Dr. Amy C. Cottrill

Denson N. Franklin Professor of Religion

2020 Outstanding Educator of the Year

May 14, 2021

I am truly honored to be here today on this day of celebration. A college education is a momentous achievement. The list of what you have to celebrate is long: challenging coursework, empowering self-realizations, friendships, deep engagement with ideas, authors, and artists that will take root and flourish over the years. This year we have other things to celebrate, our very lives not the least of those. You are here. And that means something different this year than it would have two years ago. You did incredible work this year in the midst of challenges that no one could have been fully prepared for. On behalf of everyone here at BSC, I want to congratulate you and all of the people who have supported you. You are here. We see the efforts that brought you here and we celebrate you enthusiastically and without reservation.

Considering the celebration that this day deserves, it is a perhaps ironic that you have before you a commencement speaker who often studies and teaches about suffering, trauma, and violence in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and even, on occasion, apocalyptic books of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It occurred to me several times in writing this address that I am possibly the last person to invite to speak at a celebratory occasion such as this. But, I learned something in writing this speech, because writing is learning, after all. In studying, for years, ancient texts about violence, trauma, suffering, and the collapse of meaningful reality, I have also been learning about how people survive those circumstances, physically, emotionally, and ethically. I thought of myself as a student of human suffering, but I think I am also a student of resilience and hope. That is a recent insight for me and as you all have taught me to say, “I am here for it.” If we ever needed resilience and hope it is now. So, in writing this speech I gave myself the small task of distilling what I have learned from my studies about suffering and hope to fit within the minutes that I have been given today. This will be a commencement address for 2021. It does no good to act as if this is a year like any other. I hope these words offer you some support, some encouragement, as our relationship with you changes, as you transition from student to graduate.

The first thing I have learned is that suffering and trauma must be acknowledged and remembered if hope is to be possible. Even on a day of celebration like this one, we bring with us the suffering of the year we have been through. Some of us have been sick or lived with people who have been sick, or worried about people who might get sick. We have been fearful and we have grieved the deaths of friends, family, and members of our human family in our country and all over the world. Add to that the stressful and overwhelming political tensions and economic shifts in the nation and in the world that have very much impacted our individual and communal lives.

Yet the anxiety of a global pandemic and intense political divisions are not the only causes of trauma that we have encountered. The realities of racism and white supremacist movements in our country has been a source of ongoing trauma, especially for Black people and people of color. We live in a country that is still gripped by racism, in which Black people and people of color do not live with the same expectations of safety, health, and protection as white people. Even on a day of celebration, especially on a day of celebration, we must remember that. You have learned in your studies and in your life experience that you have the ability to hold complex emotions and stances together at once, lament and joy, grief and celebration, appreciation and critique. And that is important, because what I have seen time and time again in the texts that I study is that acknowledging the complicated truth is the beginning of hope. Telling the truth is, in fact, the necessary condition for hope.

The second thing I have learned about hope is that, even though we often say “I feel hopeful, or I do not feel hopeful,” hope may not actually be a feeling, or not predominantly a feeling. What I have seen is that hope is more often an act of will, an ethical stance. We often have a thin idea of hope, I think. The phrase “Hope springs eternal,” come to mind, which makes it seem almost like hope is inevitable, it will always return, and it just happens. It springs. Eternally. My studies lead me to a very different conclusion, however. I think hope is work. It is a discipline. For example, in the Psalms, which is where I spend a lot of my time, the psalmist often decides to turn toward a future anticipation of comfort and joy, even when, in the moment, that feeling is not reality. The psalmist very often does not appear to feel hopeful. Rather, they decide to pivot themselves toward the possibility of something different in the future, even when they are in the depths of despair.

