In the 1970s Ernest Becker
wrote The Denial of Death and made
the case that our inability to recognize that one day we will die is the root
cause of many of the issues moderns face.
Seemed to me then to be a reasonable thesis and my experience here at
MIT continues to confirm the notion.
When I first came here over
30 years ago we tried to ignore death and students took quiet pride that MIT
was so hard that many students took their own lives. The Institute tried to ignore the issue
knowing that the numbers were not out of line with our peers. Today they face
the truth with more honesty knowing that one death is one too many, but that it
is also impossible to build a safety net that catches everyone.
The sensitivity to death and
dying has contributed to the difficulties of this year. We had a graduate student who died last fall.
A former student now a graduate student at another university died
shortly after the first of the year. An alum who worked closely with current
students died of natural causes, but for those who knew him his death had to be
dealt with in a world that depended on his presence. Then there was the Marathon Bombing and the
death of Sean Collier. Finally, in a bicycle accident, a post-doctoral visitor
from Japan lost her life.
When I offered the invocation
at graduation I asked for comfort and presence in light of these events. We
then turned to Tech Day with memorial services both planned and unscripted
where we remembered the deaths in our alumni community.
I think we have come a long
way from denying death to making a serious effort to think about what our
mortality means.
As glib as it may sound, what
this means is that we recognize that for all of our smarts, there are problems
we cannot solve, concerns that do not yield to our inquiries. We may deny death pretending that if we
ignore it or do the happy dance it will go away. It doesn’t and we know it. We die too young. We die too soon and even at the end of a long
and good life we had rather not go. Step to the edge and maybe look over, but
we prefer to step back into life.
At a less frivolous level it
means we recognize that we are part of a larger community where death comes too
often. Students tell us they want to get
on out into the real world. What we have seen these last weeks is a reminder
that the world here on Massachusetts Avenue is as real as it gets. The shock
for many international students is that the violence they are familiar with at
home has found them in the US.
Humility, recognizing that
there are problems that defy solutions and shared humanity across the borders
of nationality and violence, are steps that take us in a more humane direction,
but I asked as well for comfort, a sense of well being, and presence and it may
be that I am simply whistling in the dark.
As a Christian I think not.
The Christian faith offers us
the notion that God remains concerned with humankind and our myriad of triumphs
and tragedies. We test the notion and it may be that the transcendent is simply
less dependable in our world or less apparent. There is no way to know, but I
stay in conversation railing at one moment, grateful in another for a sense of
presence.
During graduation week we
celebrated the life of Umaer Basha, born when his parents were post-docs at MIT
in 1979. He returned in 1997 to begin his studies as a freshman. He had, he
wrote, come home! A series of tragic
events took his life before too many weeks had passed. As the sun set that fall
with the dark foreboding that comes each year, his mother asked me what she
should do in her grief? She was tired of crying and we agreed that she should
find ways to embrace living that kept her son’s memory alive.
From Pakistan, the family is
Muslim with a deep sense of God’s presence even in their loss and so she began
a series of projects including the establishment of an Institute of Technology
within the University of Karachi. She
still cries, but she also knows that her family has made possible better
education for a generation of Pakistani students and that knowledge gives her comfort
and purpose.
Death reminds us of what lies
ahead for all of us. And we know the end
for certainty if we turn inward paralyzed by fear and grief, but if we choose
to engage the world, shouting to God about our anger as well as about our
hopes, it may well be that we can find in our losses the substance of a better
tomorrow.
This year I prayed for
presence and comfort. In 2010 I offered these words:
In these hard days when we
are reminded often of what we cannot do, help us to remember what we have done.
Let angry words not be our mantra, but rather words of celebration, words of
joy and words of hope. Tomorrow will be better because of what we celebrate
today!
Or as Mary Oliver has
written: .
Let
the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the
trees,
and the mystery hidden in dirt
swing through the air.
How
could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my
heart?
What should I fear?
(A Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of
Faith)
May it be so.
Robert
M Randolph
Chaplain
to the Institute
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
