2024 Commencement

Let me begin by offering my heartfelt congratulations to our graduates. Members of the Class of 2024, finishing college is no small feat.

For many of you, this moment is especially sweet, since your high school graduations were canceled (or were held online) during the first few months of the COVID pandemic four years ago.

Most of you began your time at Seattle University hunched over a laptop, taking your classes on Zoom.

How far you have come since then! Your resilience – your tenacity – are an inspiration to all of us.

But none of you got here alone.

And so I’d like to take a moment to ask our graduates to join me in thanking and congratulating the parents, spouses, supporters, mentors and friends who are here, and without whom you would not be who you are or where you are today.

Let’s also thank the faculty and staff of Seattle University, who helped you get off to a great start – despite the disruptions caused by COVID – and who have supported you throughout the rest of your Seattle University journey.

And I’d like to add a thanks to all the faculty and staff who have helped to plan this commencement ceremony and who have taken time away from family on a Sunday to be here with us.

We owe a special debt of gratitude to Nancy Carroll, the tireless leader of our Commencement planning, this is her final year with us at Seattle University. She leaves HUGE shoes to fill. Seattle University’s mission is to empower leaders for a just and humane world. Class of 2024, you are those leaders. The most important way we achieve our university’s ambitious goals is through the impact and the success that you will achieve.

As Ignacio Ellacuria – the former rector of the Jesuit University of Central America – said in his 1982 speech at the Santa Clara commencement, even as we aim to transform the world around us, institutions in the Jesuit tradition understand that it is our students who are “the immediate instruments of [that] transformation.”

Our mission of educating and empowering students means preparing you to lead, teaching you to question and to think, equipping you with the skills to listen to, engage with, and persuade (and sometimes be willing to be persuaded by) those with whom you disagree. It means teaching you how to think, NOT telling you what to think.

You are our mission.

The word “mission” derives from the Latin word “mittere” – to send.

In a sense, this commencement is a kind of missioning – a sending forth.

Today, we are sending you, our graduates, out into the world, to put into practice the skills and insights you have acquired through your hard work and reflection during your time on campus.

Not just intellectual insights – the knowledge and skills you have gained.

Those are important, to be sure.

But also the passions, the enduring loves, you have discovered during your time at Seattle University.

Some of you will have discovered love at Seattle University in a very literal sense.

In my first three years as President, I have met enough Seattle University couples – young couples and “young at heart” couples – to know that there are at least a few newly minted Seattle University couples sitting here among our graduates today.

Even if you have not met your life partner at Seattle University, you may have fallen in love with a calling to pursue, with an idea to advance, or with a challenge to confront and overcome.

A beautiful prayer, often attributed to the former Jesuit Superior General, Pedro Arrupe, reminds us that “What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.”

The prayer concludes with the wish that we should all – each one of us – “Fall in love, [and] stay in love.”

Unstated in the prayer, but crucially important, is the hope that we will fall in love with the right kinds of things – things that uplift us and those around us, things that make the world more just and more humane; things that fill the world with kindness and reconciliation; NOT things that separate us from our fellow human beings, that alienate us from ourselves or from them.

Discerning what is worthy of our love is a great challenge – perhaps life’s greatest challenge. Rather than a singular event, a bolt from the blue, it may be more accurate to think of falling in love as the project of a lifetime, involving constant reflection and course-correction as we deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world and people around us.

And so I’d like to conclude with a friendly amendment to Pedro Arrupe’s hopeful prayer.

This morning, as we celebrate the successful completion of your college education, my hope is that Seattle University has helped you to begin the lifelong project of falling in love with something worthy of your love, and that you will remain committed to that effort.

And I hope that love will bring you, time and again, back home to Seattle University. Class of 2024, once again, congratulations!