Graduation time! Here is an edited version of what I wrote to our daughter-in-law (of whom we are indeed proud), but it applies to any graduate -- especially to those gaining their terminal degree. ["I'm done with school! So cool! I wonder what it means?"]
Some people find graduation ceremonies pretentious and prefer to skip the formalities. I skipped my BA ceremony (I was already in Rhodesia [1972: now called Zimbabwe] when the grad was held) and my Th.M. grad (we had gone off to Missionary Training institute in the Detroit, MI area for orientation for our service with BIC Missions. I was there for my M. Div. – informal, no gowns please, we’re Mennonites! And for my D. Miss. at Asbury. I think that was when I understood the importance of the formal stuff. Darrell Whiteman [my advisor, and who shaped my mission and teaching career thoroughly] gave me a Parker Jotter pen, a small symbol of the fact that he had been my mentor. His advisor had done the same some years before. Since then, I have given out pens to my advisees when they get their MA. The symbol reminds me that I stand in a chain of scholars, none of us complete on our own.
For my final degree (doctor of missiology), I was hooded, so that I wear the cap and gown and doctoral hood. I didn’t really grasp the importance of being robed and hooded until I went through grad several times as a member of faculty at Providence. The gown that a local company made to my specifications is wrong. I told them burnt orange (missiology); they gave me blue (education). Well, a D. Miss. Is the equivalent of a Doctor of Education (Ed. D.) – which is why they gave me blue, but I want my burnt orange! Sometimes I wear the master’s hood from Providence, since it has the right colour. Sometimes I wear the hood Gaspards (the maker in question) gave me, since it is a doctor’s hood. I can’t quite wear both to the grad itself!
A side note: My colleagues at Providence have heard me bemoan the wrong colour many times. They might have said, "Well, get it fixed!" But they have been gracious and listened sympathetically (at least on the outside).
I tell this story because of what I learned in it. The hood is important, and the colour of the hood is important, because it stands for something. It is a symbol of the community of scholars to which we belong – a community of people for whom truth matters. We betray that truth often – through a wrong-colour hood, through shoddy scholarship, through biases through which we twist our data to say what is not in fact true. But behind and beyond our failures, we hold that truth matters. We have devoted our lives to the search for truth, and in laying the hood of your shoulders, your advisor initiates you into full membership in the community of scholars.
The same is true for every graduation: Whatever symbol stands for the graduation in your mind, the real meaning is, I submit, that you and I [all of those who have committed themselves to the task of learning] belong to a community for whom truth matters. Many in our society have abandoned truth and the search for truth. We recommit ourselves to truth in the name of the one who called himself "the way, the truth, and the life."
2 comments:
I attended high school and my B.A. degree. I skipped Master’s.
What I find curious is that now every level has a “graduation.” Pre-school, kindergarten, grade school, on up. Seems silly to me, but maybe it helps encourage people to keep upholding and continuing education.
I think that the plethora of graduations actually devalues the ceremony. Symbols and ceremony can lose their meaning and value through overuse. Then again, the old custom was for scholars in university to wear their academic gowns as a signal of their identity -- pursuers of truth. A friend of mine, an Anglican priest, wears her collar when she teaches as a reminder of her calling. But I still suspect trivialization by repetition when we graduate from every level.
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