Needless to say, I got choked up, quite a bit. Not because I was rooting for Chelsea to win (I was, Torres scored the first goal and I know that Mack would have worn his Torres Chelsea kit to school today were he still with us). Traveling and being away from family is never easy, but being alone when you are grieving makes things even worse. Most of the time business trips are just that, business and they keep you busy. This trip has been no exception. It is when you are back in the hotel room that the loneliness of it all comes crashing down.

Mack was and always will be a part of me (and of each and every family member and friend). I am a bit soppy anyway and even before he died I would miss E and the kids terribly when I traveled. Now travel just exacerbates the pain of being apart from him. I think the times I have felt his absence most keenly is in gift shops. I would always get each child something from a trip, for Mack it was always a keychain and for Izzy usually a snow-globe (now it is hoodies). My first few trips this new year I could almost forget our loss. Then I would stand there looking at the rows and rows of keychains and think of which Mack would like…and then realize I don’t need to get him one (and then I would get one anyway).

If you are still reading this, thank you. If you are still reading, it means that you either care for us or are hurting yourself. I have tried not to put too much of my grieving on this site, on the other hand so many have expressed their gratitude for this sharing and at times I need to get out what I cannot keep in. I hope it is helpful to you, I know it is for me, so thank. But I try and have a point to my sharing as well.

In this case (and I feel this to be true most of the time) I am merely stating the obvious, but when we are apart from one we love, we need to also remember that they remain a part of us, no matter whether the distance is geographic or temporal. It is this painful paradox of mourning that I need to remember Mack, holding him, calling him to dinner, reading stories to him in bed, and this brings me so many tears, yet it also brings me closer to him, keeps him a part of me.

Good afternoon scholars, Parents, and friends, trustees, President Erickson and Provost Pangborn. Congratulations to you all! Each one of you has played a significant role in getting to this moment.

Mrs. Schreyer and DrueAnne it is a particular honor to have you with us. Thank you for being here and thank you for all you have done for Penn State and our students.

It is now my great pleasure and honor, as dean of the Schreyer Honors College and as our tradition dictates, to address you one final time.

“Graduation is both an ending and a beginning.”

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

“A journey begins with but a single step.”

“Your future lies ahead of you.”

“The best is yet to come.”

“Remember, do what you love and love what you do.”

“Keep your eyes on the prize.”

“Spread your wings and fly.”

“Be true to yourself.”

“Always aim for the moon and if you miss you’ll still be among in the stars.”

And finally, “Will you succeed? Yes, you will indeed. (98 3/4% guaranteed.)”[1]

There! I have just provided you with the substance of just about every graduation address I have ever heard. (You can go home now. No, not really.) With the exception of the words from Mr. Theodore Geisel, these are all clichés, phrases that, no matter how true, have been worn down with use so that they become banal in the extreme. The reason we resort to them at a time like graduation (or weddings, get ready to start attending a lot of those as well) is because there is truth in them. This is a time of great change for you.

In the last two weeks some of you have even told me that you find yourselves getting weepy, happy to be done with the work but realizing you are going to miss Penn State, miss Happy Valley. (Let me let you in on a secret: you can come back any time!)

It is a bittersweet time. You are eager to move on, yet you have, I trust, fond and wonderful memories of your time at Penn State. Of course great change has come to this university in your time, but the greatest changes of all are personal. You have grown, made new friends, learned how to do laundry (I hope), and of course demonstrated not just to your faculty, but to yourself all that you can accomplish academically.

It is also a time of mixed emotions not least of all because there are some who started this journey with us who are not with us today.

Just two days into his second year at Penn State Schreyer Scholar Tom Richards suffered a seizure and died. He was a remarkable young man who made such a great impact on his friends and Penn State that YOU created a program call The 367 Project. This is an amazing testimony of Tom’s legacy and your love.

This is how The 367 Project website describes your motivation.

 We were founded by a group of Penn Staters and Tom’s parents in September 2010. Our challenge since then has been to “go ahead” and make an impact in the lives of others. Following in Tom’s footsteps, we believe that we can make the greatest impact by helping students discover their true potential as leaders, developing their fundamental skill-sets, and empowering them to go ahead and make an impact.

For so many of us Tom’s death was an horrific shock, yet you chose to celebrate Tom’s life and make a positive difference in the lives of others, even as he had impacted so powerfully your own.

This New Year’s Eve our son Mack died unexpectedly of a blood infection, just two weeks shy of his 9th birthday. What everyone thought was simply strep throat took the life of our incredibly funny, clever, and active boy in a matter of hours. Mack’s passion was soccer and he was, by all accounts, a great goalkeeper. He dreamed of starting for Penn State and the US Men’s National Team. Thanks to the generosity of so many of you, all Penn State Goalkeepers will now carry Mack’s name onto the field on which he dreamed of playing. On behalf of our family, thank you.

