Novelist Charles Johnson delivers Baccalaureate address

In his spiritual practice as a Buddhist, said National Book Award-winning novelist Charles Johnson in his Baccalaureate address to Lehigh graduates, he almost never talks about himself. “And besides,” he continued, “when I look on my own life, I always feel it’s pretty boring, except for the people who influenced me one way or another—my parents and teachers and mentors. So in order to talk about me, I have to talk about them.”

In his address, which he delivered to graduates on Sunday, May 22, in Packer Memorial Church, Johnson told stories to illustrate the critical influence of his parents and teachers and mentors as he developed into a cartoonist, an editor and one of America’s most prominent writers.

Johnson offered his congratulations to graduates, as well as their own teachers, counselors, mentors and parents.

“The very fact that you are in this audience means that you have distinguished yourselves through hard work and discipline,” Johnson said. “I also want to congratulate your teachers, counselors and mentors. All together, each of you possessing what the others needed, you formed—as teachers and students—a community dedicated to moving toward enlightenment and completion.

“And, most important, I want to congratulate your parents, who were your very first and most important teachers. If you are at all like me, what you learned from your parents will be with you all the days of your lives.” 

Johnson described his childhood in Evanston, Illinois, where he lived with his hardworking father and his mother, an avid reader who imparted her love of books to her son. Johnson and his mother would sometimes read books together and discuss them.

“She’d always wanted to be a teacher, but couldn’t because she suffered from severe bouts of asthma,” he said. “So she made me her student. Like so many other things I owe to my mother, I am indebted to her for seducing me with the beauty of blank pages—a diary she gave me to record my thoughts.”

Johnson’s mother kept bookcases filled with a wide variety of genres, and it was in one of those volumes that Johnson discovered meditation, which would become an integral part of his life. After reading the chapter on meditation in that book on yoga, he said, “I spent the next half an hour in my bedroom following its instructions for vipassana, the method Shakyamuni Buddha recommended for his followers in the magnificent Mahasatipatthana Sutra (‘The Great Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness’).

“It was the most peaceful and renewing thirty minutes I’d ever known, an experience that radically slowed down my sense of time, and cleared away the background noise always on the edge of my consciousness.”

‘They don’t let black people do that’

While in high school, Johnson began reading one book a week, which eventually turned into three. He also retreated into drawing.

“There was something magical to me about bringing forth images that hitherto existed only in my head where no one could see them,” he explained. He began considering a career as a professional artist.

His father, however, told him his dream wasn’t possible: “‘Chuck, they don’t let black people do that.’”

“Those eight words felt as if he’d delivered a death blow to me,” Johnson recalled. “Art was the only passion I had. Yet his was the irrefutable voice of 244 years of slavery, then the decades of segregation, discrimination and disenfranchisement that had shaped his childhood and consciousness. How could I argue with that?”

Crushed, Johnson wrote a letter to Lawrence Lariar, cartoon editor at Parade magazine, who promptly responded, “Your father is wrong. You can do whatever you want with your life. All you need is a good drawing teacher.”

Johnson shared the letter with his father, who listened, admitted he was wrong, and agreed to make the monthly payments for Johnson’s two years of study with Lariar. Johnson went on to publish hundreds of drawings in a variety of publications. He later gained national and critical acclaim as a novelist. His 1990 novel, Middle Passage, won the National Book Award, making Johnson the first African American to receive the award since Ralph Ellison in 1953.

“Lariar taught me to draw professionally, but my Dad taught me how to work, how to regard everything I did, seen by others or never seen, as being a portrait of myself, and even a kind of sacrifice,” he said.

‘That’s the one I was looking for’

In his introduction of Johnson, Lehigh Chaplain Lloyd Steffen described him as “a critic of essentialism, racism and separatism.

“Charles Johnson has provided a courageous model of independent thinking, even as he has worked to remind us of a Buddhist teaching that we are interdependent, that consciousness is a social phenomenon, and that we face a moral challenge to promote tolerance, to serve others, to seek truth, and confront the imperative to love,” Steffen said.

Johnson gives much credit to his father.

“He taught me that loyalty, reliability, resilience, truth and the willingness to accept the fact that we can be wrong, unselfishness, resourcefulness, faith, morality, and humility were ideals to strive for every day,” Johnson said. “He taught me how to talk to my pillow during good times and bad, which prepared me, as a Buddhist, to chant Sanskrit verses on my zafu, another kind of pillow. These things for him were always unstated dimensions of what it means to be cultured and human and civilized—things I learned from watching him, not in a 14-week college course.

“And he taught me something even more important. When he financially backed me up on something he barely understood, I realized that he had shown me the true definition of love: helping others because you believe in them, regardless of whether their dreams outstrip your own understanding.”       

Johnson recalled an expression his father would use when finishing a task.

“Whenever he lifted that last heavy box, or hammered home that last nail, he would remove the cigar from his mouth, smile, happily cast his gaze at the last remaining item that brought a period of work successfully to an end, and he would say, ‘That’s the one I was looking for,’” Johnson recalled.

“And so, as I wrote this Baccalaureate address,” he concluded, “I heard his voice urging me to complete this true, autobiographical story. When I reached the end, this page, my father’s words were there again, saying, ‘That’s the one I was looking for.’ I think the graduates tomorrow, when they get their diploma, they’re going to think, ‘That’s the one I was looking for.’”

A celebration of spiritual traditions

The first Baccalaureate, Steffen explained in his greeting, was held in 1432 at Oxford University. It was originally intended as a final exam in which prospective graduates were required to deliver to faculty a sermon in Latin, demonstrating mastery of religious communication and classical languages.

Today, said Steffen, many colleges and universities have maintained the religious element of the Baccalaureate tradition, transforming it into an interfaith religious service to honor the various spiritual traditions within the community. In Lehigh’s Baccalaureate service, held each year in Packer Memorial Church, community members from different faith traditions are invited to speak about their faiths. This year, five members of the Lehigh community participated:

• Sam Waldorf ’16, who majored in supply chain management and participated in the Global Citizenship Program, represented Judaism. Waldorf plans to move to Chicago to become a member of the AVODAH Jewish Service Corps, through which he will work for Literature for All of Us, which organizes book groups for Chicago schools, children and young adults.
• Pranav Kashyap Modali ’16, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, represented Hinduism. From India, Modali is an active member of the India Club and will graduate this summer.
• Kendall Wilkins ’16, an Eckardt Scholar and global studies major with minors in economics and Latin American studies, represented Christianity. She plans to pursue a master’s degree in economics at Lehigh.
• Rehab Elkhayat ’17, who is pursuing an MBA with a concentration in finance, represented Islam. From Egypt, Elkhayat has served as vice president of the MBA association and is a member of the Fulbright Club.
• Qian He, professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and visiting scholar at Lehigh, represented Buddhism. She was a visiting Ph.D. student in Lehigh’s Signal Processing and Communications Lab from 2007 to 2009 and a postdoctoral research associate there from 2010 to 2011.

The service opened with music from South Side Brass and the Concord Chamber Singers. Rabbi Danielle Stillman, director of Jewish Student Life, gathered the community, and Father Allen Hoffa, director of the Newman Center, offered the invocation.
 

Photos by Christa Neu