Just a year ago, my husband Dave and I sat on the piazza in Bologna, Italy, and watched the newest graduates of the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world, saunter by. During their joyous walks around the piazza, with friends and family around them, all of the graduates – men and women – wore big, beautiful crowns of laurel leaves, flowers, and berries. It is from these crowns of laurel berries – bacca lauri – that the name baccalaureate has evolved.

Today we join together to honor your baccalaureate – without the literal laurel and berries – but with gratitude to our Creator for all the good gifts that bring us here today. The gifts of good news for the oppressed and comfort for those who mourn.

We are part of the Manchester College community, and today we celebrate the ways our lives are enriched by that reality. Each of us is here because other people have supported us. We didn’t get here by ourselves. We had help from

• Our families

• Our churches

• Our friends

• Our neighbors

• Our roommates

• Our RAs

• Our professors

• Our advisers

• Our custodians

• Our coaches

All this support doesn’t mean, however, that we never felt lonely. When our families dropped us off that first day, we didn’t even know how to get to the cafeteria. At choir tryouts, we were terrified to sing in front of the experienced music majors, and at our first athletic practice, we feared that we would look pathetic in comparison with juniors and seniors. We felt very lonely.

Even midway through College, we sometimes felt lonely when all our friends left for the weekend and we chose to eat a granola bar rather than go to the Union by ourselves. We felt lonely when we bombed an exam. We felt lonely when a dating relationship ended and it seemed like every other couple in the entire world was supremely happy. 

We were lonely, but we were never alone. We are in a community that values learning, faith, service, integrity, and diversity ... where professors and coaches are honest enough to tell us the truth about how we are doing, even when it isn’t good. We sing in choirs where the quality of performance correlates with practice and focus. We did not study and sing and compete and work and laugh in isolation. We were part of a community.

It is that community that helps us realize that the world is wider than Indiana.  Tensions in Israel and Palestine are more vivid for us because our friends came here from their homes in Ramallah, and some of us had summer medical internships in Jerusalem. Hurricane Katrina became more real to us when we heard our own graduate, Mark Stahl, describe his evacuation from New Orleans. The challenges of living with cystic fibrosis became more real to us because Professor Marcia Benjamin has been so trusting and generous in sharing her experiences with this genetic disease. 

We are a beloved community because we are committed to respecting the infinite work of every individual and because our members include such a wonderful array of people.

• Patty Cox checking our meal cards

• Dave Friermood in his omnipresent truck

• Brian Kinner cleaning our residence halls

• Brad Yoder teaching social work at 2 o’clock and running with the cross country team at 3:30

• Lila Hammer finishing the graduation audits on Saturday and playing first clarinet in our symphony orchestra on Sunday 

These people challenge us to lead lives worthy of the callings for which we have prepared. A Jewish lesson tells of a very old Rabbi Zusya who reflected on his death: “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘why were you not Zusya?’”

Who are we? And what are we called to do? Is it possible for the one among you who will be a first-year teacher at Concord High School to be thinking about a calling? How can a first semester at IU medical school for two of you be a calling?Don’t we have to become missionaries or ministers to be called? Frederick Buechner writes that vocation is “the place where a person’s deep gladness meets the needs of the world.”1 Imagine that kind of life work – where your deepest gladness meets the needs of the world! It’s possible! Many of the faculty members surrounding us right now view their work as a calling. In Buechner’s words, their “deepest gladness” comes from interactions with you – and some of those interactions change everything. When we compare you today with how you were when you arrived – how you thought (pretty simplistically) and talked (loudly and often) and acted (you don’t even want to know) – as we look at you now, you bring us deep gladness!! 

You’ve gained focus during your time here. Which books were like magnets and drew you in and which books almost feel like they pushed you away? Which classes excited you and which didn’t? Which class opened your eyes more than others? One of our graduates who has completed a Ph.D. in philosophy and now teaches at the college level said the class that opened his eyes most widely was canoeing taught by Tom Jarman because “it was about so much more than canoeing.” 

But Buechner rightfully noted that our gladness also needs to match with the needs of the world. Manchester faculty and staff have certainly educated you about those needs. Just a week ago today, you raised funds for a micro-loan organization to help impoverished women in Benin and Togo. Others of you built houses each year for Habitat for Humanity. Nearly 150 of our students tutor local elementary children in reading each week! Senior social work majors just completed field placements that plunged them into the lives of those who have no homes. You have learned a lot about the needs of the world.

When you combine the needs of the world with those things that bring you your deepest gladness, you have a sense of calling and vocation. It is this sense of call that distinguishes a job from a vocation. An accountant whose work is her vocation not only analyzes spreadsheets but serves her clients with integrity. A teacher with a sense of vocation doesn’t clock in at the last minute and clock out at the earliest time each day. He spends time with students and develops his lesson plans carefully. A teacher with a sense of vocation, like one of our own graduates this year, shaves his head when one of his students loses her hair because of chemotherapy. 

One of the most powerful professors in Manchester’s history was Gladdys E. Muir, founder of our peace studies program. Students who studied with Miss Muir describe the immense academic challenge she presented them, with her famously long and rigorous reading lists. Her students describe her gentle but “thorough”2 probing during discussions. She kept in touch with her students, long after they had graduated. She sent them reading lists and expected them to go to graduate school and to participate in international humanitarian aid programs. Our own peace garden is named in her honor. She would love to know that we sat in that garden and talked and thought about difficult issues.

She taught by who she was. Like Quaker writer Parker Palmer, Miss Muir listened to her life. Palmer wrote: Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my identity, not the standards by which I must live – but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”3 Miss Muir knew herself. Able to articulate her beliefs. Willing to listen to other points of view. Impeccable integrity.  

Palmer could have been writing about Gladys Muir: “Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”4

Sitting before us are graduates whose will become our children’s teachers, social workers, doctors, mothers, physical therapists, professors, fathers, journalists, bankers, accountants, choir directors, sales reps, and chemists. On behalf of all of us here, I say to the graduates: Be persons of integrity. Find the place where your greatest gladness meets the needs of the world. Use your gifts “for the glory of God and our neighbor’s good.”5 

Wherever you go from here, remember that you are a part of this intentional, albeit imperfect, community that is Manchester College. We cared about you while you were here, and we will care about you after you leave today. We are glad you were part of us for this chapter in your lives. Go in peace.