My dear graduates . . .

I will probably never be asked to give a commencement address. However, if I was ever asked to give such an address, I do have a good plan for what I’d like to say...

I am sure that most of you have come here today ready to be flattered. Most graduates and parents expect to hear at a graduation that this year’s graduating class is somehow unique, special, and intelligent. I hate to disappoint you, but none of that is really true. Sure, this class is full of blessed, gifted young people, but so is every class. The truth is that graduating from high school is not really so great an accomplishment. Let’s face it, almost everyone graduates from high school. You actually have to try to fail.

Even the most challenging teachers rarely fail a student. In fact, if they do fail a student, teachers have to build a case to justify the choice to do so. It is not really acceptable for teachers to fail a student just because the student fails to master the objectives of the course. The teacher has to prove that the student utterly failed to do the work. Otherwise the blame tends to be placed on the teacher. Did we do enough to make sure that the student passed? Did we engage the student’s interest? If a student doesn’t pass, it is almost certain that the grading system isn’t fair.

Let’s face it, my friends. Graduating from high school isn’t really an accomplishment. I’m not saying that the adults in your life don’t have a right to be proud of you. I am certainly proud of you all. But it is more the pride that a father has for his child when the little one learns how to walk. It’s a milestone in the child’s life that signifies maturity and growth, but doesn’t really signify any individual accomplishment or particular intelligence.

I don’t even think our culture can claim that graduation from college is any particularly great accomplishment. Colleges today are businesses not schools, more concerned with attracting their clientele than they are with actually educating. Just look at the focus placed on most campus designs: university centers crammed with fast food and readily available entertainment, fitness centers with Olympic-standard facilities and climbing walls, fine arts buildings constructed to capture your attention, but not necessarily to inspire your imagination. Classes are designed to catch your interest; you can take classes in feminist politics, vampire literature, modern movie critiquing, video game design, or sexual health. Teachers are pressured to make passing easy. All this is in order to retain you as happy, paying customers. While you don’t have to work quite as hard to fail out of college (almost a third of college freshmen do), you do have to try. Usually spending your days drunk or hung over and skipping classes is enough of an effort. If you attend classes and make at least a cursory effort at studying, passing is almost guaranteed. After all, flunk-outs do not become supportive alumni. Except for the freshman third of drunken, immature malefactors, nearly everyone graduates from college. Despite the value our meritocratic culture places on that little piece of paper, a college degree isn’t really anything special.

However, I don’t mean to completely rob your special day of all vestiges of pride. The fact remains that each and every one of you has some reason for being proud today. Each of you has been given a unique set of natural and supernatural gifts. God has blessed you with your own unique talents and temperaments. He has led you to develop certain skills, abilities, and character traits in your time at Columbus. Some of you have taken advantage of your opportunity to grow as individuals at this school. You have learned how to think. You have learned what it means to become a person of virtue and integrity. You have grown in your faith.

God has led all of you to grow and develop according to your unique pattern for the purpose of helping you to find and to fulfill your vocation in life, and so to find fulfillment beyond anything that a simple diploma or degree could ever promise you. Some of you are being called to the priesthood or religious life. Don’t fight that call. You will be good at it because God has prepared you for it. You will be happy in that lifestyle because it is the lifestyle that will allow you to serve God and your fellow human beings in the way that God designed for you. Most of you will be called to the lay vocation. Your task is no easier than the task of priests and religious. You are called to enter into this sinful, toilsome world and to bring into it some measure of wisdom and goodness. You are called to transform your workplace, your love life, your recreation, and your families into fertile ground for the seed of the Gospel. Your task is not easy, but don’t run from it. Don’t fight that call. You will be good at it because God has prepared you for it. You will be happy in that lifestyle because it is the lifestyle that will allow you to serve God and your fellow human beings in the way that God designed for you.

Some of you are scoffing at my words. You are thinking to yourself that talk of God at a Catholic school’s graduation ceremony is quaint and expected, but not truly relevant to life beyond Columbus. Some of you have the attitude that Catholic educators do not have enough contact with reality, and that you are exiting the Land of Make-Believe where you received a safe, sheltered education and are now taking the trolley out into the real world, where prayer and morality and the triteness of faith can be set aside for the nitty-gritty solidity of secular life. Of course, you are free to think that way. However, choosing that path on this day robs you of the only potential for authentic pride. Leave God behind, and you are stuck with the nitty-gritty solidity of the reality that you have accomplished nothing sitting here today than what many people smarter than you and many people stupider than you have also done. Embrace God and you can leave here in the awe that your future could be used to affect eternity. Which will you choose?

The word “commencement” means “beginning.” The idea of a commencement exercise is that your diploma gives you the power to begin down any path you will choose. That, of course, is a pile of horse-pucky. The diploma means nothing. However, today can mark the beginning of your quest to shape your gifts, talents, temperaments, and character to the task that God will set before you. This can be a grand and beautiful beginning, if you will only embrace it.

In the love of Christ,

Brother Thomas