FEATURE STORY
What's Your Story?
by Richard W. Pointer, Emeritus Professor of History
2024 Commencement Address
Most of you have no clue who I am and are probably wondering how I got here. But the real question of the morning is, “How did you get here?!”
A lot can happen in four years, or five or six as the case may be. Just when many of you were arriving in August 2020 to begin your Westmont journey, I was leaving, retiring after 26 years here and 40 years of college teaching. Who would have guessed that almost four years later, our paths and our stories would intersect again on this Commencement morning?
Stories are actually what I want to talk with you about briefly today. More specifically, I’m curious as to how you would sum up your Westmont story. What would be the breaking-news headline version of your time here? Take a moment to think about that.
Parents, I imagine you’d have your own versions of those stories. I can see your minds already scrolling through memories, mostly wondering how your babies can already be graduating from college! Golden Warriors, I imagine you’ve been telling and retelling your Westmont story for 50 years, right up to this weekend. By the way, as a 1977 graduate of a sister school, I’m delighted to have some people in the audience today who think of me as a young person.
OK, back to you, students. What did you come up with? If you’re stuck, here are some possibilities: “Westmont broadened my mind — and shrank my bank account (actually maybe that should read, my parents’ bank account)”; or “I found paradise in Santa Barbara, and I’m never leaving here”; or “Thanks to Westmont, I now have six BFFs”; or more seriously, “Jesus found me and will never let me go.”
Whichever headline fits you best — and obviously most of us would need more than one headline to do our Westmont story justice — it’s important to have some sense of what these years here add up to. First for the sake of having some answer to the inevitable post-graduation questions such as “What was your college experience like?” or “How did college change you?” When a prospective employer or, for that matter, your mother asks you a question like that, it’s generally good to respond with more than a blank stare or a shrug of the shoulders.
But I think there’s an even more important reason for reflecting on that question: How we choose to remember and recite the defining or pivotal seasons or moments of our lives goes a long way to shaping our sense of ourselves and the world. To put it another way, I believe that to a large extent, we are — or we become — the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We use memory, usually in the form of story, to interpret ourselves and then we place our personal plotline within some broader narrative provided by our surrounding community and culture — what academics call our “social imaginary.”
Let me illustrate that claim with a story about myself. When I retired four years ago, the world was about six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. It put a major crimp into what my wife and I had planned to do that first year of freedom. But by the following summer, an even bigger crimp emerged in the form of my rare, long-term liver disease suddenly turning fatal. I came to the very brink of eternity several times before a transplant team at UCLA inserted a new liver into my body, allowing me to be here today.
Shortly after those events, I received a kind email from a lifelong friend noting that, “You now have a story to tell.” I agree, but what story? Should the headline be, “Grieving Utah family donates liver of loved one to California stranger”; or “Modern medicine works another miracle!” or “The power of prayer saves Pointer!” I realize thatthese different ways of describing what happened are not mutually exclusive, but they can’t all get top billing. How I narrate that dramatic, traumatic period of my life and the meaning I ascribe to it are crucial elements in how I now think of myself and my place in this world, and even more broadly, how I view reality.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that on your graduation day, an historian would be asking you to think more about where you have been than where you’re going. But I’m not the only one. Retired Westmont professor Greg Spencer writes powerfully about this theme in his book, “Reframing the Soul.” Listen to what Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen says on this point: “[If we cut off our past] we paralyze our future . . . . Our memory plays a central role in our sense of being. Our pains and joys, our feelings of grief and satisfaction, are not simply dependent on the events of our lives, but also, and even more so, on the ways we remember these events. . . . Forgetting the past is like turning our most intimate teacher against us” (Henri Nouwen, The Living Reminder, 18, 19, 22).
Graduates, I would suggest that determining how you’ll remember your Westmont years entails first recognizing that your experience here has not been a solo act but instead has connected you to a host of additional stories, as well as continuing some stories you were already a part of. These are mostly larger, deeper, longer stories, wider than yourselves. Some of them even chose you rather than the other way around. We’re all part of some family’s history, whether we know the specific details or not. All kinds of people made choices across millennia that allowed you to come into being and, most recently, brought you to Westmont. How might that fact affect your sense of self, your identity?
