I would like to begin my own brief remarks to the Class of 2001 on this happy afternoon, first of all, with a disclaimer. This disclaimer concerns the title of my comments as listed in the program. It implies the sort of clairvoyance (or foresight) into the future that no one possesses. I confess that in the 6th grade I fantasized about having the ability to read tomorrow’s newspapers today and about the benefits such a gift would bring. More than 40 years later this notion became the theme of a popular television series, but never a reality for me personally. Hence, chastened in my ambitions by time and reality, I can today only repeat the oft-quoted line that “the future – in this case, the 21st century – will be very much like the past, only different.”

Secondly, I want to acknowledge the debt I owe to David Kogler, recently retired editor-in-chief of The Gustavian Weekly, for his provocatively entitled editorial of April 6, 2001, viz., “thank God for the tornado.”  David, reflecting on the three-year anniversary of that watershed event in the history of this graduating class and our College, appropriately qualifies his essay’s title by acknowledging the deaths, misery, and sacrifices that the 1998 tornadoes brought upon the Saint Peter community, including the Gustavus campus. His closing sentence, in particular, is timely as we reflect upon the significance of this day. I quote: “three years later as the graduating seniors walk across the stage on Hollingsworth Field, we should be thankful for the lessons of the tornado and the experiences we had as a result of the March 29 storm.”  Those words strike me as the sentiments of a survivor. And I take it that David was calling upon you his fellow graduates to live as survivors and all that this might imply.

Let us grant that I have David’s intentions right. The first thing I would observe is that the word, “survivor,” has been much overused and often misused in recent years, especially in contemporary popular culture. For example, the made for television serials called “survivor” (and more recently the outback-set, “son of survivor”) present a quite different phenomenon than the one we will focus on briefly. These popular television shows and their clones seem to me to confuse “survivors” with “survivalists.”  The latter are peculiarly asocial or even antisocial (too frequently sociopath) individuals that television culture invites us to view as winners in the crypto-Darwinian struggle of all against all – in the battle for “the survival of the fittest” in a vision of nature as “red in tooth and claw.”  Most of us recognize that such an image of survivors, now popularized in fictional television shows or cartoon video games, is but a variation of television’s long-running wrestling matches with their prearranged winners and phony drama.

Now, Darwin’s concept of the “survival of the fittest,” i.e., of those best suited or adapted to their environments, has undoubted explanatory value as a scientific theory in biology, but it is totally inadequate (unfit) as a means for understanding human social existence, and most especially, for the moral relationships that anchor our existence. “Survival of the fittest” was widely used as a pseudo-moral concept more than 100 years ago in the intellectual movement called “social Darwinism.”  But as history attests, such moral confusion played a key role in attempts to justify the most inhumane (even hideous) treatment of other sentient beings – witness the moral disaster referred to as “the holocaust” or, closer to home, the American slave trade, the slaughter of Native Americans, and (most recently) the references to so-called “collateral human damage” whenever civilians are unintentionally killed or maimed as a byproduct of contemporary high technology warfare.

I hope that we can reject this all too widespread, dated, and (to my mind) perverted notion of survivors as having little to recommend for itself. I also urge us to see survivors as more than persons who have (merely) escaped death or disaster. Indeed, some persons survive not by outsmarting death, but by the effect they have on others through the way they lived life and related to others even should death win the immediate contest. I would remind us of the young woman, Anne Frank, whose biography many of us recently saw on t.v. and people such as Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. In any event, I lean in the direction of a well-established psychological concept that survivors are persons who have undergone severe trials and even traumas and who exhibit a subsequent syndrome of behaviors, feelings, thoughts and attitudes that are influenced by their experiences. For today’s purposes and to build upon David’s implicit suggestion, I want to lay claim to the notion that “survivor” is also, and perhaps in an exemplary way, an important moral category.

