Graduates: Go Out To Live

I attended one of those watershed events this weekend, the college graduation of our younger daughter. It was a big milestone for us because we are now officially empty-nesters, but I'm sure it was a bigger milestone for our daughter.

We actually attended two separate ceremonies, a commencement for the entire student body in the football stadium followed by a commencement the following day for her particular college where she crossed the stage and received her diploma. Thus we had the opportunity to hear a number of people attempting to send the graduates out into the world with appropriate advice and wisdom to guide them.

This advice was varied, but one theme popped up a number of times, that of passion. The grads were encouraged to pursue careers or activities they were passionate about as well as to develop passion for some aspect of whatever they found themselves doing. 

I suppose that one could be passionate about that are detrimental to self and others, but understood in a certain way, passion describe what Frederick Buechner says about call in a famous qoute. "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

In today's gospel reading, Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree that does not bear any fruit. The parable's notion that our lives are supposed to produce something of value is hardly confined to Christianity,or to religion for that matter. Commencement speakers regularly encourage graduates to go out and do something worthwhile with their lives. But exactly what is a worthwhile life? What thing of value should I or anyone else produce?

My own faith tradition has always placed a great emphasis on the idea of call or vocation, which is likely why Buechner, a fellow Presbyterian, feels the need to comment on it. We have long insisted that any passion which fails to take into account the needs of others, "the world's deep hunger" as Buechner calls it, is a false passion. 

I certainly hope that my daughter and her fellow graduates find careers and others things in their lives that they can be passionate about, but I hope that passion is of the sort Buechner speaks of. In this overly individualistic world of ours, we already have too many people who are passionate about making money, acquiring power and influence, or being top dog. We need people with a passion that blesses self and others. And whhen they find that, they will have discovered what it means truly to live.

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