BACCALAUREATE HOMILY 2016 LOYOLA HIGH SCHOOL OF LOS ANGELES
My dear Brother Jesuits, Members of the Administration, Faculty and Staff, Parents, Families, Friends and Guests, and Members of the Class of 2016:
Mr. Schaeffer will confirm for you that I am not lying when I tell you that, after I accepted his kind invitation to preach the homily for tonight’s commencement liturgy, I asked him to consult members of the class so they could give me some suggestions for what I could say that might keep the class’ attention.
I liked the one that was five brief words: Be wise and be brief. But I like this one even more: Just tell us how awesome we are and then sit down.
As if…..
The Baccalaureate Mass tonight falls on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a feast that is very dear to the Jesuit tradition because of its connection to the Jesuit ideals of leadership and service. The scripture readings center around the theme of the characteristics and the responsibilities of a good shepherd. They emphasize for us that the shepherd who takes pride in his or her calling will fulfill three serious and interdependent missions: to lead the flock, to feed the flock and to protect the flock.
In that sense, Loyola, in all its offerings and in all its operations, has done its best to be shepherds for you. Loyola has led you to academic, athletic and extracurricular pastures which have increased your perception of yourself and your confidence in yourself. Loyola has fed you by providing you the tools of knowledge, repetition, cooperation and affection so that you will not starve to death from ignorance, arrogance or loneliness. And Loyola, with all its heart, has tried to protect you from the wolves of contemporary culture: the narcissism which encourages you to see yourself as the center of the universe, the entitlement which makes you assume that great things should happen to you even if you haven’t worked hard to achieve them, and the superficiality which encourages you to be satisfied simply with a surface understanding of both persons and events.
Only you know how successful Loyola has been for you; but the one thing I know for sure is that Loyola has been effective in direct proportion to your ability to trust the shepherd and your willingness to open your heart to being led.
And as you sit here tonight, I hope that you don’t think you have reached the end of anything; but I hope that you are resolved to continue to develop the habits you have learned here which will make you a lifelong student of our humanity and of all of its experiences.
Seeing graduation through that lens, I think it’s appropriate and helpful for me to try to articulate tonight what Loyola hopes it has been forming in you and is now unleashing upon the world.
I can say it in five words, even if they are in Spanish: “en todo amar y servir,” “in everything to love and to serve.” This is another way of articulating the Jesuit way, the aim and scope of everything St. Ignatius set in motion: in schools, of course, but in whatever other involvement in the world Jesuits and their partners challenge themselves to engage.
Loyola’s hopes for you can be reduced to three questions: Are you learning the habit of courage? Are you learning the habit of compassion? Are you learning the habit of connectedness?
Courage, whose root is the Latin ‘cor’ for heart, is often equated with heroism, but that is not necessarily true. Courage is simpler than heroism. It’s the habit of living your truth, whatever that truth involves. Courage allows a person, even if what they do is never seen, to welcome their own vulnerability and even to accept eventual disappointment in life.
The habit of compassion is preparation for daring, for being able to confront our fear of pain. The habit of compassion allows us to relax and to move gently toward that which scares us, whether the fear is of persons who are different, possibilities that are not slam dunks, or ideas that are unsettling. The habit of compassion means that we never shut down our capacity to feel for another, and that we recognize that our relationship with others is never one between the healers and the wounded, but a relationship between equals.
The habit of connectedness is practicing the value of living life taking nothing for granted and seeing everything and everyone as grace, as blessing. It means living one of life’s most important axioms: “We have no control over the length of our lives, but we do have control over the depth of our lives.” It’s another way of saying something Pope Francis emphasizes over and over again: the culture of superficiality in which we live is becoming more and more of an insult to the humanity we share. To the extent that any man or woman is considered invisible, relegated to insignificance or expendability, all of humanity is diminished.
The twin towers of your senior year, the Senior Project and the Kairos Retreat, have, along with so many other experiences during your four years here, been training in courage, in compassion and in connectedness. These are the three things, along, of course, with conscience, which all of us hope are in your backpacks and toolboxes as you turn in your caps and gowns tomorrow. Seek these, treasure these, and you will preserve your soul.
By this time tomorrow, all of the names of 2016 will have been read aloud, from Austin Herbert Abling to Jason Zhong; and this part of your life journey will begin to recede into the golden haze of memory. But this moment, rather than being an end, is merely the door to the next phase, the next invitation from St. Ignatius: the movement from “en todo amar y servir” to “Ite et inflammate omnia”, Latin for: Go and set the world on fire.
That’s where you go now as your roads diverge from this sacred space on Venice Boulevard. Go and set the world on fire: not with matches, not with fear and division and hatred and suspicion. Set the world on fire with ideas, with dialogue, with passion for truth and for justice, with excellence, with compassion for and service to everyone without exception, with unselfish love. Set the world on fire by defending the weakest among us, the most neglected and forgotten and be the light needed in what Blessed Paul VI called “this sad, dramatic yet wonderful world.”
And when you return to this space for your reunions, for the football games and the plays and the musicals, when you come back to have your children baptized in Clougherty Chapel or to register your own sons as freshmen, know that you are coming home, home to the place that shepherded you into manhood, the place
that fed you with competence and goodness, the place that protected you from meaninglessness and from willful stupidity, the place that taught you how, and how important it is for the future of culture itself, to be a shepherd yourself.
So, 2016, you are Loyola’s, and you are awesome; having said that, now I will sit down.
Amen.