Open Letter to 2024 Graduates:
Your graduation marks a significant milestone in life. You are completing a course of learning, and beginning the next stage of life.
You have acquired a set of skills that outfit you for particular life challenges. It is these skills and capacities that so often form the definition of your successes.
I suggest to you that there are qualities or strengths that you have which mark and reflect who you are. I speak of character. A person’s character has to do with acquired values, strengths, virtues—being a virtuous person.
You have learned to collaborate with others in reaching a goal. Collaborative efforts bring strength to an endeavor, make the most out of the best each brings to the effort, allows for teamwork that issues in something far more valuable than any one person could achieve alone.
The ability to listen is the first step in collaboration. Listen with your mind, but more importantly listen with the ear of your heart. Such listening affirms the dignity and value of the other. In growing international partisanship, fundamental institutions of society fail to serve the common good, and thus fail to serve the human family. Partisanship is not “all about me.”
You have learned that leadership is about encouraging others to embrace a goal, to expend energy to accomplish, and to value being part of a winning team.
A leader takes delight in his/her team and regards the value of the team is more than the sum of its parts.
Scripture teaches that the spread of the Good News of God’s mercy, justice and love is the work of a team. Jesus sends out the disciples in small teams of two. He prays that all his disciples may be “one as He and the Father are one.” Jesus calls his disciples to “Servant leadership.” “If you wish to be first, you must be the servant of all.”
Pope Francis teaches that the work of the Church is rooted in synodality—the posture of openness to hear the voice and heart of the other. This opening and listening issues in an encounter. This encounter issues in being together in the name of Jesus—“where two or three gather in my name, I am there in their midst.” Sometimes we crowd each other, are more interested in our idea than in listening to the other, seek to persuade rather than discover. When this happens, there is no midst into which Jesus can stand.
Congratulations on undertaking a “new beginning”.
Father Steve Adrian
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