The Bellarmine University Board of Trustees voted unanimously on September 6, 2016 to award me an honorary doctorate degree.
It was awarded last night at the December 21, 2016 graduation ceremonies.
Bellarmine University Board of Trustees
Dr. Doris Tegart, Interim President, places the Doctoral hood over my shoulders. Dr. Melanie Prejean Sullivan, Director of Campus Ministry, assisted in adjusting the hood.
Dr. Tegart handed me the diploma.
BELLARMINE UNIVERSITY
December 21, 2016
Commencement Address
‘A Hopeless Case?”
Rev. J. Ronald Knott
I
was completely shocked and honored when I got the call that I was going to be
awarded an honorary doctorate by this University. After seventeen years of relishing
being a campus minister here, I had retired from Bellarmine University back in
the spring, retired from St. Meinrad Seminary the year before that, retired
from the Archdiocese of Louisville a little before that and I have been
collecting Social Security for about a year before that. After all that
retiring and collecting, I thought I was finished. I thought that all I had left to do was to
find a place to die – hopefully in a socially acceptable situation!
I
am not the type to get awards like this. Oh, I have won a couple of awards in
the last few years, but not enough to invest in a trophy case just yet. I am
not a million-dollar donor. I am not a successful businessman or well-known
politician. I didn’t graduate in the top of my class and I didn’t invent
anything. There are no buildings or streets named after me. I was the MC at a Crater Lake National
Park beauty pageant once, but I have never won one personally. Even Don Knotts
had an “s” at the end of his name and I don’t. I am not a Monsignor like Father
Horrigan who started this place. I am simply a priest from a humble background
who has ended up amazed to be where he is today - all because of God’s amazing grace, my own
unrelenting determination, the help of a whole lot of good people and a dab of
luck.
If
I were to list my greatest accomplishment, it would not be any of the things
listed in my introduction, it would be overcoming crippling bashfulness to
become an international speaker, in eight countries on well over one hundred
occasions! From stages like this, I have looked into the eyes of more
Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops and priests than is healthy for one person!
Yes, I have stood and talked in front of all those clerics, without batting an
eye, usually a week at a time, and lived to talk about it! I have preached in front of thousands and
thousands of Catholics, people from other faiths and people of no faith at
all. From the feedback, the thing I am consistently
known for is my simple, direct and straightforward speaking style. I may not be the best speaker in the world,
but I do know how to do “short and sweet,” so here goes!
All
of you can listen in, and hopefully get something out of this, but tonight I
want to speak directly to you graduates who struggled to get here today. Yes, I
admire the winners of awards and scholarships and I congratulate them, but
those of you who really struggled are my kind of people and I want to share a
bit of what I have learned, especially with you! Yes, I do hope it will also be
helpful to everyone here, in one way
or another.
I
grew up in a Walton’s Mountain kind of town down in Meade County. I am John
Boy, the first in my family to graduate from college. I was told almost every
day as a child that I would never amount to a hill of beans. When I flunked the
altar boy test in the second grade, sweet Sister Mary Ancilla told me that I
was a good kid, but predicted that I would, in her words, “never be any good
around the altar.” When I wanted to come up here to Louisville, out of the
eighth grade, to the now-closed St. Thomas Seminary on Old Brownsboro Road, my
pastor reluctantly filled out the papers, but predicted that I would not last
till Christmas! After limping through my first year of seminary, the head
priest called me into his office to tell me that he was sending me home,
calling me, to my face, a “hopeless case.” I had to beg for another opportunity. (To get
through the seminary, you need to get good at groveling! My groveling career
was launched that very day!) His last words to me were to call me “a ball and
chain around his leg for six years!”
Even when I completed four years of high
school seminary, four years of college seminary and four years of graduate
school seminary, on the day of my ordination, a woman cornered me at the
reception and asked how long I had gone to school. When I answered “twenty,
counting grade school,” she stepped back, gasped, and said, “My God, you could
have been something!” Graduates, I feel
like I have been swimming against the stream all my life!
