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The Graduation Season 2015
It is the graduation season. On university and college campuses around the world people gather in a highly-ritualized pageant to mark a point of transition in many areas of human endeavor. Professors and administrators, bedecked in the colorful robes that mark their status and wearing academic hoods that reveal their own university’s colors, process in solemn assembly, leading in the candidates for a myriad of degrees: doctorates, masters and bachelors. Parents, grandparents, wives, husbands, friends and even children of the degree candidates are gathered in massive numbers. The university band or orchestra plays the familiar sounds of Pomp and Circumstance. A commencement address is given by some luminary in political life, business life, the theater, the world of international relations and sometimes even by an alumnus of that institution, who has achieved prominent stature. The world into which these freshly-minted degree candidates are about to enter is spelled out for them in that address. The call to nobility is uttered. Usually a plea to begin support of the graduates’ alma mater is issued. An oath may be administered and the event normally concludes with the playing of the school song which, of course, graduates and alumni together sing lustily, knowing the words by heart.
I view university graduation ceremonies as windows into the state of our culture, just as I view the presidential election every four years as an opportunity to see just how our nation understands itself at that particular moment of our nation’s history. Both provide insight into our social order and into where we are as a nation. So I attend graduation ceremonies looking for clues that will reveal how we understand ourselves at this moment as a people.
This year’s graduation season took Christine and me to Charlottesville, Virginia, where two of our grandchildren received graduate degrees. The first was Katharine Shelby Catlett, our first and thus oldest grandchild, who received her Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine. She will begin a three-year residency in emergency medicine at the Christiana Health Care System in Wilmington, Delaware, on or about June 1. The second was our first grandson, John (Jay) Baldwin Catlett, III, who received a Master of Science degree in accounting from the McIntyre School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and who will enter the employ of Ernst and Young on September 1. Fortunately, they were both graduating from the same university so the family could gather in one place to mark this rite of passage for both of them. Three generations of us were there.
Once I separated myself from the emotions of being a grandparent, which was not easy, I began to see in this ceremony many signs of the times that need to be embraced as real. Universities are always barometers of things to come. The first thing of note was that the role of religion, as we have tended to understand it in our culture, is fading, perhaps has largely faded, from our consciousness or awareness. Fifty years ago, such a ceremony would have been opened with an invocation and closed with a benediction. Indeed, when I finished at the University of North Carolina in the class of 1952, each graduate was given a personal copy of the King James Version of the Bible by the university. Religion and patriotism joined to surround the graduation ceremony in that day. Only patriotism was still there in Charlottesville in 2015. Religion was largely gone. We said the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of our nation and we rose to sing the national anthem accompanied by the United States Army Band from nearby Fort Lee, Virginia. There was some pain present at this graduation ceremony, as references were made to tragedies that had occurred on the campus during the past year. These crises brought commendation for the work of counselors and caregivers. None of these caregivers, however, was identified as clergy or pastors. Caregiving, I noted, has also now become a secular task.
I thought about the absence of references to God and found myself, some might think strangely, not disapproving, but approving. There is, frankly, something bizarre theologically about the words “invocation” and “benediction,” when one stops to think about them. Both assume that God, however God is defined, is external to life and so at the beginning of a solemn occasion, God must be invited to be present and, at the ending, the divine blessing from above must be pronounced. Is God ever really external to life? Is God really a deity who needs to be asked to be present and whose blessing must be sought? It seemed to me that in this omission perhaps the theological debate in regard to the theistic definition of God had now, at last, entered the public arena. If God has finally begun to be understood as that ultimate reality in which each of us lives and moves and has our being, then both invocation and benediction must mean something quite different from what we have traditionally understood them to mean. Perhaps the time has come to have our words match what we have come to believe.
There were some signs of our religious past that still crept under the radar that I found noteworthy. The commencement address at the graduate school’s degree ceremony, was given by Dr. Robert Bruner, the retiring Dean of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, one of the crown jewels of the University of Virginia. In that address I heard references to the Bible on two occasions. Whether Dr. Bruner knew that these were biblical references or not I do not know, for both quotations have become familiar in our culture. He referred to the human conscience as a “still, small voice” that speaks to our inner selves. The phrase comes from the story of Elijah (I Kings 19:12). Next, he mentioned the necessity of “doing justice and loving mercy,” a reference from the prophet Micah (Mic. 6:8). Dr. Bruner also couched his whole address to these graduate degree recipients in terms of finding the place where each could do his or her “best work.” He called it their “vocation” on several occasions. “Vocations” were once spoken of only in terms of the priesthood, now, I noted with approval, they have become universal callings to service in all areas of life. I think that is progress. It was a good address, significant in its meaning and in the ideals he held before the graduates.
