I Wonder

A Charge to the Graduates

Today the Iliff School of Theology, where I am an assistant professor, held its 118th annual commencement ceremony. I had the honor of being asked by the graduates to give the charge, and rather than a traditional charge, I tried to frame it in terms of curiosity. I thought that I would share it here.

(Note: I have gone back and added a few footnotes to explain references that might not be obvious).

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I wonder.

I wonder what it means to graduate, to commence, to finish and to begin and to continue all at once. I wonder what it means to gather like this, again and for the first time and for the last time, to gather like this to point the way both behind us and ahead of us and to point most of all to where we are right now.

I wonder what we will charge ourselves to think, to dream, to do, to venture or undertake. I wonder what we might charge ourselves to let pass us by. I wonder what charge might quicken our spirits and set loose our imaginations.

I wonder where we would find ourselves if we followed an old path or a new one, or if we pushed our own way through the understory. I wonder what it would sound like, to hear a call from one of those directions, to travel toward the voice and to hear it becoming clearer. I wonder what it would feel like to arrive at that place to which one had been drawn.

I wonder what would happen if we took the truest thing we knew, and lived as if it were true.

I wonder at the possibilities and privileges of entering into the holiest of spaces, of being present for the most sacred of moments, in the intensive care unit or on the street corner or in the narthex, in the living room or in the classroom or in the Zoom room or in the place where something falls apart or in the place where everything comes together.

I wonder what it would feel like to live like a child to a river and to play elder to the summer rain, to be a sibling to a season or to a god or to a stranger.

I wonder what happens when we denounce ancestors and claim descendants, when we choose family and make kinship where we need to be bound. I wonder who we would be if we allowed ourselves to belong to each other.

I wonder, as one Iliff student recently did, whether we can look at the wounded torso of Christ and see top surgery scars. I wonder whether we could see ourselves in that transformation, whether we could see each other in the wound like the place a cocoon has burst open, whether we could learn that new anatomy of holiness. (1)

I wonder if we could stand before a pieta and see Sybrina Fulton, Lezley McSpadden, Larcenia Floyd, Tamika Palmer, or Samaria Rice cradling the bodies of Trayvon, Michael, George, Breonna, and Tamir. I wonder whether, when we see the cross and the lynching tree, whether it will change anything about what we mean when we say salvation; I wonder whether it will change anything about us at all.

I wonder what it would be, to choose the borderlands. I wonder what it would be like to wander la frontera, to stand there shouting questions to the other side, to cross over and back and over again. (2)

I wonder what actions might be required of a citizen of a country that does not yet exist. I wonder what civic duties might fall to such a person, what service that country that does not yet exist might ask of us. (3)

I wonder how we are supposed to think about our inheritances, the blessings and the curses both that have come down to us in our own day. I wonder what we are to do with the atrocities passed on to us like heirlooms, the ones they had imagined us rejoicing to receive, and to repent of them. And I wonder what it might mean to seek absolution for the sins of our fathers. I wonder whether it is even right to ask. (4)

I wonder at the size of a mustard seed, and how it could be enough.

I wonder what it means to learn, to be formed, to pass through an institution and a community and to remake it from the inside and to remake ourselves along the way. I wonder what it means to interrogate one’s traditions, to throw them down in frustration, to take them up again, to negotiate with the future on behalf of the past. And I wonder what it means to find oneself on the other side, degree requirements completed, diploma in hand, hood hanging proud, and to wonder what comes next, to wonder which corner to turn, to wonder which practices of faithfulness to cultivate or to borrow or to cast aside.

I wonder at all the good work incipient in this room and at the many ends of this live stream. I wonder at the compassion and the scholarship, the leadership and the friendship, the proclamation and the ritual and the vision and the purpose and the charge that waits with us here. I wonder at the long labors yet to be undertaken, at the brilliance yet to unfurl, I wonder at the mistakes and the missteps and the wrong things not yet said and the most essential words already on the tongue, and I wonder at the ways the world might yet be better for them all, the ways the world might yet be better for you all, the ways we can sense here and now the renewal of things, the ways the world begins to turn, the ways you have gathered wisdom and foraged knowledge and put them away for just such a time as this. I wonder what might begin from this ending, and I wonder what this beginning will bring.

I wonder.

(1) This student, Henley Levi Holder-Brown, wrote a marvelous paper for one of my classes to this effect.

(2) This section is a riff on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, whose writing has been influential for me, especially her book Borderlands/La Frontera.

(3) Here I am echoing the words of Vincent Harding, a professor at Iliff for twenty years and a leading civil rights activist.

(4) People connected to Iliff will recognize this as a reference to the “Iliff book,” and the recent conversations with the Lenape people about it.