This is important because feelings can’t always be relied upon to crop up when we need them. You know this from personal experience. Though I assume that in the last four years you had momentary encounters with creative inspiration, in which you felt taken up by your reading, research and practice such that your effort was barely noticeable, those brief moments were not enough to get you here today. You had to develop habits, discipline, and persistence. In the past year, I have come back many times to a quotation from philosopher and activist Angela Davis, who spent some of her childhood years right down the road from BSC, on Dynamite Hill. Davis said, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”[1] Davis captures the role of sheer willpower, a kind of stubborn and courageous commitment to something different: Acting as if it is possible to change the world is quite possibly more important than feeling like it is possible to change the world.

The third thing that I have learned about hope is also reflected in Angela Davis’s quotation. You have to act as if it is possible to transform the world. We have to act as if the world is capable of transformation long before we are certain that it so. We have to act “as if,” which means we have to cultivate the power of imagination. This is tricky. This kind of imagination is not about retreating into fanciful escapism or simply choosing to look on the bright side. Hope is not optimism. It is more like looking at the way the world is and saying “Yes, this is a mess. People are being hurt.” And without looking away from that suffering, I can also envision the possibility of something better, more just, more compassionate. What I have seen in the texts I study is that the ability to imagine is a mechanism of survival and transformation. Hope, I think, relies on ethical imagination, being able to see what is and what is possible at the same time.

I do not pretend this is easy. It certainly is not for me. My powers of imagination are sometimes profoundly challenged. My ability to see the mess in the world and maybe in myself is much more developed than my powers of seeing the potential of that mess to be something else. In my studies, however, I often encounter people in the past who teach me to imagine in bold, outrageous ways that challenge my sense of what is possible in the world. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi (third century, Israel), offered this instruction in imagination in his teaching about the value of every individual person. He said, “A procession of angels passes before each person and the angels go before them saying, “Make way for the Image of God.”[2] The Rabbi invites us to an “as if” world in which we are asked to meet every human being as if they are a refraction of what is most sacred, precious, and treasured to us. The first time I read this invitation from the Rabbi, I was frankly shocked, both by the ethical implications of this image and by the simple truth that I do not always hear angels singing the presence of every single human being. (Not even close!) But what if I did? What if I could? What possibilities would unfold? Rabbi ben Levi’s invitation is to engage our ethically capacious imaginations, to proceed as if human beings are sacred, even when we struggle mightily to see that facet of every person. Cultivating imagination is itself a hopeful action, one that changes our habits of perception and opens up possibilities that are often hidden by our fears, anxieties, and wounds.

Finally, I would like to talk about the word for hope in Hebrew, tikvah. Hebrew words often have a concrete image at their root. The word for hope, tikvah, is related to the word for a rope, or a cord, kavah. In the Hebrew worldview, it seems that the concept of hope is a means of tying one thing to another. Hope is a means of connection. Hope is a cord. I find this image instructive. Especially when the injustices of our world are before us, to concentrate on the possibility of hope might seem impossibly naïve. Clear-eyed realism often seems completely detached, in a different category, from the language of hope. I think the Hebrew conception of hope may imply just the opposite, that hope is what makes realistic change possible, what keeps us connected, tethered to life, what keep us from floating into the ether in a hot air balloon of despair and cynicism, what makes resilience possible. Hope is a cord. It is what connects us to the world and to each other.

And we are connected to each other. We have all been through something significant together this year and we have learned something about what it means to hang on even while we grieve, to imagine a better future even while we try to understand the struggles of the past and present, to doggedly commit to a vision of the world that is better than the one we currently inhabit even while we recognize our own complicity in the problems of the present. On this day, we honor our connection. We honor the work that you have done here. We honor the risks you have taken. We honor the way you have challenged us to live up to our own ideals. We are connected.

As we part ways today, at least for a while, I want to invite you to come back and see us, to allow us to be involved in the work that you do. Allow us to continue to be part of your story, which sustains us in ways you can’t possibly know. When you come back, we will greet you as if a procession of angels passes before you heralding your return saying, “Here is a person of sacred worth, who reminds us to make room for imagination, who is for us a reason to hope.”

[1]Angela Davis, from a lecture delivered at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. February 13, 2014.

[2] Deuteronomy Rabbah 4:4.

Read a recap of Birmingham-Southern’s 2021 commencement celebration here.