LEWISTON – In a talk peppered with playful gibes, Rev. Peter J. Gomes delivered the convocation address to about 500 incoming freshmen at Bates College on Tuesday afternoon.
Gomes, whom Time Magazine called one of America’s most influential preachers in 1979, told the new members of the Class of 2009, “The winds may blow and the waters may rise and difficulties may surround you on every hand, but you will not fall down. You will not only endure, but you will, indeed, overcome.”
Gomes joked a bit about freshmen discovering new freedoms from parents, from high school and from all kinds of convictions and constrictions that govern most “hormonally active teenagers.”
He said he learned “a most remarkable definition of freedom,” at Bates as a student here in the early 1960s. He said he learned that “freedom was not only freedom from, but it was also freedom for. It was not simply the absence of restraint; it was the advancement of opportunity.”
“That was part of a great excitement of being in a small, friendly, co-educational college centrally isolated in Lewiston, Maine. Freedom for was a powerful thing and it has served to sustain me all of these days,” he said.
Thinking hearts’
Gomes said, “The second thing I learned about Bates, and from Bates, was a strange redistribution of some conventional wisdom. Here I learned about thinking hearts and loving minds,” which is opposite the way the expression is usually heard.
“That is to say, the heart is an instrument not simply of passion, but of discourse and analysis, as well. When you think with your heart, you think with the wholeness of your being.”
“And if you love with your mind, you love with your eyes open,” he continued.
He said he chose to the title “Before You Go Too Far” for his talk is “to capture this moment of opportunity.”
“At this very moment, everything is possible. There are no limits to what you can do,” he said, but he warned that limits are coming soon enough. “Your world will contract and you will find the beginnings of limits and inhibitions.”
“Limits are good,” he added. “You can’t do everything you want to do. You don’t know everything you ought to know, and you won’t learn everything that’s put before you.”
“Even today when I pass by some of these buildings, a terrible shudder goes through me, not because of what I remember but because I remember what I didn’t know.”
Gomes addressed about 2,400 faculty, staff and students on the quadrangle. The Bates student body will total 1,844, with 1,688 on campus and 156 in off-campus programs this fall.
Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen urged students and faculty to put aside labels such as “left,” “right,” “conservative” and liberal,” and to listen as much as they speak in all discussions.
Gomes is Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University and minister in the university’s Memorial Church. A 1965 Bates graduate, he is a college trustee who was first elected to that board in 1973.
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