Well, good morning, Pipers. Good morning. Good morning and hello class of 2025.
So thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this beautiful ceremony. I want to thank interim President Murray and the Board of Trustees.
And I start by offering my heartfelt congratulations, congratulations of course to you, the class of 2025. You made it.
Also though, I want to offer congratulations to the faculty and administrators and staff of Hamline who made this special day possible.
And congratulations to the family and friends who are here to share in this day. You made this possible also.
And a special congratulations to Anna Deibert, your student speaker, who I know you'll be hearing from next.
So I remember my own college graduation – mostly. It was exciting, it was exhilarating. It was happy and sad all at the same time. And I vividly remember when our two sons, Sam and Mason, graduated from college. There Archie and I were sitting in the stands, so proud and also thinking at the same time, like, what – this is over already? For everything that this cost, I would've thought it would've gone on a lot longer.
But here we are. You're here, I'm here, and I am so honored to play a small part in what I hope will be a memorable day for all of you.
I have to confess, though, that I did not come equipped with answers to the big questions that you have maybe about your futures – finding a job, choosing a life partner, building a life. That’s going be up to you.
And this isn't a very easy time to be doing any of this stuff. You want to go through the whole list of everything? You've got: COVID, tariffs, elections, social media, inflation, bird flu. I mean seriously, it’s a lot!
You're not just graduating at a moment when it feels like a lot of history is happening. I think you're graduating at a moment when it feels like a lot of this history is happening to you personally.
And it doesn't matter if you follow the news, the news follows you. It follows you to the grocery store, follows you to job interviews. It even follows you on dates, maybe. Like uh, so can you tell me who you voted for last year?
Even if you're not directly impacted by the price of eggs or what’s happening on the stock market or any of the daily insanity, I think that there is a psychic impact to all of this chaos and uncertainty. I think we are all walking around with a little bit of a feeling in our bones, and I don't think it’s just irritation or anxiety about what tomorrow might bring. I think that it is something deeper than that. I think that it goes beyond the daily emergencies. And I have come to think of this as a crisis of faith.
Now, when I say faith here, I am not talking about our relationship with the divine. I am more talking about our relationship with each other. Society doesn’t work if we are not connected to our neighbors. So in a healthy society, we practice a kind of civic faith, the one where we are all aligned around a core set of shared values, values that by the way and not by accident, are often consistent with all of the world's religions. Compassion for people who are struggling, empathy for people that are different, a commitment to honesty and good faith, a strong sense of justice, universal respect for the basic concept of human dignity. In short, the dogma of our civic faith is the recognition that we owe something to one another, not just to ourselves.
And as with religion, the truest expression of our faith is in our actions. We're called upon, right? We are called upon to act on our duty to our neighbors by working to make our society better.
Now, many of us who believe in the importance of civic faith participate in the electoral process
because the most obvious expression of our civic faith is our vote.
Nobody goes to the ballot box with the illusion that our vote alone will determine the outcome. We go because we believe in the idea that each one of us, if we uphold our duty to act, that we will get a government that reflects our collective will and leaders that reflect the best of us.
So I have to admit, this whole scene playing out right now and the news and in our country is maybe not the best argument for the redemptive power of the democratic experiment right now. And I have to say that I'm worried about this not just for the obvious immediate reasons, but for a deeper reason.
I am worried about how we even can begin to rebuild the shared purpose when so many seem to simply not even believe in the idea of a shared purpose. And I'll admit that on some of my darker days, I wonder what’s going to happen. Are we just going to give up on this great democratic experiment? But if this happens, this crisis of civic faith becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because what it means is that we're giving up on each other.
So ask yourself, what kind of life can you lead if we are each on our own, where you don't owe anything to the person sitting next to you and she doesn't owe anything to you?
Maybe, maybe if you came into this world with a lot of privilege and not a lot of empathy, that would seem okay to you, but for most of us it does not seem like a satisfying life. It’s lonely and it’s cynical and ultimately it’s not fulfilling. And I don't think it’s the way we humans are wired. It’s not the way this country was designed to operate either.
Now we can have a long discussion about who and why and what’s going on and who's to blame for this. But I will quote a good friend of mine who once said, for every complicated question there is a simple answer, but it's almost always wrong.
So today what I want to talk about is how do we find a way to rebuild these bonds that hold us together, that holds society together? This connection, how do we rebuild this connection, one connection at a time?
