Cottey holds 133rd commencement

Monday, May 15, 2017
Dr. Tara Stuart delivers her commencement address Sunday morning.
Ralph Pokorny/Daily Mail

On a Sunday morning in May 1952, Tara Stuart listened to a speaker exhorting the graduates about how they should go out and conquer the world, walked across the stage at Cottey College and received her diploma.

Sixty-five years later, on Sunday morning, Dr. Stuart’s life came full circle when she was the selected speaker for Cottey College’s 133rd commencement and as a member of the World Peace and Prayer Society presented each graduate a unique gift — a miniature hand-crafted Peace Pole, recognizing them as global citizens.

“What is deeply appreciated by me is that I would be invited back to a small outstanding women’s college in Nevada, Mo., to give a short speech. And I think that is incredible because I don’t have the credentials. I’m not the secretary of … I’m not the president of … I’ve had a few of those in the past. I don’t have any great whatever. I’m just a woman,” Stuart said Friday afternoon.

Tara Stuart presents Blessing Kumbirai Gandawa, from Zimbabwe, her hand-crafted Peace Pole during Sunday morning’s commencement.
Ralph Pokorny/Daily Mail

Stuart is a world traveler and an advocate for peace. She has lived and worked in many countries including New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, India, Turkey, Tibet, Switzerland and Great Britain.

Her professional background includes being an educator, a speaker, author, illustrator and CEO of her own business. While working on the equivalent of a doctorate at the University of London, Stuart said she and her associates worked to establish an international education program for gifted high school students in five nations. And she will soon be commissioned as a Justice of the Peace in New Hampshire.

Stuart said this is the first time to her knowledge the World Peace Prayer Society, which is a nonprofit, nondenominational organization dating to 1955 has been asked to craft Peace Poles for a college commencement ceremony.

Cottey College president Dr. Jann Weitzel, left, and Dr. Tara Stuart at the Peace Pole at Cottey College.
Steve Reed/Cottey College

Today there more than 200,000 Peace Poles in 180 countries, including six in Kansas City and one installed on the Cottey College campus in 2008. The Peace Pole is symbolic of humanity’s longing and active service in conflict resolution, creating right human relations and the foundations of peace.

“Dr. Stuart brings a message about the importance of living in right relationships as global citizens,” said Dr. Jann Weitzel, Cottey College president said. “It is a charge to our graduates as they move forward in their lives to take personal responsibility for creating the world in which they choose to live.”

“Cottey is a college that welcomes international students as well as faculty with international backgrounds,” Stuart said. “My challenge to Cottey graduates is to take the spirit of peace that they have absorbed through their Cottey education and take that spirit into the world.”

According to a release from Cottey, Stuart presently serves as a board member of the United Nations Caucus on Spirituality. She is described as a global citizen by her colleague Deborah Moldow, a representative to the United Nations for the World Peace Prayer Society. “Tara is the vehicle for encouraging these young women to go out and make a difference in the world. Cottey graduates are being offered the opportunity to fly like Tara.”

Stuart said, “Peace is living in harmonious relationship with self, others and all life. The culture of peace is an integral component of global citizenship. Therefore it is most appropriate that each graduate receive a miniature Peace Pole.”

Each Peace Pole carries the message, “May Peace Prevail on Earth” in four different languages of the world to promote peace, “which is right human relationships toward the good for all.”

“I think the newspaper should have a miniature Peace Pole, I think the radio station should have a miniature Peace Pole, I think every person who goes into the radio station to talk about the community … That’s what we were talking about earlier. It’s the people, such as Neal [Swarnes], who is in charge of maintenance at Cottey, he could have retired a long time ago and what he is and what he does, or meet the pecan farmer out here who instead of throwing away the shells, recycles them into mulch for the various gardens in the area, think of the service he is providing ...”

“Just to talk to that man or that woman or that family with that pecan grove, it’s what they’re doing that makes a difference.”

“But it’s the people who make the difference and that’s what is so important to spread about. Communities that are going through stressful times. And most of our small communities are, and that is how we move from the crisis of stress into the opportunity to go forward. To be against the difficulty, sure, but it isn’t against anything. It’s moving forward with what can be done.

“You can’t put all your energy into being anti — what do you need, not want.”

Stuart breaks relationships into four levels, with the lowest level, tolerance, which means you put up with someone or something.

The second level is acceptance, which “means, of course, you accept them. More than tolerance, you accept them. Then you start to appreciate. When you truly appreciate someone who you thought you could only put up with, you can appreciate that man or woman or child.

“And then you can move on to celebrate. That is what life is all about.

“I have trouble with tolerating. I can only tolerate so much. Accept, certainly. Appreciate, most certainly. Celebrate, I love a celebration,” she said.

“I find something in them, that is special and that makes a difference,” Stuart said.

Which she illustrated with a story.

Just imagine a Land Rover in the middle of the Chinese outback, way in northeast China.

“As we’re driving along and I’m a token American, a Chinese-Canadian friend of mine says, ‘There’s a village over there, why don’t we stop and see what that village is like.’ So we stop, walk down a bank into a mud-brick village in China.

“They don’t know us — we don’t know them. They don’t know foreigners. They’ve never had foreigners and this is not a tour group.

She said they met with a farmer who motioned for them to follow him.

“We walk back up the bank and across the road into a small vineyard. And we look up and he points to the beautiful harvest of grapes he is going to have. We all admire them. There is no common language and he is so happy to see our admiration for his harvest. And then my amazement he just reached over and in pantomime picked up a bottle. I figured it was wine. Who was I not to offer a cup, as I picked up a cup and offered it and the farmer poured the wine into my imaginary cup. And I said Hans, who was my traveling companion. So Hans picked up an imaginary cup and poured wine into it. Then he raised the bottle and he said something in Chinese and he sipped out of the bottle, then sat down and looked at an Austrian and an American woman and he said ‘One — One.’”

“This is a farmer in a Chinese village that had never seen foreigners, they only speak the dialect, ‘We’re all one.’”

“That’s what I’m totally about,” she said.

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