Robb Nash ’83 delivers 2022 Baccalaureate address

“Water and Waves” 

 Thanks to Dr. Axtell¹, Dr. Moreland, and the graduation planning committee for what was an utterly surprising, unexpected, and undeserved invitation to speak to the Class of 2022 for a few minutes this afternoon. I recall, 39 years ago, sitting where you are seated today, wondering, like you are now, what this old guy was going to say that would be worth showing up for when there isn’t even Convo credit available. The expectations here are higher than the messenger can reach, but I will endeavor to do my best and share with you a few observations from my life of service in the hopes they may be useful.  

I was a religion major here, patiently mentored by Dr. Eric Mount, whose steadfast example of intellectual rigor and loving patience was a beacon of Centre life for decades and still informs me daily. One of Dr. Mount’s books, “Conscience and Responsibility” has accompanied me across many moves over the years and enjoys a featured place on my bookshelf – Eric’s inscription is burned into my very soul, and I would like to share that with you today, in hopes that you may also draw comfort from his words. “Dear Robb”, it begins, “of all the students I have ever had, you are one of them. Regards, Eric. PS – you owe me $7.95 (plus tax).”  

My choice of major cannot be blamed on Dr. Mount, however, but actually is the fault of Dr. Tom McCullough, because it was in Tom’s Comparative Religions class that I first experienced the feeling of being grabbed, shaken, overtaken and in love with an idea that would not let me go. And it fell to Milton Scarborough to widen my view by introducing me to incredibly beautiful worlds beyond the traditional Christianity of my youth. None of you will have the benefit of knowing these men, but they each gave me different gifts that are inseparable from my being. You have your own special relationships with your faculty – that is a distinctive gift of a Centre education².  

One of the ideas that these scholars shared with me during my time here is that of Liberation Theology, which emerged from Catholic Social Teaching and is central to my own world view. One of the many gifts of a Centre education is being exposed to new ideas, and when I was a student here, Liberation Theology was still a new development. I cannot imagine my life without my grounding in this theology. The opportunity to explore new ideas here with truly great minds and hearts is a remarkable gift³.  

The central organizing premise of Liberation Theology is the recognition that while our Creator loves us all, She has a special place in her heart for the sufferings of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed. Nurtured into being by Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez and rooted in the soil of suffering Latin American campesinos in the 1960s and 1970’s, these teachings have anchored an amazing, ever-enlarging group of servants to humanity across the years. Many of you today recognize the name of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man whose singular vision for justice-driven healthcare for the world’s poorest citizens fueled the creation of Partners In Health, in which his legacy lives on today. I am beyond proud, but not in the least surprised, to learn that there’s a Partners In Health group here at Centre. 

And so, inspired by Liberation Theology and Dr. Farmer, I’ve chosen to remind you today that community is the key to fulfilling our human potential – our individuality is an illusion. I am who I am, you are who you are, as a direct result of the communities from which we came, in which we find ourselves, and to which we will go. Anything that has ever been accomplished through me has been done not by me, by this human frame, but always and only by the universal spirit of love moving through me⁴.  

In his little volume, “Coming Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers”, Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn uses the analogy of waves and water to explicate his world view, which sees no fundamental difference in any of the manifestations of creation that we in the West identify as Individual. For Thich Nhat Hahn, the Western world is intoxicated by our insistent hyper-individualism, something at odds with his Buddhist understanding of the world. In a brilliant metaphor, he offers the relationship between waves and water as a path into an understanding of the world that flows as a corrective to that hyper-individualism. The wave says, “look at me. I am tall, powerful, and have a fine foamy crown”. The water says, “from where do you arise? Of what are you made? Where are you going?”⁵. 

We are waves. Our whole society, in fact, is designed to appeal to our waveness. But I stand here today and ask you the questions posed by the water – “from where do you arise? Of what are you made? Where are you going?” Look around you. Take in a deep breath. Close your eyes and feel yourself immersed in the water of friends, family, faculty, and the amazing education with which you have been blessed. And I will share with you that this water will carry you far. I have found that the water that carries me has been enriched not only by this hallowed place, but also by and through the lives of everyone I have encountered in the life of service for which Centre prepared me⁶. 

And let us not overlook the gift of being here in community today. You began your journeys here in full expectation of a “normal” college experience. You came to this place and began to experience new currents of water in your waveness. Here, the depths and flows of the human experience became the wellsprings of a new awareness of our shared reality. Then COVID came and challenged the new quality of your waterness by taking you away from this place.⁷ You returned to campus and gracefully navigated the challenges of what some would find to be too much community when you had to stay on campus during another phase of the pandemic. By coming together to keep each other safe, you literally embodied Centre’s cherished value of community. You are stronger than you know, and we are all so immensely proud of you and grateful for your steadfast care for each other during an unprecedented challenge.  We hope that even the pandemic has revealed that the depth of our shared water is infinite.  

