Commencement

This month, hundreds of thousands of students in high school and college will don their graduation caps and gowns, gather in an auditorium or stadium and listen to a commencement speech that attempts to empower, encourage, motivate, stimulate and inspire.  The best commencement speeches are those that challenge the graduates to think beyond their academic blackboards and halls of ivy.  Here’s a snippet from two addresses given in the last decade:

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling, Harvard University, 2008

What’s worth spending your post-Penn lives trying to do or undo?  It might be something simple.  It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth… …That’s what this degree of yours is, a blunt instrument.  So go forth and build something with it.

Bono, University of Pennsylvania 2004

This week, Catholics around the world will hear what we could call Jesus’ commencement speech, challenging words meant to empower the disciples.

Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.

Mark 16:15, Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

Like an education, liturgy schools us and tools us.  It forms us in the ways of  being and gives us the tools to live out our faith.   Like a  commencement speech, each liturgy sends us forth with challenging words:  “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord with your lives.  Amen!