This is the time of year for commencement exercises. We have graduation exercises of all sorts, beginning with children from nursery school into kindergarten, from junior high into high school, commencement exercises for high school graduates who are finishing their high school education and commencing, beginning, a new time in their life, going off to more schooling, perhaps, or to some other service, or perhaps even to military service or some job training or beginning working in some way. Then, of course, there are just the thousands of college graduates who have their commencement exercises at this time of year, those graduating with bachelor’s degrees and associate’s degrees and master’s degrees and doctors and post-doctoral degrees. All around the country at this time of year, you have these commencement exercises that mark the passage of people in their course of study, from one stage of their life into the next.

I personally have witnessed many of such commencement exercises; I’ve been involved in several myself as a student and then as the dean of the seminary. And one always cringes a bit when one thinks of the commencement addresses that are given. Especially I’ve been to some in the secular scene where it’s all about success and making it and being what you can be and doing what you want to do and going for it and all that kind of thing—it’s very often the rule of commencement address in university these days.

But I fantasize sometimes: suppose I were asked to give a commencement address at just about any commencement ceremony that you can think of, even from nursery school—you wouldn’t use the same words, of course. But let’s imagine a commencement from college, from a university. And I imagine—I kind of fantasize—if I were asked to say something to younger people who are graduating, who are finishing education, who are moving on in their life, what would I say? What would I want to tell them? Especially if I could not overtly preach the Gospel, if I could not tell them Jesus is the Christ and the Christ is the Lord and the Lord is the Son of God and the Son of God is divine with the same divinity as the Father and the kingdom of God is come to the world through Jesus and he is raised and glorified and he is coming in glory—I couldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that; it would be presumptuous and out-of-place and rude and so on.

But is there anything that a believing Christian could say or would want to say that could be meaningful, that could be helpful just to anybody, to anyone at all—believer or unbeliever, Christian or non-Christian, believing Jew or Muslim or Buddhist or nothing or secular humanist or whatever. If you could just presuppose and imagine that those people in front of you, those graduating students, had not completely killed the image of God in them—or that society has not or their parents have not, or their parents have not—in other words, if you would imagine that, to use C.S. Lewis language, they are not yet the humanoids who have lost their humanity; if there’s some shred of the Tao, as C.S. Lewis says, in that book, The Abolition of Man, some remnant of the image of God in them, the Logos, the heart, the law implanted: something of their humanity would remain in them, whoever they would be, and whatever they would believe or not believe—but they were gathered in front of you at a commencement exercise, and you—I—would want to tell them something, something that could be meaningful to them, something that hopefully even from the Christian perspective could be kind of what they used to call a pedagagos to Christ, a kind of of a pre-evangelization, some laying of the ground for the possibility that those people might one day hear the Gospel and hear the word of God and come to believe it, but something that could really speak to them, and that if they were honest people—pure at heart, in some way, dealing with what they’ve been dealt, reflecting on the fact that they were graduating from college, or graduating from a university, receiving a degree—something that they themselves could relate to positively—what would it be?

What could be said? I’ve often thought about that, and I would just share with you now what I think that that could be, what that might be. And perhaps we ought to kind of keep this in mind when our neighbors are graduating, our children, our children’s friends; we’re invited to such a kind of a party or something like that for a graduate—what would we want to convey that would be, in some sense, most fundamental, most essential, meaningful, even if it would not be overtly, clearly evangelical preaching of the Gospel of Christ?

I think it would be this, and I take this from Fr. Alexander Schmemann, who was a very famous priest and teacher in our time; he died in 1983. And in commenting on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a great Russian writer, Fr. Alexander wrote something that I often thought that, if I even had to give a commencement speech, an address, at some major university or something—that’ll never happen of course; no way that that’ll happen, but if it ever did—I would use it. I would use what he wrote, and this is what it would be.

The first thing that I would say to the graduates is this. Having studied, having worked hard, having completed courses of investigation, trying to understand what one is studying, whether it be science or art or humanities or whatever it would be, there is one thing that a person really would have to have, would have to believe, so to speak, would have to count on. And the very fact that a person is graduating from college or from a course of study somehow does indicate that they have this conviction; they already have this belief. And that would be the conviction that, basically, life is good and that life is meaningful.

