St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center
Graduation Mass
Friendship. Wherever we go in life, friendship shapes us more than anything. Of all the things we remember about high school, our friends are the most important. The same thing is true about college. For our graduates from KU today, friendship is what will endure. Many academic accomplishments will be celebrated today. Many things have been learned, minds freed, and skills mastered. The Rock Chalk graduates will be challenged, no doubt, in Memorial Stadium today, on a beautiful Easter Sunday blessed by the Lord, to go out and to bear fruit with what they have learned. They will be challenged to use what they have learned at the University to make a difference - to make the world a better place. We pray that they will. Yet no matter what happens to our graduates after they leave KU, whether they use the skills they learned at KU and build upon them, or whether life takes them in another direction altogether and they wonder why they ever learned calculus in the first place, the friendships they have made here will remain. Above all, the university is a community - a community of learners - it is a place of encounter with people you have never met before, people from whom you can learn. It is a place where friendships are born, friendships that should last well into the future, shaping our graduates as much as the classroom ever did. And this building of friendships is not something adjunct to the learning that is central to the mission of the University; to the contrary, it is something essential. For deeper than man's vocation to know is man's vocation to love. Man is made, beautifully so, not only to learn what he does not know but also to love, and as Jesus puts it, life reaches maturity and arrives at meaning when one gains the capacity to love, the capacity to lay down his life for his friends. This is why friendship is so essential on graduation Sunday; it represents the spiritual aspect of learning that intersects beautifully with scholarship. Friendship is the spiritual aspect of learning, for love, as we hear from St. John's letter, is in the end a spiritual reality; in the end, love is of God, and whoever loves is begotten by God.
Jesus reminds us his disciples through his farewell discourse that He intends to be our friend. He reminds his disciples of the essential components of true friendship, a friendship that goes beyond clicking a facebook icon or going to grab a beer and watching the game together. The essential qualities of friendship are simple - you must tell each other everything - a real friendship is free of secrets and betrayal; indeed, nothing destroys a friendship more quickly than secrecy and exclusion. The other quality of friendship is that you must do what your friends ask. Friendship has a cost. Indeed, friendship goes much deeper than simply liking the same things, or feeling attracted to one another. Friends do what their friends ask them to do; they respond to the needs of their friends. They love their friends, and so choose to always do what is good for their friends, without counting the cost, even to the point of laying down's their life for their friends. Jesus invites us to base our friendship with Him, and with each other, after the friendship that Jesus Himself has with His Father, a friendship in which Jesus is obedient to the will of his Father, without there ever being a suspicion that He is being treated as a slave. In the same way, our friendship with Christ begins with His choosing to love us without counting the cost, even to the point of death, but in turn, He is able to command us not as a master commands a slave, but as a friend commands a friend, to love one another as He has loved us.
Jesus chooses us for this friendship - this is the Christian mystery and the source of our vocation from God. Those who are seeking God do well, but those who are chosen by God to go out and to bear fruit that will remain do better. The quality of your Christian faith, dear graduates, will depend upon your choosing to allow Christ to 'choose you' rather than your continued discernment of whether or not you will choose Christ. The decision to allow yourself to be chosen is a decision to go out and to bear the fruit that God has chosen for you to bear, and to go perhaps even where you do not want to go, and to do things you never thought you would do, in obedience to the friendship you have with Christ, as an expression of the trust you have in His love for you. Do not be afraid of Christ or of His love - he takes nothing from you and offers you everything. Indeed, the plans that you have to go out and to be successful in the world, using the skills you have rightfully earned at a great cost through the University, must never obscure the spiritual vocation that you have deep within you, a call to give without counting the cost, a call to love as Christ has first loved you. As successful as you will all become in the world, and the many blessings you will enjoy because of the privileged education and degrees you have earned, for most of you, your greatest fruit of your lives, the fruit that will remain the longest, will come from your spiritual vocation to love, and to lay down your life for your friends. For many of you, this will mean the discernment and answering of a vocation to marriage; for others, it will involve receiving a supernatural invitation from Christ to be His bride as a religious sister or to marry His bride, the Church, as a priest. Finally, some others will receive a call to a special mission of love that can be best accomplished by remaining single. In all of these, the discernment of how Christ is calling you to love, and to bear spiritual fruit that testifies to the reality of God, who has first loved us, must always remain primary, and the answering of your vocation must never be delayed for superficial reasons.
In celebration of your many accomplishments, and in thanksgiving for the friendships you have made, and for the support of so many family members and friends who rejoice with you on this beautiful day of graduation, the Church sends you Her prayerful best wishes and asks that the gifts of the Holy Spirit be renewed and stirred up in you on your graduation day. Please remember the St. Lawrence Center and its mission to the University in your thoughts and prayers! Congratulations! +m
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