You all and the entire Penn State community rallied around us and continue to be here for us, in these darkest times, even as you were there for Tom and his family.

I could add to these tragedies simply by citing the names of cities and towns, just from the past 12 months: Sandy Hook, Boston, and Aurora. What we have all, each in our own way, had to come to terms with is the brokenness of this world. Such tragedies and a million smaller travesties that we confront every day, have no satisfactory explanation other than that. This is a place of great beauty and terrible cruelty, incredible joy and unbearable heartbreak. This is a reality that we must grapple with, but never accept it. “There will be wars and rumors of wars.”

Frederick Beuchner put it succinctly: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

It is time to step out, but don’t be afraid. Be strong and take on the challenges of this world. Our job, your job, is to face the reality of brokenness and respond with healing and comfort. Wherever you go from here, grad school or career, Teach for America or teach for local school district, you have to opportunity and the responsibility to do what you can to help others.

In rabbinic Judaism there is a phrase tikkun olam, “repairing or healing the world.” It was an expression used in legal texts like the Mishnah to indicate that something should be done, not because law required it, but because it was the right thing to do for the benefit of everyone, to bring healing the world. Over the centuries its meaning and use has expanded, but the fundamental concept remains the same. Do not simply do the minimum required, don’t ask yourself “is this legal,” rather “is this the right thing to do.” And do it. In this way we may bring about some healing of this broken world.

Finally, I have one more cliché I would like to challenge. You have heard it said, perhaps at more than a few graduations, that you should “live each day as if it were your last.” Or, the more contemporary take, “YOLO.”

Don’t. “Don’t live each day as if it were your last.”

If I knew today would be my last, as much as I love you all and am so proud of you, I would merely poke my head in, say “Well done!” and go and spend the time with my family. We cannot live each day as if it were our last. And my wife and I are so grateful that we didn’t know what day would be Mack’s last. Instead, live each day, each moment to its fullest. Take advantage of the opportunities you have, whether they be to excel in your career, take a trip, or help a person in need.

Live life fully.

In our own time of grief we have often read the comforting words from Ralph Waldo Emerson “It is not the length of life, but the depth.”

Tom Richards exemplified that and you have carried on his legacy. Continue even as you leave Penn State. So now we send you out!

Live life fully. Live life deeply. And live life with love.

Congratulations to you, the 2013 class of Schreyer Scholars, women and men who are already transforming and bringing healing to this world.

Grief

Today I was talking with a colleague about another tragic death of a young person. The runner collapsed and died during the Pittsburgh Marathon apparently with a “coronary artery abnormality.” No one was to blame for his death. He was born with this condition, although he was unaware of it. There was no person with a gun, a knife, or a bomb. It just happened. I called it “agentless injustice.”

It is not “just” that one should die so young, that their life should be over before it began. But there is no blame to be leveled either. That rid not active agent who brought about his death. Rather it is simply further evidence of the broken world in which we live. “Agentless injustice” is not an elegant word, but I think it captures an inelegant truth.

A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless rage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I hope, that it never was a “matter of faith”; it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing—say, the point of a needle—it is located there in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is “there,” it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of different people’s thoughts being concentrated upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper subject of the argument is thus seen “to be the distinction between location and extension in space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be the nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been something else; the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not to use words like “there” in a loose and unscientific way, without specifying whether you mean “located there” or “occupying space there.

Excerpt From: Dorothy L. Sayers. “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Fig Books, 2011-10-09T06:19:01.004768+00:00. iBooks.
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Fifth Sunday of Easter – Year C 
RCL

Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

Collect: Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

“Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.” Pope John Paul II

“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”

We as a western community, although we are part of a liturgical community in the Episcopal Church, forget that Christmas and Easter are seasons and not simply a single day. We continue to be in the Easter season and this is the 5^th Sunday of Easter. I feel I should open this sermon with an apology because I know that my own circumstances with the death of our son will come into my thoughts and comments. Yet, as tragic as our circumstances are I know we are not alone. We all have lost loved ones, often very close; we all struggle and suffer. But this is what Easter is about, death and resurrection, loss and hope. That is what our readings are about, living in this world, after the ascension and before the New Jerusalem shall descend from Heaven.

JP2 said, “Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.” Despair is all too easy in this world. I do not need to belabor the point. We see and feel it. The last six months alone in our safe and secure country have given us ample examples and the majority of the lives with far greater dangers of war, disease, malnutrition, and persecution.

Jesus knew that his disciples would face the worst days of their lives immediately following this last meal as a community. Judas had gone out to betray him and soon he would be beaten and crucified. His “glorification” would be his sacrifice. And what does he say to them? Love one another.

