Harvard Divinity School Dean David N. Hempton commemorated the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks today with a visit to New York City, where he challenged students at one of the nation's elite independent schools to "better understand both the conditions that produce violent conflict and the approaches that can help resolve and prevent it."
Hempton's address at Manhattan's Trinity School was also a meditation on memory, a history lesson on the legacy of the First World War, and a remembrance of his own experience coming of age during the most violent years of the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Dean Hempton began his talk by focusing on an important anniversary—but probably not the one most on the minds of the teenagers that filled the pews of the Trinity Upper School Chapel for services on Thursday morning. He spoke of the 100th anniversary of World War I and that conflict's connection to the September 11, 2001, attacks via the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the assertion of French and British imperial power in the Middle East.
"What history teaches us is that wars and violence rarely solve the problems that occasioned them, and almost always set in train a set of conditions that make future conflict unavoidable," he said. "The First World War was described as the war to end to all wars, but of course its terrible tentacles extended to the origins of the Second World War and decades of instability in the Middle East."
A high school student in Belfast in 1968, Hempton said that his own youth was shaped by violence—the decades long conflict between Catholics and Protestants that became known as the Northern Irish "Troubles." Like many of the students in his audience, Hempton said that his adolescence was wrapped up with "studies, college aspirations, sports, dating, music, and having a good time." He thought little of it when the marches, riots, and police violence started, but was "jolted out of my complacency" by the first death in 1969. Many more would follow.
"I would never have believed that the 'Troubles' would last a further 30 years with a death toll considerably more than that resulting from 9/11 in a province with a population of less than a fifth of that of NYC," he said. "Mercifully, violence did not touch me as closely as it did…the families and loved ones of 9/11 victims, but it did cast a long shadow over my young adulthood."
Beyond the terror and violence, Hempton said the "Troubles" left him with a paradox with which he has grappled throughout his life—one that he feared the young people in the pews had inherited. In Northern Ireland, he saw the way that faith motivated acts of courage and compassion—and also acts of staggering bigotry and cruelty.
"I had seen the good side of religious devotion in my own family and among thousands of faithful and compassionate believers who courageously reached out to serve people of both traditions," he said. "But I also saw first-hand the hard edge of religious bigotry/exclusivism/militancy and violence inflected by polluted religious ideals. I was so intrigued by this apparent paradox that I have spent much of my life thinking and writing about it…For you, as leaders of the future, this is—or will be—a very real question as well."
Hempton drew on the mission of Harvard Divinity School for suggestions about how a new generation of leaders could confront the challenge of religious identity and conflict. He urged students to learn about all of the world’s major religious traditions in order to promote respect and tolerance. He challenged them to resist the impulse to retreat into an "us versus them" mentality, and instead to embrace the diversity of humanity. Finally, he asked students to find not just their career or even their calling, but also their ministry.
"As we teach at HDS, ministry can be any vocation a person chooses, from religion to business," he explained. "What matters is not so much what we do, but how we do it; that we seek to be friend and guide, to illuminate with knowledge, to engage the 'other' with clarity and with understanding, and, most of all, to serve something greater than ourselves: community, humanity, and, if we are a believer, God. When we follow this approach, we often find that meaning finds us, rather than the other way around, even in the face of great uncertainty and adversity."
Hempton ended as he began, with a nod to memory and remembrance, "both fundamental parts of being human." He asked students to develop the discipline of reflecting and give thanks "for the lives of others, not just our own." Most of all, he urged students to learn from the past so that they might confront the reality of the present and work for a better future—one without world wars or falling towers.
"The Great War, despite its unprecedented carnage and futility, did not turn out to be the war to end all wars any more than 9/11 turned out to be the end of vicious terrorism," he said. "The challenge for us, then, is both intellectual and spiritual. As students, how can we better understand both the conditions that produce violent conflict and the approaches that can help resolve it and prevent it? And as people of faith in something greater than ourselves, how do we propose to live and what difference are we going to make?"
—by Paul Massari