Graduation thoughts

AS chaplain of a number of schools, l can’t help but get involved in the preparation and celebration of the graduation of students. I consider it a very rewarding privilege, especially when I finally get to celebrate the Holy Mass for them and to say my little piece of reflections.

Graduations are blessed occasions to give thanks to God and to many others—parents, teachers, students, etc. They also allow us to consider again certain basic truths that we tend to take for granted.

In my view, graduations remind us that our life here on earth is made of parts and stages. Graduations, among other things, precisely mark these points of transition. But they actually point to a very important truth.

And this is none other than that our life, though made of different parts and stages, is actually one, the very one created by God though procreated by parents, and meant to participate in the very life of God.

It is a life that comes from God and belongs to God. Given our nature and the way we are, it is a life meant to be knowingly and lovingly offered to God. Man is meaningless without God.

The basic structure of our life can readily validate this truth. The different parts of our being—our intelligence, our will, our emotions and bodily aspects, even our social life—find their proper objects in God.

But these truths are often taken for granted. And sometimes from this indifference and complacency, a more serious attitude of disbelief can develop with a matching moral life that can not rid itself from sin and evil.

The problem that we often have is to consider education independently of God. The problem comes when we pursue our idea of human development and maturity outside of the forces of religion and faith.

The problem develops when we simply depend and rely on our own powers, often forgetting that these powers—our intelligence and will, especially—come from God, and have to be used according to God’s laws, not simply to our own will.

This problem can become so widespread that we can talk about a certain secularization, that is, a systematic removal of God from all human affairs, replacing him with our own ideas of what is good and bad. We develop a secularized world.

We now make ourselves our own God, the ultimate creator and designer of the world, of what is right and wrong, etc. And thus, everything now depends on us. What we cannot cope, we simply dismiss, and we don’t seem to care about what would happen. This is the ultimate expression of self-deification.

The task of education is precisely to form men and women into real persons aware of who they really are and what they ought to be and do. This is when we realize that we need to pray to be in constant contact with God.

Education develops the different aspects of our life with God as the ultimate and constant principle, goal, pattern and driving source of energy. The challenge is how we can make this truth a living reality in all of us.

Only in this way can we, for example, pursue our physical development that would feel the need for modesty and chastity. The pursuit for beauty and strength would be cleared of vanity and arrogance.

Our intellectual development would always follow the objective standards of truth and recognize the role of faith. It would always be exercised in humility.

Only in this way can we use our freedom properly, vitally linking it to truth, and thus making it compatible always with responsibility and obedience. Freedom would never be a capricious, licentious freedom.

Graduations make us realize all these, and many, many more. Remember, they mark those points of transition that connect us to other stages until we reach our proper end, and that’s God, our Creator, Father and Savior.