Day: June 14, 2009

“I am the vine, you are the branches … abide in me”

Wow! Here you are! Look at you! All dressed up – again – and everywhere to go! We salute you for your accomplishments. Today you are the pride of the school, the pride of your parents and grandparents, your relatives and friends, your cultures and communities. There is always something just a little overwhelming about these occasions; a day super-charged with so many emotions. We are both sad and glad to see you go!

You meet for the last time here this morning as students of King’s-Edgehill School.  In a short while you will step up and step out as graduates. You have made the grade and are about to step into a whole new set of relationships. Such is graduation. You do so because of the things that have belonged to your time here whether it has been for one year or for six. It has been the place of your abiding, to strike the note in the lesson which Ashley read. This is the place where you have lived and learned – sometimes, no doubt, the hard way (let’s not go there!), sometimes not! And perhaps, some of the lessons have yet to take root, let alone to bear fruit, in you!

Together we have been through a lot. We have laughed and sung together – well, at least we’ve tried! We have cried and grieved together, known suffering and loss and sorrow together as well as joy and delight. We have experienced the agonies of defeat and the ecstasies of victory. It is almost as if you have already lived several lifetimes, so intense and busy everything has been. And there have been the quiet times of reflection and meditation, too; in sum, the hard lessons of thinking and acting beyond yourselves. All these things enter into the making of who you are. They are part of the formation of character; they belong to the shape of your being.

But only because you have embraced the challenges and the responsibilities that have been set before you. Not always willingly perhaps. After all, there are many things that we don’t like doing, many things that we kick against and rebel. It is called adolescence and it lives on in all of us, as arrested, atrophied or simply extended. It reaches back to the old, old story of humanity’s rebellion against the limits and the restraints that properly define freedom. We have rehearsed that story many times both in what has been read and heard but also in the awareness of what we have all done, “by thought, word and deed”, as it were. And yet, that is all part of the larger story of human redemption and the hope of transformation.

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