These were my remarks at yesterday’s commencement celebration at Susquehanna University.
Commencement means beginning. Today we celebrate the beginning of what you will take from this place to shape our future. We celebrate the launch of your gifts into a world that desperately needs them.
Class of 2024, every August, we begin the academic year with convocation. On the heels of move-in, students and their families gather in this space to be welcomed by representatives of a number of constituencies including the faculty and the Student Government Association, and at that event, I invite our new class to their graduation back in this space four years later.
That didn’t happen to you. We held a video convocation led by a handful of us in Weber Chapel because we were returning from lock down and were navigating being on a residential campus while maintaining a significant level of isolation.
At that virtual event, I asked you to join in a social contract to do the right things that would allow us to stay here, and you did. We never had less than 80% of you on campus that entire year. Thank you for making that possible.
I also thanked the CenSUs taskforce for developing a set of goals to make Susquehanna a more inclusive and supportive campus. Thank you for the many ways you all have helped us make meaningful progress on that work.
Lastly, I did invite you to be here today, and here we are. In the fall of 2020, moving into a campus took a leap of faith, and making it possible to stay here required sacrifice and diligence.
We all learned a lot about ourselves and each other as a result of that experience. And many of you will bore your children regaling them time and time again about what it was like.
Sadly, you won’t be able to say everything got better and returned to normal. I’m not sure things ever have been normal. Normal may be what we call the comfortable corners of memory, and we are clearly not there.
Since you arrived here, you have seen our own citizens assault our nation’s capital, civil war in Myanmar, humanitarian crises in South Sudan and Somalia, Russia attack Ukraine, and the deadly turmoil in Israel and Gaza that has become a flash point of division around the world. These are wicked problems in every meaning of the word.
We each see clear, inarguable rights and wrongs, but the dividing lines seem to be drawn on a 3-D chess board. As plain as right and wrong may be to each of us, these are complex, vexing conundrums, and sorting them out is made all the more difficult by the noise of seemingly ceaseless, fractious, and conflicting narratives.
Facts and truth have become topics of debate, but as the quote attributed to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan avers, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
Our time is sometimes jeeringly referred to as the “post-truth” era, but we cannot let this be the case, as the Gospel of John states, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”[1]
Or as Maya Angelou so poignantly wrote:
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms…
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness…
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.[2]
This is why you took that leap of faith in the fall of 2020. You came here to seek the truth, to develop the skills to discern true from false, right from wrong, good from bad.
You proved that we learn best in community; that by engaging with each other to tackle life’s most challenging questions, we can find common ground; and that allowing ourselves to be intellectually vulnerable opens us up to new levels of wisdom.
And you are just in time. Our weary world needs you. It needs inquisitive leaders who reflect honestly about the best roles they can play in our global community. It needs humble servant leaders who recognize that each of us benefits most from those things that benefit us all. It needs leaders who deeply understand that inclusive communities need to be intentionally cultivated and supported.
Over the past four years, we have seen you grow. You have sent down deep roots and reached around the globe. You have plumbed core beliefs, and opened yourselves up to rich and conflicting perspectives. You have taken chances, and you have exercised bold compassion.
You have been brave, generous, clever, expressive, discerning, strong, adaptable, resilient, imaginative, and most importantly, kind.
Take these talents and be that gift to the world we have witnessed you become in this special place. You are our best hope for a better future, and you have now “come to it.”
Thank you, good luck, and congratulations.
[1] John, 8:32.
[2] Angelou, Maya: from A Brave and Startling Truth, 1995.