If a person didn’t think that life is basically good, that it’s really good to be alive—it’s good to study; it’s good to work; it’s good to learn—and it makes sense to do so; it’s meaningful to do so… Not only meaningful practically and pragmatically, in order to get a job, but it’s just meaningful; it’s delightful—that if a person studies science, they should love it and say, “Wow! That’s interesting! That’s great!” and really feel that what they’re studying is basically something good, something valuable, something precious. Or if they study literature and they read poems or writings, they would say, “Wow! That’s really great! That’s really good!” Of course, on the other hand, they’ll say, “Ooh, that’s not so good,” or in science they might say, “Yeah, that’s not true, or that’s a false hypothesis” or something.

But there would be a kind of sorting-out of things that a person who is finishing school would have to have within them, maybe even somehow unconsciously, but would be there, and that would be the fundamental essential goodness of reality. That basically our life is a good life; it’s a meaningful life; it’s an interesting life. That there are things in creation that are thrilling. And the fact that we could know them, that we could come to see them, and that would cause a joy within our heart, some sort of happiness within us—I think that we could point that out. We can say, “You know, whatever we think or believe about anything, all of us here today affirm that life is good, life is sensible; it’s meaningful; and what we have done is a good thing. It’s a good thing. What we are doing is a good thing.”

But secondly, it would be affirmed that there are things that are not good, that are not true, that are not beautiful. That there’s argumentation and contestation about what is good, true, and beautiful, and what is not. And anyone who has studied and been in a classroom knows that there is conversation and contestation and disagreement about what is true and false, what is good and bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly. But our being in that and trying to discover it and talk about it with other people and go online and try to make our point—that shows that we do believe that there’s meaning to it and there’s goodness to it. And we try to express and to show what we have seen, and we try to get other people to see it, even to agree with it. And we can say, well, if they don’t, they don’t, but still we are motivated in that direction.

But this leads also to another conviction, and that, although things are still basically good, there is evil. And on a commencement day, we should face the fact that in human life there’s not only good things, there’s bad things; there’s not only happy things, there’s sad things; there’s not only right things, there are wrong things. We may debate what they are, but they’re there. And some of the evils that obviously exist in our human world, virtually no one can deny: that there’s injustice, that there is war, that there [is] hatred among nations, that there’s pride, that there’s arrogance, that there’s greed, that there’s violence, that evil often prospers whereas good gets crushed, that there’s sickness, there’s disease, there’s death. We could even see that perhaps, on commencement day, some of the students that were with us in class are no longer there. Sadly, some of them may even have killed themselves, taken their own lives. We know that that happens a lot among young people.

So while we affirm the basic goodness and meaningfulness of things, that we would affirm also the real evil that exists, that has to be faced. Now, we would say that you can only affirm evil because you know good. If you have no sense of good, you have no sense of evil. So evil is there. Evil is there. And when you look at evil, you know that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, about whom Fr. Schmemann was writing when he spoke about the fundamental goodness—also the fallenness, the corruptedness, the perversion, the evil that exists among humanity—Solzhenitsyn said when you’re in a situation of evil, there’s only three things you can do. You can surrender to it, give up, and let it destroy you; or you can give in, and join it, and become part of the evil; or you can go on: you can face it, fight against it, as you know how, for what is good, what is true. And probably, certainly, you will suffer immensely if you do that; you may even die, but you can do it.

So we can give up, we can give in, or we can go on, in the face of evil. And hopefully our education has helped us to try to sort things out and to encourage us and to give us courage to carry on, struggling for what we have come to see and be convinced is good and true and beautiful, realizing that others may not agree with us, but nevertheless that’s what we want to do. But we will never give in to evil, we will never give up in the face of evil, and we certainly won’t become part of that evil ourselves. We will not do that.

And then the third thing is hope, because if we do believe that there is sense and meaning and goodness in life, but if we are ready to face that there is evil, too—injustice, sadness, inequalities of all sorts: people are demeaned and degraded and violated and ridiculed, and we don’t want that, and we’re going to fight against it—we have to have some hope that there is a victory. We have to have some hope that everything is not just absurd, that everything is not just lost, that everything is ultimately just meaningless. We have to have some kind of motivation that it’s worthwhile living, worthwhile carrying on. And many people can undergird that sense that it’s worthwhile by various ways, and virtually all philosophies and religions of the world, if they’re not outrightly demonic and satanic and absurd, they will even have hopes that are beyond this world. They’ll say that the hopes that we have within this world give us a good grounding, even maybe to believe that there is a victory that goes beyond this world, a victory right through death itself. And different philosophers and teachers have tried to come to understand what it is; as the philosopher Heidegger said, to be a being toward death. Knowing for sure that we will die at some point in some way, nevertheless, not ever surrendering to death as the final word.

