Tonight we gather to welcome newcomers into our midst, to offer them membership in this community, to cast our gaze over the year that is ahead of us, and to remind ourselves of what we do and why we do it.
So first, a warm welcome to our students and families, to faculty, staff, and board members as we begin a new academic year. Welcome especially to our new students, who embark today on a journey of learning and formation. Welcome also to Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, our new faculty member, who embarks on his own journey with a new community of colleagues, students, and friends. Welcome to Irit Umani, whose remarkable journey we celebrate this evening.
As I was preparing for this event I made a typo in an email, referring to this evening as “ma-tribulation” rather than “matriculation.” I assume this newly coined word was some mash-up of “my tribulation” or, perhaps, “more tribulation”—and, though Freud might think otherwise, I am convinced that my typo is no harbinger of apocalyptic doom. Exam anxiety, workload worries, relationship drama, soul-searching—yes; but all-things-coming-to-an-end kind of suffering—very unlikely.
In our reading from Deuteronomy this evening, the tribulation of God’s people after 40 years in the wilderness is about to come to an end. The people of Israel are preparing to cross the Jordan into the long awaited promised land. Their journey, perhaps like some of yours, was long and difficult fraught with moments when turning back looked like the best idea in the world. But here they are, just this side of the Jordan, seeing their journey’s end but not yet able to cross over. First, they have to listen to a very long speech from one of their leaders. (If this moment reminds you of that, then my apologies, indeed.)
Moses stands before the people to recount the law, to tell them, for a second time, the ways of Torah, so that when they enter the land they might live well and long. “Hear, O Israel,” Moses proclaims,
The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
These words from Moses’ last address became so formative for the people of Israel that even today this passage, the Shema, is recited daily.
If I might dare to paraphrase it, Moses seems to be saying something like: “When you are making a journey into a new place, begin with love.” And this loving is followed by a fantastic set of instructions – to bind the words of Torah to one’s hand and head, doorpost and gates. It’s as if one who loves God wants their knowledge of God to be made visible, made present, made, quite literally, close at hand. The passion to know Torah begins with love of its author. As the words of Torah are bound to household and body, so knowledge and love are bound, each needing the other to be complete.
Knowledge and love. The connection is deep and ancient, but it is a connection that is often lost on us today when knowledge seems more the result of a detached attempt to control objects by rendering them lifeless. The frog to be dissected on the lab tray promises to yield up knowledge and yet, precisely because a frog is meant to be alive, whatever is discovered through the slicing, probing, and labeling is inevitably going to miss the most important thing to be learned, that is, what it is to be a frog.
Even here, in our own context, one can study Bible, liturgy, theology, or preaching as a detached observer looking for mere technical control and losing, in the process, the beautiful thing that we loved in the first place.
My claim, which I believe is intimated in Deuteronomy is that if we are to know, we must begin with love. Or to put it more strongly, we can only know that which we love.
Thomas Aquinas taught us that for Christians love is the form of all the virtues, including the intellectual virtues such as wisdom, understanding, and prudence. Of course, Thomas is just following St. Paul, who says in 1 Cor 13, “If I . . . understand all mysteries and all knowledge . . . but do not have love, I am nothing.” And the point here, I think, is not just that knowledge needs to be used lovingly, but that we cannot have true knowledge until we love the object of our knowledge.
What does it look like, then, here at Seminary of the Southwest to let love form our knowledge?
It means, at the very least, that love awakens us to to see what is true and beautiful in all things.
The fact that love awakens us is hardly a novel claim. Every new Disney movie seems to riff on this theme, re-working its assumptions even while reinforcing its power as cultural truism. From Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to Frozen and Maleficent, “True love’s kiss” awakens the sleeping. It even awakens the dead. And if you are inclined to write this off as a cheap Disney ploy, think back to The Matrix when the character oh-so-subtly named Trinity, tells a dead Neo, “you can’t be dead, because I love you.” And with a kiss she brings him back to life. Love awakens us and the stories we tell cannot find enough ways to remind us of this.
But the awakening we are talking about here is not just the awakening of passion, though that is not entirely unrelated, but more so the opening of our eyes. Knowledge happens because love demands a certain kind of attention be paid to the beloved object. Aquinas once said, rather enigmatically, “Where love is, there is the eye.”1 By which, I think, he meant that love directs our gaze, or more powerfully put, there are things that only the lover sees. Love draw us to attend carefully, gently, to what is before us. Love waits for the object of knowledge to give itself to us.
