This Is the Speech I Gave

Hey folks. So I got the chance to speak at my own graduation last week. If you were there, you heard what was, technically, the seventh draft of my speech. The first was about four times longer and completely different in its path, and I'll post it here in a day or two. But first, this is the speech I gave:

Good morning, and congratulations, everybody. In addition to my friends and family who’ve seen me through for so long, I would like to thank our amazing Education and English departments for the incredible work they do. Those of us who have benefited from their service, and from any of our faculty, are deeply indebted to them.

Looking back at my own experience at this school, and that of many of my friends, there were only two things that struck me as being both applicable to nearly everybody, and being located, in one form or another, very near the heart of our existence these past few years: one of these is the struggle of faith, and the other is community. We expected these things when we enrolled – we even looked forward to them – and yet I doubt either of these things manifested itself in exactly the way we thought it might.

Personally, I had imagined that the struggles within a Christian school would be fewer and simpler than those of any other given institution. As I discovered, they were not fewer; they were of a different kind altogether. The question for me was not “What do I do or not do?” but rather, “Who am I, what is this faith I have been professing, and what does it mean to me?” The answers to these questions, if we have found them, are deeply personal to each of us. But I would like to characterize our search for answers with the only story that ever seemed to fit. I read from Genesis 32:

24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
27 The man asked him, "What is your name?" "Jacob," he answered.
28 Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."
29 … Then he blessed him there. […]
and Jacob was limping because of his hip.

How like the conflict that arises in any faith! We find ourselves, sooner or later, alone in the dark night of the soul, and we grapple with a stranger who will not reveal himself to us. The temptation to surrender is nearly unbearable, the pain and exhaustion nearly overwhelming, and yet we know that without this struggle and its promise of a blessing, we have nothing. We feel wrenched apart, and broken, and the night seems never to end. It is only just in time that the glowing fingers of dawn stretch across the horizon.

In the light of the coming day, we find ourselves not destroyed, but changed utterly, and we see that our blessing from God was not some gift at the end: it was the struggle itself, and the transformation it brought. Our new identity is summed up in the meaning of our new name, Israel: “struggles with God.” Our limp reminds us that there will be more wrestling in the future.

We see also that we were not alone at all during our experience – around us in the night were our brothers and sisters in faith, some wrestling as well, and others, unbeknownst to us, supporting us through the hardest times. This is the community of Christ.

As we graduate, many of us will be leaving this particular community. And though each of our experiences with it has been vastly different, these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer bring perspective:

“It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us […]. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.”

Even if nothing I have said of our experience has rung true to your own time here, know that nonetheless, I am as entirely bound to you, and you to me, as any two people on this earth. As Christians, each one of us lives out a small, unrepeatable fragment of an ever-increasing whole that we call the Christian experience. If there is anything I believe CCU has taught me, it is that the Christian experience is infinitely broader, infinitely more complex, infinitely more all-encompassing than I could ever have imagined, and the grandeur of God, in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, will flame out like shining from shook foil.

We have struggled together, and we have found a holy love together. If we leave after today and settle elsewhere, my prayer is that wherever we travel we support those others who grapple with the Lord; that when we struggle ourselves, we allow our brothers and sisters to support us; and that in all situations, we infinitely pour out to others from the infinite love we have received, and continue to receive.

Thank you.