Graduation: the end or the beginning

Throughout the past and coming weeks, many of you will be attending graduations. It is often an exciting and rewarding event for both the individuals completing their coursework and their families and loved ones who honor them. The event itself is often referred to as a Commencement Ceremony, a celebration of the completion of a school or college course when diplomas and degrees are conferred.
Many traditions have developed, over the years, which have become important pieces of this grand experience: wearing special brightly colored robes, moving of the tassels, speeches and orations offered by alumni and other hand-picked speakers, processions, songs, hymns and other music specially chosen by choral directors and the graduates themselves.
It’s a grand time which attempts to capture the importance of hard work, study, and years of educational focus. It can result in seeing family and friends not seen in many years, exchanging yearbooks and signed cards loaded with kind words and generous gifts, and even tears on the part of graduates and attendees.
I’ve attended and taken part in many of these celebrations myself, both as a graduating participant and sitting within the jubilant audience, always find it heartwarming in many different ways.
So much so, I experience my own misting eyes along with the tears of proud parents, grandparents, faculty and administrators, and the beaming newly-minted graduates.
But I often also wonder; are these the tears of ‘thanks’ that this stage of life has finally ended, or tears of ‘fear’ contemplating what awaits me on the other side of the classroom?
Graduations are usually assumed to be an ending, but like life itself in many ways, endings for one stage of life is at the same time a beginning for something new and often totally unknown. To understand this insight I rely on my Christian belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and how it relates to my own life.
For us as believers in the Resurrection, death is as much a part of human life as birth. From the moment we are conceived and born, our presence on this earth will always result in death….we just don’t know when or how or where or why, but simply at some point in human time it will end, it must end: “for unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies“ it remains just a grain of wheat.

And our belief in the Resurrection leads us to realize that death is truly not an end, but a change. A rather major change, like being in a school for eight years or four years, or some other mathematical calculation, but a change, nonetheless, that defines, in many ways, what our future will be.
And so, the event of graduation, is also a time when we begin to look towards the future, and this celebration becomes a Commencement. To ‘commence’ is to give origin, to begin, to initiate, to start something new.
Children become teens and cannot enter high school until they finish their primary educations, just as colleges rarely accept new students until they can produce a high school diploma. Military service, whether through the draft or as a volunteer also depend on varied educational completions.
Even working within the family or close acquaintances require some special or time-tested learning…..the one needs to take place before this new stage can begin, can commence.
And so, congratulations to you all this coming Spring: you students graduating, parents and families, you many teachers and staff, you’ve all made this journey together and so celebrate together.
And again relying on your Easter Faith, as St. Paul has so beautifully taught us: nothing can separate us from the Love of God.
And because you graduates have accomplished this magnificent feat through your Commencement Exercises, go forward believing in yourself, knowing that your past performances will drive your future behaviors, and whether tears of joy or tears of fear, fear not, for your Lord is always with you!
The Reverend Jay Jung, C.M., is the Senior Priest in Service at St. Vincent dePaul Parish in Perryville. Ordained in 1977, he graduated from St. Mary’s of the Barrens College Seminary in 1973 and has served in both educational settings and parish ministry for over 45 years. He is a member of the Congregation of the Mission, commonly known as the Vincentian Fathers and Brothers.