And so that if we would affirm that we still have hope to work against evils as we see them in our life and to use our education for that purpose and to affirm the goodness that we know exists, we may be led one day even to affirm the ultimate goodness, the ultimate truth, the ultimate beauty of reality that not even death can destroy.

So on this commencement day, I think every one of us, if we’re holding a diploma in our hand, even if we’re a little child going from nursery school to kindergarten, even that little child could know: life is good, and it has sense, and it’s fun to live. It’s fun to go to school; it’s fun to learn things. But even that little child will know that it isn’t a picnic; there’s bad stuff that happens, and you get hurt. And there’s sadness, and things aren’t fair. Even little kids have this sense of justice. How many times do you hear little kids saying, “That’s not fair!” But you’ve got to deal with that, and that there are different kinds of people who like different things, and you’ve got to learn to live with that.

But then you also have the hope to go on to kindergarten, and first grade and second grade and eighth grade and high school and college and university and whatever, because you have a hope that it is worthwhile and that you can work for the good while you try to diminish and lessen if not totally eliminate the evil. And then perhaps, living that way and having that hope, it might even lead us, in one way or another, to believe that there is the ultimate good, the ultimate true, the ultimate beautiful, that literally can never be destroyed, not even by death.

So on the day of commencement, when we are moving ahead, when we are being grateful to our teachers, to our parents, to everyone who made this education possible, who are looking ahead about what comes next, we can simply say: Whatever it is, let us always affirm the goodness and the meaningfulness of it all. Let us never diminish or deny the real evil, injustice, and wickedness that lives, that exists, and is there to be challenged. And let’s never give up hope that we can increase and magnify the goodness while we diminish and lessen and hopefully even one day, by some miracle that we cannot yet see, overcome every evil, every wickedness, every disease and death itself so that what we intuit, what we feel as we study, could one day really, ultimately be forever victorious. Whether or not that’s the case, well, we can debate, but let’s have hope to carry on in that direction.

That is what I would like to say, if ever I had the chance to address a graduating class. Three things that must be held together, and no part can be denied: the goodness of things, the corruption of things, the reality of evil yet something in us that motivates us to have hope to live and to carry on and to cling to that with all of our might and never to deny it.

Now, once in my life I did have an opportunity to give a commencement address, but it was not at a college or a university; it was at the theological seminary at which I studied and at which I worked and taught and at which I was the dean for ten years, from 1992 to 2002, and from which I am now retired for already the sixth year. But last year, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, my seminary, invited me to be the commencement speaker, to give the commencement address to the graduating class of 2007. That was last May, just about a year ago from right now. And it also happened to be the 50th anniversary of my entrance into this school as a student. I entered as a student at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 1957. I was graduated in 1963, having received my undergraduate bachelor’s in 1960 and my divinity theology degree in ‘63. And then after being a parish priest for five years, during which time I got a master’s degree from Duquesne University actually in philosophy, then I came back to be a teacher and worked at the seminary, the pastor in the chapel and the dean of the school.

So it was the 50th anniversary of my entrance into the school, and I’d like to share with you now, this year, 2008, what I said last year to the graduating class of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York. After acknowledging and greeting the metropolitan and the bishops and the dean and the faculty and the parents, this is what I said.

I am delighted to speak to you at this commencement ceremony today, and this honor is especially significant for me, since I came to this school as a student exactly a half century ago in September 1957. For 40 of the last 50 years, I was officially connected with St. Vladimir’s. I was a student for six years, and then after five years as a pastor in Ohio, I returned to the seminary where I served as a teacher and pastor for 34 years until my retirement in 2002.

This school gave me my spiritual life and my spiritual family. It also gave me my wife, and our children, and our grandchildren, for which I am inexpressibly grateful. (I said that because I met my wife when I was a student at the seminary.) Fr. Erickson and the seminary faculty asked me to tell you today what I believe to be the most important things that I learned in the last 50 years, since entering the seminary. They asked me to do this in about 20 minutes or so, so what can I tell you in my remaining 18 minutes?

