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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday May 28, 2001 Volume III Number 22 |
FOCUS - Farewell Alma Mater
I was twenty-six years old and a senior pastor. One of my church leaders in the first or second year of my tenure just off the cuff mentioned one Sunday afternoon that he considered it an oxymoron to call a twenty-something pastor a senior. I was sharply offended. At the time.
Of course, nearly three decades later, I see his point (though I’m still not so sure that it really helped much for him to bring it up). Perhaps I was most vulnerable to disappointment back then because I didn’t know what I lacked in that role. I figured that I was ready. I believed that my performance in the seminary (cum laude), my personality type (gregarious, self assured), my sense of humor (quick wit and propensity to laugh at adversity), my general maturity level (“way beyond his years” they used to say), and my mastery of all things biblical (serious classroom time in exegesis, hermeneutics and sermonizing)… all of this and more pretty well prepared me for just about any eventuality in a pastor’s workweek.
One of my regular assignments in those days involved visitation of the infirm and recovering. I’d bop in and out of hospital rooms in the same way a plant manager goes up and down the assembly line, cheering on the line crew. I’d stop in and see a stroke victim, “Hey John! How ya’ doin’?” I’d joke a little bit about the nursing staff and the general state of the national news and the annoyances of intravenous feedings, read a Psalm, whip out a pastoral prayer and head on down to the next guy, a hemophiliac. I wondered why some people had trouble visiting hospital rooms. Didn’t bother me, I thought.
I don’t know what happened. But I don’t do so well in hospitals anymore. When you’re twenty-five or less, and a guy, suffering and disease and the deterioration of the human body don’t really impact you that much. Aging happens to someone else. It comes with the territory. All the stuff that accompanies aging, well it’s just part of the deal. That’s what I would tell myself.
But these days it’s getting harder to detach myself from all that. These are my friends in those hospital beds. Sometimes, my family. The people I love. And, truth be told, it could be me.
So that breezy in-and-out with a Bible under my arm and clergy badge on my sport coat lapel… all that went the way of that twenty-six year old senior pastor. A misty memory from a distant past.
The things that happen in the sickroom as people age, well, it all seems a bit more serious now.
* * * * * *
This week, I’m in a college town. One of those tiny mid-west farming municipalities with a hundred-fifty year old college with lots of tradition stationed out on the southern edge of town. The population of the University exceeds the population of the town, and has for over a century. It’s graduation day.
The campus is buzzing.
Parents from all over the nation are gathering to hear the strains of pomp and circumstance. Most are showing signs of weariness, like their students. Puffy eyes. Accelerating gray at the temples. The disappearing hair color is moving up into a thinning hairline. Most have scrimped and saved and sacrificed for the past four or five years just to make this thing happen. The rite of passage for both parents and students is soon to begin. The graduating seniors are done reading the chapters and the books. Done reviewing notes and memorizing obscure labels and phrases and formulas. Done writing and footnoting papers and choosing between A and B or C or A AND C or none of the above or all of the above. Or maybe it’s D. Or E. They survived an endless parade of lectures and incomprehensible theories explaining the inexplicable; fuzzy descriptions of the indescribable; late nights and poor nutrition. They learned how to be a friend. They are programmed to answer all the questions coming at them on this milestone weekend – “What’s your major?” “What’s next?” “Where do you go from here?” “What do you think of the school?” “Where’s your room-mate from?” “What will you miss the most?” “Are you packed and ready to go?” “When do you have to be out of your room?”
And as you look around the great auditorium, you see a flock of young people. You can tell, these are the crème de la crème. They will be the top achievers in their work place. The bright eager performers in the graduate schools. They will be leaders.
This weekend, they gather the night before the Big Event to affirm the values that brought them to the school in the first place. They reminisce, flashing the photos and videos on the screen in a multi-media trip down memory lane. They laugh, wipe away a tear, wondering how this passage could have come and gone so quickly. There are long hugs in the hallways. They look at each other, intense eye contact, and don’t say much. They don’t have to, as four years of experience is summarized in one last nostalgic gaze. It hits them that life in this place, unreal as it is, a kind of cocoon for post-pubescent young adults transitioning from home to a high anxiety Darwinian world of survival of the fittest, this place where ideals thrive and thought is free and speech is valued and nobility honored, well, it’s over.
The time to test those ideals is here.
No one admits it, really. But just the thought of it is terrifying… and exhilarating. All at once.
