Commencement: Let's Get Started!

My mind this morning is where my heart is, at University of Detroit Mercy.  It’s Commencement Day. 

“Graduation” literally means “dividing into degrees”, like on a measuring cup, or its precision cousin in a chemistry lab, the graduated cylinder.  And sure enough, at UDM, the graduates will process across the flower-decked, sparkling clean campus with Ph.D candidates in the honored position just before the executives and trustees.  The Bachelor’s Degree candidates will smile in plain black gowns, followed by their Master’s Degree fellows also wearing hoods with red, white, and blue school colors inside and the color of their college on the outside.  The colleges’ graduates will march in order of the foundation of their colleges, from the Liberal Arts and Education (around 1877) to the School of Architecture (around 1964).  Though they are “graduated” into their various degrees, they move from the same learning culture into a world that needs them to get started.

“Commencement” means getting started.  I like that better.  

I imagine a room, a table strewn with papers.  Three or four people there snap to attention when one of them says, “OK, let’s get started.”  They start by taking a look at what they’ve got; what’s the situation.  The situation is pretty dire.  Their city is shrinking inside a shrinking state.  Job prospects are poor and each of them is carrying debt as big as a mortgage.  In my imaginary room, the team has assessed the situation.  They’ve identified the challenge that they face and now they begin to formulate alternative solutions.

While the graduates are divided by their academic degrees, the distinctive colors of each of their colleges in clumps like the flowerbeds they pass, each college shows a precious diversity.  Faces are male and female, all colors and ages.  In my imaginary room the diversity of the team results in grasp of more of the complexity of the situation, and results in more alternative solutions.  The graduates march from their various college buildings into one arena, one commencement ceremony; this is a University.  It is a place where all turn toward the same truth, from their various points of view, with their same tools and filters and aims.  And it is a place that shares the same vision – graduates who lead and serve in their communities.

In my imaginary room, the team has assessed the situation and reviewed their alternative solutions.  The situation is pretty dire.  The alternatives are all challenging.  What makes them go, leave their imaginary room and enter the sticky, messy world outside?  It will be the final commencement for Fr. Gerry Stockhausen, the president who played his guitar on the stage on campus the first few years of his presidency, and sat in the noisiest student section at the basketball games in his tee shirt, and led the place through six years of growth when most other places were just hanging on.  At his inauguration Mass, he chose a Scripture reading that he would use again and again at every key liturgy for the years of his presidency.  Jesus comes out of the desert, where he has assessed the situation, his identity as the messiah of a lost and occupied people.  He has considered alternative solutions, and rejected power, prestige, and possessions.  He goes to the synagogue where the leaders are gathered, and opens the scroll to Isaiah 61.

"The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to announce a year of favor from the LORD and a day of vindication by our God." 

I hope Fr. Gerry uses that line today in his comments to the graduates.  From day one he’s been all about mission.  And on this day of Graduation, the dividing into degrees, it is this message of Isaiah, and Jesus, and Gerry Stockhausen that will serve this group coming out of my imaginary room, coming together into a dire situation, in a city and a state and a world that needs their leadership and service.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.