'We Are Walking a Sacred, Anointed Path': Commencement Student Speaker Auds Jenkins

Auds Hope Jenkins, MDiv '24, was selected by a panel of students, staff, and faculty as the class speaker for HDS Commencement 2024.

Each year, the addresses of all of the finalists are published in the HDS Commencement Bulletin. The following remarks were delivered by Jenkins at the Diploma Awarding Ceremony on May 23, 2024.

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We are celebrating today in the midst of unspeakable loss in Gaza and Sudan, the Congo and Haiti, and more. There are no universities left in Gaza. So we cannot sit here today at our own university graduation without bearing witness.

I invite my classmates to join me in reading If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer.

"If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
make it white with a long tail
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale."

Thank you.

"Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations, and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and that so many of our old ideas disparage." Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury."

Yeah, I could just end with that.

Bye. Time for lunch.

We came to Harvard Divinity School because we had questions, big questions about the world and our place in it, about the past, present, and future of religion in a pluralistic, polarized country, about moral injury and repair and the spiritual dimensions of the climate crisis.

And in our time here, we have endeavored to answer some of the big questions that the world posed to us, questions like, What are you going to do with that degree? Are you going to become a priest? And my personal favorite, Did you have class with Maggie Rogers?

It is an honor to be with all of you this afternoon. Thank you, family, friends, professors, staff, mentors, everyone, for being here with us in whatever room, Zoom room you are here in. Your presence is radiance. And we are here because of you. And congratulations, graduates. You are all so brilliant and beautiful. No, really. You're all so beautiful. I considered reading a list of my HDS crushes in this speech.

But I decided that would be wildly inappropriate. So instead, I'm going to talk about heresy.

In "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," Black feminist Audre Lorde tells us that: "There are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us." This is kind of rough to hear because truthfully, I came to HDS to read books and take classes, and I was hoping that someone somewhere was going to give me some new ideas about how to change the world—or at least my very small corner of it. And yet along the way, I have realized that the key to our future is not in our books but in our bodies, in the heretical actions that we barely dare to dream.

The word heresy is derived from a Greek word that means taking, choosing, and choice. In response to the immense suffering and oppression of our world, I choose to respond with heresy, because heresy is the things we choose for ourselves. It is the wisdom of our hearts. It is our deepest freedom dreams, and it is the rookery of the future of all of our worlds. When people ask me about HDS, I often tell them that it's a sacred circus.

You know it is. I mean, look at what we're doing right now. A playground for the poet and the future saint.

During my time here, I have relinquished my deference to orthodoxy, to the way things are or should be, and sauntered into a fertile place of possibility where the world to come is clay in the hands of the beloved. Instead of waiting for someone else to take charge, I am learning how to listen to the still small voice within myself and to call her divine.

In his 1838 address to the graduating class of HDS, Ralph Waldo Emerson said pretty much the exact same thing that I just did but in many more words. I didn't know that I, a woman of color and a first generation, low income, transracial adoptee from Korea and rural Iowa, would have anything in common with Ralph. But here we are.

In his address, Emerson argued passionately for his peers, whom he called "newborn bards of the Holy Ghost"—BRB, updating my LinkedIn profile—to listen to the divine within. He wrote, "In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite soul, that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind, that he is drinking forever the soul of God?"

Rather than unquestioningly accepting institutional authority, Emerson challenged his listeners to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and to dare to love God without mediator or veil. And to be very clear, this institution, our institution, did not like this.

Our boy was a heretic. In fact, his words were so radical and so dangerous to this institution that they did not invite him back here for 30 years. Yet fast forward 180 years, and now he has a chapel with his name on it in Divinity Hall. So Emerson, Audre, and I, the trinity, have a message for you. This is a country and a school founded on dissent and heresy, and they are holy. As we fight and walk out and camp for justice, as we queer our churches and our temples and create new rituals and music and pursue ordination as the next generation of broken-hearted, enraged, diasporic Buddhist priests for whom liberation is not a metaphor, we are walking a sacred, anointed path.