Friends,
here is my point! In the words of W. C Fields, “It ain’t what they call you,
it’s what you answer to!” As a graduate
of the “School of Hard Knocks,” from which I have three earned Doctorates, I
have learned that if you want to get on in life, you have to do two things.
First, you need to shut out those negative discounting voices of the people
around you. Second, and even harder, you need to shut out that negative discounting
voice in your own head. Henry Ford said, “Those who believe they can and those
who believe they can’t are both right.” Marianne Williamson said, “It is our
light, not our darkness that most frightens us!”
The
12 years it took for me to get to priesthood was a piece of cake compared to the
47 years of staying in the priesthood! In almost every assignment I have had as
a priest, I have been told by those who were there before me “not to expect any
results” because “nothing can be done” because of “this or that” reason. I
deliberately chose not to believe any of them and I have seen both small and
large miracles in most of those places, not because I am some kind of miracle
worker, but simply because I refused to believe their negative predictions, as
well as those my own mind tried to invent. I have learned that people declare certain
situations, other people and themselves “hopeless” because it is easier that
way. If you declare situations, other people or yourself “hopeless,” you don’t
have to do anything! Nobody expects you
to do anything about “hopelessness!” Here is another quote from George Bernard
Shaw that has guided me over the years. “People are always blaming their circumstances for
what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look
for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.”
One
of the most useful things I learned from my tough childhood is that “there has
never been a rescue party out looking for me” so I have needed to practice
self-rescue. To do that I have learned to be imaginative and creative and look
for alternatives, rather than look for someone to blame or someone to fix it
for me. Another of my very favorite quotes, one I used regularly in Bellarmine
Baccalaureate homilies, is also by George Bernard Shaw. “This
is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as
a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap
heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of
ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to
making you happy.”
All you, “barely made its,” listen up! One of my very
favorite things to do is to walk down the hall way at my old seminary, where
they hang the class pictures. I like to stop at the year 1970, the year I
graduated and was finally ordained a priest. Some of the biggest brains and jocks,
the ones that most of us could never measure up to, the ones everybody “made
over,” bombed out a long time ago and some of us ugly ducklings, in a classic
“tortoise and hare” scenario, are now swimming with swans! Maybe you have the
heard the joke about what they call the person who graduated at the bottom of
the class in medical school? They call him or her “Doctor!” As Yogo Berra said,
“|It ain’t over till it’s over!” So I
say to you, it ain’t over till it’s over, so be forces of nature, not feverish
selfish little clods of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will
not devote itself to make you happy! Claim you power! Take the road less
traveled! Believe in yourself! Dare to dream! Work hard! Be determined! Remain
focused! If you do that, then good luck will find you.
Remember! “It’s not what they call you, it’s what you answer
to!” “Those who believe they can, and those who believe they can’t, are both
right! Maybe someday in the distant future, Bellarmine University will give
another really nice award like this to yet another former “hopeless case” who
“could have been something.” Maybe that “someone” will be you!
To close, let me quote a few lines from the song “Defying
Gravity” from the musical WICKED.
I'm through accepting limits
'Cause someone says they're so.
Some things I cannot change
But till I try, I'll never know.
To those who ground me,
Take a message back from me!
Tell them how I am defying gravity -
I'm flying high, defying gravity.
And soon I'll match them in renown
And nobody in all of Oz -
No wizard that there is, or was,
Is ever gonna bring me down!
Remember graduates, they don’t call this a “commencement” for
nothing!
PRE-COMMENCEMENT PHOTO
LEFT TO RIGHT
Dr. Melanie Prejean Sullivan, Director of Campus Ministry, with whom I worked for seventeen years.
Dr. Doris Tegart, Interim President of Bellarmine University
____________________________________________________________
DOCTOR OF MINISTRY
in
PARISH REVITALIZATION
1981
McCORMICK (PRESBYTERIAN) SEMINARY
Chicago, Illinois
