R.I.P. Peter J. Gomes

With a twinge of sadness I read of the passing of the Reverend Peter J. Gomes.

At Harvard, he was the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at the School of Divinity and the Pusey Minister of Memorial Church, a nondenominational center of Christian life on campus. For decades, he was among the first and the last to address undergraduates, greeting arriving freshman [sic] with a sermon on hallowed traditions, and advising graduating seniors about the world beyond the sheltering Harvard Yard.

I was lucky enough to be one of those seniors a number of years ago. Being irreligious even then, I wasn't inclined to attend Rev. Gomes's Senior Class Chapel Service, as it is called today (I could swear the address went by a different title back then, but my memory could be playing tricks on me). A friend convinced me to make the trek to Memorial Church, pointing out that I'd never get a second chance to experience anything commencement-related.

It was a masterful performance. Even then Rev. Gomes had performed such services often enough that he knew how to hold his audience in the palm of his hand.

The heart of his address was an admonition to his proud, confident audience. Harvard graduates, he reminded us, had been trying their hardest for over three centuries to make the world a better, kinder, gentler place. Look around you, he added dryly, it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. He urged us to take a different tack: instead of striving to understand the world (implicit in his words was the addendum, "and conquer it"), we should strive to have a heart full of understanding. Intellectual understanding should make room for emotional (and perhaps in Rev. Gomes's mind, spiritual) understanding.

I have never forgotten that admonition. I must admit that I've never lived up to it, either, but at least I have never stopped trying.

It seems Rev. Gomes was in the habit of toning down the grandiose ambitions of his soon-to-be-graduated audiences. According to the Harvard Gazette's coverage of the 2010 commencement exercises:

He cautioned the students against striving for the kind of greatness that is too often tied to a drive simply to achieve. Instead, Gomes urged the graduating class to aim, above all, for goodness.

Gomes acknowledged that some listeners may perform great deeds, such as finding a cure for cancer or a “sensible way of explaining the economy,” and that he would be grateful for their successes. But he suggested that most of the graduates would simply be “called upon to do small and ordinary things as well as possible.”

Gomes added, “If you do that well, you will have remade our world and your little corner of it, you will have justified our high hopes in you, and you will have given substance to the ancient vision for a new heaven and a new Earth.”

I have forgotten much from my college days, but Rev. Gomes's advice lingers. Perhaps that is only natural, for where most of my education touched on matters of the mind which no longer are relevant to my daily life, his words were about the human heart.