Pomp and Circumstance

SDG here.

Yesterday I gave a commencement address for my parish school’s eighth-grade graduation.

I don’t remember the commencement address from my own eighth-grade graduation, but I remember my high-school commencement address. It was lame. The speaker got up there and basically admitted that she had no idea what to say, but then luckily she saw Dead Poet’s Society, so she wanted to tell us carpe diem, “Seize the day.” Good thing for that movie.

Anyway, I tried to come up with something I thought might be meaningful and relevant to students of that age, based on my experiences teaching CCD to seventh and eighth graders. I have no idea what they thought of it or whether they’ll remember it any better than I remember mine (darn, that would have been a good lead-in), but for what it’s worth, here’s what I said.

Class of 2008:

I’d like to tell you about a dream.

In this dream, you find yourself in a room with two adults. One is early 20s, a recent college graduate, living on his own (or her own), an apartment, a car. Maybe more or less where you might see yourself in ten years. Maybe your parents hope so too.

The other is older, a manager or director. It’s a job interview. And the older person is saying something to the younger one like, “This is a very responsible position. You need to be able to work on your own, without a lot of direction.”

And then a strange thing happens. The job applicant turns to you and says uncertainly, “How well do I work on my own?”

And you think, “Why ask me? I’m graduating 8th grade, going into high school. I’m not applying for the job.”

Or suppose the interviewer says, “This position requires excellent oral and written communication skills, or a good head for numbers,” or whatever it is. And then he turns to you and asks, “How well do you do in those subjects?” And again you wonder what’s going on.

Maybe you’ve played simulation computer games like Sim City or Theme Park where the lives of the characters depend on decisions you make. What if you were playing a game like that and you found out the decisions you were making were actually affecting real people, real families with children, even?

You might think, I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility. And yet the fact is that the decisions you make right now, that you will make tomorrow and next month and next year, really do have that kind of influence. Job interviews in the real world really do depend on your decisions. That twentysomething’s fate really is in your hands right now.

Some of you have probably figured out who it is. It’s you, ten years from now.

Maybe you’re thinking, 2018 is a long time from now. I’ll be an adult then. I’ll worry about that when the time comes.

If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re totally hosed. If you’re thinking you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it, you could find the bridge burned before you ever get to it. To put it another way, now is when you start building the bridges you need to cross in ten years. If you aren’t building bridges now, they won’t be there for you when you need them. Now is the time of your life where you’re given just enough rope to hang yourself, or to make rope bridges. The choice is yours to make, not ten years from now, but today and tomorrow and next month and next year.

Maybe you’re thinking, “I’m still a kid. It’s not my responsibility to make sure I make the right decisions today. I didn’t decide to go to St. John’s school—that was my parents’ decision. I didn’t pick my high school. When I get there, someone will make sure I take the right classes. The teachers will teach me—it’s their responsibility. It’ll all be different when I’m on my own.”

It will, and it won’t. One of the main things that will be different is that you’ll see then what you may not see now, that it isn’t really as different as you think, and that to an alarming degree, you already are on your own, and always were. It’s your life right now, nobody else’s. Not just this part of your life, but your whole life. In a way, you already are that twentysomething at that job interview. You just don’t know it yet.

I remember my own eighth-grade graduation over a quarter century ago, at a school and a neighborhood not unlike St. John’s. The school was Catholic, though I was not, my family was not, as some of you are not. My parents sent me and my siblings to Catholic school because they hoped we would that we would benefit from Catholic education, that we would learn something.

What have you learned? Hopefully, some math and language skills, something about science and history, something about God. If you weren’t paying attention, you might think you now understand these subjects. If you were paying better attention, you may have learned just how much more there is to learn.

Hopefully your teachers pushed you to make more progress than you might have made on your own. That was part of the reason my parents sent me to Catholic school: We had been going to a non-Catholic school that was less structured and disciplined, the theory being that students are individuals who need to learn at their own pace. Which is true. But what their own pace is, or should be, or can be, isn’t something students are necessarily the best judges of. Many of us, invited to choose our own pace, would choose a pace that allows for maximum computer games, DVDs, Facebook, hanging at the mall. And there’s nothing wrong with those things.

