Graduation Day
Today’s newspaper is full of stories about high school and college graduations. In theory, at least, the students have now learned enough to go on to the next stage of life, which will either be more schooling or what is called “the real world,” meaning a job. They have been preparing for something, and now they are ready for it. Or at least they should be ready; it’s coming, whether they’re ready or not.
As one gets older, one becomes (or ought to become) conscious of having learned something. We speak of the lessons of life, the school of experience. But what is the point and the use of this learning? We don’t get a chance to go back and try again, equipped with the knowledge of what we did wrong. Sometimes I wonder if life itself presents us with the same situation that T. S. Eliot complained of in relation to writing poetry:
…one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.(from Four Quartets)
Or, in the famous line from Kierkegaard, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” What is the point of the understanding, if it can only illuminate the past, and provide no light on the path ahead, which itself may end suddenly in a blank wall anyway?
We can’t even console ourselves that although what we have learned is of no further use to ourselves, it may be so for those who come after. There is a certain amount of objective information we can pass along—knowledge and skills, facts about the world, instructions for doing and making, anything from baking bread to building computers. But those are pretty clear-cut, and easily tested: either the bread is good, the computer works properly, or not. Nor is there any particular incentive for every generation to doubt and possibly discard straightforward factual information.
But what one learns in the way of personal wisdom is not the same. It’s notoriously difficult for parents to warn their children out of dangerous paths on the basis of the parents’ own experience, and certain impulses and temptations are no easier to resist now than they were ten thousand years ago; no matter how many times individuals have learned that, for instance, giving in to anger is usually a bad idea, most people still have to learn it for themselves. Most often one recognizes ancestral wisdom only after experiencing the consequences of ignoring it.
Do we spend a lifetime learning, often at great cost to ourselves and others, how to live, only to have it all vanish with us, as when a light is switched off? I can’t believe that’s true. Most religious traditions seem have some idea of life as a learning process directed toward some sort of progress in another life, and the fact that the belief is so widespread indicates, if nothing else, the strength of the intuitive conviction that all this learning can’t be for nothing.
I believe that what we are put here to learn is, above all, how to love. For many or most of us the process of dying is probably the final lesson, and it’s a tragedy that the Catholic idea of offering all our suffering as an act of love is so little known and thought of today, even among Catholics.
The day we die will be the day we leave school for the real world. And what kind of world must it be if learning to love is the preparation for living in it?
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
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