"Our Whole Lives" Welcome Luncheon: Closing Reflections
(Susan Carlson, St. Olaf College, Sept. 20, 2007)
Our Whole Lives – Our Whole Community
This luncheon is titled Our Whole Lives – both a celebration of the many aspects of our lives and an intention to live all of those aspects fully and help others do the same. In the same spirit, I thought in closing I’d say a few words about Our Whole Community.
We talk a lot about community – community of scholars, gay and lesbian community, GLBT/GLBTQA community, campus community, local community, artistic community, business community, congregational community – the St. Olaf community. The word can be both inclusive and exclusive – with resonances concerning identity and assimilation, belonging and separateness.
We don’t need to explore all that right now, but simply acknowledge it, and remind ourselves that each of us belongs to many communities, and that our work in one community spills over and affects our surrounding communities. (To co-opt another word with many resonances, we live in imbedded communities. I’m sure there is a pertinent sociological model with a neat diagram for this, but I’ll have to make do with English vocabulary.)
The work we do to strengthen the community, or communities, represented in this room, also strengthens the whole community of St. Olaf, a college that explicitly desires to “foster the development of the whole person in mind, body, and spirit.”
So – let’s stay committed to supporting each other’s goals and enterprises, and to working cooperatively on common projects, like the Gender and Sexuality Center. And let’s keep in mind how these various activities will end up improving the “whole life” of the college.
Go forth! Take care of yourselves, and of each other.
