Commencement

Watching our youngest child receive her college diploma seemed like a major transition—one period of life ending, bringing on the next. I know there are still more transitions to come—when the children marry; when Alison and I become grandparents; and when we walk inevitably toward the sunset of our lives.

But I am way ahead of myself…back to Saturday and watching our youngest walk across a stage to receive her diploma. 

It was an eventful graduation if only because the commencement speaker was James Carville, a man who cannot speak without triggering a reaction—

Carville: How many of you are graduating with a 4.0?

Six seniors stood up to polite applause

Carville: Well, you and I share something with that 4.0—I had a 4.0 at LSU when I was there—my blood alcohol level!

He did, however, have a wonderful insight for the graduates—they have been living in a cocoon in college—a place where everyone is focused on their success, and they are about to leave for a place far less concerned about their well-being than they ever imagined, and it will rear its head in competition for jobs, paths, and that elusive ideal of success. Failure will come. The truly successful will use failure to find their way, and he elucidated Abraham Lincoln has a man of intense failure who rose to unimagined success. Mr. Carville assured the class that they would not fail as badly as Lincoln, and they more than likely would not succeed at his level, either, but that leaves a tremendous range of life in which to live. So live there, live well, and live knowing that real life is actually hard, dealing with that truth to become whoever they are to be. 

Being a pastor, I immediately recalled a seminary professor who challenged us pastors-to-be with Jesus’ model of ministry—preach for three years, have the entire congregation decide to kill you, and lose every single disciple you had, then die. His point was the same as Carville’s—idealism is wonderful, but at some point one has to deal with life as it actually is. That ability—something Reinhold Niebuhr named Christian Realism—is a tremendous tool to use in faith praxis. It provides a base from which to encounter and engage the world because it meets the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be, or need it to be, or even want it to be—the world is the world. Take it as such. I remember a Peanuts comic in which an exasperated Lucy in her psychiatric booth confronts Charlie Brown—

Lucy: Do you know of any other worlds?

CB: No.

Lucy: As far you know this is the only world we have?

CB: I guess so, yes.

Lucy: There are no other worlds in which to live?

CB: No.

Lucy: This is it?

CB: Yes.

Lucy: THEN LIVE IN IT!

Yes, live in the world in which we live as it is. But meet it with Christ’s transformational love, love that takes what is in its full reality, then works in it, with it, and through it to bring transformation into something more, something other. Jesus took the Twelve as they were, with no illusions about them, but then met them with transformational love that was able to wade through the lonesome valley of Good Friday to see them through to the other side on Easter, even as their experience of Easter took more than a Sunday morning to fully blossom within them. 

My world has changed. My children are real adults now, with independent lives and being. To wish it otherwise would serve no one. Acting as if nothing changed would actually do harm. I have a new role to play as I accept altered reality. With Christ, it can be done.

True for me—also true for all of us. 

Let us go and meet the world as it is, bringing Christ with us. The kingdom comes.