| Augsburg Now |
 |
| Augsburg College > Augsburg Now |
|
|
|
||||
|
|
FACULTY PERSPECTIVE: "Polonius Revised: To Thy Vocation Be True By Joan Griffin Following is the conclusion of the Opening Convocation talk given by Professor Joan Griffin on Sept. 8. In it, she suggests that the familiar advice in Hamlet, given by Polonius to his son Laertes, "To thine own self be true," needs some revision when applied to Augsburg freshmen.
Augsburg has not forgotten this. It is a Lutheran college. And because it is a Lutheran college, Augsburg roots its educational mission in the theological principles of a person whom President Frame has sometimes called the founder of this college, Martin Luther. Chief among these principles is Luther's idea of vocation. At the heart of your education, Augsburg would maintain, is your discovery of your vocation, or calling. In the Middle Ages, when Luther began his career, most people thought that only monks and nuns had vocations. If you had a vocation, a calling, you had to renounce the world and retire to a monastery where you would devote your life to worship and study. Here you might consider questions like: Why was I born? What does my life mean? How should I live my life? Indeed these remain the grand questions of a liberal arts education. They belong to the contemplative aspect of vocation represented by this academic garb. And Augsburg believes that responding to these questions is essential to your discovery of yourself. But you may have noticed another form of symbolic dress on campus today. It's this: the T-shirt that says "We can't spell success without U."... ... a Martin Luther might argue that vocation is as much about T-shirts as it is about academic robes. Vocation asks you to translate meaning into action; it asks you to take your education into everyday life and use it to care for the world. As theologian Frederick Buechner says, vocation has to do with "finding the kind of work: a) that you need most to do, and b) that the world most needs to have done"... It is "the place where your own deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." That's why the self to whom your vocation calls you cannot remain selfish. Vocation calls you into a community. But - and this is paradoxical - the success of that community depends solely on the extent to which you become most fully yourself. That's because the self to which your vocation will lead you is the one way in which God becomes present in the world. In the words of the Dutch Catechism: "God did not create the world long ago. God is in the act of creating the world" now. And God "does it through us (emphasis mine)." And so, if I were Polonius, and Laertes were coming to Augsburg College, I would have to tell him: This above all, to thy vocation be true/And it must follow, as night day/Thou canst then be false to any man. Joan Griffin is professor of English, chair of the Faculty Senate and co-author of Augsburg 2004: Extending the Vision. |
|||
| Copyright 2007.
Augsburg College all rights reserved. |
I've lingered over details of academic dress because I thought that
first-year students may not be familiar with the traditions that it
represents. But these costumes are more than a medieval fashion
statement: they remind us that education is above all a religious
enterprise.