain decision,	23:18
	and on to a new level of perception,	23:22
	knowledge, commitment, and action,	23:24
	this pattern is demonstrable.	23:27
	It's not imaginary, it's demonstrable.	23:30
	We have all felt the fact of its influence on us and in us,	23:33
	and if we continue to grow in mind and spirit,	23:38
	we shall feel it in other and deeper ways	23:40
	as the years go on.	23:43
	So much meaning in our own little world of time and history	23:48
	allows us, and as far as I am concerned, demands of us,	23:53
	faith in the kind of God	23:58
	who moves beyond our time bounded world,	23:59
	as well as within it.	24:02
	Faith of that kind is the confirmation	24:05
	and extension of what we know,	24:08
	and in the sense that we insist	24:11
	on basing it upon those things we know,	24:12
	all of us, I suspect, are doubting Thomases	24:16
	in our day and time.	24:18
	We want to be sure before we believe.	24:20
	It is worth remembering, however,	24:24
	that that same thorny saint	24:27
	who wrote so stirringly to the Ephesians about faith,	24:29
	learned that faith on the tortured roads of doubt,	24:33
	disbelief, and denial.	24:37
	He didn't learn them in the academy	24:41
	or at ease on a silken cushion.	24:43
	Saint Paul is good company for that very reason,	24:46
	even if like Thoreau,	24:49
	he is not very comfortable while he's around.	24:50
	He calls us to the hard roads of self discovery	24:54
	where each of us must find God	25:00
	through the use of His own gifts.	25:03
	We cannot prove God in any simple minded way,	25:06
	but I seem to believe that He proves Himself to us	25:11
	in this moving emergent texture of our lives.	25:16
	If we will let him speak, He proves himself to us.	25:20
	The commencement poem which I have written this year	25:26
	tries to suggest how.	25:29
	It is the only present I can give you, you know,	25:32
	except for the small matter of a diploma tomorrow,	25:34
	and you hardly regard that as a present from me,	25:38
	nor do your parents.	25:44
	(crowd laughing)
	I hope that you will take this poem though	25:50
	as a gesture of my affection and my regard,	25:54
	but that is exactly what I mean by it.	25:58
	Like the wooden boat made by a third grader	26:02
	and brought home to his parents,	26:05
	it may be out of shape,	26:08
	but he gives the best of himself	26:11
	when he gives it lovingly to someone else.	26:14
	And so I give you this.	26:17
	Among others, Dante and Elliot had visions,	26:23
	transitory, yet real as triangles,	26:27
	of worlds that moved so softly they stood still,	26:32
	spinning their weightless gyroscopes of love.	26:38
	Such worlds we also live in.	26:44
	We adore a God we cannot hear.	26:48
	The clamorous voices would shout Him down	26:53
	if he were fool enough to speak.	26:55
	He moves the sextant of the mind instead,	27:00
	making us sight each angle,	27:03
	work each real, but silent miracle of position	27:06
	that shows us where we are and who love is.	27:12
	This is geometry.	27:18
	Alive as fire along each nervous filament of our hope.	27:20
	We dare not take our reckoning on faith	27:27
	and God does not really ask it.	27:30
	He says think after your question, after your despair.	27:34
	Others were lost before you.	27:41
	Saints or sinners were baffled, and He found them.	27:45
	He has time to wait while you unravel the theorem,	27:51
	but you must work the problem for yourselves,	27:57
	asking someday that He confirm your premise,	28:02
	and may He go with you on all your many roads	28:09
	as you confirm your premises,	28:15
	and I hope that something of us will be there with you too.	28:18

Item Info

Title:

W. Arthur Kale - "Then and Now" (June 4, 1967)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4qz26j8h

Date:

June 4, 1967

Speaker:

Kale, W. Arthur

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0386
ref5975_2to
uachapelsermaud
duke:628584
dcrau002380
ark:/87924/r4qz26j8h
786fd9b4-fd8e-4290-a85f-fb0297f1edf5

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Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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W. Arthur Kale - "Then and Now" (June 4, 1967)

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