Edwin G. Wilson

Commencement Address

Campbell University

May 10, 2004

I would like to say how happy -- and how honored -- I am to have been invited to speak at Campbell University’s Commencement exercises and to have become a Campbell alumnus.  Ever since I was a student at the old Wake Forest campus just sixteen or so miles north of Raleigh, I have known and appreciated Campbell, and over recent decades I have admired the extraordinary achievements of Norman “Ed” Wiggins as day after day, month after month, year after year, he has brought new strength, new programs, new schools to this good place.  He and I, once upon a time, were Wake Forest faculty members together, and I salute him today with friendship and affection.  I also salute Jerry Wallace, whom I congratulate on his important new responsibilities, coming to him after years of distinguished service, and who is already destined for presidential leadership of a rare quality.  He also is a long-time friend.  And I cannot fail to say while I am here that both President Wiggins’ wife Millie and President Wallace’s daughter-in-law Marybeth were coworkers of mine at Wake Forest.  They are both splendid women and dear friends.

* * * * *

A few weeks ago I rented a DVD of the movie adventure epic Lawrence of Arabia, a favorite of mine ever since I first saw it in New York City more than forty years ago.  At the time, I was thinking about this Commencement address that I had been asked to give, and I was fumbling around, so far unsuccessfully, for an appropriate topic: one, I hoped, that would be appropriate for this Campbell University occasion.

The movie started, and soon I was lost in the breathtakingly beautiful -- and terrifying -- Arabian desert(unfortunately more familiar to us now than it was when the movie first appeared).  Then, suddenly, a bit of dialogue occurred which, strange as it may seem to you, brought me back to my Commencement speech.  Lawrence has just encountered an Arab warrior named Ali Ibn El Kharish, and he immediately has good reason to fear and distrust him.  Therefore, when Ali asks Lawrence, “What is your name?” Lawrence replies, “My name is for my friends.”  And Lawrence will not give away his name.

Why was it, I asked myself, that Lawrence thought his name was so valuable?  Lawrence might well have offered Ali a drink from his canteen, some dates to eat, a cape to wear, but his name he would not give away.  His name, I saw, was that possession of his which most thoroughly represented himself; it was, if you like, the essence of himself.  And, as I realized the implications of what Lawrence was saying, there flashed into my mind -- perhaps illogically, you will say -- that incomparable opening sentence from John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.”

Several days after my movie experience, I read a story about the Holocaust.  Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, and a man who in his writings and in his life has borne witness to the horrors of the Nazis’ concentration camps and gas chambers, had been interviewed for the story.  And Wiesel recalled that, when he was at Auschwitz, he had, in his words, “no name, no hope, no future.”  He was known “only by his number.”   He had had “no name” to give, and therefore he was reduced to the nothingness of a number -- even though he walked and talked like other men outside the camp.

Obviously, I saw a link between the “name” of Lawrence that he would not give away and the “name” that Elie Wiesel, during a bitter time, did not even have.  And then -- for the mind moves mysteriously in its efforts toward coherence -- I remembered what was perhaps my favorite fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm: the story of Rumpelstiltskin, that little man who spun gold out of straw for the miller’s daughter in return for her promise that, unless she could discover his name within three days, she would have to give him her first child.  The miller’s daughter tried for two days to guess his name: Caspar?  Melchior?  Cowribs?  Spiderlegs?   Finally, on the third day, because a friendly messenger had overheard the little man declaring aloud his name, she knew what to ask: Tom?  Dick?  Rumpelstiltskin?  And the little man, now without power, and shrieking and angry, tore himself into pieces.  He no longer wanted to live: his name had been captured, and he had been revealed for what he was.

You will forgive me, I hope, for moving now through what may appear to be an unseemly transition from the ridiculous to the sublime.  For I have one more illustration to offer, and it also arises from a memory of childhood.  When I was a boy of, I suppose, ten or twelve, I had as a Sunday school teacher a deeply religious and perceptive man who, week after week, told us stories from the Bible.  One Sunday he told us about Moses and the burning bush, and he dwelt with emphasis on those verses in which Moses says unto God, “. . . when I come unto the children of Israel . . . and they shall say to me, What is his name?  what shall I say unto them?  And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM . . . say unto the children I AM hath sent me unto you.”

