Toast

May 12, 2022

Yesterday afternoon I had the chance to participate in a new event for our seniors: the Graduate Toast. 

Students and guests gathered on the sunny Upper Lawn (aka the dining hall's grassy roof) to celebrate together their upcoming graduation. 

I told them that I didn't have any advice for them. 

This class, which went into lockdown in their sophomore year, has faced as many challenges as nearly any Xavier class in history. Just about the time they had figured out how college works, the pandemic changed everything. It hasn't stopped changing since. 

Some of them will leave here with gaps, things earlier classes picked up along the way. But this COVID class also departs with hard-earned strengths unlike any that most of us developed in college. 

Persist? Adapt? Quarantine? Zoom? Yep, they've done all that now.

It's been a bumpy road. But with your support and that of each other, the class of 2022 has made it. And, as I told them, I'm enormously proud of them. 

The world they'll now enter in a new way is a world of promise – but also of injustice, disease, racism, and war. It's a world that needs the people our students are becoming. Thinking of them renews my hope.

As do you. Over the past two years I have asked you – and repeatedly you've asked yourselves – to continue doing what we've always done despite new and challenging circumstances.

Somehow you've done it. You have challenged and supported our students, at times nearly carrying them, while finding ways to support one another as well.

No thanks is adequate for that. The beaming faces of our graduates at Commencement this weekend won't fully lift the burdens you continue to carry. I know.

But I hope that you will take satisfaction in what you've accomplished – and that the weeks ahead will offer each of you opportunities to renew your spirit.

Here's to you.