Vigil of Pentecost, Baccalaureate Mass, May 10, 2008

Homily by Monsignor Stuart W. Swetland

 A few years ago (2005), Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco, then Bishop of Salt Lake City, Utah, was asked to give the commencement address at the University of Utah.  This was quite an honor for a non-Mormon religious leader in an area dominated by members of the Church of Latter Day Saints.  The Bishop, a former literature professor and avid collector of stories of Americana (particularly stories of the West), began his commencement talk with a story about stagecoach tickets in the Old West:

Back when our Western states were being settled, a major means of transportation was the stagecoach. You’ve seen people riding in stagecoaches in many a western movie. However, you might not know that the stagecoach had three different kinds of tickets: first-class, second class and third-class. If you had a first-class ticket that meant you could remain seated during the entire trip no matter what happened. If the stagecoach got stuck in the mud, or had trouble making it up a steep hill, or even if a wheel fell off, you could remain seated because you had a first class ticket.

If you had a second-class ticket you could remain seated--until there was a problem. In case of a problem, second-class ticket holders would have to get off until the problem was resolved. You could stand off to one side and watch as other people worked. You didn’t have to get your hands dirty. But second-class ticket holders were not allowed to stay on board. When the stagecoach was unstuck, you could get back on and take your seat.

If you had a third-class ticket, you would definitely have to get off if there was a problem. Why? Because, it was your responsibility to help solve the problem. You had to get out and push uphill, or help to fix the broken wheel, or whatever was needed because you only had a third-class ticket.

What does all that have to do with all of us here at this commencement? I want to offer the stagecoach and its three classes of tickets as a metaphor, or image, for the community--indeed the various communities--in which we live, and into which you graduates will move after today. This is what I mean: you have received a first-class education here at the University…. Many people, including your family, friends, and fellow citizens, have supported you in reaching your goals. You will now take your place as an educated, skilled and resourceful member of the community--many communities, actually: your neighborhood, your profession, your city, your church or synagogue or mosque, your state, your country, your blue planet.

However, you need to know that life in these different communities will be much like a trip on one of those stagecoaches. You will find yourself among lots of other people, many of them strangers to you, from backgrounds that are different from, as well as similar to, your own. And it is most important that you remember this: your first-class education here at the University entitles you to only a third-class ticket on any community’s stagecoach. And because yours is a third-class ticket, whenever there’s a problem, you are expected to get out, get down and help solve it.

Why is that? Because on any community’s stagecoach there are only third-class tickets. There are no first- or second-class tickets; there are only some people who behave as though they have first- or second-class tickets. In more contemporary terms, a community has no first-class or business class; in community, everyone travels coach.

Why do so many of us in modern society often behave as if we think we have first- or second-class tickets in life? As if we can sit or stand around while others fix things? Some people who observe social behavior will suggest concepts like entitlement and victimhood. Other suggestions are more old-fashioned, like selfishness, or its popular subdivision, laziness.

The danger, at any rate, is that we, who have had so many advantages, will get locked up in ourselves, weakening our ability to see the heaven-sent possibilities, the good we can do in cooperation with others. If it’s at least partly true, as Robert Hughes has observed, that the self has become the sacred cow in our culture, then it helps a bit to remind ourselves that the smallest package in the world is the human being wrapped up in himself or herself.

I tell this story today, because as we celebrate your graduation and the Vigil of Pentecost, we are challenge by the gospel (and I trust that you have been challenged by your education here at the Mount) to recognized that we are all sent into the world with the obligation to become involved, become engaged in fixing the problems that beset our world.  Indeed, for Christians, there are only third class tickets in life. “The greatest among you must serve the rest” (Mark 10:43).

Many of you might be tempted to say “what can one person do?”  The problems are so big, so complex, so vast, so many ….that nothing can really be done.   And if you were entering the world alone, you might be right.  But you are not alone, you are never really alone.  You of course have your family and friends, your classmates and colleagues to help you. And you have God …God is always with you.  As Cardinal Newman stated, “you are never less alone when you are totally alone with God.”

Our God is a God of relationship.  A God who is pro nobis (for us.): The Father who created and sustains us, who adopted us at our baptism, who finds us adorable and calls us his beloved sons and daughters:  The Son, our brother who saves us and sets us free, who calls us out off darkness into his wonderful light: and the Spirit that sanctifies us and dwells in us, who allows us to “dream dreams and see visions” (cf. Joel 3:1-5).  With this God, we are “more than conquerors” (Rom 8:37).  Without him we “can do nothing” (cf. John 15:5) but in him we “can do all things” (cf. Phil 4:13) for “nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).

