'A Moment for Saving Time and Saving Ourselves'

Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, and John Lord O'Brian Professor of Divinity David N. Hempton was the faculty speaker during the Multireligious Commencement Service on May 24, 2023. The following remarks were delivered by Hempton during the service on the HDS Campus Green.

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Congratulations class of 2023 and welcome to all relatives and friends of our graduates. Thanks for supporting our students and for being here to celebrate their achievements.

All of us here today are to some extent survivors of the Covid pandemic, though many of you have suffered loss, or illness, or mental health issues of varying severity. We have been through some hard times. We have needed one another.

One of my favorite activities during the pandemic was to walk around our campus during its renovation and recreation. Watching the old stripped bare for conservation and the new slowly rising was therapeutic. Quite often in my perambulations, I was accompanied by my young granddaughter, Hadleigh. She had a name for all the trucks and cranes and the workers played along with her with waves and friendly comments. Hadleigh assumed the role of site supervisor and enjoyed the attention.

On Easter Sunday in April, she and I went for another walk along a beach in Cape Cod. We were the only two people on the beach. The beach ran along a fast-moving tidal inlet and as the tide went out it left little sand islands separated by water channels. Hadleigh, dressed in boots and an oversized coat loved playing a game of island hopping, depending on me to rule when the water was too deep to mess with. She took my hand as she moved from island to island. When she jumped along an uneven, rocky pier reaching out to sea, she reached for my hand once again. The greater the sense of danger, the tighter she took my hand. On the way back she started to collect little golden shells for her mother. I was allowed to help in her curation of shells, but my offerings were subject to ruthless quality control, as my shells were tossed aside for being too white, or too flawed, or simply because she had not picked them herself. In quality control mode, Hadleigh is not a soft touch.

Throughout this expedition, I knew that Hadleigh depended on me and trusted me to assess danger levels. The more adventurous she became, the more she needed me. She trusted me and her trust freed her to take more risks. During our beach walk, I was also aware how much this beach had changed over the past decade, and I could not help thinking about what this beach would look like in 20 or 30-years’ time. Would it even be there? Would the row of Cape houses framing the beach survive rising sea levels? Would Hadleigh ever walk this beach with her own children or her own grandchildren?

As these questions crowded in, I began to think more about Hadleigh’s childlike trust in her grandfather. What if I was only trustworthy in the playful games of island hopping, but not trustworthy in helping to save the beach itself? What if she looks back on her grandfather, not as a caring companion, but as a careless collaborator in the destruction of her favorite place.

I thought of this little episode when I attended an event during Climate Justice Week at Harvard Divinity School hosted by Terry Tempest Williams and the climate activist, Rebecca Solnit. Around 40 students gathered around the outside fireplace to talk about climate change. At the end of the evening, we agreed that love and hope were better motivators for change than anger and pessimism. We were all asked what did we love? I said I loved my granddaughter but was troubled by what my generation was doing to love her.

The next day I read a book on my bedside table by Jenny Odell entitled Saving Time: Discovering a Life beyond the Clock. The main message of the book is that we have created a world centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. She advocates for “different ways to experience time – inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales – that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries.” We are urged to “become stewards of these different [more natural] rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.”

What got my attention in this book is the way in which our very existence in space and time has become dominated by a culturally constructed Chronos. We clock in and out of our lives like factory workers punching in and out of industrial time machines, built to measure every single minute for purposes of surveillance and remuneration. Odell writes, “I believe that a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its everyday capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion. In that sense, the idea that we could ‘save’ time – by recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature – could also mean that time saves us.”

So, what’s the point of all this? Each of you graduating students are in an interstitial moment between one way of measuring time (by semesters, credits, term papers and deadlines), and another measurement of time (the time of your own choosing, how will I make my time meaningful and choreograph my days?). You know that your time at HDS was not just measured by the academic clock. You had peer-group and mentoring relationships; you had time to experiment, and think, and discover things about yourself; you became critics and activists and passionate advocates for creation care and human flourishing. You had your hopes and aspirations refined by new knowledge and hard experience. You also found open time to simply, contemplate, dream, and catch up with yourself and identify your true feelings.

So, what comes next?

I am sorry to say that the next phase of your lives may not be easy. My generation has left you with many troubling challenges. You may be thinking of people like me the way I once thought of the generation that bequeathed the Irish troubles to me and my fellow students half a century ago in Belfast. Why didn’t they see it coming? Why could they not see that societies built around exclusive cultural identities, unequal access to economic resources, and partisan political domination could not survive peacefully for very long? Why were they so resistant to change when the grim consequences of sectarian paralysis were so clearly visible?

Over time, I came to see that opinions based on accusation and blame were not change agents. In truth, we were all complicit in a problem that was centuries in the making. The real question was could we reckon with past evils we had not created, and present consequences we could not avoid, in hopes of a better future we could choose. For us, whether we are reckoning with the legacy of slavery at Harvard and beyond, or with impending climate and environmental disasters, this is a moment for saving time and saving ourselves and the planet we relentlessly abuse.

In conclusion, I want to say, honestly, I have more confidence in this graduating class than any other class at Harvard. It has been an extraordinary privilege getting to know many of you and to have the opportunity to speak to all of you. Someday, when you get the chance to hold the hand of a dear child you care about, or one of your own beloved children or grandchildren, make sure you can look them in the eye and know that they can trust you to keep them safe in both small things and big things. Spending your time in soulful stewardship of this beautiful, broken world—and offering your hand—changes everything. There is no better use of your time. It will save you.