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filled the church to capacity, and the eloquent sermon by our young priest made tangible, in a way many of us had never experienced before, our great need for all the Church provides: a place to grieve, to join hands, to be renewed. Signs and symbols, portents, themes. As we do when we read great literature, we make note, not yet fully understanding, and read on. We read on to find the Church that served us so well in September, that served so many of the dead, fire fighters, police officers, Irish, Italian, Hispanic New Yorkers, in spring is diminished, publicly humiliated by its own foolishness — to find that the same front page that contains
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from an address given in May by Alice McDermott ’75 at Regis College, a Catholic women’s school. McDermott is the winner of the 1998 National Book Award for fiction for her fourth novel, Charming Billy. Her new novel, Child of My Heart, is published this month by FarrarStraus and Giroux. We are proud to present this address as the first edition of The Last Word, a new feature designed, in the best tradition of academe, to inspire thought and provoke discussion.
Signs & Symbols CONGRATULATIONS, GRADUATES. You are, you know, the future. It’s a squeaky old commencement platitude, isn’t it? You are the future, you are our hope, you are what the world will become – yada, yada. Don’t mention this to your dear old aunt if she wrote the phrase on your graduation card, or to your parents if they work some form of it into a toast this evening, but “you are the future” is, let’s face it, a commencement cliché and in any other year, at any other place, I would cringe myself to hear it, or to use it. You are the future. I know what you’re thinking: For such gems she gets an honorary degree? But this is not any other year, or any other place. This is the academic year that began with the horrific events of September 11 and comes to a close with our (Catholic) Church shaken and shame-faced. This is the first graduating class to enter the changed world of post-September 11, and the world hungering for change that is our post-scandal Church. For you it is neither a Hallmark Card platitude nor a commencement chestnut; it is an injunction, an obligation, a prayer: You are the future, you are our hope, you are what the world will become. I suppose I might be better able to convince you of this if I carried the authority and the experience of a head of state, or a politician, or a rock star, someone who’s out there, keeping an eye on the whirling world. But I’m a novelist, a teller of tales, worst yet, a teller of tales about ordinary people in plain circumstances. My professional life is spent making things up, playing with words, creating the signs and symbols that will make the fictional universe of my stories seem fated, predetermined, inevitable. Worst yet, when I graduated from college, I OSWEGO
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Alice McDermott ’75
graduated as an English major – you know, one of those degrees. (I recall my parents’ reaction when I told them, toward the end of my own senior year in college, that I thought I’d like to get a Master’s in English as well. My poor, patient, pragmatic father looked at me over his reading glasses and said, sympathetically, “You’ve already got one degree you can’t do anything with, why would you want two?”) I do indeed have two of those degrees you can’t do anything with, degrees that leave you, nevertheless, with a life-long propensity for searching out signs and symbols, lit motifs, character motivation, foreshadowing, tragic flaws, portents, grand themes. And so it is as a novelist, a reader, a former English major, that I make my case today: The unfolding story, the signs and symbols, portents and themes of this time and this place, have put the future in your hands. Signs and symbols. The events of September 11 offer many. Those of us accustomed to seeking them out, make note, for instance, that the first death certificate written on that terrible day was for Father Judge, the Fire Department chaplain, a Catholic priest killed while ministering to his people. Or that the Episcopal church closest to the devastation remained perfectly intact – its grounds littered with the debris of the fallen towers, but not a single window in its chapel broken. In my own parish, an inside-the-beltway parish filled with busy professionals, a hastily scheduled mass at 9:30 on the evening of September 11
Those of us accustomed to interpreting literature see a theme developing, a tragedy taking shape.
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reports of a siege at the birthplace of Our Lord features accounts of unspeakable cruelty perpetrated by Catholic priests, of unfathomable neglect on the part of their superiors. The beautiful language of our liturgy, the comforting eloquence of our priests that was so essential to us in September, is tainted by doublespeak, evasion, or an awkward silence. Those of us accustomed to interpreting literature see a theme developing, a tragedy taking shape. In his first public statement about the scandal, Pope John Paul II called it evidence of the evil at work in the world, and while his words were lost in the public debate over whether he said enough, whether he’ll do enough, whether priests should marry or cardinals resign, those of us with a literary frame of mind, those of us accustomed to looking for metaphors and portents continued on page 43