Address to the Graduating Class of Eastern Mennonite University, 4/25/04, Harrisonburg, Virginia

Larry Yates

I want to start by acknowledging my father, Dr. Warren Yates, who has waited decades for this moment. He is the primal source of the social justice perspective you will hear from me today. I also want to thank my wife, Carol, who supported me so much. In fact, let me thank all the families and supporters of those in the Adult Degree Completion Program . Adult students need some very special support from spouses, children, parents, friends -- and, since we are here today, we clearly got it.

I also want to acknowledge the talented ADCP faculty and staff, who understand adult students’ resistance to administrivia and academic trappings, and kept a focus on the program’s core curriculum. Of key importance for them was getting us engaged about important issues within that curriculum. My mind and my soul learned from those conversations -- and my hunger for more led me to these thoughts.

EMU’s Adult Degree scholars are intelligent, hard-working, responsible, and caring. Many of us have hit the tough spots in this economy; most of us are in the midst of changing our lives. My fellow students chose the ADCP as a way to get the greatest educational benefit and career advancement without taking too much time or resources from their families and commitments. They were seeking to meet very real and very precious obligations.

However, these obligations have little to do with this University’s Anabaptist mission. ADCP students pass by -- but do not really pass through -- EMU.

I am not suggesting that ADCP students should be recruited to Anabaptism. I would have resisted that myself. But in discussions of tough issues in the workplace, in the family, and in civil society, there were openings to an encounter with Anabaptism and with a Beatitudes-based peace and justice message. I think the faculty had, as I have myself, an uncertainty about how to talk to people who did not ask for an encounter with the peace and justice vision of the Mennonite faith.

I am not singling out the ADCP, or EMU, or even Mennonites, with this observation. Our Commencement Speaker today, Dr. Martin Marty, wrote that “forming community” is common to all religions, and that “as community forms, it can easily create the “we” that heals as well the “they” who become the repulsive other.” (Is Religion the Problem, Tikkun, Mar/Apr 2002) The Samaritan, of course, was the “repulsive other” to Jesus’ fellow Jews. But do those of us committed to peace and justice, also avoid, or expect less from, our own Samaritans?

Though not even close to being a Mennonite, I personally came to EMU deeply in sympathy with the Anabaptist project, my years of working with and for the disempowered having taught me that the divine is no respecter of nationality or race, of riches, or of social status.

Like many here, I passionately believe that US corporate culture, the culture of Barbie, the NFL, Fox News, McDonalds, and WalMart, must be profoundly subdued.

After a year and a half of Monday nights with them, I can tell you that many of my fellow ADCP students are very much in that culture. And I can also tell you that they are frustratingly easy to love, respect, and enjoy. This has complicated my life: I had planned, going in, for my fellow students to either all be Mennonnite saints, or to all be easy to write off as corporate dupes.

I am proud to have my degree show the name of the Mennonite community, a body that exemplifies peace and justice worldwide. But I am not the first to wonder if this community (though of course not only this community) must not do more to genuinely encounter not only Iraq but Rockport, Maine, and Little Rock, Arkansas, and Rockingham County, Virginia. Disciplines like conflict transformation, community development, and community organizing can help us with this task.

Those of us who crossed the road long ago to tend to the broken and beaten know that our efforts are far from enough. Can our faith stretch to imagine that those who today are focused on career and family will also cross over?And, on the other side, can those who are caught up in the daily conventional world open up enough to grasp how badly they are needed, and how much they can do, as healers of a bleeding world?

In this world of where war, waste and injustice are institutionalized, where powerful forces mobilize to make us all cynics, we know what we must answer. Now we just have to learn, day by day and person by person, how to do it.