Breana Norris, MTS '23, was selected by a panel of students, staff, and faculty as the class speaker for HDS Commencement 2023. Each year, the addresses of all of the finalists are published in the HDS Commencement Bulletin. The following remarks were delivered by Norris at the Diploma Awarding Ceremony on May 25, 2023.
♦♦♦
Seeking words for this momentous occasion has been a daunting task.
There have been many iterations of this address over the centuries, words to speak to every tangle of history our school has endured.
Fortunately, I come from a legacy equally persistent. Like our university, my family’s history in this nation goes back to the beginning.
From rural Texas and Alabama, to Los Angeles, the city I call home, The Norris’ and the Heflins, the Parkers and the Smiths, and ancestors who’s names I will never get to know have endured.
Standing at the unlikely intersection of these parallel histories, I sought words for this moment. A means of tethering ourselves to this time. I remembered my grandmother, who knows exactly what it feels like to fumble for a foothold in time. My grandmother has dementia.
She is someone who knows vividly what we can all feel at times, bombarded by moments, caught up in the spins of news cycles,—our attention fragmented—and struggling to make sense of the world around us.
Today, I invite us all to follow her example.
For when she’s overwhelmed, or lost and confused, we can always bring her back to us with love. Our love for her grounds her in any moment, at any place and time, regardless of the chaos of the world around, or within. Love grounds us. Love surpasses understanding.
The late bell hooks reminds us that if you lead with love, you cannot go wrong. In life and in her scholarship, she brought emotion and heart into the clinical halls of the academy, and urged us to lead with open hearts and minds. Here on this day of celebration with our loved ones, I can think of no better message for this occasion.
If you’ll indulge me, I have a story to share about how I found this principle of love best embodied in a friend I made here at HDS.
I arrived here in September of 2020, the heart of pandemic. It was the time of weekly COVID tests in Northwest Labs, and eking out connections in the DMs of Zoom.
It was a time when I was forced to ask what is Harvard? Prestige with no people, immense buildings, crumbling cemeteries, the lengthy syllabi of my classes, a Cambridge with no community could not be Harvard.
In my second year a new era of in person-hood was ushered in, and the community we built together breathed life into this city and the Harvard experience. What each and every one of you did in this time, how we reached for each other, the kayaking trips, the conversations in the commons, the knitting clubs—it was in this sea of newness that I met Vandan, and began a friendship that would change my life.
Vandan was a visiting Hindu monastic student, here for one year on exchange from India as part of a new program at HDS. We had a morning class together, and he noticed I was always audibly hungry, stomach growling because I skipped breakfast to arrive on time.
Over the year we bonded over similarities, like struggling to feel comfortable in our own skin: Vandan wore his sadhak, the robes of a person in training to become a monk. In one conversation he said everyone back home dressed like him so he didn’t feel his difference until arriving here.
Missing my own loved ones back home, I shared with him how my very skin could make me feel different in classrooms and on campus.
In addition to our similarities, we had our fair share of differences that cannot be overstated.
He was strictly vegetarian. I’m an omnivore with no food allergies.
Kayaking on the Charles is my favorite activity, and I only learned he couldn’t swim after we were in the boat together.
I was Christian. He was Hindu.
I was his first Black friend. He was my first monastic one.
At the end of our year, like we are here to do today, we bid farewell. But this goodbye was different.
To ascend in his tradition, Vandan would enter a period of renunciation, taking vows that meant cutting off contact with the outside world, his family, and his new American friend. Only in his 20s, Vandan knew exactly what the rest of his life would look like. On this point, we could not have been more different.
I want to read a selection from the card that he wrote me to say goodbye.
“Thanks so much for everything, for a warm and welcoming attitude that made me feel at home and made my Harvard time worthwhile. I’m so very grateful and thankful for your friendship, and you’ll be missed. Breana, keep me in your prayers as I seek to pursue an ambitious path of monasticism and renunciation. I’ll pray for you. Take care, my dear friend. Good memories are a pleasant way to keep the person alive and with you. Thanks for those … Farewell, Breana”
Our friendship is the most unique one I’ve had at HDS, and in life. I believe it could only have happened at a place like Harvard Divinity School, at this moment in its history.
The lesson I learned from Vandan is a Love that goes beyond a shared culture or worldview, beyond a shared corner of the world, love beyond networking, love that is the opposite of self centered interest:
People here at Harvard, maybe subconsciously, are taught to constantly network, to expect great things from the great people we meet and befriend, maybe even to anticipate how they can benefit us later.
Amongst our university’s esteemed future doctors and lawyers, politicians and businesspeople, educators and engineers, we at the Divinity School are often saddled with a discomfort in the ambiguity of our degree, sometimes stumped when asked what will you do next?
Grounded in love, I find these questions change: not what will you do after here but how will you do it? Not what, but why? Not what, but with whom by your side?
Once I knew our separation was coming, I tried to enjoy getting to know Vandan, and to cherish each memory we made during this time our lives crossed paths, when we left our vastly different corners of the world to share this Cambridge zip code for four seasons. Though we will never meet again - in this life - I have learned from him not to see this as the end of anything, because we both have the bonds of our experiences together, and our love for each other lives on. Like my love for my grandmother will live on, even when she no longer recognizes my face.
Love that grounds us. Love that surpasses understanding.
On this joyous day, surrounded by your loved ones, I hope and pray this is the kind of love that will propel you forward, through your certainties and uncertainties, through the rest of our lives. I may not know all of you, we may not see eye to eye on everything, [you might have a lunch reservation you’re actively counting down towards], but I can still love you.
It is custom on occasions like these to take a text. This one is not from my tradition, but Vandan’s. He inscribed it on the back of the card.
“In the joy of others lies our own.”
So whether today is goodbye, or just goodbye for now, I pray that you go forward grounded in love and share your joy with others.
Congratulations, Class of 2023.