Pop 89: Were You There at the Time?
By Madonna Hamel
Last week, I attended three graduations. And though I couldn’t be at two of them in person, I did my best to be fully present. The first was a post-graduation ritual devised on the fly. We decided to celebrate my friend’s grad by taking a trip to Shaunavon, planning the day around meals and walks and lots of talk about life changes. And how to be here when they happen!
We talked about the growing pains that come with graduating. And how they can manifest as a subtle but consequential shift in perspective or a swift kick to the proverbial pants of awareness. Caught between ending and new beginning, graduations are vulnerable moments in our lives, some more than others. (Birth and death come to mind.)
In these moments, we are like trapeze artists suspended in mid-air. We have to let go of the receding swing in order to catch the one coming at us. And in order to catch that swing, we must be physically present to the moment, embodying it completely.
If we’re lucky, we have a net beneath us. In the case of college or high school graduation, that means: a place to rest our head until we secure that job we trained for. We also need witnesses to help us over, to catch us if we fall.
I remember studying Greek mythology in university and learning about “the numen” - spirits who help people across major life “bridges.” Bridesmaids are examples of such spirits at work. Their job is to act as decoys to divert the attentions of dangerous spirits ready to attack the vulnerable transitioning bride.
The day after our ritual foray to Shaunavon, I attended Val Marie’s high school graduation. It was a large class this year - four grads in total, which means, easily, four hundred witnesses. It’s a “it takes a village” thing.
The ceremony went on for hours, resembling more of a roast than a ritual, but the videos, painstakingly edited by one of the dads, brought home to me the value of being raised in the country, where embodiment begins early with morning chores, rough-housing, manual labour and animal husbandry. No matter where they end up, these teens have a core connection with the physical world and their own bodily capacity to encounter it, feet first.
The third convocation was the ordination of eleven priests in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, accessible through the Vatican’s YouTube channel. Throughout the highly ritualized and solemn ordination sacrament and ceremony, I sat, transfixed, as the young men lay prostrate on the ground, then rose to receive anointing, then blessing, then the adoption of new robes. Every gesture, witnessed by thousands present and millions over the world, had symbolic meaning. Every prayer and song and pause, a way to help incarnate the moment.
To be a witness is to affirm that it takes a community to raise each one of us, to keep a conversation alive, to enliven a vocation. In fact, without others who needs graduations? We graduate into a calling, and there is no calling that does not, in some way, call us to serve each other. Even the contemplative contemplates and prays on behalf of the rest of us.
Graduation is the arrival at a destination after a journey of work, struggle, discovery, wonder, confusion, etc. Upon arrival, we have hopefully gained some knowledge, skills, and a deeper awareness of self. We can assure the world that we have learned some things- even if it’s: “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know.”
Without the journey, what does one actually celebrate? It is not the diploma itself we celebrate; it’s just a piece of paper. To celebrate the piece of paper itself is the equivalent of celebrating an AI-generated book or piece of art- all product, no process.
I didn’t bother asking my family to come all the way to my university graduation. I was working as a barmaid that day and made a joke of turning my mortar board upside down and using it as my serving tray. “Because that’s what kind of work I’ll get with a specialty in literature of the American South,” I quipped.
I took my last required credit - a Shakespeare tragedy - over the summer. Afterwards, we all went to the pub where, instead of attending the evening grad ceremony, I hung out until closing, egging a fellow classmate from Texas to recite Hamlet - you have not heard Hamlet until you hear it performed with a southern twang.
Later, attending art school, I grew to understand symbols, and I understood my diploma would be more than just a piece of paper, so when it came time to receive my second degree, I made sure to show up for the ceremony. I wore my overalls, with tools in my pockets - ready for action, reporting for duty as a 24/7 artist. My best pal accepted her degree in a wedding dress. Now, that’s a commitment to art!
As a child growing up in the Catholic tradition, we had guardian angels to get us over bridges. We celebrated the transformational sacraments of baptism, communion, and confirmation - the spiritual equivalent of high school graduation. I remember the day I was confirmed, how I marched around feeling like Joan of Arc, waving my invisible sword in the air.
Watching the young seminarians, vulnerable to the new life ahead of them, it hit me: Each graduation I attended was a culmination - the result of time and effort dedicated to an outcome. The degree to which we are able to embrace the new is completely dependent on the degree to which we can release the old. And that’s where ritual and witness help. They keep calling us to show up, to focus our whole being on the task at hand. For some of us, that means stepping out of the mundane and into the sacred. For others, it may nudge us into considering what it is we hold sacred, ourselves.