FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE IN THE COLLEGE JOURNEY BY RYA N S UM MERS
I N TRO DUCTI ON Greetings and thanks to the Board of Trustees, Bear Creek administrators, faculty and staff, alumni, parents, relatives, and friends. And, congratulations, Class of 2020! In the next 12 minutes I want to try to show you how you will need faith, hope, and love in your college journey. FAI TH A S VI S I ON When I make salsa, I tearfully chop the onion first. But later the tomato, cilantro, pepper, and lime come along and everything gets fragrant and tangy. The first three minutes of this address are the onion—hopefully the tangy fragrance will come by the end. Albert Camus laments: “I want everything to be
explained to me or nothing. And reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The world itself, whose single meaning I don’t understand, is but a vast irrationality. If one could only just say: ‘all is clear’ then all would be saved.”1 That resonates, doesn’t it? We love clarity; in fact, here at Bear Creek we teachers live by the motto “predictable and supportive.” The problem that Camus points out is that we can’t say “all is clear,” and we more often find ourselves saying with him, “I don’t understand.” When a genius like Camus says that “human reason is impotent” and that the world “is but a vast irrationality,” we have something to be concerned about. The more recent existentialist work The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams makes a MODUS VIVENDI –
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