Hearing Voices

Northland College Presents Lecture, August 2003

Madeline Island

By Dr. Karen I Halbersleben

Well, I am going to make a public confession today that might or might not surprise those in the audience who are still getting to know me as a Northland’s newest President. Funnily enough, it is actually a confession that some 570 years ago could have gotten me burned at the stake alongside Joan of Arc. There have been times in my life when I have heard voices. It seems to happen when I am very caught up in the total experience of where I happen to be: the sights and sounds, the sense of the moment, a blurring of past with present, a strong connection to those who have walked the earth before me.

Let me give you a couple examples; see if you’ve experienced similar sensations. The first time I remember this happening, I was wandering through the war cemeteries that line the road approaching Verdun in central France. As a European historian, I knew that Verdun has the unfortunate distinction of being one of those wretched cities, like Sarajevo and Kabul, that happen to consistently be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Men have been fighting over and dying at Verdun since they began keeping records of such things during the Roman Empire. In our own desperately bloody century, I knew that I was standing on land that 70 years before my visit had witnessed the single bloodiest battle the world had ever seen until that point. In a nightmare of epic proportions, stretching from February until November 1916, over one million French and German soldiers lost their lives in the fields and hills around Verdun. The bombardment that accompanied the battle was of such mind-numbing proportions, that the medieval walls that protected the city sank three feet as concussion succeeded concussion over those desperate months. So much ordnance was expended, so much gunpowder used, that when you visit Verdun today they still mark off areas in the land where you should not walk for fear of the shells that are still exploding over four generations later. Neither grass nor trees will grow on this poisoned earth, and any place you walk in the countryside you can still find bits of teeth and barbed wire and shell casings.

I wandered around the countless cemeteries in which the soldiers of this battle lay buried, many of them in graves marked “unknown.” It was a glorious July day: gentle breezes with an essence that is distinctly French, birds and butterflies hovering nearby. And because it was July the fields were ablaze with poppies: those blood red flowers said each to symbolize the blood of one dead soldier. I looked out over grave markers as far as the eye could see covered with the living red of those poppies, knowing that 70 years before there would not have been flowers, but the actual flood of the life-blood of a lost generation. And, here’s the point: as I stood rooted to the spot, I heard groans. Or rather, I felt the earth groaning beneath me, still polluted with the blood and the bones and the flesh of men who gave their lives by the hundreds of thousands for a battle of no strategic importance in a war that forever destroyed our illusions of civilization. My memories of Verdun begin always with the nightmare of those groans: the voices of the abandoned soldiers who perished there.

A little farther north, on a different trip, I heard voices of another sort. Nestled in a valley in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales in England is, to my mind, one of the most beautiful sites in the world. An enormous Cistercian Abbey, named Fountains for the nearby springs, had been built in the 12^th century by a community of devoted monks. Fountains Abbey was ordered destroyed during the Protestant Reformation occasioned by Henry the 8^th’s desire to take a second wife. That’s a story you all know. When Henry dissolved the abbeys, he was very interested in confiscating their considerable wealth. The local farmers were interested in using the abbey as a convenient quarry for large, already-hewn stone. And so this venerable abbey, a spiritual community that had stood and served both God and humanity for over 300 years was pulled apart stone by stone. What is left today, 700 years later, is most of the marvelous bell-tower, the housing for the stain-glassed windows in the sanctuary, as well as the skeleton of the rest of the abbey. You can’t believe how beautiful it is, to wander through the ruins in this gentlest of gentle English valleys, through the cloister, the kitchens, the infirmary, the dormitories of those long-dead monks. And here, it was the aura of sanctity, it was the sense of standing in the presence of great blessing, that rooted me to the spot. And this time, instead of groans, the voices I heard were more like whispers. Like prayer, or chant. Again, time seemed to stand still, and I felt a sense of connection to the past and to the experience of those who had come before me. Whereas Verdun had been a moment of connection to horror and insanity, Fountains Abbey was a connection to sanctity and blessedness that is with me still. Horror and blessing: I guess you need to hear both voices to have been a child of the 20^th century.