If the institution is 30 years behind and wants to silence, punish, and suspend you, if they want to deny our peers their rightful degrees for the height and depth of their love, so be it. Because while Harvard punishes its own students for speaking out against genocide, over 35,000 people are dead in Gaza. It doesn't take a Harvard degree to figure out that silence is not an option.

But now that we do have Harvard degrees, we have a sacred responsibility to use them on behalf of the oppressed. My friends, today's heresy is just holiness in disguise. Today's heresy is tomorrow's wholeness. And in 30 years, they're going to be trying to name a chapel after you, too.

Throughout my time at HDS, I've been trying to understand what it means to bear witness. On one hand, I think it means to look and not turn away. Witnesses are those who are willing to look at the world in the fullness of its pain and its beauty. But witnessing is not just looking. Bearing witness also implies possibility.

In the same way that the body may bear a child, to bear witness means to incubate the seeds of possibility, to bring forth the fullness of life from the fertile womb of our dreams, the dreams that sing to us in the night, breaking upon the shores of our half-conscious minds with the promise of other worlds. In this moment, what we need are witnesses, those who are willing to hold the pain of what is because the beauty of what can be is more than worth it.

Witness-bearing, like child-bearing, is underappreciated work in a patriarchal, capitalist society that wants us to believe that we are mere products. Yet the truth is that we are divine collaborators, our very atoms birthed from the furnace hearts of exploding stars. Witness-bearing is the work of the hopeful, the hope-filled, and the hope-fed, those who believe in life. And as we choose life, we become her because we are not just transiting through this life, passive passengers on a cosmic MBTA. Thank God.

Rather, life is passing through us like thread through a needle. And it is our actions and our inactions that weave the tapestry of our world. In this moment as graduates and in every moment as members of the family of things, we can choose to be accountable for this great and awesome responsibility. We can choose to live into our role as future ancestors.

I'm getting to the end of this speech, and I think it's time for me to say, OK, graduates, time to hit the real world, or whatever. But I hate that. And I would never say that to you because I think it's total BS. I've been in the so-called real world already. I'm in my 30s. And I want to tell you that this is my real world. You are my real world.

Your dedication, your creativity, your curiosity, and your refusal to back down have changed me and shown me the kind of world that I want to live in, the kind of world I want my children's children to live in. If we can do it here, we can do it elsewhere. From the ashes of a capitalist, individualist, imperialist white supremacist world on fire, we are building elsewhere. We cannot accept this world as it is. It is not good enough yet.

But this work can't happen alone. It will only happen together. A lot of people out there want to downplay student activism and organizing and art and ideas. They call it naive. They call it indulgent. They call it child's play, as if that could ever be an insult. Children are the most imaginative dreamers that we have. They don't know what's not possible, so they are not bound by it.

There are no new ideas. We can't think ourselves out of this crisis. But as we harness the fullness of our collective moral imagination, we may feel our way there together. Lorde writes, "The white fathers told us, I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us, the poet, whispers in our dreams, I feel, therefore, I can be free."

Take a look around. Yes, really, take a look around. No bait and switch. Look into the eyes of your peers and bear witness to one another. We are each other's divine collaborators, the ones that we have been waiting for.

I am not ready to let you go, so I won't. We must hold fast to one another as we attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply. The thread between your humanity and mine is love all the way down. Life is not a problem to be solved but a love story to be lived. And our love must grow and expand and never stop growing until the entire world is a liberated zone.

I want to know what else our love can craft. I want to know what else the force field of our love can create that was not there before. I want to see what blooms in the garden or the yard of our delights, the soil watered by our tears of grief and irresistible joy.

As I close, I want to leave you with one of my all-time favorite quotes. In an interview after she won the Nobel Prize, Toni Morrison said, "I stood at the border, stood at the edge, and claimed it as central, claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was."

My friends, we must stand in our truth. We must stand in our power and claim it as central and wait for the world to move to us. We cannot be moved if we are grounded in love, our love that tugs justice forth with the force of planets. We will not stop, and we will not rest. I can't wait to see where you all go from here. The heresy of our love is but a morning star. Thank you.