* * * * * *
Dr. Archibald Hart is about to end his distinguished career as another graduate school’s distinguished professor. He’s known all over the world. His books are landmark works. He is sought after as a lecturer, counselor, consultant, advisor.
And he’s a devoted Christian.
I go to the board meetings, early mornings in Pasadena, mainly to hear his devotional remarks. They precede the business of an international non-profit organization. Last week was no exception.
Arch is a man who has learned to live with his emotion. He doesn’t disguise his feelings. They are powerful. Intense. But managed. He too, is at a crossroad.
This summer after four decades, he retires from his tenure in the classroom.
He carries a worn Bible. You get the sense that the heartbeat of this formidable man pulses in cadence with the heart of the God of the book he opens so regularly. He finds the passage where the Apostle reflects on a life of ministry and service. Dr. Hart reads out loud from the text: “I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. I have finished the course.”
And choked with the passions of a man who vibrates with the great apostle, Arch told us that lately he has been possessed by the whole notion of finishing well. “Finishing well,” he repeated. “That’s all I want now… to spend my remaining years in such a way, that I can ultimately say, I have finished well.”
“It’s not simply that I want to hear those familiar words, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ I do, mind you.” His speech betrays his roots. He was schooled in the King’s English. “But I spend most all my free time wondering what it means for me… to finish well.”
And then, uncharacteristically, he closed his Bible, and couldn’t find any more words to add to these remarks. And the assembled men and women were silent around the table, too. Until my eighty-five year old friend Ted chimed in. “Arch, that’s the best question you can possibly ask at this stage in your life. Not a day, not an hour goes by when I don’t consider it, too. How do I finish well? Don’t stop asking. God will bless you for it. Abundantly.”
Then we prayed.
* * * * * * *
Valedictorians are chosen generally because they rank number one in their class. The content of their obligatory speeches are generally predictable. They talk about this one being the greatest class in the history of the school and it’s time to take the cherished values of the old alma mater, get out there and show a waiting world what they’ve got.
Literally,
the valedictory speech is a farewell. It
is a reminiscence. A motivation. A summary. But
mainly it is a good-bye. Good-bye
to a faculty and staff who will remain behind and start over again with a new
incoming class. Good-bye to a
campus that will remain basically unchanged.
While the campus buildings are lifeless brick and mortar, it was the
stage for a four-year drama now taking its last curtain call. Good-by halls and walls and dorms. Good-bye classrooms and lounges and dormitories and
cafeterias and libraries that once seemed like home.
But no more. On future
visits, this place will be occupied by a new class who will not even know your
name, or have any sense at all about the life that was yours when you walked
these halls and occupied these rooms every day.
They will re-create this world. It
will be theirs. Farewell to a
world that measures success in a whole different way. The exams. The
reading. The tests.
The lectures. The labs. The
professors. Farewell to all.
The new world operates under a different set of rules. It’s time to learn them. Make the transition. It’s a launch into the unknown, yet-to-be conquered territory.
Farewell alma mater. Fare thee well good friends. When we meet again, we will be changed. May it be for the better. We will bless our time here. But these brilliant, brightly colored moments are about to become memories.
The Valedictorian is the spokesperson assigned to say all this.
We heard one of these speeches Saturday.
When Jamie took the gold tassel and moved it from right to left along with the three hundred and ninety one senior classmates, the crowd cheered, the orchestra played, the choir sang, and the whole world it seemed, joined in the celebration of a great milestone, and a fond farewell.
The tears and hugs and shrieks and smiling family photos, were all genuine.
This summer, Jamie will become our son-in-law. As of this weekend, he is a college graduate. He seems to us to be quite ready, well prepared, for the next phase.
* * * * * *
It’s Monday morning, and Springtime is about to give way to summer.
You are a leader.
You remember your campus days. The friends. The teachers. The hopes and dreams that possessed you in those formative years. The transition out more than likely had its challenges, and likely was painful, too. Some of us become easily jaded.
Stop for a minute and call up those hopes and dreams. Re-affirm them. Remember the teachers and counselors who set the pace; who believed in you; who prepared you for the world to come.
And maybe, like me, you were somewhat surprised at the degree of challenge presented by this new world they talked about back then. You’ve overcome. You’ve made the transition. You paid a price.
And now it’s time to aim at a new goal.
Like my friend Dr. Arch Hart, let’s aim to finish well.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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