I know for most of you you're glad that finals are finally over. I don't know why we call them finals because in terms of your life there is nothing final about them. The exams later in life get shorter but come in bundles.
This week beside wearing a gown and tassel you're all just itching to meet your room mate for collage next year.
Today is a heavy for another reason, because it's a day of asking what really matters. What matters most in relation to schooling is not, "Have you accumulated boundless quantities of knowledge and experience?" but the deeper question, "How much if any of this knowledge and experience have you turned into something useful or turned into wisdom?"
Jean Vanier, the French Canadian founder of the L'Arche movement. L'Arche is an international network of communities made up of people whose development took a different route, as well as people who come to share life with them. Jean Vanier has spent the last 40 years living in such communities. He was asked "What's the hardest part?" He was expected to say words about getting tired of dealing with the hardships some residence experience in relation to dwindling resources.
But what he said was this. "The hardest part is when young people come from college and they stay with us for a summer, or maybe for a year. And they say 'This has been the most amazing experience of my life - I've learnt to see the world so differently and value things so truly and ponder things so deeply.' And they have this word they like to use... Transformative, that's it."
"They say it's been transformative. And then they leave. And I think, 'If it's all been so fantastic and transformative, why are you leaving?' You see, if life is fundamentally the accumulation of experiences, you have to leave, otherwise you'd have to rethink your whole life," Vanier said. "People leave, because they're frightened of who they're becoming if they stay."
I remember for a summer job I worked on a newspaper for residents in a very poor area of Winnipeg. The people who ran the paper were use to people moving in and out of this job. One day one of the workers said, "Are you truly going to allow this place to change you?" I remember saying something stupid like "Who knows?" Don't get me wrong - I cared deeply about that place. I worked hard there. But deep down I knew that come September, I was going back to school to finish my degree.
In the first chapter of John's gospel, there's a huge build-up before the central character, Jesus, makes his first appearance. There are all sorts of people around, and we get a strong sensation they're all looking intently for something, maybe for someone. And then, lo and behold: there is Jesus. Now, whatever your religious background, if you had the chance to meet Jesus, and you could ask him any question in the world, I wonder what that question would be.
The first people who meet Jesus in the gospel of John ask him a very simple, but memorable question. "Where are you staying?" At first hearing it sounds so mundane, almost trivial . If there's one thing we don't imagine about conversing with God, it's the need to search around for small talk. Who cares about house prices in Galilee, and whether it's cheaper to rent than to buy?
But hear those words again. "Where are you staying?" In other words, where is your dwelling place? Where do you abide? Where do you belong? What are you really committed to? What are you really made of? All the questions we're most frightened to face.
For Jews, the tradition of the Ark of the Covenant, the law bundled up and carried around and finally set at rest in the temple in Jerusalem, was the answer to that question. God had made his home with Israel. Muslims see the Koran the same way. For a Muslim, the Koran is God's guarantee of his presence among us. That's how Christians feel about Jesus. When they see Jesus, they realize God's answer to the question, "Where are you staying?" is, "I've made my dwelling-place with you, come hell or high water. I'm staying with you."
God unlike the intern that spends a transformative summer with L'Arche, or like the me who cut my teeth in a rough part of town before moving on. God doesn't move on. God stays. God's staying with us, for keeps.
So that puts the question back on us. Because we've accumulated knowledge and experience at Downers or Hinsdale or Naperville, and we're glad to be applauded for it; but the real question is, what are we going to do with it?
In the end, life isn't about potential - it's about realization.
It's not about accumulating power and choice: it's about what you do with your power, and how you live with the choices you've made. One day you'll have to stop thinking about who you're going to see who you are.
In 1898 a young man named Albert Schweitzer completed his undergraduate education at Kaiser William University in Strasburg, which was at that time part of the German Empire. Over the next ten years he did a series of extraordinary things. He became a world-class organist. He published a book that transformed the historical study of Christianity. He qualified as a medical doctor. This was a man who, it seemed, could do anything. But how was he going to turn all this talent and potential into a real life?
How was he going to turn knowledge and experience into wisdom? Where, in other words, was he staying? The answer was a little West African hospital on at Lambaréné in Gabon.There, from 1913, he treated countless thousands of local patients, with conditions ranging from dysentery to sleeping sickness to leprosy to malaria to sandfly fever. He spent the majority of the 52 years from 1913 to his death in 1965 caring for and seeking to cure all who came to his hospital at Lambaréné.
The irony was that he was probably a better theologian and musician than he was a doctor. But being a physician was where he "stayed." He turned his potential into actuality, he turned his knowledge and experience into love, he let his life go beyond transformative moments into lasting commitment to repair historic wrongs of western colonialism; he allowed Lambaréné to change him.
When he was asked about what he had learned, Schweitzer said, "Everyone can have their own Lambaréné." That's a place to stay. Not an address but a spiritual place.
Everyone has their own take on the historic wrongs of the world. Lambaréné was Albert Schweitzer's way of doing something about them.
When we ask God, "Where are you staying?", God's answer is, "I'm staying with you." When God asks us, on a day like today, "Where are you staying?", what's our answer? Albert Schweitzer said, everyone can turn their own experience of the wrongs of the world into a lifetime spent repairing them.
Anyone can accumulate knowledge and experience. The point is to turn it into love. That's what really counts. Everyone can have their own Lambaréné. The question today is, "Where's yours? Where are you staying?" Where will you turn experience and leaning into love.
I know your saying why's he asking that today we off to the unknown, but eventually you will all have a place where you will turn experience and knowledge into wisdom and love. Hope you stay there. DH Lawrence wrote in 1913,
As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.
And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
Life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
And we ripple with life through the days.
Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,
If life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding, Good is the stool,
Content is the woman, with fresh life rippling into her,
Content is the man.
Give and it shall be given unto you, Is still the truth.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool,
Or letting the living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
Even if it's only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.
Where will I turn learning and experience, into wisdom? Where will I kindle the life quality where it was not. Love is where I hope you stay. Rousseau said what wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness. And EE Cummings gives us words, "I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing, than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance."