Fall Convocation 2007 - 2008 September 8, 2007
Invocation
Can you stand still in the midst of flowing time, suspend yourself in the buoyancy of time and let the currents of minutes and the tides of seasons wash over you as they flow on toward the mystic place where the rivers of our days meet the great sea?
Or are you always moving, always drawn on by the slope of living, always on the way to the valley that waits insistently to be watered?
Each year we set aside this hour of time to stand as still as we can, together, just for a little while, in the always-urgent streaming of this place. At the beginning of a year – quite a ways, now, from the first hesitant trickles up in the freshman hills, and not so far any more from the place where this violet stream of time will join the next river – we pause long enough, at least, to consider looking at time instead of just being lived by it. We choose an hour well past the half-way point, to consider that what not so long ago seemed an infinite number of hours of learning and living, here, is now almost a finite, countable number of hours. To consider, perhaps, that all of our hours are countable, and finite – and to entertain the possibility that they are flowing somewhere, down the graceful slope, toward a better time.
Someone I know once found this little scrap of words scrawled on the wall of a house in a country filled almost to overflowing with both poverty and hope:
Habrá tiempos mejores, pero este es nuestro tiempo.
There will be better times, but this is our time.
In the flow of our days in this place, we learn to see this time as the best time – the sweetest, the brightest, “the shortest, gladdest years of life.”
But to pause in the flow, to savor a moment of buoyancy in the current that we hope flows toward June or job or joy or justice, is to notice that the time we inhabit is not yet the best time. Around us, beyond us, ahead of us, the world lurches and seethes, wounded by all sorts of antipathies and apathies, blind to the precious finitude of time, thirsty for ways of living together that it has imagined but cannot seem to enact. The world is a house filled almost to overflowing with poverties.
And so in this hour, with another set of seasons and a few more precious hours yet ahead, we pause to say, this is our time. We know it to be filled almost to overflowing with hope. And we will dare to believe that by claiming this time, seeing this time for what it is, we may indeed hasten the better time for which the world thirsts, for which the human family yearns, for which our intellects and imaginations reach.
We receive this time as a gift. We inhabit it as a blessing. We will release it into the great sea of the Mystery of grace toward which all our lives slope – to which we speak our overflowing hope and resolve:
See us into this new new beginning.
Arrive with us at the beginning of new labors.
Bless the flow of time in which we stand,
and the pouring out of our energies and ideas into the current.
Give us courage for the telling of the truth.
Give us humility to name what remains unknown and undone.
Give us delight in the honoring of others, and joy in the honoring of life itself.
Begin with us, again.
We ask it in the name of all that is sacred to us.
Amen.
The Rev. Richard E. Spalding
Chaplain to the College
•
Benediction
Whether with heads bowed low
And folded hands,
Whether with bended knees, prostrate limbs
Or ancient reverent postures
In all our still sacred moments
Silence speaks
To the soul, the spirit, the self
The necessary reassurance
That there is always something
To be considered a blessing
At the day’s end
Just
As at the day’s beginning
So let it be
That we here gathered
With outstretched arms,
Kind hearts
And open minds curious and probing
May anticipate what has yet to be revealed
Accept what has already been discovered
And at all times celebrate in story, song and dance
With lyre, lute and harp
With word, with voice, with gesture
Our gratitude for this place
And one another
For now
For tomorrow
And forever.
Fr. Gary C. Caster
Roman Catholic Chaplain