God actually did make it into the ceremony at the very end. One might say that God got the last word when the University of Virginia’s first female president, Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan, dismissed the students with the words: “God bless and Godspeed.” It was a gentle reminder of our religious past. The reality is that this external, theistic God of yesterday was nowhere else to be found in this ceremony. That was not surprising as this God is increasingly absent from the workings of our secular society. That does not mean, however, at least in my mind that a deep sense of the holy was absent on this day, only that the holy was conceptualized differently.
When this theistic God of yesterday is invoked politically today by members of the religious right or by the Tea Party advocates I find it embarrassing, for this God is always invoked either in the service of or in the defense of a prejudice that ought to die. This God always seems to be opposed to racial equality, to the rights of women to control their own bodies via birth control and family planning and yes, including the right to decide when and whether to bear a child, and to the rights of gay and lesbian people to be treated with justice and equality in all matters from marriage to being accommodated by those who are licensed to serve the public. Increasingly this traditional, theistic concept of God is not appealing to me or to the world in which I live.
There were other signs of the times noted on that day. While most of these signs were drawn from the final exercises at the medical school, I have no reason to think that there were any substantial differences in the ceremony of the McIntyre School of Commerce. About half of those receiving M.D. degrees were female! That statistic is being replicated all across our nation. These female doctors were also not necessarily headed into the traditional medical specialties where women have found acceptance in the past, like pediatrics and obstetrics, but into surgery, orthopedics, dermatology and emergency medicine. The next sign to note was that significant numbers of the doctors in the class of 2015 from this medical school were of African, Asian and Middle Eastern descent. Race and ethnicity issues were nonexistent in this school of medicine, as these same issues will soon be in our society at large. When I was operated on in 1998 by a Nigerian surgeon, and treated recently by a young female dermatologist both would once have been thought of as unusual experiences. Today such is commonplace. The world is changing and the negativity we still see in politics today reflects more the culture of our nation a decade ago than it does the culture of our nation emerging today. We are today traveling into a new world of universal consciousness that transcends issues of race, religion, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation and we are traveling at a rapid and unchangeable pace.
These young MDs were mostly in their late twenties. On this day, the title doctor was permanently attached to their names. They smiled as they heard it or read it for the first time. They all stood at the end of the ceremony to recite the traditional oath of Hippocrates, calling them to integrity, to confidentiality and to a practice beyond the boundaries of any human barrier. People will look at them in a new way from this moment on. Childhood and dependency were now for them things of the past. They would learn the lesson of Thomas Wolfe: “You can’t go home again.” One last celebratory burst of childhood enthusiasm remained for “my granddaughter, the doctor.” As she processed out, degree in hand, doctoral hood over her doctoral gown, she spotted her father, my fantastic son-in-law, sitting in an aisle seat. He held up his hand and they exchanged a loud high five, with grins as wide as one can imagine. It was, in my mind, an appropriate farewell to childhood.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Judith Barnit, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
Recently, I have had contact with people who are worried about something called “Sheltie and the Cycle of 7,” from the book of Daniel. I have looked this up on the Internet, but find no credible source of information. Since I trust your scholarship and approach to scripture, could you help me understand this issue? I enjoy reading your work and find that it helps me with what I have felt for many years.
Answer:
Dear Judith,
You could not find a credible source of information on the Internet regarding “Sheltie and the Cycle of 7” from the book of Daniel because there is no credible information on this subject. This is in the category of speculative biblical nonsense in which religious neurotics like to traffic. The book of Daniel along with the apocalyptic chapters in Mark (13), Matthew (24) and Luke (21) and the book of Revelation are the primary sources from which all the end of the world predictions are derived. Most people are too biblically illiterate to be able to counter this nonsense so they worry about it and it takes on a reality it does not have.
There are no hidden predictions of future events that are sure to come to pass anywhere in the Bible. That is to misread the Bible totally. There are no predictions of the prophets that Jesus literally fulfilled. The Jesus story was written to conform his life to the messianic yearning of the Jewish people. Jesus never “descended into hell” as the creeds suggest, nor did he preach to the souls in Hades during the time between his crucifixion and his resurrection.
So, sleep well tonight and allow others to play their religious games. There is not enough time in life to waste any of it on questions like these.
John Shelby Spong
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