The first and surely the most important thing is that we are boundlessly loved by God, who blesses us to love him boundlessly in return. I can also tell you that we can love God as he loves us only by faith and by grace and by his divine power; and that we prove our love for God by loving everyone and everything, beginning with our worst enemies, just as God does, with the very same love with which God, who is love, loves us, the very same love that God himself is.

And I can tell you that being loved by God and loving God in return is the greatest joy given to creatures, and that without it there is no real and lasting happiness for humanity. And I can also tell you, alas, that such loving is always a violent, brutal, and bloody affair. The God who is merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abounding in steadfast love and mercy and faithfulness, the same God who gives us his divine life and peace and joy forever—is first of all the divine Lover who wounds his beloved and then hides from her, hoping to be sought and found. This God is the Father who chastens and disciplines his children. He is the Vine-keeper who cuts and prunes his vines so that they bear much fruit. He is the Jeweller who burns his gold in his divine fire, so that it would be purged of all impurities. And he is the Potter who continually smashes and refashions and reshapes his muddy clay, so that it can be the earthen vessel that he wants it to be, capable of bearing his own transcendent grace and power and glory and peace.

I learned that all of these terrible teachings of the holy Scriptures and the saints are real and true. And so I became convinced that God’s Gospel in his Son, Jesus, is really and truly God’s final act on earth. It is the act in which God’s Word is now not simply inscribed in letters on pages of parchment, but is personally incarnate as a human being in his own human body and blood. And so I became convinced of the truth of all truths, that the ultimate revelation of God as love, and the ultimate revelation of humanity’s love for God are both to be found in the bloody corpse of a dead Jew, hanging on a cross between two criminals, outside the walls of Jerusalem, executed at the hands of Gentiles, by the instigation of his own people’s leaders, in the most painful, cursed, shameful, and wretched death that a human being, and especially a Jew, could possibly die.

So to the measure that we are honest and faithful and try to keep God’s commandments and repent for our failures and sins, we come to know, and to know ever more clearly and deeply as time goes by, what we have learned here at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. We come to know by experience that the Word of God, ho logos tou theou, is always and necessarily the Word of the Cross, ho logos tou stavrou, and, in language befitting a commencement ceremony at an Orthodox graduate school of theology, we come to see that true theologia is always stavrologia, and real orthodoxia is always paradoxia, and that there is no theosis without kenosis. This means that theology is stavrology: the word of God is the word of the cross. And that Orthodoxy is paradoxy.

The Almighty God reveals himself as an infinitely humble, totally self-emptying, and absolutely ruthless and relentless Lover of sinners. And men and women made in God’s image and likeness must be the very same. Thus we come to see that there is no resurrection without crucifixion; there is also no sanctification without suffering, no glorification without humiliation, no deification without degradation. And that’s what we mean when we say no theosis without kenosis. There is no life without death.

We learn, in a word, the truth of the early Christian hymn recorded in holy Scripture, the second letter to Timothy, where it’s written:

If we have died with him, we shall also live with him. If we patiently endure with him, we shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he will also deny us. If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.

According to the Gospel, therefore, those who wish to be wise are constrained to be fools, at least as far as this world is concerned. Those who would be great become small. Those who would be first put themselves last. Those who rule serve as slaves. Those who would be rich make themselves poor. Those who want to be strong become weak. And those who desire to find and fulfill themselves as persons deny and empty themselves for the sake of Christ and the Gospel. And finally, and most important of all, those who want really to live have really to die. They have voluntarily to die, in truth and in love, to everyone and to everything that is not God and is not of God.

And so, once again, if we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation, and pastoral service, we have learned to beware and to be wary of all contentment, consolation, and comfort before and without co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that, though we can know about God, through formal, theological education and classroom learning, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus and for him. And we can only do this by faith and by grace, through the Holy Spirit’s indwelling and abiding power.

When we speak about taking up our crosses and bearing our burdens in imitation of Christ, by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, we also learn, by painful experience, that the crosses we take up and the burdens we bear must be those that God gives us and not those that we ourselves choose and desire. Thus we become convinced that when our burdens become unbearable and our crosses crush us in joyless misery, and we become dark and depressed and despondent and desperate, the reasons are evident. Either we are choosing our own crosses and burdens and rejecting those sent to us by our merciful God, whose thoughts and ways are not ours; or else we are attempting to carry our crosses and bear our burdens by our own powers, and not by God’s grace and strength, given to us by Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Church.