I’d like to tell you about two programs that I’ve been a part of that have sought to serve some of the most marginalized people in our society. And I want to make clear at the outset that untold numbers of people experience homelessness in the richest society on the planet not because of a choice, but because of structural forces that first marginalize and then abandon them. There’s a terrible human cost when we neglect our inherent interconnectedness – the water itself. I’ve worked with people who slept on park benches between working shifts at Nashville luxury hotels because their wages wouldn’t cover the cost of gas between downtown and the rural communities where they could afford housing. I’ve accompanied people forced into bankruptcy by medical bills. I’ve met people who lost everything in a bad divorce and who live on the street, yet find a way to see their grandchildren at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I have encountered so many people in clear and desperate need of residential mental health care – people literally lost, confused, and overwhelmed by the sheer impossibility of “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps”. It is so terrifyingly easy to fall off the rails in our society, and once off the rails, especially when alone, it is almost impossible to get back on track. So please understand that these are social justice issues and not what some people call the failures of “lazy drug addicts.” 

My first story is about Foot Clinic at Room in the Inn, the second largest homeless shelter in Nashville, TN, where I served as Medical Director from 2007 – 2009. This was my first job after finishing Nurse Practitioner training, and the job for which I went to school in the first place. I provided post-hospitalization care for people experiencing homelessness who were too well to remain in a hospital bed, but too ill to return to their lives under bridges, on park benches, or hidden in tents behind big box stores. I provided post-surgical wound care, medication management, pain management, daily wellness checks and program oversight for around 25 patients a month, each with an average length of stay of 21 days. For many of us, when we leave the hospital, there’s a comfy couch and Netflix to keep us entertained. Imagine even trying to do thrice-daily dressing changes on open wounds while living under a tarp by a polluted creek or in the literal concrete jungle that is downtown Nashville. 

One day, a local pastor/activist came to me with an idea that she had seen in her travels to the West Coast. What if we started a program to minister to people by washing their feet? That was the mustard seed for Foot Clinic, which I saw as having two complementary purposes. First, kneeling at the feet of another child of the Universe, who at that moment feels completely powerless, to wash, massage, and tend to their feet has obvious religious overtones in the Christian tradition and is a deeply beautiful and humbling experience. I’ve seen people weep and sometimes even relax into a gentle sleep as foot care was provided. People struggling to survive on the street don’t get to be touched, and the intimacy of touching and bathing their feet was both beautiful and sometimes overpowering for everyone involved. Second, my Nurse Practitioner training gave me an awareness of the clinical utility of assessing feet for signs of chronic and acute illnesses. So, Foot Clinic was born. We washed feet and I taught volunteers how to safely do nail care, as it’s hard to walk in used shoes that are two sizes too small when your toenails are 3 inches long and curling back under your feet. I assessed everyone for signs of lesions that were not healing, unusual swelling, poor circulation, and sent concerning cases next door to a city health department free clinic for care. I am very proud that Foot Clinic endures, both at Room in the Inn and also through the services of Open Table Nashville, where one of my sons worked after college. I will carry the memory of doing Foot Clinic with my son, and then with my wife and son, with me for the rest of my days.  

The other program with which I’ve been associated is The PATHways Program at the Vanderbilt Comprehensive Care Clinic, the largest HIV clinic in the Southeast. There, I learned early that the most significant impediments to successful management of HIV were neither pharmaceutical nor clinical. The most persistent and most corrosive impediments to successfully managing HIV are social. This insight dovetailed with my internal orientation to Liberation Theology, drove my approach to clinical care, and guided my doctoral dissertation. Unless you make yourself vulnerable to the experiences of people living with HIV in the South in the 21st century, you would have no appreciation for the relentless onslaught of homophobia, stigma, lack of access to education, trauma, and racism that haunt these people. Sadly, there are no pills for these horrors, and the pain and suffering inflicted by these demons travel across generations with terrifying ease. 

If I could have written a prescription to solve the problems of poverty, anti-blackness, fundamentally poor education in grossly under-funded public schools, years of economic opportunity denied, of course I would’ve done so –  any of you would have, but that’s not the way things work. However, just because you can’t do the biggest thing doesn’t give you license to retreat and do nothing. So, the PATHways Program was born under the premise that even though we couldn’t solve the grand problem, we could identify people being crushed by the structures feeding the grand problem and perhaps instill in them through time, patience, love, and community just enough self-advocacy to give them the strength to stand up better for themselves against the onslaughts faced in their daily lives.  

