For those of you unfamiliar with this place, to put it mildly, Carleton College is insanely difficult. Let me stress again my choice of adverb – INSANELY. We’re talking more hours of homework per week than most full-time jobs, arctic winters that last roughly the entire school year, and a senior thesis/comprehensive exam that each and every student must complete. Frankly, this means everybody you’re here to honor has probably endured 12 10-week periods of intense sleep deprivation. So potential employers take note – this is a special breed of worker we’re celebrating.

But I do not want to talk about jobs, though I’m sure the topic of gainful employment is on many of your minds, especially considering the current state of our economy. I’m going to ask you to lay aside your material concerns for the next 5 minutes or so, because, in light of the nature of this ceremony, I believe there are a few items well worth pausing and reflecting upon.

First though, allow me to introduce myself so that I am no longer a stranger. My name is Vincent Poturica and I am 23 years old, which means that everything I have to say is limited to my own 23 years of experience. I arrived at Carleton earlier then most of this class, back in 2004, but I didn’t stay long. At the time, I was under the powerful spell of Charles Bukowski, Arthur Rimbaud, and many other poets of the school of self-destruction. So after a term and some change, I left this place, following my own deluded conception of freedom, ending up deep in the Oregon woods working and living in tents with tree-huggers and train-hoppers and other such wonderful and wild folk. Why Carleton allowed me to return remains a mystery, like so much else. But they did and I will always be more than thankful to this institution for that very minor lapse in sound judgment.

I tell you this because I was never supposed to graduate. I was never supposed to be here, let alone finish a term early back in November, and my heart is filled with gratitude today.

But mainly, I tell you this because I believe that for communication to happen, true communication, a person must be vulnerable, must share something of who they are in order to warrant a response that carries any depth. And I believe this because I’ve had to learn the hard way, the way of many literal and figurative black eyes, what the artist James Baldwin meant when he said, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

You see, hate is incredibly deceptive which makes it all the more terrible. Because, at least for me, I’ve found that when disguised as philosophy, or ideology, or even common sense, I am convinced that I don’t have it, or worse still – that I’m above it – an idea I think we all try to hold on to, although intuitively we know we are lying to ourselves. But to see these lies is very, very painful, as Baldwin knew himself, as out of necessity, I too have been forced to know. Because to see that we hate is to admit that we are human, and to be human, to be stuck with this strange condition we all share, is painful indeed. I’m sure that most of you in attendance know this pain much more intimately than any of us graduates do, simply because you’ve lived longer. So my question is – how do we deal with the pain? How do we face it?

I like what Henry Miller, another artist, said, “I discovered this suffering was good for me, that it opened the way to a joyous life . . . [because I found] through acceptance of the suffering . . . the heart opens up like a flower.” What a beautiful statement that is. Whether you believe him or not is up to you, but his words capture the core insight that every enlightened woman and man I’ve been fortunate enough to know has discovered – that we must surrender to the fact that all of us here, coming from so many different walks of life, so many different sets of experiences, that all of us will always struggle with the messiness that is our day-to-day existence, the messiness that no theory, however hard it tries, will ever contain.

And these are the individuals I follow, those who have accepted this impossible fact, yet in the mouth of so much darkness, live with a degree of integrity and joy that humbles and then inspires me to do the same – individuals who no longer squint through the lens of skin color or class or gender or nation or belief, but who look each and every one of us straight in the eye, as equals, as sisters and as brothers – individuals who love.

So let me leave you with a sketch of a particular hero of mine in order to give form to the essence of the diverse group of individuals who are my guides. A Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an outspoken dissenter, rallying against the Nazi Socialist Party that came into power in his native country during the 1930s. Bonhoeffer initially went into exile in the United States, fleeing the tide of fascism, the tide of hate, drowning his homeland. But he soon returned, against the protests of many. He knew he could not turn his back on his countrymen – he had to share in their trials, to suffer alongside them. By April of 1943 he was put into prison for his critical stance against the government and it was there he spent the final years of his life. During this time in captivity, his guards were so impressed by his dedication to those who were sick and in despair, those who had lost all hope, that these guards smuggled to his friends and family the poems, papers, and letters Bonhoeffer composed behind bars. On April 9, 1945, he was executed by the Gestapo, along with many others, in a concentration camp at Flossenburg, only days before it was liberated by the Allies.

Bonhoeffer wrote the following shortly before he was killed – “It all depends on whether or not the fragment of our life reveals the plan and material of the whole. There are fragments which are only good to be thrown away, and others which are important for centuries to come because their fulfillment can only be a divine work. They are fragments of necessity. If our life, however remotely, reflects such a fragment . . . we shall not have to bewail our fragmentary life, but, on the contrary, rejoice in it.”

May all of us in the class of 2009 seek with all of ourselves these “fragments” which Bonhoeffor describes. And may we all do this, all of us here today – may we continue to grow past our hates and our fears and our sorrows to become these “fragments of necessity” no matter what the cost required. And may we also rejoice in this shared struggle, our human struggle, in the face of the infinite complexity, the infinite mystery we confront each and every day of our lives. May we do this always.