As such, a true survivor should reflect or give expression to insights/lessons gained from the realization that we are created and destined to be social beings, members of a moral community. A survivor should be especially well positioned to see that you and I gain and express our humanity, our moral standing, only when we understand ourselves as members of a community of persons all of whom have fundamental human rights that are matched with corresponding moral responsibilities. In such a context, a survivor may still be (perhaps even must be) a singularly distinctive individual. But he or she does not stand alone against the community of people that is our moral home. A survivor could well be someone who has been singled out (even by seeming accident), but such selection brings with it a clear responsibility for those less fortunate – indeed it comes with an obligation toward those whose lives have not been positively altered by their looking devastation in the face and surviving with a sense of deep purpose, with a calling to share their transformative experiences with their fellow beings. True survivors are neither mere victims of circumstance nor do they see themselves as superior to non-surviving victims or even to persons having not yet confronted trials, disaster, or tribulations. Rather, it is the opened eyes, the feeling of compassion, the sense of being called to a purpose beyond themselves that are hallmarks of the sort of survivors that both David Kogler and I hope you have become or will become.

In the years ahead, you members of the great Class of 2001 will undoubtedly encounter a lot of phonies, people pretending to be survivors as we have used that honorable term. “I did it all by myself” is a ready giveaway that you are being confronted by such phonies – by deluders or the self-deluded. Human life is always lived in relation to others or the other – and we are only survivors to the extent we feel and act upon our responsibility for or to others – with the assistance of others.

Members of the Class of 2001, I want to believe, along with David Kogler, that you were not merely victims of the 1998 tornadoes but survivors who discovered in the challenges you faced that spring both an inner reserve and a strengthened commitment to lead by serving others. I want to believe that you learned lessons from your resilience in the face of adversity that will affect the way you live, the way you care about others, and the way you think about carrying out the calling that is uniquely yours. I want to believe that you do not denigrate or feel superior in any way to non-survivors or to victims of a great variety of circumstances or destructive forces. “There but for the grace of God go I” should not be a crow of triumph, but the recognition of a calling to lead in serving others. It is a prayer of thanks wrapped in the mantle of commitment to make the most of the opportunities life presents to you.

Last November, Harper’s magazine reported on a survey of U.S. schoolchildren that asked them to rank the “most important people in the world today.”  As is typical in this yearly survey, they ranked the outgoing U.S. President as #1 and the Pope at #2 (no comment, by the way, from the pope!). What is interesting to me/us is that they ranked “myself” at #11, just two places ahead of the popular author (Harry Potter books) J.K. Rowling at #13, but a full 8 places ahead of God at #19. But these are schoolchildren, and very few have yet had the sort of experiences and reflections on those experiences that would constitute them as survivors, persons with considerably more humility.

A few years back, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Elie Wiesel was our commencement speaker. Many of you know him from having read his account of his youthful encounter with what is certainly one, if not the, most horrendous moral evils of human history – the World War II death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Elie Wiesel states that he does not know how it was that he survived this horror, but he knows for certain that he was called to bear witness – to bear witness to incomprehensible evil lest it be permitted to happen again. This is a calling Elie Wiesel has followed for more than 45 years, a calling that has freed other Holocaust survivors to speak and write about the unspeakable for the sake of millions of silenced victims and for the sake of the future of humanity.

One ought not and cannot compare what any of us have as yet survived to what young Elie Wiesel encountered. But there are many other, in some ways more comprehensible human moral and natural disasters that have remarkable survivors who also morally guide and serve others. There are the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who, even in death, speak out against the horrors of nuclear warfare. There are the survivors of the massive firebombing of Dresden, an enemy city largely filled with women and children who were refugees in a so-called “safe city” near the end of modern history’s most destructive war. One of this disaster’s child survivors, Günter Blobel, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Medicine, will be with us for the upcoming Nobel Conference in October. I should mention here that he gave his $1 million in Nobel Prize money toward the rebuilding of one of the world’s most beautiful churches that, along with some 100,000 civilians, was a victim of an unprecedented, and as yet unsurpassed, bombing campaign that served no apparent military purpose.

