Office of the President

New Student Convocation — August 31, 2008

Carry The Fire

Let me pose a question without asking for a show of hands. How many of you would rather be doing something other than listening to me make a speech just now? Well, we do not need to see the vote in order to know the answer, do we?

Most of you have just arrived on campus for your first day in college. There is a lot to be done. Moving in. Setting up dorm rooms. Meeting new roommates and classmates. Buying books. Attending orientation meetings. Saying good-bye to parents and family members. Striving to stay in control in a strange new world.

Yet, the College says, “Drop all that activity. Come to Siebert Chapel for an academic convocation. Watch members of the faculty and the administration process in their caps and gowns. Listen to a few speeches, a little music. Try to sing the Carthage alma mater for the first time.”

But why do all that?

The answer is this New Student Convocation is our effort to show you respect. We want to do something special for you, and to welcome you into your new college community. This is a hallowed tradition at Carthage, and it likely will continue for many years to come.

Actually, this ceremony is the first of bookend events for most of you that will mark the beginning and the end of your time at Carthage. Almost four years from now, most of us will be back here in Siebert Chapel to celebrate your New Alumni Convocation. Just as you are joining the student body today, you will be joining the ranks of Carthage graduates then. Just as a picnic follows this event, a festive promenade dinner in the Hedberg Library will follow that one.

We have been looking forward to your arrival. We have been preparing for you. Carthage adopts a fresh theme to accent each new academic year. In a blaze of imagery, your program proclaims the new one. The street banners that just went up a few days ago multiply the impact. Successive college publications during the 2008-2009 year will urge Carthaginians to “carry the fire.”

But what does it mean to “carry the fire”?

Across the years, suggestions for new themes have come from many different sources – faculty members, Trustees, students, recent graduates. This year, the inspiration comes from the man who just may be the most powerful living American writer. One of the best this country ever has produced. A year or so ago, a number of you may have become acquainted with Cormac McCarthy. He wrote the novel from which was adapted the Academy Award winning film No Country for Old Men.

Mr. McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road is set in the bleakest atmosphere imaginable. The whole earth is a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Fire has destroyed everything. Cities and towns have burned to rubble. Forests, animals – all gone. The wind blows harsh and cold. Ash floats in the dim light of day, always blocking the sun from view.

In that gray, grim world, a father and his young son make their way down the road. They are trying to reach the ocean far away, not knowing what they will discover but hoping to find a better life. Their most precious possession is a decrepit grocery cart, in which they push their meager possessions. They scavenge abandoned farmsteads for canned food left over from the holocaust. Burned corpses litter the surroundings. There are only a few survivors along that road. For good reason, father and son try to avoid those people. There is no civil order anymore. Among the remaining humans, there are no rules of conduct or behavior.

But they do have each other. The father talks in language the small boy can understand; there are the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” The father assures the boy the two of them are among the “good guys.” Poignantly the boy keeps asking about how the world used to be, the one he cannot remember. The father repeatedly tries to inspire the boy, to give him hope. In that burnt-out bleakness, the father regularly tells the boy “carry the fire.”

But what does it mean to “carry the fire”?

From the time of the cavemen drawing on their stone walls, fire has been a symbolic presence as well as a practical necessity for human life. The ancient Greeks communicated with fire. Building fires on ridge-tops, they ignited one, then another, then another, in a cascade across the geography. Our ancestors told the story of Prometheus, condemned to suffer because he stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. They invented the Olympic games. As we witnessed this summer, we now relay the Olympic torch around the world until it ignites the flame that opens the Olympics.

But what does it mean to “carry the fire”?

Last week, knowing I was working on this speech, Pastor Harvard Stephens brought me this note. He wrote: “The fire of God cleanses, heals, and encourages us. Sometimes it is a sign of the courage we discover to face danger and live with greater discipline and purpose. The biblical references abound: Jesus’ fire baptism, the three Hebrew boys kept alive in the fiery furnace, the strange specter of the burning bush, the Lord’s fiery descent on Mt. Sinai, and many others. The most potent reference for me comes from the book of Exodus: “the Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night.”

