The end.

Last night we bid farewell to the Class of 2015 at our 45th Commencement Exercises.  The ceremony, as always, was held at the Sullivan Arena at Saint Anselm College.  As is our custom, the faculty and staff form a sort of receiving line and the seniors process in and we greet each of them.  After all the graduates had gone through, we processed in and the families gave a very generous round of applause to the faculty and staff, it was quite moving.

The ceremony, like most, was a series of speeches from the valedictorian, salutatorian (plural in this year's case as there was a tie for 2nd), Mr. Mailloux '72, and the superintendent of schools Fr. John Fortin, OSB.  Mr. Mailloux spoke about a doctor who helped Mother Teresa heal from a serious illness in 1989 and tied it in to our call to serve one another.  You read a nice Union Leader article about the ceremony here.

I had the honor of offering the opening prayer and I prefaced it by referring back to the student reflections offered the previous night at the Baccalaureate Mass.  Erin Barry '15 and Nicholas Capobianco '15 spoke glowingly of their time at Trinity and how they had been formed.  I pointed out that they didn't focus on their academics and how they are prepared for worldly success but rather how they talked about people, and not just any people.  Instead of talking about the rick and the powerful, they talked about the poor children that we serve each April vacation in Montana and Guatemala City, our bus driver for athletics, and our former English teacher Mr. Gorski '58.  It was in these people that Erin and Nick saw God and saw true happiness and found their call to serve others.  It is a reminder to us all, I said, that God uses the poor, the lowly, and the humble to make Him known and that we all have the job to indeed be Christ to others.  In that vein, our prayer was the prayer I use each year by St. Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,

no hands but yours,

no feet but yours,

yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion

is to look out to the earth,

yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good

and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.