And you know what, it worked. It absolutely worked. And this achievement was possible because a small community of diverse providers – a social worker, two case managers, and a Registered Nurse – Karie, Raven, Emily, Kira, and Judy – chose to throw in their lot with a common vision for a better way to meet the needs of some of our most acutely suffering patients. We became a community ourselves, and freely and lovingly invited our patients in. Together, we celebrated the daily successes of sobriety, jobs, better relationships with self and others, and improved physical health. We used a set of carefully selected screening tools to highlight patient strengths, and patients participated in their own care by self-selecting issues that they wanted to address, versus us deciding what were their most pressing issues. It’s a fundamental premise of the PATHways Program that everyone has strengths and everyone has agency, regardless of how they dress, where they sleep, or the last time they bathed.  

In order to give you some insight into the power of community, I want to share the stories of two beautiful women, both very dear to me. Let’s call them Mary and Martha. I first met Mary and Martha when I was serving at Room In the Inn. At the time, the shelter was in an abandoned warehouse, and the only safe space for our female guests was basically a large closet that barely held three beds and was considered safe because there was a lockable door and women could rest at night without fear of assault. Mary and Martha were both living on the streets, both suffering from the twin scourges of addiction and poverty, and both were exhausted from the daily fight required to stay alive and safe on the streets. I still remember the first time I met Martha, all those years ago – she showed up barefoot, wearing nothing more than a cloth sack and had not eaten, slept, or bathed in days. Room In the Inn offered Martha and Mary a safe space to rest, eat, and breathe. These gifts laid the foundation for the gift of time to contemplate, to heal, and to eventually overcome their addictions.  

Little did I know when I first met Mary and Martha that they both had AIDS. I learned this when I joined the Vanderbilt Comprehensive Care Clinic and both asked me to be their provider. They gave me the gift of watching them come into their own full agency, and what a gift that was. Mary and Martha became close friends through volunteering at Nashville’s largest AIDS social service provider. Today, Mary is a highly effective advocate for people living with HIV in Middle Tennessee, and Martha regularly speaks at local AA meetings about her journey to sobriety and peace. When I was recently serving as the director of a new local homeless shelter, it was Mary and Martha who approached me with their plan to assemble first aid kits for each of our guests. The unseen served becoming the servers. Agency and empowerment can and do work wonders. 

And let’s be 100% clear here – Foot Clinic and The PATHways Program didn’t succeed because of me. In both cases, solutions that I was partially responsible for came into being and flourished ONLY in the deep currents of the communities in which I was working at the time. Fr. Charlie Strobel at Room in the Inn and Dr. Steve Raffanti at the Vanderbilt Comprehensive Clinic are my heroes, as the seas of compassion in which I found myself working were deepened by their beautiful visions and tireless cultivation of safe spaces for those our society has discarded. My dear friends and colleagues who joined together to make the PATHways Program work – these too are my heroes.  I am not the hero of my story – in fact, there is no such thing as “my story”. There is only OUR story.  

One story that I am keen to share with you today regards what happens when you fail to carefully choose the waters into which you will next venture. In the deep currents of compassion, good ideas become greater. In polluted waters, even the greatest of ideas will struggle to stay afloat. Accordingly, it’s important for me to share that part of my story involves troubled waters. I left HIV care in May of 2021 to assume the role of Executive/Medical Director for a new program in Nashville designed to meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness who needed extra care and support after hospitalization, much like my role at Room In The Inn years ago. The program would have been the first in the nation in terms of the scope of services provided – not only shelter, but all of the services that I knew from the PATHways Program would be necessary to justly care for marginalized people. I saw a vision for a unique community serving a grossly under-attended population. But, you have to be in a place that knows how to draw from the deep wellsprings of compassion that are the source of our unity to be effective. I became so entranced by what could be that I neglected what was. I dismissed fundamental failures with the Board and Founder because I so wanted the opportunity to bring my vision to a larger need. Sadly, not everything that is broken can be fixed, and I resigned from that role after only five months. Sadder still, the organization has forfeited the opportunity to be a national example of comprehensive, justice-driven care for people experiencing homelessness.  Here were waves that misunderstood that they belonged to the sea. 

