Graduates Leave Remarkable Thumbprints

Saturday is graduation day at Murray State University, the May commencement that marks both endings and beginnings.

Graduate Will Pitman, for example, a Murray native, is headed for Medical School at the University of Kentucky.  Will Cartwright, from Madisonville, is bound for Lexington as well, to the University of Kentucky School of Law, but first, he will spend his summer in Washington, D. C. with two internships, one in the United States Senate and the other in the United States House of Representatives.

After a proper celebration this weekend, other young men and women Murray State graduates will end their undergraduate careers to commence careers or graduate schools all over the United States and indeed the world.

Our high school daughter, Cammie Jo, just experienced another sort of celebration, her junior/senior prom.

This is, after all, a season for celebration, and in celebratory times such as these, deep insight sometimes is revealed.  Abraham Heschel, a Jewish rabbi, remarked that “true insight is a moment of perceiving a situation before it freezes into similarity with something else.”

The writer of one of my Sunday school lessons paraphrased the rabbi’s statement.  “Celebration,” he wrote, “is a moment of perceiving a situation before it freezes into similarity with every other experience in our past.”

Celebrations help break up the hum-drum tick-tock of our lives.  We set these times aside to remember the past, to revel in the present, and to anticipate what the future might hold.  In a sense, a celebration serves as a culmination of all that has gone before.  The prom represents the social event of the junior or senior year.

A graduation or commencement is the academic culmination of four years of homework, research papers, and examinations.

Dr. Harry Spalding, a Kentucky family doctor and at one time the mayor of Bardstown, was also a poet.

His collection of poetry, “Tales of a Kentucky Town,” includes a poem about the last days of the old Bardstown Preparatory School for Boys.

One of my former students, Jen McPherson, now a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, quoted from Spalding’s “The Last Prep Man” in her research report on Nelson County in my History of Kentucky class.  The poem gives a note of finality at the last commencement of that venerable institution:

“And now he was the very last

Of all that he’d then known;

The faces, the names, the glow

In friend’s eyes, the teachers past

The span of time, the truth they’d shown,

And the voices that echo, echo, and echo.”

Certainly a sense of finality as well as celebration pervades the pomp and circumstance of both proms and graduations.

And yet, there is at the same time an understanding that there is so much more to experience and to learn.  “You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands,” wrote John Updike.  “Take it up reverently,” he advised, “for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.”

So, to the graduates of Murray State University, take up the rest of your lives reverently.

You will encounter millions of other thumbprints as you proceed, but you will also leave your own mark, a thumbprint like no other.