Sometimes, we do our best having someone else set the pace for us, tell us what we can achieve. That’s why people at the gym who can afford it get a personal trainer: not because they don’t know what to do, but because they need someone to tell them to do it. A good teacher can do for us. I hope you’ve had good teachers who pushed you to work hard.

If they were extraordinary teachers, they may even have taught you how to push yourself, not just to get by, but to get ahead at every opportunity. That’s a priceless lesson. Because in life, and even in high school, you can’t count on having a personal trainer. Most of the time, if you want to coast, the world will let you. And you won’t have the momentum when you need it most. Your parents may pick the schools, your guidance counselor may help pick the classes, but what you do or don’t get out of it, how that helps you or doesn’t help you in 2018 is largely up to you, starting now.

It’s not just about how you do in school. Picture that twentysomething filling out a job application, getting to that question on every job application for the rest of your life, whether you’ve ever been convicted of a crime. Now let’s say that also in the room is a 15-year-old smoking a joint, or an 18-year-old with the keys to the family car going to a party where there’s going to be drinking. That 15-year-old, that 18-year-old hold the twentysomethings’s future in their hands.

It’s not just about job interviews. The whole lives of children, the happiness of families, the success or failure of marriages can depend in part on decisions made by 18-year-olds, 15-year-olds, 13-year-olds about relationships with members of the opposite sex, about things they will or won’t do, places they will or won’t go both online and in the real world, commandments they keep or break.

Because of decisions made by teenagers, children grow up without one parent or the other. Grown men lose part of their paycheck every week to support a child—if the child is lucky—neither of them really knowing the other or even wanting to. Married couples live with emotional and physical issues that never, ever go away, because of decisions made by teenagers. Those kinds of issues may seem very far away, like they’re not part of your life. They are your life right now. You just don’t know it yet.

And it’s not just about all of that. You’re graduating today from Catholic school. You aren’t graduating from the Catholic Church. I should know. It was ten years after I graduated from Catholic school that I joined the Catholic Church, much to my father’s chagrin. Two years later he became Catholic too. But plenty of people go the other way: They graduate from Catholic school, and then wander away from the Church, away from the sacraments. The world is full of lapsed Catholics who may have learned something in Catholic school, but didn’t learn their faith well enough to keep it, let alone share it with anyone else.

Ultimately, the way you live every day helps to turn you into one of two kinds of person: a person who loves God above all else, or a person who doesn’t. Sometimes people think of the day they stand before God sort of as the ultimate job interview. Will the interviewer be impressed with your qualifications? But it isn’t really like that at all. God doesn’t have to pass judgment on us at all. The moment we see Him, we know instantly that this is either the One we have loved all our lives with our whole heart and mind and soul, the One we wanted to please above all else, the One we want to be with forever, or else someone who would have gotten in the way of whatever it was you really wanted in this life, someone you don’t want to be around forever. Every day you decide which of those two people you want to be.

Maybe you’re thinking this is all pretty depressing. You don’t want to be thinking about job interviews and child payments, let alone your individual judgment. You’re eighth-grade graduates. You’re looking ahead to high school.

All right. The point of all this is not to be afraid, be very afraid. Don’t be afraid. But don’t be afraid for the right reasons.

Have faith, trust in God, put Him first. And you’ll find that life is good. God is good. You’re in for a lot of hard work, drudgery and sacrifice. Things won’t always go the way you want. There will be crosses for you to carry, just as Jesus carried a cross for you. Don’t be afraid. Life is good. God is good.

You may screw up. You certainly will screw up. Realize that you screwed up, and be sorry. Tell God—and anyone else you need to—that you’re sorry. Go to confession, go to Mass. By the grace of God, try not to screw up again. Because you know what? You don’t have to. Nobody—not your parents, your teachers, your friends—can stop you from screwing up—but no one can make you screw up either. Don’t be afraid. Life is good. God is good.

In whatever situation you ever find yourself, there’s always a way of starting to do God’s will. Figure out what it is, and do it. Some situations may be tougher than others, and sometimes you’re only in the situation you’re in because you screwed up. It doesn’t matter. You can always begin, wherever you are, in any situation, however difficult, to do God’s will. It’s usually easier if you start sooner, and harder if you start later, but it’s always better to start than not to.

Start now.