This is the last of the Easter season and soon we will be into the long season of Pentecost. This is also the season of graduations. We celebrate small graduations and big ones. But maybe, there is no such thing as a small graduation. We send our children to kindergarten and cheer when they graduate into first grade and primary school. We have 8th grade graduations with lots of pomp and circumstance because for some school becomes a chore and they do not complete high school. High school graduations take on a much more significant role as we hope that our soon to be adult child is prepared for the real world (as though the school yard is not the real world). For the lucky few, college graduation is a time for all the stops to be pulled out. When you consider the number of five year olds who start kindergarten and the drastically reduced number who complete their college education, we should pat them on their backs, hug and kiss them and tell them just how proud we are for what they have accomplished.
Yesterday I attended the scholarship awards ceremony at the Scottish Rite Hospital where my senior in high school grandson received one of their 4 year scholarships. One of the speakers was a man who had been awarded a scholarship 15 years ago. He completed his freshman year of college and dropped out of school. He returned to the Legacy Committee and asked for his scholarship to be reinstated. He was prepared and ready to complete his college education. He was so overwhelmed with gratitude that he was unable to complete his speech because of impeding tears. This non traditional student deserves our accolades just as much as the fresh twenty-two year old. This man’s graduations, like ours, came after overcoming challenges and persevering.
I had never noticed there are thirty six days in this graduation season that is neatly sandwiched between two important holidays, Mother’s Day in May and Father’s Day in June. Since forty days is a ‘magic’ number in many religions including ours, perhaps we should explore the significance of this season also.
What is important about graduating? There are the stock answers about doing your best, about taking advantage of the opportunities that come your way, about planning for the long haul, etc. For those of us who are on the other side of the long haul, we have a different set of graduations. We celebrate graduating from work to retirement and, for some, back to work. We graduate from the desk to the golf course or the cruise ship. We graduate from being alone to having a companion and we experience the reverse from being together to being one. All these big and little graduations prompt us to come forward on Sunday mornings to receive a blessing.
St. Thomas is unique in that the clergy, the vestry and the parish want to be part of our life. We want to celebrate the big and the little, the supremely significant and the mundane. Perhaps celebrating the mundane is even more important that the glorious. The mundane give us reasons to be excited about life and to share it with others. Share with me and us the mundane and the glorious so our lives can be interconnected and strong. Let’s sing of graduation and of seeing the world.
Kathy Carson
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