And so we come to another conviction: the Church, the communion of faith and love, as St. Ignatius of Antioch defined it in the second century, the henosis agapis kai pisteos, the Church, the community of saints, who are Christ’s own very members as his body and his bride—the Church is essential to our human being and life. We cannot being human beings, and still less Christians and saints, by ourselves. We need God and his wise and faithful servants, and we need God’s commandments and living examples of their fulfillment. We need the Church’s Scriptures, sacraments, services, and saints. And we need one another. As Tertullian said in the third century, “One Christian is no Christian.” And as the Russian proverb puts it, the only thing that a person can do alone is perish. Like it or not, we are members of one another in God. If we like it, it is life and paradise; if we reject it, it is death and hell.

So in the end, because everything is about the true God and Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the Church’s Scriptures, sacraments, services, and saints, and God’s love and wisdom and truth and power, so, too, therefore, is everything about the most important and Godlike reality of all, what St. John Climacus called God’s thrice-holy humility, the humility of God himself, that cannot be defined but can only be seen and adored in the crucified Christ, and in those who, by faith and grace, are co-crucified with him.

Thus, if we have become convinced of anything at all as Orthodox Christians, through our theological education, we are convinced that human beings are not autonomous. The proclamation and defense of human autonomy is the most insidious lie of our day, especially here in North America, and in the Western and Westernized worlds generally. Human beings are not autonomous. Human beings by nature are heteronomous.

Another law, a heteronomos, is always working in our minds and members. This is the teaching of the Apostle Paul and of the Scriptures. This other law is either the law of God, the law of Christ, the law of the Holy Spirit, the law of liberty and life that can only be recognized, received, and realized by holy humility—or it is the law of sin and death. See, for example, the seventh and eighth chapters of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. When the law within us is God’s law, then we are who we really are, and we are sane and we are free. But when that law is the law of sin and death, then we are not ourselves, and we are insane, enslaved, and sold to sin.

More than 1500 years ago, St. Anthony the Great of the Egyptian desert declared that “a time is coming when people will go mad, insane, and when they see someone who is not insane, who is not mad, they will attack him, saying: You are mad! You are insane! You are not like us!” (Saying 25 in the Desert Sayings). It may well be that the time that St. Anthony saw is now upon us, or at least is rapidly approaching, at least in the West. And because of what we have learned, we know what we have to do about it. The same St. Anthony, with all the saints and all the holy people, has told us. I urge you, and if I could I would command you, to read St. Anthony’s 38 Sayings in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Everything we need to know in order to live is there for us in its simplest and clearest form.

Abba Anthony first tells us that when we are plagued by whirling thoughts (the so-called logismoi) and are worn down by an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness and futility (the akedia)—which we will be, necessarily, in this sinful world—we must simply, diligently, work and pray, and pray and work, by pure devotion and sheer obedience. We must pay attention to ourselves and mind our own business. We must do our own work and let God, and other people, do theirs.

St. Anthony also tells us that, whoever we are, we should always have God before our eyes; and whatever we do, we should always do according to the testimony of the holy Scriptures; and wherever we are, we should never easily leave that place. Abba Fr. Anthony further tells us, with his friend, Abba Pambo, not to trust in our own righteousness, not to worry about the past, and to guard our mouths and our stomachs. He tells us to take responsibility for our own behavior and to expect to be ferociously tempted to our very last breath. He also tells us that there is no salvation for us without trial and temptation, and that without being tested no person can be healed, illumined, and perfected. He tells us that each one of us has our own unique life to live, and that no two people are the same, and that each of us has to be the person that God made us to be. As my dearest friend, Fr. Paul Lazor, here at the seminary, so often says, “Where we are, when we are, with whom we are, from whom we are, and such as we are, according to God’s inscrutable providence.”

St. Anthony also tells us, as do all the saints, that our life and our death begin and end with our fellow human beings. He insists that if we have gained our neighbor, we have gained our God; and if we have scandalized our neighbor, we have sinned against Christ. He says that all of our ascetical disciplines, including our scholarly and academic studies, are means to an end; they are not ends in themselves. The end, the goal, is discernment (diakresis) and dispassion (apatheia) and the knowledge (epignosis) of God, through keeping his commandments, the first and greatest of which is agape, love. And he teaches us that our only hope to escape the countless snares of this world that seek to enslave us is found in one thing only: in Christ-like humility. For with a broken, contrite, and humble heart, as the psalmist says, being our sole sacrifice acceptable to God (Psalm 51:17). “I saw all the snares of the enemy spread out over all the world,” Abba Anthony says, “and I cried out, groaning: what can get through from such snares? And then I heard a voice saying to me: Humility.”

