Struggles are the fertilizer for spiritual growth.
—Joyce Rupp
The work is often hidden and unglamorous, but it’s holy.
—Andy Stanton-Henry
Dear Members of the Class of 2023,
It has been quite the pilgrimage you have taken these past four years. In spring of 2020, you were isolating at home, probably anxious about whether life would ever be normal again, and in the days and weeks since, you have dealt with zoom and hybrid classes; you have worn masks and socially distanced; you have tested weekly for COVID; and you have even lost some of life’s normal rites of passage—all of it with the ever-present reality that school could close at any given moment’s notice, disrupting life yet again. Even now, as many routines, traditions, and habits have returned, the shadow of the pandemic lingers as each test positive forces a 5-day quarantine at home. You are the class of the pandemic, and it has not been an easy four years.
Nor have the events of the larger world been any less challenging. Since those first shutdowns you endured, you have witnessed an armed insurrection in our nation’s capital, the overturn of constitutional protections, Ukraine’s invasion by a despot, and far too many mass shootings of school children and police killings of people of color. China is actually busy building new coal-fired power plants—even in the face of its own destructive climate events—and the economic turmoil coming out of COVID has generated inflation and other financial hardships not seen since the late 1970s. It has, indeed, been one of the more tumultuous times to live through as you have matured into young adults.
Yet in that same time period, you have also observed the nearly miraculous creation of a successful vaccine in less than a year that saved billions of lives; you have seen the successful criminal prosecution of law enforcement for the murder of George Floyd; and you have witnessed the first nuclear fusion reaction to generate more energy than it consumed, laying the foundation for a truly carbon-free energy future. A multi-national effort launched and installed a telescope a million miles from Earth for peering at the origins of the universe—an engineering marvel so complex that it had more than 300 potential points of failure threatening its final activation—and four countries (Columbia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Panama) created the Transboundary Marine Biosphere Reserve of the Tropical Eastern Pacific, the largest conservation area on the planet.
Hence, along with the bad has come the good; along with the good has come the bad, and in between, there have been thousands of sunrises and sunsets, moments of great joy and times of deep sadness. There has been laughter and tears, days that were interminable and those you wished would never end. There has been, as the wise author of Ecclesiastes once wrote, “a time for every purpose.”
And it is about that sense of balance and its agency that I want to write to all of you today. We, your elders, have not always done a good job of achieving equilibrium with the world—or even within our own lives—and we now share with you (and will eventually leave with you) significant environmental and social problems that threaten to unbalance things even further. Not least of which is the very technology I am using to write this letter. As I have demonstrated to some of you firsthand, the device you are reading this on is simultaneously inhibiting your brain’s ability to function at full capacity—not ideal for tackling the kinds of problems we are leaving you—and if one adds in the fact that AI is now threatening our very capacity to discern what is true from what is false, it can be quite challenging to maintain any optimism about rebalancing both our lives and the larger world.
However, you will neither be the first…nor will you be the last!…to inherit the failures of those who came before you—a truth the Jewish scriptures sometimes refer to as “the sins of the fathers”—and in your own generation’s struggles with these “sins,” you will discover for yourselves what is perhaps the fundamental truth about what it means to be fully human: that there is not and never can be enough time; so choose wisely the use of the time you have.
Granted, embracing this finitude is never easy, and it has frankly been my generation’s failure to do so collectively that has gotten our species into the current “hot mess” we are confronting. But once you recognize and own that you cannot do it all—that each time you choose one course of action, you are by definition ruling out its alternatives…that you can never be everything you potentially could be—then you approach all of life’s choices with a better sense of balancing that of the Light and that of the Dark within you.
Because there will be both. No one walks through life without times of alienation, and no one walks through life without times of grace. Indeed, what my many students have taught me over the decades is that the dance of estrangement and redemption, of sin and salvation, of harm and healing…this dance is the moral and spiritual equivalent of breathing. And just as biological breathing provides the body’s agency for action, so too does the soul’s “breathing” give agency for purpose—the power to effect change.
Which brings me to a question I have now asked my graduating seniors at the end of every year for 34 years: what will you do with yours? What will you do with your power? Will you consume simply to consume the way so much of our society continues to do? Will you invest your resources without thought to their potential footprint on the world? Will you support legislating to maintain the systemic structures of white, hetero-normative privilege? Or will you actively care for the Other? Will you deliberately fight for social and economic justice? Will you thoughtfully choose your impact on the environment?
Or, to paraphrase my favorite proverb, will you merely curse the darkness or will you light candles against it?
Will you willingly tackle the “sins” you’ll inherit?
I will never get to see your answer. But I have joined the caring adults in your lives who have done our best to give you the tools to walk a path that is both meaningful for you and a positive one for those around you, and it is with faith, hope, and love that we part ways, launching you into the next stage of your journey. It won’t be an easy one; nothing that truly enriches your life ever is. However, if the pandemic has given you nothing else, it has made you resilient beyond your years, and thus, I have the fullest confidence in your capacity to confront successfully life’s future demands.
In the meantime, to quote Dr. Seuss—a mandatory requirement of every graduation event—“Oh, the places you will go!” Congratulations and best of luck!
References
Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gazzaley, A. & Rosen, L. (2016) The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Maylett, T. & Vandehey, T. (2023) Swipe: The Science Behind Why We Don’t Finish What We Start. Herndon, VA: Amplify Publishing.
Rupp, J. (2005) Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino. New York: Orbis Books.
Stanton-Henry, A. (April 1, 2023) Ten Miles Around. Friends Journal. https://www.friendsjournal.org/ten-miles-around/.
Light a Candle 