We Are Most Honored to Accept…

In this graduation and other end of year tributes season, suppose we in the women’s ordination and church renewal movements actually did receive an award – a prestigious award – and public acclaim – and applause – for what we have done to attain justice for women in the church? After we got over the shock, what would our acceptance speech be?

Why have we been doing this for so long? What would we say about ourselves and our struggle? What would we proclaim?

I’m going to propose one sample as inspiration. It’s part of one my favorite speeches by one of my favorite authors of all times: William Faulkner accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature.

And so, with the greatest respect and in great tribute to Faulkner, I am, humbly and gratefully, going to shorten it a bit and pluralize a few of his words to make his speech our own.

I feel that this award was not made to us as individuals, but to our work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only ours in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But we would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which we might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already those who will someday stand here where we are standing. 

They must teach themselves that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching themselves that, forget it forever, leaving no room in their workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until they do so, they labor under a curse…of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion.…Until all of us relearn these things, (it will be) as though we stood among and watched the end of humanity.

We decline to accept the end of humanity. We believe that all of us will not merely endure: we will prevail…because we have a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…. It is our privilege to help all endure by lifting each other’s heart, by reminding all of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of our past…. and our voices…can be one of the props, the pillars to help us endure and prevail in the future.

Thank you.