An extended explanation of St. Anthony’s teachings and those of our Christians saints generally may be found in a book published in 1867 in Russia. It is by St. Ignatii (or Ignatius) Brianchaninov, and it is called in English, The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. I personally am convinced that every committed Christian—surely every seminary graduate—should feel obliged to read this book, meditating especially on its first part, on the absolute necessity of keeping God’s evangelical commandments, what he calls the evangelskii zapovedi in Russian, accompanied by St. Ignatii’s dire warnings to religious people, especially those with theological educations and ascetical inclinations and mystical desires and prophetic pretensions—who may fail to keep the commandments of the Gospel because they accept the lie that they are not like other people, as they surrender to the delusion, the fiercest and most destructive of all delusions for religious people, that they are especially gifted, especially zealous, and especially illumined. For as my beloved professor, Serge Verhovskoy, here at St. Vladimir’s never tired of warning: The worst of all sins is the lie, and the worst of all lies is the lie about God, and the worst of all lies about God is the lie about God and me.

So I would also recommend this day, this day of commencement—and again if I could, I would also insist—that all thinking Christians, and surely all seminary students and graduates, be required to read one other book that contains in my view the most incisive analysis of what happened to humanity in the last half-century, these last 50 years, since I entered St. Vladimir’s. This is C.S. Lewis’s prophetic masterpiece, written in 1944, called The Abolition of Man. This slender volume should be read slowly, methodically, and carefully, many times over. Parts of it which I have read more than ten times are still unclear to me, but its main point is crystal clear. C.S. Lewis says that for human beings to see, to know, to love, adore, and offer fitting thanksgiving for all that is good and true and beautiful in human life, and so to remain fully and truly human, they must possess and cultivate the uniquely human faculty that differentiates them from angels and beasts, that, we must also add today, also differentiates us from the artificial intelligence of electronic technology.

Lewis calls this faculty the Tao. He says that it may also be called the image of God or the spark of divinity or the law or the logos or the heart. If he knew Orthodox literature, today he might also have said in English that it may be called, in Greek, the nous. Whatever one calls it, it is the faculty whereby human beings intuit and contemplate the basic truths of human being and life that ground all ratiocination, discourse, conversation, and disputation. Lewis claimed in 1944 that if the methods of education prevailing in the schools of his day proved to be successful, this uniquely human faculty will be obliterated, and human beings as we have known them will no longer exist. It will literally be the abolition of man.

I am convinced that what C.S. Lewis foresaw has happened, and is still happening with ever more catastrophic consequences in our Western and Westernized worlds. It happens that men and women who once were human are simply no longer so. They have become nothing but minds and matter, brains and bodies, computers and consumers, calculators and copulators, constructors and cloners, who believe that they are free and powerful, but who are in fact being destroyed by the very nature that they wish to conquer as they are enslaved to an oligarchy of conditioners who are themselves enslaved and destroyed by their insane strivings to define, design, manage, and manipulate a world and a humanity bereft of the God who boundlessly loves them.

Others have seen and said similar things to what C.S. Lewis saw and said. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Stern, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Thomas Merton, the alleged atheist Russian writer Anton Chekov, and my most beloved Flannery O’Connor, the writer, are among my personal favorites. The challenge and the joy, and the pain and the discomfort of reading such extraordinarily gifted people as these, whom the members of the class of 2007 may most likely have not read for their courses here at St. Vladimir’s—but who knows what the new curriculum will bring?—this still lies before them.

And this tells us why this present graduation ceremony is called a “commencement.” It is a beginning of new things, many wonderful and challenging and convincing new things that we wish for the men and women completing their studies at St. Vladimir’s Seminary today. And this brings us to the very last conviction that I may share with you today. Every day, by God’s grace, brings us a new beginning. We are always beginning. We are always commencing a new spiritual adventure in living and loving as God lives and God loves. It is never over, and it is never too late to commence, to start anew.

I congratulate the class for their remarkable achievements. I congratulate their families, friends, and teachers, and all who cared for them during their time of studies at the school. And I pray that the merciful Lord will bless, guide, and protect them in every way as they commence this new stage of their lives. And I thank God and the seminary faculty for the privilege and honor of addressing them and you all here today.