Convocation Prayer

The Convocation Prayer by Charles F.Dey '51, Dean of the William JewettTucker Foundation, was in its way ashort address on the theme chosen alsoby President Dickey and Robert B. Reich'6B. Many have urged the editors toprint the text of the prayer:

OUR Heavenly Father, through whose mysterious ways we enjoy Life, we offer thanks that just as on 197 earlier occasions, so today, for the 198 th time, You enable this community to gather physically comfortable, relatively isolated and secure, far from the trials and torments of our countrymen whose lot it is, at this moment, to cope with ghetto, guns, and guerillas.

Frustrated at home, disillusioned abroad, psychologically uneasy about our privileged sanctuary, we justify our immunity in terms of an annual rebate to society - excellence in the form of men who possess both critical qualities of mind and durable qualities of character. May we, O Lord, as a community, prove worthy of this passport:

Prove worthy as administrators — by responding to each crisis, each problem, each new student initiative as opportunity, not obstacle; by treating students neither as larvae waiting to be hatched from an academic cocoon nor as inmates awaiting parole to graduate school, but rather as terribly important people, short on experience perhaps, but long on talent and enterprise young men who will have much to say about the shape of the future.

Prove worthy as faculty by our concern that beyond those mountains of bluebooks about to be generated there will have been inspired not boredom and irrelevance but wonder, joy and enthusiasm for learning.

Prove worthy as students by responding to reckless and sordid misadventures of older generations (we who pretend to know answers for Asians but flounder in desperation in our cities; we who supervise elections in Saigon while stuffed ballot boxes return a white minority to power in Fayette, Tennessee) not with adolescent righteousness but rather with courage to invest yourselves in these problems, now, with a consuming passion to do a better job in your inning which is soon upon you.

Prove worthy as students by shunning pretentious loyalties to abstract concepts of Love and world citizenship while in the hard reality of the here and now trading your human dignity and promise for self-indulgence and self-gratification.

As we begin this new academic year, O Lord, may we rededicate ourselves to the fundamental proposition that each and every person in this community is important, be he student or secretary, teacher or track coach, biologist or boiler tender, groundsman or fund raiser, student wife or dean. Help us, O Lord, to understand that no matter how wise the Trustees, skillful the President, learned the faculty, devoted the staff, promising the students, exalted our reputation . . . except as we engage one another in meaningful ways, except as we share both the learning process and the full life of this community, we are no more than purveyors and purveyed passing through a spiritual ghost town.

Finally, O Lord, with knowledge that we can know ourselves only as we are engaged in matters of consequence, with knowledge that we can know You only as we turn to purposes larger than ourselves, we ask thy sustenance in the days ahead as we continue that struggle whereby we mortals attempt to come to terms with the higher drama of the universe.