That story had a profound impact on my boyish conscience.  I didn’t really understand it.  (Does anyone really understand it?)  But what I heard in the story was a man asking God Himself what His name was and God replying in richly ambiguous and poetic words -- words which I found strangely unsettling.  I was so affected, I will tell you in all honesty, that ever since I have not liked to speak the name of God in public.

But to return to my Commencement theme, which, you now see clearly, has to do with the significance, the centrality, even the sacredness of names.  Especially on a day like this one, we are newly conscious of names from our past: of James Archibald Campbell and Leslie Campbell, those pioneers whose family name is before your eyes and on your lips almost every day of your college lives; of Norman Wiggins and Jerry Wallace and A.R. Burkot, whom I read about a few days ago in The Campbell Prospect.  Names are all around us, and they speak at once of the rich heritage that is ours.

But it is not Lawrence of Arabia or Elie Wiesel or Rumpelstilskin or even the Campbells who are the destination of my remarks this morning.  I would speak rather of the names of you students -- the name by which each of you is called -- the name which, like a Word, has been yours from the beginning.  Unlike Elie Wiesel you have a name; at Campbell, you are not merely a number.  Unlike Lawrence of Arabia, you have nothing to fear; unlike Rumpelstilskin, you have nothing to hide; unlike James A. and Leslie Campbell, your name has not passed into history.  You are young and vibrant and alive to the future.  And yet your name already speaks of who you are.

Have you ever thought, about a person you have known a long time, that no name other than the one she has would do for that person?  When I think about my two daughters, I see them only as Sally and Julie.  I can’t imagine them as Rebecca and Patricia.  Rebecca and Patricia wouldn’t fit.  Can those of you who know Little Women imagine Jo being called Meg or Beth answering to the name of Amy?

No, your name is already peculiarly your own, and irrevocably your own.  And around your name has already formed a cluster of associations to which your parents, your brothers and sisters, your friends have contributed impressions and opinions.  Since you came to Campbell your name has become surrounded on this campus with comments and evaluations and attitudes friendly or neutral or even, now and then, hostile.  Your name is the sum of who you are or, at least, whom you seem to be.

And that is why it is the peculiar task of your life -- as you move ahead from college into the world -- to attend to your name, to strengthen it, to respect it -- in short, to honor it as the most conspicuous outward symbol of your very self.

The poet William Butler Yeats said, very near the end of his life, that if he had to summarize in one sentence what he had learned in the more than seven decades of a career filled with insights and honors, he would say, “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.”

You and I search -- in our classrooms, in our laboratories, in our late-night conversations, in our readings, in our churches -- for what we optimistically call the truth, and we gradually construct our own understanding of truth, centered as often as not around our definition of Him who said I AM THAT I AM. But we know that, to our human eyes, the truth is not always obvious.As Charles Seeger said, “The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it’s somewhere in there.”

But, even though we cannot always know the truth, can we, in Yeats’s word, “embody” it?

Do you know the old-fashioned Christian catechism which begins, before anything else is asked, with the question “What is your Name?”   May I use the language of poetry and faith to suggest that, just as once upon a time the Word became flesh, so in your time the Name which is yours became the living person that you are?  And that your mission in life is so to “embody” that name that, when it is spoken or read, it means truth: a truth that is faithful to where you came from; a truth that presents itself in the same way to the most prestigious person you know and to the humblest person you know; a truth that so uniformly manifests itself in public and in private that the person your friends know is the same person you truly are and that you know yourself to be.

“A good name,” the Book of Proverbs said, “is rather to be chosen than great riches.”  And in Ecclesiastes we read, “A good name is better than precious ointment.”  The purpose of true education, especially at a place like Campbell University, is, I believe, to be able to live your life after college in such a way as to show that you really believe what those proverbs say.  Your name will not need “riches” to ornament it, nor will it require “precious ointment” to make it sweeter.  It will stand, simply, for what it is: the pure and innermost expression of who you really are.  Through honor, through integrity, you can -- in your own inimitable way -- “embody” the truth.

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