Twelve years ago, I sat with hundreds of parents, friends, and faculty, watching my son and four hundred and fifty other students graduate from Colby College in Waterville, Maine.  We sat in the warm sunshine on the sloping front lawn of the library, there on Mayflower Hill, a familiar place I had known from my childhood, sledding there in the winter, working there in the library itself in summer employment after high school, eating my lunch those summers up there behind the tower windows where now the class banner fluttered in the wind.  I grew up in Waterville, and, when I was little, my parents would drive up around Mayflower Hill so that I could see those exotic license plates from other states.  Town and gown: on that graduation Sunday, I sat among the gowns.

Charles Osgood delivered the commencement address, I remember, the Charles Osgood of CBS radio and television, this poet who was not only the designated commencement speaker but also the father of a graduate.  “I will tell you what your parents are all thinking,” he said, and I had done very well with my emotions to that point.  “They are remembering when you were born, your first day of school,” and on he went, and my mind went to every place he said.  “And this is a day of beginnings also,” he was saying as I returned from my daydreaming.  All of this: the sunshine, the smiles, the caps flying in the air against the blue sky, the memory of all of this led me to think of commencement this week.

This is a day for taking notice, capturing in the words and in the poetry something of whatever this moment is when we wish our graduates well, when we send them forth with our blessings, when we remember our own youth and the choices we made, when we simply stop and take notice.  Time moves on, remember, and relentlessly.

You who are seventeen or eighteen, who have been so much a part of this place and will continue to be so, but in different ways now, these are words for you and for all of us.  There I am at my own high school graduation, sitting alphabetically between two friends I had sat between since kindergarten, Murray Shulman and Greg Staples, and there in the graduation, or was it the rehearsal, it came to me in a flash that I would not see many of these friends again, and that my life was changing.  What must be said is that we are not alone in these feelings, whether it be in this moment or in the very same feelings that our parents had once and these other adults, too.

Here is a poem written by one of our parents, Polly, about her daughter, Joanna, graduating from high school, some years ago.

Tight-throated and trembling,
We watch this diver
Who stands at the end of the board,
Confident, alert, arms upraised,
Steadying herself.
The diving board yields to her weight,
Curving gently downward,
Ready to spring,
Ready to catapult her suddenly
Into thin air.

I like the diving board image.  I had always thought of this moment more like a sluice gate opening, to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” graduates all tumbling out, head over heels, into something called Life.  Good-bye, we all say.  Good luck.  The world is your oyster, or something like that.  But what I’ve learned is that these moments never end.  There are many graduations.  The etymology of the word holds its meaning: “divided into degrees, little steps.”

“We’re weaned a thousand times before we die,” writes the poet Robert Levy.  “It takes an adult to know that parents are your children, too, that the consoling Oreo you long for is also their birthright.  Parent and child,” he says, “gingerly steer a course to the beacon of a glass of warm milk by their bedside.  We’re weaned a thousand times before we die.”  Parent and child, child and parent, turned upside down and inside out.  Some days, who can tell the difference?  

“Parents would teach us how to be adults if they themselves knew how,” Robert Levy writes, “but the fact is, all parents are merely rank amateurs who never turn pro.”  Marian Wright Edelman, who worshipped with us three Sundays this spring, says in writing to her own two sons:

“I seek your forgiveness for all the time I talked when I should have listened; got angry when I should have been patient; acted when I should have waited; feared when I should have delighted; scolded when I should have encouraged; criticized when I should have complimented; said no when I should have said yes and said yes when I should have said no.  I did not know a whole lot about parenting,” she writes, “or how to ask for help.  I have often tried too hard and wanted and demanded so much and mistakenly sometimes tried to mold you into my image of what I wanted you to be rather than discovering and nourishing you as you emerged and grew.”

This is a day for taking notice, for taking notice of how to love, how to be a parent, how to be a child, how to mark the moments of our lives rather than letting them rush by, letting them go by unnoticed.  “It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation,” says Antoine de-St.-Exupéry.  That is what we are doing here with these words; these are passwords – from Polly and Robert, from Marian and Antoine.

And another poet, a book perhaps more of my generation, THE PROPHET by Kahlil Gibran, words found in the back of the hymnbook, too:

“Your children are not your children.  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.  They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.  You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.  You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.  For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.  The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.  Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; for even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves the bow that is stable.”

These are the passwords.  We are shaped by one another, you the students, we the parents, all of us.  There is no laboratory to practice what we do, either in parenting or in being a child, in friendship or in our work.  We struggle with it all, “never as perfect as we’d like, nor as imperfect as we imagine.”  We are all, in our time, on the end of the diving board, ready to catapult out into thin air.  There are times of commencement all through our lives, commencement meaning “beginnings.”  We keep common company here, across the generations, in all of the beginnings and endings that come our way, some remembered, some forgotten; some celebrated, some barely noticed.  

A word here from First Parish – and from other faith communities like ours: this is the place where we can learn the passwords and practice saying them.  We are in a unique position to do so, to mark our lives: the births we announce, the children we dedicate, the Bibles we give, the creeds at Coming of Age, the Youth Sundays that make us come alive, mornings like this when we bestow blessings, the weddings, the anniversaries, the birthdays, the memorial services, the illnesses and prognoses, we mark them all.  

Watch the year go by: every Opening Sunday, Transylvanian Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, All Souls, Divali, Thanksgiving, Advent, the Holiday Loss wreath, the angels who process, every Christmas Eve, Hanukkah, the Solstice and the times of Equinox, the New Year, Lent, Easter, the Passover, Earth Day, Mother’s Day, we mark them all.  Hello to members, and good-by.  Hello to interns, to staff, to ministers, and good-by.  We mark all these passages.

Here is the building as we have known it, this room, the rooms underneath, the religious education wing.  It will be changing.  There are memories here.  Many of these graduates have been here since infancy.  Many I have known all their lives.  This place holds memories.  We will say good-bye to the rooms but not to the memories.  We will make new places sacred.

When the poet says, “we’re weaned a thousand times before we die,” he means we are always weaning ourselves from what was to what is to what will be, trying to love each other without owning each other, learning how to stand back, bestowing the gift of freedom.  This is who we are to each other, letting go, taking hands, moving away, coming home, again and again and again.  Here, at the end, a poem by the Maine poet Philip Booth, entitled “First Lesson.”

“Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you.  Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls.  A dead-man’s
float is face down.  You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea.  Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.”

May it be so.