33 Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’  34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

You have often heard me say (assuming you have heard my sermons) that love is not this emotional arousal that we often equate with the term, nor is it a simple “no matter what you do I will still stand by your side.” Love is not “liking” and it is very hard because sometimes it means taking a difficult stand, even against the one you love.

In the days, weeks, and months that followed the disciples would be challenged as never before in their relationships. What had begun as following a great teacher, tough enough for some family members to accept I am sure, now became an outrageous claim to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God raised from the dead! They would be spurned, rejected, and persecuted and that just by those closest to them. “Love one another” was probably the greatest challenge Jesus could give them and us.

Our reading from Revelation may seem odd, as the entire book does to many, but it too is part of living as an “Easter people.” The book was written sometime in the mid to late first century when Christianity had gathered enough support and followers that they garnered the attention of more than a few people. Nero famously blamed the Christians on the burning of Rome in 64 and in the last two decades local persecutions of Christians began to spread around the empire.

Into this chaos John of Patmos received his “revelation.” (Note the lack of plural!) The fantastic images of fire and judgment, angels and saints, beasts and demons, and the New Heaven and New Earth are all intended to encourage the community of the faithful. Just as Daniel with the witness of God saving him from the Lion’s den when he refused to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar, so too the church should be reassured that all is in God’s hands, even as it seems to be falling apart all around us.

This is the fundamental tension that we have to grasp: we live in a fallen and broken world, yet it is a world that is being and will be redeemed in Christ. This world full of free will and its effects hurts us all. It is full of wicked people, cancers, and infections. Innocent people die and the wicked flourish. BUT this is not the end of the story nor even the end of this world.

Just as we are being transformed by Christ now as we live in this world, learning to love another, especially the unlovable, and as we will fully come into our completed lives when we are raised with Christ, so this world will finally be seen and enjoyed in all of the glory that God intended.

For we and all those saints that have gone before including Mack and Martin will complete the transformation begun in this world in the next. That is the promise of Easter. As Paul said,

1 Cor. 15.20   But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.  21 For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being;  22 for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.

And in John’s vision we are given a further taste of the greater glory. The ultimate reality is that in God there is the justice that is not present in this world and there is the reward that we inherit solely through the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf. God’s order will be fully established and even nature itself will be restored to the glory for which she was created.

In Genesis we are told that God made the heavens and earth and it was “very good.” He walked in the garden with humanity. That is heaven, living with God, hanging out with him and enjoying company with God and one another. What does it look like exactly? I don’t know. John saw a golden city where each gate is a single pearl. If that vision were given today, what would it look like to you or to me? I don’t know, perhaps a lot of perfectly flat and open fields and a lot of soccer.

What I know and the truth that we are given is that for now we have one another and that we are to love one another as best we can. And that when we do enter together into that new heaven and earth we will be with God and all will be well.

3 “See, the home of God is among mortals.

            He will dwell with them as their God;

            they will be his peoples,

            and God himself will be with them;

4          he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

            Death will be no more;

            mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

            for the first things have passed away.”

The Game of Your Life

Whatever way it’s kicked out, face the ball!
While wingers await delivery in space,
Centrefield must rise above the maul
And safely field, taking thought to place
The ball of fortune with the chosen one
And will him on to make the greatest use
Of what he’s given as he solos on;
Centrefield’s involved as play ensures.
For now’s the time when great men must redeem
The story of the game from death, defeat:
The game of life’s the story of a team
Who cannot rest until their task’s complete
To take the cup, the cup that cannot pass
And raise it up in glory for the mass.

Fine Art Appreciation

He would be horrified that I use that term, but this week we met the young lady (and lady is the correct term) that Mack had been talking about all year. They are in different classes but ride the same bus. That was their time. She is the most incredible, wonderful girl. She loves sports, is very articulate and funny, and sits ramrod straight (reminds me of someone who I married nearly 20 years ago). She and her mother came over to bring a book of photos and memories from Mack’s school and while we had tears in our eyes it was a wonderful hour and a half. She (I will refrain from the name for now) went up to the loft to see Mack’s LEGO world and then up to his room. She shared how Mack would tell her stories about places we had traveled and silly jokes. She teared up now and then and her mother told us (when she was out of the room) that our friend worried “who will be my crush now?” As we said goodbye I knelt down and gave her a hug. I looked into her eyes and said,

“You will always be Mack’s girlfriend.”

The smile that came to her face was nothing less than radiant, pure joy. As the left she skipped happily along side her mom and I think I heard her say, “He told me that I’m …!”

Elizabeth said it best this morning. In just less than 9 years Mack managed to do it all: live a life full of joy, find his passion for soccer, and a partner.

May we all be so blessed.