Two years ago, I spoke at graduation. This is what I said:
I like teaching more than almost anything except my family and my faith. Part of me wants to hold class here. I have so much I want to tell these students behind me, so many things I’m afraid they’ll forget. The board is here, Mr. Kempton is here. The whole faculty and staff are here. Parents, and siblings and friends are here. Thank you for coming!
Part of me thinks: “This is my chance!” “This is the culmination of my teaching career!” “We could all circle up our chairs and I could lead the largest class discussion ever!” We only need a thousand photocopies, and we could discuss poetry, mimetic desire, and Orthodox faith in the essays of Donald Sheehan… or something like that.
Somehow, I will resist this temptation. It doesn’t seem like the place.
If I were teaching a class, I’d face my students. But here I am, turned away from the graduating class, like they’re already gone.
Today the school is saying goodbye to its students, and the students are saying goodbye to their school, which feels bittersweet, but it is actually a wonderful thing.
After all, school is a thing designed to be finished. No one wants students to stay here forever. We want classes to end, tests to be over, essays to be complete, years to pass, calendars to turn. We want students to learn the material, to finish the book, to master the skills, to graduate, and to move on to something bigger and better.
School is inevitably a preparation for departure.
A faculty tabernacles for a little while with students to call them on to adulthood and maturity, but in the end, the goal of education cannot be possession. It has to be to release. What every teacher wants is for his students to surpass him, to leave him behind, as grown men and women, as children of the Most High. We want them to go out into the world, and when they go, we want them to speak the words of the Creed with intent and adoration, to walk humbly before God, and to welcome fellow travelers along the Way that Christ and the Apostles, through the Holy Spirit, have shown to us.
Our curriculum should aid with this, but the word “curriculum” is diminutive; it’s Latin for “a short road. A brief race,” like the lap around a Roman stadium so many heroes of the faith took before us. There is a greater way down which we all must travel: the Way that is Christ himself.
So, instead of presiding over an 1,100 person Socratic Seminar, I simply want to say to the class of 2016, thank you for your presence here, however temporary it inevitably was. I love your class dearly, both as individuals and as a collective, cantankerous, exuberant, and erudite group. I’m going to miss you terribly.
I miss the students, teachers and staff members that were part of your journey, but are gone now. I miss the teachers and students you never knew but who changed this school and whose absence remains in rules that were discarded years ago, in programs established, in curriculum bolstered or in books resting on my classroom shelves. They’re not here anymore, but they were once, and that matters somehow.
I mean, I hope I do see you again. I hope you all are involved in the alumni association. Film Club has unfinished business this summer. Homecoming. All that. But this is the last time your faculty will see most of you, and the last time you will see us, and we will remember you by what you used to be and aren’t anymore.
Next year I will remember you by the things that you used to do, which don’t happen anymore: by the absences you have left behind.
I will remember Elyse caring so much about coherence that she even wanted to organize the class’ brainstorms into outlines.
I will remember reading Amber’s second paper sophomore year and realizing that the weird daughter of my former babysitter was probably a genius.
I will remember you all saying that if I was going to make you think about Plato and Socrates at eight in the morning, we should at least have breakfast while we do it.
I will remember James when I try to make a yearbook without his photos.
I will remember AJ letting others ramble and keeping his thoughts to himself.
I will remember Nate trying to show underclassmen how to work hard and take themselves seriously.
I will remember your class next year when I wake up the morning after film club and no one has emailed me an eight paragraph essay on cowboy movies and the American Dream.
I will remember Amanda asking the right questions.
I will remember Holly bringing discussion to a stop by saying things so deep we all had to come up for air.
I will remember Christian ripping passes across court that no one else saw coming.
If I ever teach Romeo and Juliet again, I will remember Sarah’s strength and Tiffany’s courage.
And next year, when I’m reading Things Fall Apart, I’ll remember how Josh promised me a bowl of yam foo-foo that has yet to materialize.
Whenever I ask students what questions they have about the reading, and a thoughtful, awkward silence fills the classroom, I will remember Victoria and Ashanti, sitting next to each other like a Zoroastrian Socrates, peppering me with question after question until class ended.
And next year, I’ll think back to the best mentor group ever, that won’t be here anymore, but who did such earnest, difficult, and lovely work while they were, and who never tired of seeking truth, and helping the oppressed.
You all are going to leave here and go out and encounter the world. You will find tragedy and joy and work and rest. We will want to be reunited, and to know each others’ stories, but between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.
I wish I could say what the absence of AACS will mean for you, but I can’t. Each human life is a story as replete with detail and pathos as the Odyssey, as solitary as Macondo itself, as precise and mysterious as the cities in Kublai Khan’s empire.
I hope most of your time here was good, but probably parts of it were disappointing or frustrating. It seems frivolous to count and measure the good and the bad that happened here against each other. The glorification of God, which we do by seeking the truth, serving others, and stewarding his creation is not competitive, it’s relational.
I hope while you were here that you were kind to those around you, and that they were kind to you, that you helped those who needed help, and that you found rest when you were exhausted. I hope that AACS has been an encouragement. I hope that your world is bigger now as you leave the school than it was when you first arrived. I hope you’ll leave here educated, not just eighteen. I hope that you’ve found teachers here who are pursuing grace and truth and whose classrooms are generous and welcoming.
I hope you feel ready to give to others what they gave to you.
I hope you remember to seek something purer than a destination, something cleaner than triumph. I hope you see your failures and move away from them. I hope you see your successes and move beyond them instead of tallying them and keeping a record. I hope you find a way to live that points you to the same place whether you live or die, whether you follow it or not. I hope you listen to those who suffer, instead of lecturing them on their culpability and your own innocence. I hope you live by grace. I hope you act out your faith in good works.
I hope that the goodness and truth that were here point you to Christ, and that the brokenness that was here also points you to Christ. I hope you remember that the explanations for beauty and for sorrow are the same: that Christ is calling his beloved to take up her lamp and follow him. And so, lastly, I hope you go to church.
Next year, dear graduates, we will feel your absence. Only people we love can be absences.
After all, do not all the Saints of the faith hold communion with us even now in their absence? Though we may lament that we are sundered by such deep waters, yet they linger like incense, and we feast in their honor.
And was it not the Son’s ascension into heaven that brought the Spirit to us and brought our humanity even into the midmost mysteries of God? So that, though creation groans all around us, we rejoice that Christ came to save us, and that we will one day see him again.
Class of 2016, go in peace. Go live out the things you have learned here. Carry the absence of this school with you. Even now, we feel yours acutely. And that, seems like a reason to celebrate.
The Needle's Eye 