The gritty reality of this world
Student commencement address from Ben Zellmer, MU Health Sciences ’18
“Students of Jesuit universities must let the gritty reality of this world into their lives so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering and engage it constructively.” — Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, October 6th, 2000
Some of us have known these gritty realities our entire lives, and many of us have not.
The good of a Jesuit education is that it moves us to engage these truths. To become critically active citizens. To be agents of positive social change.
The greatest lesson I’ve learned at Marquette is that God’s Universe is a moral one, and it bends towards justice. To the students of color and others who have risked their lives organizing, educating, and protesting for justice in this country, in this city, and on this campus — You have shown us God at work in our midst.
My Marquette experience and the experience of many Marquette students who look like me are not the only narratives to share today.
As we celebrate these past four years of all our students, we also recognize the social movements happening around us and how our Jesuit education calls us to contribute to their progression.
We gather in this space this morning, a space of gratitude, learning, and love: we are surrounded by our families and loved ones, those in attendance and those not, and we thank them for the sacrifices they have made for us to sit in these seats today.
For five months, I had the blessing to study abroad and live in South Africa, a country formerly defined by apartheid, where silence was once deadly and apathy pathological, necrotic to society.
Sometimes I feel like I still live in a country experiencing apartheid. Sometimes I know that I still do.
Apartheid in any nation persists in large part because of popular avoidance of societal injustices.
Neutrality runs rampant. And neutrality in the face of injustice only perpetuates injustice.
As graduates of a Jesuit university, we are committed to a solidarity that acts for the human rights of others, especially the disadvantaged and the oppressed. We are called to resist apathy. To resist neutrality.
To work for the greater good.
And yes that means that we will need to find our super suits. Run head first into the unknown. And use our super powers to be Incredibles 2.
But this sequel cannot wait 14 years. We have no right to delay. When the state of society feels like a page out of Orwell’s 1984, when it’s starting to feel like we’re back in 1964 or 1854, action is obligatory.
We may live in the year 2018 but there are still freedom marches. Civil rights has never stopped. Black and Brown Lives Matter. People are still fighting for the dignity to live without fear for their lives. Children are still fighting for the dignity to live without fear for their lives.
“This is America,” Childish Gambino tells us. This is the America we contribute to. This is the America we can change.
On Sunday March 7th, 1965, John Lewis, a black man, just 25 years old, marched for his voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, was beaten by police and left for dead.
On August 20, 2014, at our very own convocation that same John Lewis, now Representative John Lewis, welcomed many of us to Marquette for the first time.
He invited us to partake in what he called a World House, a place where we ALL belong.
And in this house we have one chore. And that is to make necessary trouble.
I walked where John Lewis marched that fateful Bloody Sunday 53 years ago.
I felt the steel of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and gazed upon the path taken towards liberation once obstructed not by a Red Sea but one of blue.
Here’s something you may not know about that bridge in Selma.
Etched into a thin black sheet of metal drilled into the cross beams worn and faded from time are the words:
Well, aren’t we all made in Milwaukee?
You see we are not walls. We are bridges;
Avenues of civil rights; Freeways of social justice; Paths towards liberation
We are bridges. We are Milwaukee. And we are Marquette:
When we engage the gritty realities of this world, that shake us to our core and make us question our roles as meaningful contributors to the world around us; When we wonder who in the world will we become and if will we ever make the difference we dreamed of ourselves one making; When we engage again and again in God’s messy work for justice;
We may ask ourselves are we enough?
Remember that we are made in Milwaukee. We are Champions of Jesuit Higher Education. And we are Alumni and Alumnae of Marquette University.
We will always be bridges.
Thank you Milwaukee. Thank you Marquette. And thank you Class of 2018.
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