2007 Senior Commencement Address
Mary Sotos '07
May 27, 2007

When I give tours of St. Olaf as a volunteer tour guide for the admissions office, I capitalize on the following particular feature you’ll no doubt recognize:  “on your right, you can see that there are hallways connecting the library, the commons and the chapel.  That signifies how St. Olaf values the connection between the mind, body and spirit.  And it keeps us warm in those cold Minnesota winters!”

This usually elicits a positive response from at least the parents on the tour, who are reassured of their child’s winter survival and tickled by the school’s acknowledgement of some sense of idealized balance in our lives.  As a prospect student myself, I fell for this message.  I fell for it because intuitively, desperately, I wanted to know that college was more than studying—that it could inspire me to be a whole person.  I don’t know if we as people ever become “whole” or complete, but I am increasingly convinced that to seek wholeness is an important, even vital process.  In his book, A Hidden Wholeness: the journey toward an undivided life,author Parker Palmer suggests that the underlying cause of much of our discontent, dissatisfaction, and despair arises from a sense of separation—a separation within ourselves, a divide between our values and our actions.  He suggests that most of us have deep convictions concerning what life should be about—but we are rarely encouraged to weave together our passion and compassion into the rhythm of our lives.  For that matter, most of us have strong convictions about what college should be, and for almost all of us, that includes the development of a whole person.  Yet, the language that our culture uses to describe the transition we face after graduation actually reinforces a sense of disconnection:  we’re entering “the real world,” suggesting that our experiences up to this point, through college, have been unreal; that we as people are unreal, or at least unrealistic.    

But I am going to make a bold and radical claim:  the “real world” yearns for our wholeness.  It doesn’t take much to observe brokenness and tension in the world—and intelligent people alone can’t begin to heal that.  But whole people can.  Let me tell you a little bit about how I’ve experienced a sense of wholeness here through the deepened relationship between my mind, my heart, and my actions—and how I think we can continue that process after graduation.

Academically, I pursued Environmental Studies, which is about as interdisciplinary as you can get.  Essentially, Environmental Studies recognizes the inherent interconnectedness of all life—and with that, the interconnectedness of all academic disciplines.  To identify one issue—say, pollution or deforestation—is to unearth and uproot a messy history of politics, economic incentives, human psychology, and even religious perceptions of creation. 

But I could never just learn information about the environment—it had to filter through the heart, the place where information is distilled and digested, where it is pulled together in what becomes our “life philosophy,” our “ethical orientation,” or simply our intuition.  Whole people, like the one I hope I am becoming, begin to trust the fearless core of the heart – the place that is willing to take risks for what is right and what our higher callings demand.  But good thoughts and good intentions are not enough—our lives and the way we live in the physical world need to speak our values.

We don’t live just in books or in prayers; we live embodied in a real world—and by “real world” I mean a world with real trees and grasses, real people, real joy and real, tangible pain. The physical world is the place where physical people, the embodiment of heart and mind, you and I, make our ideas and hopes come alive.  This embodiment is not, and need not, be grand; it is the habits that compose our daily decisions, the habits through which we inhabit our homes in the world, wherever they may be.

In his book, Earth in Mind, environmental educator David Orr writes that “"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane.”  In short, the “real world” we are entering longs for the kind of wholeness that St. Olaf has encouraged us to cultivate.  It longs for wise, not clever, people, who operate from a place of compassion and broad, deep thinking.  We are, and will continue to become, those people. Thank you.