And to be clear and honest with you, class of ‘25, this is on all of us and it's on you to figure out what our lives are going to look like in these communities. Nobody, no matter how you feel about politics, is exempt from joining In the work of building community.
Anyone can help out a neighbor who's in need of a hand. Anyone can stand up to an injustice or pitch in on a project. And these are all valuable demonstrations of civic faith.
But I think that if you're going to make civic faith an important part of your identity, it is almost inevitable that you'll end up engaging with our political system. And when you do, I think you're going to find that what Dr. King said was right when he told us that progress is not a straight line.
As Dr. King said at a commencement address no less, progress does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability. It happens because of the tireless work of dedicated individuals, people who not only maintain our civic faith but keep on acting on it, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
After all, the whole point of faith is that it doesn't invite us to argue about what’s possible, it just asks us to do the next right thing. That's a line from Frozen 2, by the way.
Here's a line from Hebrews 11:1: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. So when you're acting on your faith, in other words, you don't just refuse to start walking down the path until the whole path is clearly illuminated.
And indeed, the story of change in this country is more often than not a story of people practicing their civic faith through defeat after defeat. People who were doing the work, despite not having the votes. People who keep putting one foot in front of the other because they believe that they will reach their destination even when they can't quite see the path.
Here's an example. Okay, it’s 2015. The United States Supreme Court issues its ruling making marriage equality the law of the land. This is a great day, but remember what happened before that victory. The Supreme Court’s ruling that day overruled a 1972 case called Baker v. Nelson, in which a Minnesota couple named Michael McConnell and Jack Baker sued Hennepin County because it wouldn’t grant them a marriage license. They lost that case and they lost all of their appeals. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled unanimously against them and one Minnesota Supreme Court justice even swiveled his chair around when their attorney was speaking, literally turning his back on two people in love seeking justice.
They lost, but they did not make the mistake of confusing defeat with failure. They did not just walk away from the fight. People kept doing the work and for a long time, supporters of marriage equality walked in the dark, not seeing the path.
In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the discriminatory Defense Against Marriage Act. He knew it was wrong, but so did many of the legislators who voted for it, including Minnesota senator and progressive champion Paul Wellstone.
Even in 2008, Barack Obama declined to come out in full support of marriage equality. Not because he didn't understand what it meant. Of course he did. But because for four decades people still saw the politics of gay rights as just impossible.
And then everything changed. When the Minnesota legislature put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2012 that would have banned same-sex marriage, people decided to organize against it. And the way they went about it was simple. Folks went out and had conversations with their neighbors and they talked about love and not politics. The organizers of that campaign trusted in the righteousness of their cause and the simple decency of their fellow Minnesota, and love won.
What we won that day goes a long way beyond the impact of a single ballot measure, right? Because that campaign helped to push our country forward that last mile towards justice. Its organizers played an irreplaceable role in a decades-long effort to make sure our society was more fair. And that culminated in the Supreme Court decision that I was just telling you about. This example gives me faith on this day.
Now, I'm retiring from the Senate at the end of this term, and while I'd like to be able to say that I've accomplished everything I wanted to when I first got to Washington, the truth is I understand I am one leg in a long relay. And these days I'm going to keep on running even though I also can't always see where the path is going to go and how It’s going to end. But I am not going to be deterred and I ask you not to be deterred either.
And many of the things I work on, people will say, that’s nice, but like how are you ever going to get that done? And you know what, you're right. I don't know. I don't know how. I don't see the path yet and I may not find it by the time I'm finished in the Senate, but I am going to keep working on it and a lot of other people will, too, and we'll keep pushing and pushing. And that’s what this work really looks like.
And however you all, class of 2025, choose to act on your civic faith, I hope that you'll be prepared for a long and arduous and also very interesting and important, important one.
But keep the faith, because we have a lot of work to do. We need to reshape our society so that the bonds that connect us are stronger and clearer than they have been before. We need to do a better job of seeing and communicating our common humanity. We need to fix our country so that it works to address the huge inequalities and income and opportunity and that regular people can have more opportunity and more freedom and less stress and less worry. We need to find ways of cutting through all of this noise and finding each other again.
It’s going to be hard work, but it’s also going to be righteous work. And I hope that you will embrace it with the courage and creativity that brought you to this moment.
Thank you so much and congratulations again to the class of 2025.
Neither the Catt Center nor Iowa State University is affiliated with any individual in the Archives or any political party. Inclusion in the Archives is not an endorsement by the center or the university.