But what does it mean to “carry the fire”?

Let me inject two personal memories. One evening in November 1963, several friends and I (all of us graduate students at the time) squeezed into my car and drove from Connecticut to Washington, D.C. for the funeral of President Kennedy. Arriving in the early hours of the morning, we encountered long lines of people waiting to file by the casket in the Capitol rotunda. There was no chance most of them would get in before the doors closed for the funeral procession. So we drove down near the White House, stationed ourselves in an intersection looking down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, and stood waiting for hours. We knew the procession would reach that point and then turn in front of us on its way to the church.

I shall never forget the flag-draped coffin on the caisson, Mrs. Kennedy following on foot with their two young children by each hand, the black rider-less horse with the boot in the stirrup backwards, and car after car carrying heads of state from around the world. Then, in those early days of transistor radios, we listened to the crackling sounds of the service as we walked over to Memorial Bridge where the procession would approach Arlington National Cemetery. We remained in the middle of the bridge, equidistant from the Lincoln Memorial and the gravesite, and watched the cortege pass again. We stayed there during the burial up on the slopes of the cemetery. When the President’s coffin was in the grave, the end finally came when Mrs. Kennedy lit the “eternal flame.”

Across the forty-five years since then, whenever I return to Washington, I always try to look up at the cemetery and see if I can glimpse that flame.

But what does it mean to “carry the fire”?

One final story. Twenty-one years ago, I needed to write a speech something like this. It was for my inauguration right here in Siebert Chapel. A youngish president at the time, thinking that I should demonstrate a measure of intellectual sophistication, I recalled a marvelous story I had first read during my college years.

The year was 627, and the event was recorded by the greatest of Anglo-Saxon historians, the Venerable Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. As Christian missionaries were first appearing among the pagan tribes, King Edwin of Northumbria called a council of his advisers to consider whether they should convert. In their deliberations, one man spoke: “The present life of humans, O King, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and retainers, and good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this human life appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.” The leaders of Northumbria did accept Christianity, for themselves, and for their descendants.

In that inaugural address, I urged all of us here at Carthage to take up our work, to help the college prosper, and to enjoy our own time together in the light and warmth of the fire.

But what does it mean to “carry the fire”?

Here at Carthage, our colleagues in graphic design have provided highly visible responses for us today. The new banners lining the streets sport photos, in blazing color, of contemporary college life. Below the caption “Carry the Fire” are other photos of past students, not in color but in black and white, engaged in similar activities.

Those banners invite you to seize your day here. Beginning today, the College is yours. These are your years to live in full color. Learn, grow, make friends, have fun. That is what this college is all about.

The banners also proclaim that you are joining something much bigger than yourselves. For the past 161 years, there have been students at this college very much like you – no matter how quaint their photos may appear. For the next 161 years, we trust and pray, there will be more generations – just like you. Those banners urge you to pick up the fire, to carry it, and eventually to pass it along, very much like that Olympic torch.

Cormac McCarthy recounts a conversation between father and son as they approach the end of the road:

The father says, You have to carry the fire.

The boy responds, I don’t know how to.

Yes, you do.

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I don’t know where it is.

Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.

Well, today, we can see the fire in you.

It has always been there. You have been and will be discovering it all your lives.

We hope your years at Carthage will take you a long way down the road, that you will graduate knowing yourselves far better than you do today. You see, you and only you can define the fire that is within you. The faculty, all of us will try to help you along your way. And we trust the commitments you eventually make will be worth your effort to carry them, well into the future.

We have been waiting for you. It is a delight to see you here today, in vibrant, living color. Let me suggest you resolve to do something special between today and your New Alumni Convocation four years hence. Leave portraits of yourselves at Carthage. Give them a special quality that will make them beautiful in black and white many years from now

At the end of The Road, Mr. McCarthy introduces two new characters. About one of them, he writes: The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Carry the fire.

Welcome to Carthage.