A Gift from a Teacher, a True Preceptor -- 31 years later

The Gift to Be Simple, the Gift to be Free

Sarah H. Youngblood
Professor of English
Mount Holyoke College
Baccalaureate Address
May 29, 1977
Mount Holyoke College


If I could have for you three wishes, I would wish for you the three gifts of the Shaker song: “the gift to be simple, the gift to be free, the gift to come down to where you ought to be.” Each is a gift of purified consciousness: of lucidity. Each describes a way of being, and a way of perceiving, that is cleaned of the trivial, released from the constraints of vanity and will. They are all, perhaps, forms of grace: ideals of being that cannot be continuously realized in the fret and clutter, the general wear-and-tear of our daily human lives; but none the less real for that; none the less to be wished for; none the less possible.

The last of them, “the gift to come down to where we ought to be” defines a grace of self-perception, and of self-conduct, that is especially difficult for persons of privilege – as you, and I, and all of us in this place, are privileged persons – and, for that reason, it is a gift the more especially to be wished for.

The privilege that we share is a larger access to culture than is possible to persons without education. And I do not mean by culture, having the Bachelor of Arts degree (even when inscribed in Latin); or going to the theater every week; or being able to quote Plato to a prospective employer. I mean by culture something that does indeed include these things; but is much larger and of much greater age: “culture” in the sense that anthropologists use the term. All of the artifacts that the human race has made, from the fluted-stone spearheads of prehistoric tribes to the pyramid of Amen-Hotep to the space vehicles on the moon. All of the texts, sacred and secular, from the Upanishads to the I Ching to Dante to the White House transcripts. And all of the concepts, institutions, theologies, intellectual constructs of human history. Culture in this largest sense is the inheritance of the educated. It is a mixed legacy: immense, chaotic, glorious, terrifying. Fortunately, no single mind can encompass it, or even a fragment of it. But by education, each generation tries to possess as much of it as possible. Not only out of practical need – so that each generation does not have to invent the wheel again, nor discover radium again – but also, out of a more deeply-rooted emotional need, we strive to understand the culture we inherit.

For culture is the home the human race has made for itself, the many mansions we have built to house the troubled, divided consciousness we carry – a consciousness that is no longer at home among the other mortal animals with whom we share the earth; a consciousness that cannot imagine a god who is not, unlike us, beyond death.

The notion of the human being as scaled on a ladder, or an ascending chain, midway between the animals beneath us and supernatural beings above us, is an ancient one. It, too, is part of our cultural inheritance, a persistent metaphor for man’s urgent need to aspire beyond the constrictions of the physical, mortal self. All of our metaphors for aspiration and self-transcendence are vertical: variations upon the same figure: per aspera ad astra. Whether for the stars, or the moon, or the apple in Eden, human history enacts again and again the same symbolic gesture. The dynamic force of culture, and the dynamic force of our individual lives, for we are creatures of culture, is a belief in the necessity of ascending. The ziggurats of ancient Babylonia, the spires of Notre Dame, the launching towers at Cape Canaveral, point in the same direction: up there.

And yet the Shaker song reminds us – quietly, purely – that it is a gift to come down: to come down to where we ought to be. For whatever “the rights, privileges, and responsibilities” that are vested in us, as signs of our acculturation, we are creatures of the earth, still. To remember this, to accept it, is not to debase the self but to honor it in its essential being. The earth is our first home; life is our first gift. That you should remember this – simply, freely – is what I wish for you: here, now always.

§§§§§

Nota Bene

Another teacher who knew Miss Youngblood well, both as professor and colleague, just sent this moving address to me. Oh, that I might have known Sarah Youngblood but I did not take a course with her although I feel now -- having read her words -- that her spirit was transmitted to me by her student and friend, my first professor at Mount Holyoke College and a person who has inspired me (in the true sense of the word) whom I am now honored to call "friend."

Sarah Youngblood "passed the Veil" in 1980. May perpetual light shine upon her.

In her honor, I ask you to listen to:

"Tis a Gift to be Simple"

http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/t/t717.html

and

"In Paradisium" from the Duruflé Requiem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ0wunX3C2o

Education comes from the Latin "educare." To lead out.
In English the word "education" can be transformed into:

Action due.

That is what I learned at Mount Holyoke College. It took me a long time to understand.

But I did. I did!

Soli Deo Gloria.