So here we find ourselves, back with the idea of community with which I began my remarks. If my life has anything to offer you, it is as an example of abiding faith in the power of community. Foot Clinic at Room in the Inn and the PATHways program at the Vanderbilt Comprehensive Care Clinic – these are examples of community. Buddhists have a name for this kind of community, Sangha. Liberation theology arose out of communities of resistance called Base Communities.  It was in a community of compassion that Mary and Martha tapped into wellsprings of meaning that flowed through them to others.  And you have been immersed in community during your time here. Community is love, and love in action is the answer.  

But how to do this supposedly simple thing? How do we love in action? I would like to close my remarks by humbly sharing some observations that I hope may be of use. The first is the difference between success and satisfaction. All of you are primed beyond your wildest awareness for success, but I am here with you today to encourage you to shift your compass toward satisfaction.  Success in our society is measured in externals.  Thanks to the depth and breadth of your education, you’re also primed for satisfaction. Satisfaction is a little bit trickier to attain because satisfaction is internal. Satisfaction does not have to do with how well you are rewarded for your work; satisfaction has ultimately to do with how pleased you are that your work feeds a larger purpose, and being pleased is much more of a challenge in our society than simply being able to complete a task. I’m often reminded of Frederick Buechner’s quote that the place for each of us to be is the place where our deepest joy and the world’s greatest need come together. In my own case, I was successful out of the gate, but it was not until I stepped back and connected my heart and my hands that I understood what it is to be satisfied. 

Always remember that those you serve will be your greatest teachers. I have been in the presence of courage, resilience, and faith that has brought me to tears. Who among us here today could survive and even laugh and smile after being unhoused for 10 years or more? Who among us, after not eating a full meal for several days or shivering for lack of a warm winter coat, would take these gifts and say to the giver “thank you, but I don’t need this. I have a friend who’s really hurting and I’m going to give it to them.” Those who have suffered immeasurably have immeasurably rich gifts to share with those of us who know only comfort. Only when they are our teachers will we fully understand our society.  Making yourself vulnerable to the lives of marginalized people taps into our common water and honors the agency and dignity of their unique waveness. 

It is a paradox, but people in need are not interested in your knowledge, whether it is a knowledge of the mechanisms of cellular respiration or micro economics, chemistry, literature, art – any of it. People who are hungry need to be fed, people who are marginalized and traumatized need to be held, people who are invisible to the world need to be seen, and structures that keep them invisible need to be changed. The paradox is that, in my own experience, I could not do any of those things that marginalized and traumatized people need without the bounty of ideas that I carry within me as a result of my education here. I rely on that knowledge to guide me as I seek to process the pain I encounter – I cannot imagine having to process so much suffering without the companionship of music, literature, and art. I could not envision new ways to subtly shift the structures in and through which I seek to do good in the world without my enduring intellectual curiosity, brought into being in this remarkable place. Your education is a gift. Your education also makes you a gift. Your critical thinking skills, your awareness of the beauty, pain and complexity of the human condition are so desperately needed to help slow what increasingly feels like an inevitable descent into irreconcilable tribalism.  

Compassion is not a suit of clothing to be put on and taken off when the mood strikes you, nor is it a crown of thorns. None of you, none of us, are here to bear all of the world’s suffering. If our Creator is going to trust us with the gift of free will, as it seems she has, then I think it’s also pretty smart on her part to follow that up with an extra eye on those our free choices leave behind, which is where and how I see both the Liberation Theology of Gutierrez and the “Engaged Buddhism” of Thich Nhat Hahn at work in the world. 

Reach across professions to find fertile ground to make change happen. No one profession “owns” or can solve any of the complex social ills that plague us. It is only when we come together and share our expertise that we tap into the true power of the possible. You are made for this – Centre has molded you for this critical work. Centre graduates present a myriad of examples of the power of this remarkable place to equip you, her students, with transformative powers that will last your entire life, leaving behind a personal and a community legacy, the depth and breadth of which simply cannot be measured with human hands.  

Water – this water, out of which your own waveness arises – has been fundamentally enriched by the gifts that you have each brought here and freely shared – by your joys, by your sorrows, and by your growth. The waters here are so deep, so rich, and so beautiful, and they will sustain you no matter where your life journey takes you. Go forth from this place with confidence, humility, and optimism. Each of you has a place in the world that you have yet to find where the gifts you have been given here will take root and bloom into loving kindnesses beyond your wildest dreams. You do not travel alone. You are loved by your Creator. You are loved by this special community that is ready at any time to encourage and support you on your journey. You are each a deeply beautiful manifestation of the unimaginably infinite universe – One creation flowing across space and time. May your Creator bless you on your journey.