Memo to Commencement Speakers

Graduation time is just around the comer, and scores of seminary professors, denominational leaders, and parish ministers will be invited to speak words of wisdom to the new decade’s first graduating class. Once again we can expect the air to buzz with the tired oratory and flowery nonsense we have been hearing from commencement speakers for generations. To be asked to speak at the old alma mater or the local university is considered an honor, and the speaker makes a mighty effort to deliver profound words to the eager young intellectuals who are about to sally forth to conquer the world.

Most of the speakers will flop on their faces, because the graduates, for the most part, are not eager intellectuals at all. They are the survivors of a four-year course of scratching, scrambling, and mayhem within the ivy-covered walls. Their main effort has been the pursuit of the impossible revolutionary dream of manhood for immature kids. Most of these already disillusioned idealists are eager, but not for words of wisdom from the fathers of the church. They want to get their feet wet in a world that they believe needs them desperately. They endure commencement speakers as the final indignity of an educative process that has trapped them for more years than they care to remember. They want to get out of the unreal world of the campus to where the action is.

But the real cause of commencement-speaker failure is not so much the audience. It is the artful way most speakers lie, or, in kinder terms, speak from pious idealism with little regard for reality. For years commencement speakers have been telling graduates that the world is waiting breathlessly for what they have to give; that unlimited opportunity lies just over the horizon; that all will be well when they take the helm and start man on a straight course. This is garbage. The graduates know it, and someone had better start saying so, or else the hypocrisy gap will widen into an impossible chasm.

Let some commencement speaker tell the graduates that much of the business world where they hope to rise to fame and fortune is shot through with highly questionable ethics. Those who do not know it already will soon discover that right and wrong are relative in the modern business community, and that the situation in which one finds himself determines his course of action. Let’s stop pretending that service and quality motivate and control our business system. Much of American business is controlled by its own god, Dollar, and no sacrifice is too great for this modern Moloch, even the sacrifice of basic integrity. Graduates should be told that in our world morality, honesty, and conscience are colored a nasty grey. What commencement speaker will tell business graduates the truth?

The great cities where these new graduates hope to practice the fine art of social service are rat-infested, garbage-strewn jungles of passion, racial hatred, and smoldering violence. The red tape and bureaucracy they despise will confront them at every turn, and unless they have unusual courage, they will soon sink into despair and join the legion of paper-shufflers who have gone before them. They will soon be trapped in the relative peace of a bureau office, constantly exposed to misery and need on every hand, but unable to do very much about it. Their dreams of triumphantly bringing order out of urban chaos will go up in smoke as they face fear and ignorance and indolence. The city of their dreams has promise, but the promise is buried under tons of dirt and inefficiency, and they had better prepare themselves for long hours, low pay, and little respect from either the needy recipients of their good service or those who provide the means for paying the bills. Let some commencement speaker standing before the graduates in social science tell it honestly one time, and forget the frills of a hoped-for world. Maybe then the only recruits will be the truly committed.

Those bright-eyed young ministers who go forth with B.D. or M.Div. in hand to revitalize the tired, decaying established church should hear the harsh truth clearly before they break their jousting lance against a wall of indifference. They have been nurtured on the small-group mystique, which tells them that small groups meeting in informal neighborhood gatherings point the way to a revitalized Christianity. They have been lured by a siren song of prayer cells, legislative prayer breakfasts, and interdenominational dialogue; this, they are assured, will be the shape of the church militant in the seventies. But let some honest commencement speaker tell these graduates that small groups, prayer cells, and all the other new dressings still cover the old man. Lives have been changed by these new means, and a new openness in the Christian community has come from these methods of ministry. But too often the small group has degenerated into a special-interest clique or a coffee klatsch for neighborhood gossip. Let some commencement speaker tell the new prophets that politics and personal interest and cultural bias hound these meetings and render them powerless to transform society and bring in the Kingdom.

Regardless of the setting, whether small college, great university, or venerable old seminary, let the commencement speaker tell it like it is. Let members of the establishment tell graduates that the world is estranged from the living God because of man’s unconquered sin. Is there a voice that will speak the clear truth that war and crime and prejudice and greed stalk this world like the ancient horsemen of the Apocalypse simply because of human sin?

Let some commencement speaker, with the courage of deep conviction and biblical faith, call for commitment to Jesus Christ from business-school graduates. The basic problem facing the entire human family, including the business world, centers in the age-old question of sin and salvation. And the good news of Jesus Christ was never more needed than in this present age of trouble.

The custodian of that grand good news is the Church. Surely the church’s spokesmen, its seminary professors, denominational leaders, and parish ministers, should have the courage to tell it straight to confused, restless young graduates. These young people can reform the business world, and change the cities of the land, and bring new life to the Church. But they will do it only through Jesus Christ, living in them and motivating their actions in the swirling current of the modern world.

IN HIS SAMENESS OF GRACE OUR CHURCH, BURNING

For a Church Destroyed by Fire December 25, 1969

God’s arson has laid us our worship waste:

This place of our reverence late, late of our Christmasing

That bell-towered peals for joy of his birth,

Reeks; in welters of smokes our altars blister

And break; like his flesh from the crossarms,

The hanged rafters char from the roof;

The great burning snakes in the steeple,

And its rent fabric fails, with a gnashing of bells.

Ah, Christ! Our singing is dead in our throats;

Were those false carols, false parables,

The canticles of ten lies that based our hopes?

What grace is this in God’s gift of burning?

What is left is rubble.

What is left of us is God’s rubble;

What is left is God’s rubble his people:

We the broken bricks, the imperfect rocks of his building

And again his rebuilding: we are left, though he level,

And are not left graceless; in the stone of us He yet towers.

For this giving Of us to ourselves, Our Father: thanks.

NANCY G. WESTERFIELD

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.