Now that you’ve been at Westmont, your story is linked to many broader stories: the college’s story, the story of American higher education, the story of Christian liberal arts, the story of Montecito and Santa Barbara, the stories of the friends and acquaintances you’ve made here, the stories of the faculty and staff you’ve met who’ve mentored you, and most importantly, the story of God’s wide work in the world. How each of those entities defines itself has almost certainly already shaped your identity and will likely continue doing so.
Choosing which of those multiple stories and potential future ones you wish to be particularly connected to, to be especially influenced by, and to care deeply about will be a crucial element in defining and refining the person you are and the person you want to become. “No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” (John Donne, Meditation XVII, “The Works of John Donne,” 3: 574-5). Anglican minister John Donne wrote those words 400 years ago, and they remain true, the myths of American individualism notwithstanding.
Deciding which wider and longer stories or streams you want to swim in is, I think, quite important for your post-Westmont life. So, too, is deciding what will be the dominant motif or paradigm of your story. That is, what’s the prevalent framework or theme or tone or color of your narrative? Current American culture offers us several templates within which to place our stories. Identifying them is relatively easy; resisting their temptations is quite a bit more difficult. Let me try to highlight a few of these options.
One is a narrative of entitlement. It’s quite popular here in Montecito. It will be tempting to believe that you’re entitled to certain things because you’re smart or well-off or good-looking or American or white or not white or male or female or an athlete or a musician or left-handed or whatever. Such a sense of entitlement is, in my view, a false narrative, one that overvalues yourself. Unfortunately, it’s often the road to arrogance and even worse, the road to obnoxiousness.
It will also be tempting to tell yourself at times that you’re a victim and allow that to dominate your story. Many of us are victims at certain points in our lives. But to allow that fact to shape your sense of self and make it the central plot line of your story is to undervalue yourself. It’s often the road to self-pity and a kind of paralysis.
Another beguiling template in our culture is the “if only” story line: “If only I had married her”; “If only I had majored in history”; “If only I had gotten that job”; “If only I hadn’t been caught cheating.” It’s a narrative of regret, of near misses, of close but no cigars. It shifts our life story from what is to what might have been and, in the process, devalues and largely ignores the daily graces that have sustained us.
Perhaps the most dominant template within our culture right now is the “You do you” mantra. Within what some call our post-truth world, the message is that if there’s nothing outside of ourselves to believe in or to give us ballast, then the best we can do is be true to ourselves, whatever that means. We’re told that we should do what we enjoy and what suits our personality, and certainly what we think is best in all situations. As a result, in this story line, each of us becomes the ultimate arbiter of the right, the good, the true, the beautiful, taking a giant leap of faith that I as an individual am trustworthy of putting my hope in, and even more, worthy of my own worship.
Together these four templates helpfully point up some of our most deep-rooted human aspirations: All of us want to be valued; All of us want to be accorded justice; All of us want to feel some sense of control over the arc of our journeys. But as master narratives for our lives, they all strike me as incomplete and ultimately misguided.
Might we do any better than these options? I think so. Fortunately, we at Westmont and Christians throughout time and space have proposed another way, an alternative motif for our stories, for your story. On this, your final day at Westmont — at least for most of you — I invite you to consider it once more. It’s the narrative of gratitude and grace. It’s the tale of an unfolding journey in which the pilgrim, you and I, discover that grace is everywhere. We come to see and portray each new day of our life — however many days that might be — as a gift of grace. We’ve done nothing to merit it — it simply comes as a good gift from the Giver of Life. My role is accepting it with gratitude and humility. Likewise, with our learning, past, present and future. It’s a gift to be received humbly with a grateful heart and a grateful mind.
All you precious graduates: Imagine telling your Westmont story within that kind of narrative. Imagine telling your life story now and forever within that framework. I promise you — I promise you — it will be transformative. For it’s the road to great joy and deep gladness. As contemporary writer Brian Doyle puts it, “Grace lifts, it brings [us] to joy. And what, as we age, do we cherish more than joy? Pleasure, power, fame, lust, money — they eventually lose their fastballs, or should: At our best and wisest we just want joy, and when we are filled with grace we see rich thick joy in the simplest of things. Joy everywhere” (Brian Doyle, “Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies,” 42).
May that be so in your lives.