One person can make a difference.  But the key is that one person must be filled with love.  That one person must be motivated by love.  That one person must be willing to pour himself or herself out as a total gift; for, in fact, this is what it means to make the choice to love.  For love is in fact a choice – the choice to lay down one’s life for others.

History proves this again and again.  Of course those who made history did not work alone. God worked with them and in them and they were able to bring others into the great enterprise of building the kingdom of God.  We think of our own John DuBois.   But there are other stories as well.  I think of the one told by the pastor and sociologist Eric Butterworth:

A college professor had his sociology class go into the Baltimore slums to get case histories of 200 young boys. They were asked to write an evaluation of each boy's future. In every case the students wrote, "He hasn't got a chance." Twenty-five years later another sociology professor came across the earlier study. He had his students follow up on the project to see what had happened to these boys. With the exception of 20 boys who had moved away or died, the students learned that 176 of the remaining 180 had achieved more than ordinary success as lawyers, doctors and businessmen. The professor was astounded and decided to pursue the matter further. Fortunately, all the men were in the area and he was able to ask each one, "How do you account for your success?" In each case the reply came with feeling, "There was a teacher." The teacher was still alive, so he sought her out and asked the old but still alert lady what magic formula she had used to pull these boys out of the slums into successful achievement. The teacher's eyes sparkled and her lips broke into a gentle smile. "It's really very simple," she said. "I loved those boys."

Or another story I heard of an art teacher who inspired a ninth grade girl to use her talent to be an Art teacher:  The young women went on to be a university professor, and at her twentieth reunion told her art teacher how he had inspired her to succeed.  At the end of the evening, the High School teacher came up to her and thanked her for “making his day.”   She said in response; make your day, YOU’VE MADE MY LIFE.’

Here is where I am supposed to tell you to go make a difference in the world.  And of course, I (and all of the Mount’s faculty and staff) want you to do just that.  And there is supposed to be, it would seem, a mandatory reference to how the world is getting smaller and “flatter”, and how your generation will be “the first truly global generation.”  But I’ll let others talk of this, for I believe we have always been global and dependent on those who came before us.   Here is what I mean (courtesy of Fr. Harold Buetow):

“A typical American on a typical day awakes “in a bed built on a pastern which originated in the Near East, to a clock, a medieval European invention.  He slips into soft moccasins invented by American Indians.  He showers with soap invented by the ancient Gauls and dries himself on a Turkish towel.  Returning to the bedroom, he dons garments derived from the clothing of nomads of the Asiatic steppes and in ancient Egypt.  At his breakfast table, he has pottery invented in china; his knife is made of an alloy first produced in southern India; his fork is a medieval Italian invention, his spoon a derivative of a Roman original.  His food originated in discoveries from all over the world.  He reads the news of the day imprinted in characters invented by the ancient Semites by a process invented in Germany upon material invented in China. Some time during the day he may thank a Hebrew God in an Indo-European Language that he’s one-hundred-percent American.”

No we have always been global and dependent on each other.  Perhaps today the process of global impact is quicker and thus more noticeable.  Thus I will not tell you to “think globally, and act locally” or anything of the sort.  You have already learned this in your education here at the Mount.  Or perhaps, on second thought I will say something akin to it.  What I want to say to you today is “bloom where you are planted.”  God has a plan for each of you.  Each of you is called to be holy, called to be saints.  Each of you has a particular vocation – a unique way of loving and serving in this world that God has intended for you to do from the foundation of the world.  Part of that vocation is to bring God and his love into the place where you “live and move and have your being” (Acts 17:28.)    Filled with the Spirit of God and empowered by the spirits seven fold gifts, God sends you forth from this holy mountain to bring his transforming love to all the world.  This is, in my opinion, the real challenge for your generation: to harness the power and the promise of love.  For as the French paleontologist and Jesuit theologian, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love.  And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.”

The “energies of love” - this is where the real “energy crisis” lies.  Not that there is too little oil, but that there are two many “wrapped up in themselves” and thus not sharing or harnessing the energies of love.  Class of 2008: open your heart to God’s love.  Jesus said, “I came to set the world aflame. O how I wished that blaze was ignited!” (Luke 12:49.)  Tonight we pray that the Holy Spirit will come down upon each of us to set our hearts aflame.  Class of 2008:  Harness the energies of love. Go and set the world on fire!