If these stories and their witnesses seem as yet too remote, I encourage you to read one of the several accounts of the ill-fated Shackelton Expedition to the South Pole in the early 20th century. The account I read was entitled, Endurance, but I understand that Hollywood is now ready to make several films to this testimony to human courage and leadership in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

But what about you?  There is little doubt that your tornado experiences are but a foretaste of whatever trials of your character, whatever tests of your mettle, may still lie ahead of you. Friedrich Nietzsche is rarely quoted at commencement ceremonies – and as an avowed atheist, probably not even mentioned at such events at a college of the Church. But his famous words, “what does not kill you, will surely strengthen you,” might be worth considering. There are many ways that people die, both in body and in spirit. I want to believe that your Gustavus experience – including even your encounter with the 1998 tornadoes – which did not destroy your bodies, will in fact have strengthened your spirits and helped to prepare you for the fulfilling lives of leadership and service that we pray lie ahead of you (no matter what challenges might also await you).

I want to end by leaving two thoughts with you, the pride of Gustavus. The first concerns the concept of “service” that you have heard us talk so much about during your years with us. Albert Schweitzer, the renowned medical missionary who was also a very gifted musician (as are many of you) and a brilliant scholar (as are many of you), observed that “there is no higher religion than human service. The work for the common good is the greatest creed.”

The second thought comes from John Gardner’s wonderful book, No Easy Virtue. Commenting on leadership, Gardner writes, “the first and last task of a leader is to keep hope alive – the hope that we can finally find our way through to a better world – despite the day’s bitter discouragement, despite the perplexities of social action, despite our own inertness and shallowness and wavering resolves.”

Again, I want to believe – indeed I do believe – that you are called to service and leadership in society. I want to believe – indeed I do believe – that you are destined and prepared to be survivors. I want to believe – indeed I do believe – that whenever you are confronted by adversity, whenever your character is tested, you will survive with an ever greater sense of self and purpose. I want to believe – indeed I do believe – that you will be continually transformed from spectators of life into active participants, into people with a strong conviction that with the grace of God you are called to responsibility for what happens to you and, more importantly, what happens to others.

And if you survivors entering the 21st century feel the need for advice, I repeat the words of Winston Churchill that I quoted in Christ Chapel a few weeks after the 1998 tornadoes. The shortest commencement address on record is Churchill’s admonition, “never, never, never, give up!”  God be with you, Class of 2001!

Axel Steuer’s Biography: Axel Steuer, the 13th president of Gustavus Adolphus College (served 1991 to 2002), was born in Silesia, Germany, in 1943. He came to the U.S. as a refugee under the sponsorship of the Lutheran Church in 1952, later graduating summa cum laude from Occidental College with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and psychology. He was awarded a Danforth Graduate Fellowship for study at Harvard University.

After completing a master’s degree in philosophy at Harvard University, a divinity degree at Harvard Divinity School, and a doctorate in religious thought at the University of Pennsylvania, Steuer taught at Haverford College, Princeton University, and Swarthmore College before returning to Occidental College in 1976. At Occidental he was recognized as an outstanding teacher and active scholar. He served as chair of the Department of Religious Studies for 6 years and also as an associate dean of the faculty and director of graduate studies at Occidental.

Steuer’s academic publications and invited papers have focused on the philosophy of religion. He also has lectured frequently on moral development and professional ethics. Steuer served 6 years on the American Academy of Religion board of directors, and he has continuing professional relationships with the Society for Values in Higher Education.

Active in a variety of higher education associations, Steuer played a key role in the founding of Minnesota Campus Contact – an organization of 45 college and university presidents dedicated to furthering community service on their campuses and throughout Minnesota and our nation.

Steuer has represented Gustavus Adolphus College at the Nobel Prize Award ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden, and was awarded the Royal Order of the Polar Star by His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf for his efforts to strengthen the bonds between Sweden and the U.S.