But love not only awakens us and gives us eyes to see, it asks us to give singleminded attention to what is before us.
You will be tempted, students, faculty, and staff alike, by the siren song of multitasking. We all imagine that we can do it, that we can do it well, and that in the end it makes us more productive and, thus, somehow more worthy of admiration. The problem with this widely held view, is that scientific research continues to prove us wrong. Multitasking does not exist. What we call multitasking is really just a matter of shifting our attention rapidly between many things so that nothing we are doing receives the sustained attention it would need in order to be done well.
Love is willing to linger over the single object before us—a text, an phenomenon of nature, a chalice, a prayerbook, a meal, and, God help us, sometimes a spreadsheet. Love invites us to be singleminded.
So love awakens us, gives us eyes to see, invites singleminded attention, and thereby, love gives us a responsibility in our pursuit of knowledge.
That is, our attempts to know will always be bound by our fidelity to love. Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet and novelist, calls us to “stand guard over the solitude of the other.”2 I take this to imply that we have a duty to that which is before us to guard its integrity, to use restraint in the face of its vulnerability. True knowledge begins by letting the other be other, resisting the urge to project our fears or desires upon it, resisting the urge to cast the other as a mere object in my personal toolbox of things-to-be-used.
Instead, love seeks to replicate the beloved by tracing its contours in thought. Rowan Williams, in his essay “What does love know?” observes, “To understand something is to have the action of our mind follow the contours, as you might say, of the active reality of what’s understood.” (Williams 262) Poets and artists have long been those who showed us what it was to follow the contours of the object of knowledge, to trace the form and heed the design of the beloved. The intellectual version of this is to trace in the mind the outline of what we are discovering, to seek the patterns of beauty that emerge and re-emerge in both objects and actions around us—in the words of the Biblical text, in the gestures of liturgy, in the craft of preaching, in the ethical act, in the theological disputation, in the pastoral consolation, in the narratives of history, in the encounters of mission.
In each case the mind is invited to follow the contours of what is given, not asking first, “how can this be useful to me,” but rather, what is this before me that by virtue of being in this world, invites my love.
Over the summer I saw the movie The Hundred Foot Journey. It is a film about an Indian family who opens a restaurant in France. The restaurant is right across the street from a Michelin-starred establishment run by Madame Mallory, who is none too pleased that she has competition and, to her mind, low-class competition at that. One of the major transformations of the movie begins when Hassan Kadam, the son and chief cook at the Indian restaurant, is given a french cookbook by a new acquaintance. In it he finds combinations of food and techniques of preparation that had never before been part of his world. Before he has tasted a single recipe in the book, we see him tracing the contours of this new knowledge, tasting already in his imagination the fruit of this fresh discovery.
To the chagrin of his father and the bemusement of Madame Mallory, Hassan makes the hundred foot journey across the street and asks to learn French cooking. His search for new knowledge begins with an extravagant love of food, even the food of another culture that is quite unready to welcome his immigrant family, even the food of a competing restaurant that would much rather put him out of business. Hassan sees in each new ingredient, each unfamiliar spice, something not to be controlled or constrained by the contours of his previous knowledge, but something to be received as a catalyst to his own transformation.
We tell good stories like this, so that we might leave the theater and encounter each meal with just a little more love.
We tell stories like Israel’s entry into the promised land, so that we might leave Evensong and live with just a little more love.
We celebrate matriculation so that, you, our students, new and returning,
may learn to love knowledge,
may love so as to learn knowledge,
and may gain knowledge so as to better love.
Amen.
Scott Bader-Saye (@ScottBaderSaye) serves as academic dean and holds the Helen and Everett H. Jones Chair in Christian Ethics and Moral Theology at Seminary of the Southwest. He joined the faculty in 2009 after teaching for twelve years at the University of Scranton, a Jesuit university in Scranton, PA. His academic interests include political theology, sexual ethics, ecology/economy, and Jewish/Christian/Muslim dialogue.
1. Cited in Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, p. 71.
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Love and Other Difficulties, p. 28, cited in Arthur Zajonc, “Love and Knowledge: Recovering the Heart of Learning through Contemplation,” http://www.contemplativemind.org/admin/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/zajonc-love-and-knowledge.pdf, 2005.
