Boston University Baccalaureate Prayers 2018

Lawrence A. Whitney, PhD, LC+
4 min readMay 21, 2018

--

Love

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love.” — 1 John 4: 7–8

We give thanks this morning for the love in this place, the love we have for our graduates, the love that brought them here, the love that guides and sustains them, the love that comforts and upholds them, the love of parents, and siblings, and family, and friends, the love of faculty, and staff, and leaders, and the love of peers and companions and mentors.

Having loved so deeply, may those who graduate today know love to the end. May they persevere in love in the face of obstacles and challenges. May they endure in love amidst rejection and loss. May they love as they have been loved. May they redeem the world by keeping the commandments of love:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” — Deuteronomy 6: 5

and

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” — Leviticus 19: 18

Truth

Gandhi said “with those who say God is Love, God is Love. Yet, though God may be Love, God is Truth, above all. If it is possible for the human tongue to give the fullest description of God, then God is truth.” — Gandhi. “Truth is God.” Young India. 31 December 1931.

Boston University is an institution, a place, and an ethos dedicated to the pursuit of truth and so to the pursuit of God. May our graduates shed forth the truths they have learned here into the land and across the globe. May they continue in the pursuit of truth, preparation for which journey they have received here, to the ends of the earth. May they declare the truth that truth is incompatible with violence, that truth is incompatible with hate, that truth is incompatible with injustice, that truth is incompatible with ignorance, and as we remember on this feast of Pentecost, that:

“The Spirit of truth will guide you into all the truth” — John 16: 13

and

“you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” — John 8: 32

Justice

And, “having been set free, you will be free indeed.” — John 8: 36

But as Dr. King reminds us, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” We cannot be free alone. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” and so “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” — “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”

May our graduates live truth and live love in lives of justice. May learning, virtue, and piety guide them in struggle and sacrifice that they may “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” — Micah 5: 24. May those who graduate from Boston University this day perpetually remember, regardless of vocation, or career, or life path, that “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

This year, 2018, we commemorate the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fifty years after his assassination, and we remember that he taught us that “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.” — Sermon at Temple Israel, Hollywood, 26 February 1965.

Life

And yet, these three are one. Love, truth, and justice are not three independent aspirations but a single principle of life. On this day of commencement, may we commence with love, may we commence with truth, may we commence with justice, into singular lives together in a great world house “in which we have to live together — black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu — a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.” — Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go from Here?

And so let us remember that “Life is short, and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who walk the way with us, so be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.” — Henri Frederic Amiel

Amen.

--

--

Lawrence A. Whitney, PhD, LC+
Lawrence A. Whitney, PhD, LC+

Written by Lawrence A. Whitney, PhD, LC+

ACLS Leading Edge Fellow at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Priest in the Lindisfarne Community.

No responses yet