The following is the speech given by Dr. Louis Stulman, UF professor religious studies, during the fall 2005 commencement ceremony.



President Freed, Dr. May, members of the Board of Trustees, administration and distinguished faculty, friends and families, and most of all, The University of Findlay Class of 2005: it is an honor and a delight to play a part in this grand celebration.

In a perfect world I would take my son’s advice who is graduating this spring: Tim suggested that I congratulate you, say something really profound in a sentence or two and then sit down.  Everyone would be happy, I’d be off the hook, and you’d probably never forget your commencement address.  Unfortunately it’s not a perfect world! So you’ll have to endure one more very brief lecture that shouldn’t hurt too much!


Dr. Louis Stulman, professor of religious studies

One of my favorite contemporary authors, Henri Nouwen, has suggested that we spend much of life in the “house of fear” and in the “house of love.”¹ At first I dismissed his metaphor as simplistic, but the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that Nouwen is right: fear and love are massive, defining forces in our lives.

Fear, for one, is pervasive and may be one of the most debilitating diseases of our time. And if we’re honest, few here could “Mapquest” the span of their life, without discovering a great deal of fear and anxiety peppering the landscape. 

1. When I grew up in the 60s many of us were terrified of nuclear disaster; we were scared that the Soviets would launch a preemptive missile strike to which the United States would respond, and the world, as we knew it, would end. The weekly air-raid drills at school, when we hid under desks with hands over our heads, were a stark reminder that our fears were not so far-fetched.
2. In college I worried about getting into graduate school, and
3. In graduate school I was haunted by doubts about measuring up.
4. As parents, Kate and I have spent many nights awake worrying about our children. And even though they are now all young adults we still have an occasional, early morning bout of anxiety. 
5. And after more than 20 years of teaching I still get real nervous when meeting with classes for the first few times each semester.
   

You might think I’m a bit weird! And you’re probably right, but I don’t think I’m that unusual! I would venture to say that everyone is frightened, at least on some level, and all of us spend far too much time in the House of Fear.

When traveling to the Middle East or just talking to students here on campus, I am struck by the negative power of fear. After getting past the facades and “I’m fine,” it seems that it has penetrated the deepest parts of our being.

And even after this grand achievement of yours, when you leave campus with diploma in hand, empowered by your success, you will likely be tempted to visit the house of fear, and perhaps live there.

1. You may worry about not finding the right job, or the right place to live, or the right person to spend your life with.
2. Some of you may be apprehensive about getting into graduate or professional schools and succeeding there. (You will do just fine!)
3. Some may be tempted not to follow your dream in fear of failure.
4. In the back of your mind you may wonder, “What will I do if they reject me, if the money runs out, if terrorists strike?” 
   

The list is almost endless! No wonder we visit this house so often.

But spending too much time there is costly, for fear ravages our bodies and minds. It drives us to despair and even to violence against ourselves and others. And if we reside there too long, we risk missing the wondrous gifts and rich opportunities that life affords us.

But how do we sell the house, so to speak, and move out?  I would suggest that love is the way out. Love is the antidote for fear. Love liberates us from oppression and empowers us to take risks; it is love, St. John reminds us, that “casts out fear,” that renders it null and void.² 

And yet to be perfectly honest: it’s strangely difficult to talk about love. In our complex world, love seems rather sentimental and even naïve. Power and production appear far more important. Even so, poets and playwrights, artists and philosophers, and many social scientists and medical professionals, have made a most convincing case that nothing is more important than this four-letter word ….that when the dust of life settles, when all is said and done, love, in all its varied forms, remains and gives meaning to the chaos of life.

After years in a concentration camp where he endured the most monstrous acts conceivable, Victor Frankel concluded that “the salvation of man is through love and in love.”³ Frankel refused to let fear and hatred overcome love. The Jewish psychiatrist was clearly not living in denial: he had encountered first hand the many distorted postures of evil, the randomness of suffering, and even the deafening silence of God. And yet in a bold act of faith and moral courage, he insisted that love is all-important…love is all important.

Without it, without poetry and beauty, music and imagination, without the people sitting next to you and the bonds of family, friends, and community, without work that builds people up rather than tears them down, and concrete expressions of caring and compassion, life is reduced to little more than utility, technology, and upward mobility. They’re all fine and perhaps even necessary, but life encompasses far more!

In 1961 psychologist Carl Rogers made a rather subversive statement (that we have unfortunately ignored): Rogers suggested that if we would invest the price of one or two large rockets in the search for love, the world would be a far safer place.⁴  Sadly in the year 2005 we still know far more about military technology than we do about love, and our global and national investment in each is dangerously disproportionate.

I find it rather strange: we can parse the human gene and probe distant stars, we can travel to virtually any place on the planet, yet we remain in the Stone Age when it comes to human relations and love.⁵ We can control the universe in our labs and offices, but can’t control our tempers when we get home. We can build palm pilots that can do just about everything but walk the dog, and yet we’re having great difficulty talking to each other these days. We not only have red and blue states but red and blue churches, synagogues, and mosques. We are polarized and hostile towards each other.

And so, more than ever, we need to find viable ways for people to work together to solve problems and live together in peace.  In other words, we must spend far more time in the house of love than in the house of fear.

Let me conclude with a story. In the '80s and '90s many faculty at the UF had the distinct honor of teaching a course or two each year at Lima and Allen Correctional Institutions (we still offer courses at Allen but the program, as I understand it, is now scaled down).

On one occasion, I believe it was in the fall semester of 1992, I was teaching an Old Testament prophets class. We were studying Hosea, the eighth century Prophet of chesed (which is the rich Hebrew word with a wide semantic range, often translated as love or loyalty). I explained that Hosea is known as the prophet of chesed because he insisted that true love, that divine love, endures all things, including infidelity, rejection, and even betrayal. And Hosea embodied this love when he wouldn’t give up on a spouse who had been unfaithful—just as God would not give up his people.

At that point I asked my students to help me define this strange and wondrous word, chesed, as it is used in Hosea. And after an uncomfortable silence, a student in the back of the class blurted out “Guts!” He then explained, “It takes guts to hang in there when there is every reason to quit. That’s what true love is all about!”

Bingo! Love, chesed, is not some vague, sentimental notion divorced from every day life; love is courageous, steadfast, and gutsy. “It bears all things,” as St. Paul says, “endures all things, hopes all things, and never gives up.”⁶

In the days ahead, be alert to where you’re living: If you find yourself spending too much time in the house of fear, jump ship for your true home, the spacious and elegant house of love.

And may the God of “gutsy” love grant you years of peace and a good measure of success in all that you do.

Thank you.


¹ Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved (New York: Crossroad, 1992).
² 1 John 4:18
³ Victor Frankel, Man’s Search for Meaning (Simon & Schuster, 1959).
⁴ Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Houghton Mifflin, 1961).
⁵ Henri Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak (Doubleday, 1988).
⁶ See 1 Corinthians 13.