Members of the Board of Trustees, fellow faculty and staff, families, friends, and especially members of the class of 2022:

It has been quite a journey.

Halfway through your college years, a global pandemic disrupted your lives and for the remaining two years completely transformed them. It did this to all of us, of course, but these were formative years for you; a time when the college experiences we take for granted were altered irrevocably or eliminated entirely. And while we all grumbled a bit, or a lot, and felt lost, and sometimes anxious, you handled the hassles and disappointments with grace. And we noticed.

Conventional wisdom has it that my responsibility today is to tell you to go out and change the world. I understand the sentiment behind this: we have faith in you, we see such promise, and there is so much reparative work to be done in this broken world. But the advice strikes me as a bit cynical, honestly, as well as an impossible burden to bear.

So on this important day in your life I want to suggest that you are called to something else. And “calling” is the operative word here. Many of you know your next steps professionally—what occupation will occupy the hours of your working life. Some of you don’t know that yet, and if you don’t, and if you’re a little uneasy about that, I hope you know that such openness can be a gift, a door of possibility to walk through, even with some trepidation.

But whatever it is you decide to do for money, your calling, your vocation is something else. You might get paid to be a mathematician or a mechanic, a painter or a professor, but your vocation is to live purposefully, gratefully, mindfully this one “wild and precious life” you have been given.[1]

And while this looks different for each of us, there are, I think, at least three essential elements to living out one’s calling in this world.

The first is beauty. We cannot be fully alive, fully flourishing human beings without beauty—the beauty of Creation and of supportive human relationships, the beauty of poetry, science, art. In the classical sense, beauty presumes integrity or wholeness.Something is beautiful (a painting, a peony, a person) when it is most fully realized, when it is utterly and altogether itself.

But brokenness, too, can disclose beauty. To attend with care to something injured or damaged—a friend’s wounded spirit, a distressed landscape—is to encounter a fragile beauty, which first requires the willingness to just be present, be with, and then the imagination to help gather the fragments into something whole, something healed.

I hope we have helped to cultivate a love of beauty in you during your time here. I hope we have expanded your idea of education beyond mere preparation for employment, such that it includes a calling and a desire to seek, enjoy, embody, create, and share beauty. And to do all this for no other reason than the sheer giftedness and goodness of it—the delight and deep joy of being caught up in the beautiful.

* * *

A second essential element for living a purposeful, grateful, mindful life is love. Love is the calling of each of us in this world. That we have evacuated the word “love” of its core meaning, which is to will and to work for another’s flourishing, makes it no less a claim on our lives. I hope you will carry the love you have found here in friendships and communities into the future that awaits you. I hope you will love those who are often deemed unloveable. By which I don’t mean tolerate them. Tolerance costs us nothing. Loving others–seeking their good, willing their happiness, choosing to spend time in their company because all persons have beautiful gifts to offer—this is the risky business of building the beloved community and of living more fully into our humanity.

I also hope you know your own belovedness. Isn’t it true that the hardest person to love sometimes is yourself? Some of you have had love withheld from you—something maddening and heartbreaking to those of us who have come to know and love you. I think of this line from the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz: I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being. And as another poet has said, sometimes / it is necessary /to reteach a thing its loveliness.[2]

And I hope you’ll love the world. By which I don’t mean what is typically referred to as “the environment.” I mean particular rivers, creeks, lakes, oceans, mountains, glades, woodlands, trees, creatures, plants—all of whom have names and to whom we all are kin. I hope you’ll regularly find yourself happily lost on a walk in the woods. I hope you’ll dig in the dirt, plant a garden, and grow some of your own food. There is a cognitive richness and a moral significance to such physical labor. Don’t let a college degree and a desk job keep you from such pleasures that can, quite literally, keep us grounded us in this world. 

And if you are terrified by climate collapse—by the catastrophic harm that human action has visited upon the Earth, you should be. And you shouldn’t be optimistic. But you should be hopeful. Because hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba has said—something we have to practice every day: both a disposition and a will to act, even when we feel despair. Climate trauma is real, especially in places like Appalachia, and so is climate grief. And thus hope is not naïve. It is the personal and collective work of resistance to powerful interests that profit from the destruction of places, lives, and livelihoods. Do that hopeful work, not because you’re optimistic that all will turn out well but because such work is the right thing to do, regardless of how it turns out.

So love with hope: other people, yourselves, this bruised, abused, and beautiful world.

* * *

Finally, a third essential element of being true to the vocation of living purposefully, gratefully, mindfully is a commitment to justice. The philosopher and social critic Cornel West has said that “justice is what love looks like in public.”[3] But that hardly rings true to the lived experiences of so many people and to what we see around us every day.

Many of you know that we have established the Center for Restorative Justice on our campus. “Restorative justice” names a constellation of convictions and practices that redefines wrongdoing broadly and its impacts specifically. Where the modern judicial system focuses on offenders and their punishment, restorative justice expands the circle of stakeholders to include those who have been harmed and members of the community as well.

A core feature of restorative justice is the idea that harm creates social obligations—the necessity of taking responsibility, putting things right, repairing what is broken. This feature flows from a worldview that imagines we live—all of us and all of creation—in a web of mutuality, and that a rupture in that web is mended, or has the potential to be mended, less by arbitrarily applied punitive measures and more through the hard, often grinding work of conversation and collaboration, of encounter and risk-taking.

There’s nothing romantic about this and there are no guarantees. Restorative justice seeks first of all to tell the truth about what is going on. As a way of seeing and being in the world, it resonates with the theological anthropology of most of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions: no human being is expendable and mercy is not only for the so-called deserving.

Graduates: I hope you have gotten a glimpse of what restorative justice can mean for your own calling. I hope you will see no one as disposable, as erasable. I hope that when you cause harm, as we all do in ways large and small, that you take responsibility for it, do the work of repair, and that those affected by it meet you in a spirit of openness that restores you to them and to yourself.

* * *

So go from this place, dear ones of the class of 2022, to live beautiful lives, to love without counting the cost, to be fierce and tender advocates for restorative justice in this punishing world. Make interesting mistakes. Work with your hands. And your heart. Practice hope. And know that we will hold your wild, weird, beautiful selves in our hearts, as we hope you will hold ours in yours.

It has been quite a journey.

We’re eager to see where yours takes you next. We are cheering you on. And we love you.

[1] Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” in House of Light (Beacon Press, 1990).

[2] Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow,” in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980).

[3] Cornel West, Howard University speech, April, 2011.