One final example, this time from this side of the Atlantic, and this time actual words. Now you have to remember, I am a historian. The past really means something to me; I long to connect with it; I usually know a lot about a place before I visit it, so that my imagination is already working, perhaps a bit too actively. It was a hot August day in Richmond, Virginia. I was alone, visiting St. John’s, an Anglican church on a small hilltop east of downtown. It was at Saint John’s church 222 years before my visit that a group of powerful Virginian landowners met to discuss how they should respond to England’s act of aggression in blockading the harbor of Boston in 1774. The church was the largest building in Richmond at that time; Richmond was the small town these men had retreated to when the Royal Governor would not let them meet in the Colonial Capital of Williamsburg. It was a numerous and important group of men who gathered that day: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Peyton Randolph, and a rural attorney from a remote Virginian burg named Patrick Henry.

I entered the church through the same door they had used. I wandered down the actual wooden floors upon which these giants had trod. I sat in the same pews where they sat that day as they debated their next course of action: should they obey the legitimate authority of the government of George III, or should they make a stand against the perceived oppression of their distant rulers. And, as I sat there, just behind Patrick Henry’s pew, I could hear the words welling up around me or inside of me, I can’t say which. The soaring words that helped give birth to a new nation: “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, almighty God. I know not what course others may take; but as for me, Give me Liberty, or Give me Death.”

I heard the voice. Maybe it was his; maybe it was my own; maybe it was the echo of voices of countless others who have repeated Henry’s resistance to tyranny through time. But, again, I felt rooted to the spot, and connected to others, in a different time, in a different place. Connected to the words and the spirit that had proclaimed a new vision of liberty, a vision that I must say I find newly haunting in light of recent world events. But, that’s another address for another time.

Agony, blessedness, liberty. Some places are so steeped in a mood or a sentiment that a glistening new reality can shine through to the hearts of those who are open to feeling, open to listening for those voices. I have found that Northland College is such a place. I hear the voices of our past everywhere I go on campus. Voices whispering of a proud history, of a school rising up in 1892 from the environmental devastation and social dislocations of the cutover period; a school embodying a commitment to provide educational access to the children of the laborers and immigrants who populated this remote region, recently blighted by ax and fire. Voices whispering of a school that reached out to women and native Americans at a time when most doors were closed to those learners. So, the voices of Northland from this period whisper both in rich baritone and in proud soprano, in English as well as Ojibwe.

The voices of Northland College are the voices of lives transformed, of futures opened, of possibilities explored. And with our 30-year commitment to the environmental liberal arts, the voices have risen to sing of commitment to the planet we share and to the future that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will inherit from us. These voices ring with a consistent and coherent commitment to life.

The three times I heard voices in the past, in the stories I shared with you, I found that the voices didn’t just connect me to the past: instead, they also pointed out lessons for the future. Each time I heard the voices it has changed something within me very, very deeply. So, too, with the voices of Northland: voices that both inspire and challenge me. Voices that have convinced me of the error of thinking with a shrug that the problems we are facing today are simply too vast for one person to make a difference. Northland voices have taught me the power of one.

Northland College is a special community of learning that has drawn out the best in thousands of students, staff, and faculty for over 100 years. Taken together, the voices of our past and our present unite to constitute a powerful witness to a world that desperately needs our message. The voices of Northland speak of the power of place and affirm that each of us indeed must choose today and enduringly to make a positive difference to the fate of our planet. Their gentle song rustles around you and then enters you: so that your voice and the voices of Northland begin to intertwine.

Come, listen, hear, feel yourself respond. Then, be prepared to add your own voice to the crescendo of dedication to knowledge and service. Add your own voice to the proud chorus of affirmation and hope that is Northland College.