Let me begin by congratulating you graduates and thanking those who have supported you throughout your years on the Hilltop — parents, spouses, partners, friends and family.

I will also take this occasion to acknowledge and thank our staff and faculty who are the lifeblood of this Jesuit University. Most recently a student wrote about one of you: 

“I had been exposed to many different professors, including several of international fame but never to a professor of this caliber. His enthusiasm for the subject and devotion to the many students in his class were striking.”

This tribute is not uncommon and could be written about many of you on this platform.

I generally look for a good story for my closing comments at commencement. This year Dean Alan Jones of Grace Cathedral introduced me to the farmer, philosopher and poet Wendell Berry, who in his poem “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” says what I would want to say to you in words more eloquent than mine:

The poem’s first lines parrot the pervasive message peddled by the media: 

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you.  When they want you
to die for profit, they will let you know.

The next stanza suggests an appropriate response  to our consumer culture:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag.  Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Next, the poem urges the rejection of cheap, short-term answers in order to exercise our God-given responsibility for this world which we hold in trust for future generations:

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant Sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

In the final lines, the poet offers his recipe for a purposeful, satisfying and fully human life.

.......................Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

In the post-USF leg of your journey, avoid the “false trail” so clearly traced out for you by popular culture; take the less-traveled one and, as the poet said, that will make all the difference for you and for our world. Practice resurrection.