ESR graduate Anna Woofenden offered an inspirational and moving welcome message during the 2014 ESR & Earlham commencement service. If you weren't able to hear it in person or virtually, the following is the text: 

Welcome, each of you, here to celebrate the graduation of your students, your friend, child, loved one, and classmates. Thank you, for standing with us today as we celebrate this milestone and for walking with us throughout our lives.

It is my honor to represent the Earlham School of Religion Class of 2014, here on our graduation day. We come from different religious traditions, stages of life, and calls to ministry, and here at Earlham we found a common community woven together in a commitment to justice and spirituality, contemplation and action, honoring the Light within ourselves and others, and working for the dignity of all people. 

Last week I was at my seminary internship site, the Food Pantry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Every Friday the sanctuary of the church is filled with pallets of fresh fruit and vegetables, piles of bread and bagels, bags of rice, and containers of yogurt. The food is set up around the altar, the communion table, in the center of the room. Every week 400 families walk around that circle, finding the groceries that they need in order to eat that week.

Last Friday I was standing just outside the back doors, with one of the volunteers, who I’ll call Jim. Like most of the volunteers, he came to the Pantry to receive food, and stayed to give it away.

He was furiously breaking down boxes, carefully separating the waxy celery boxes that get composted, from the little boxes that had held the entrée for the day. I picked up a celery box and asked him how he was doing. Out tumbled his recent struggles with his slumlord landlord’s ploys to evict him, the string of false accusations from his neighbors, his search for a lawyer to represent him, and the ongoing battle of living below the poverty line in the part of town I’d been told to never walk through alone.

As he told me about the accusations and struggles, his desire to react with violence, but how he held back, I noticed this redemptive refrain: He said "because that's not who I am, that’s not who I am. This is who I am. I'm a person who comes and spends every Friday giving food to people who need it. I am a person who cares about people.” “I help people.” 

He went on to tell me how he’d been riding the bus home the night before and he had seen a woman drop her keys as she got off. He jumped off the bus, and ran down the block, yelling “Ma’am, ma’am” as she kept walking faster. He told me, "I think she thought I was going to mug her or something, because, well, look at me,” as he pointed at his dirty black sweatshirt, his stringy grey hair, jagged teeth, and worn shoes.

“And then,” he paused with the hurried dismantling of the box he was working on and looked me straight in the eyes, “Then she turned around and saw that I was trying to give her her keys and her whole face changed. I live for that. I live for that look on people's faces when they think I'm one way and then realize they were totally wrong and can see who I really am. I’m the person who comes here and helps give food out every week. I help people. You know who I am. You know who I am.”

And you know what? We do. And he does, because he has people who enter into the messy, beautiful soup of community together and see the Light Within each other.

And have we not found the same at Earlham and Earlham School of Religion? We found a place where we have discovered who we are. Where we have claimed “I am a minister. I am a writer. I am a chaplain, I am a church planter. We are justice seekers, and an integral part of the web of humanity and Friends of God.

We have learned and grown in a place that is committed to the idea of seeing the Light within all people. From the speakers at Peace Forum every week, to class discussions, cultural immersion trips, and conversations over community lunch, this is a place to be seen and to see the world with broader eyes. Breaking down the barriers between “us” and “them.”

Breaking down these barriers because, well, it’s not just some gritty addict from the grime of the San Francisco Tenderloin district who’s being evicted. It’s my friend, Jim, the guy who I break down boxes with in the backyard and we move pallets of watermelons and we feed people together.

When we begin to see the Light within everyone, we might find ourselves hanging out with people that aren’t like us. Or that make us uncomfortable. Or that show us pieces of ourselves we didn’t know were there. Kinda like Jesus. That Divine Light that showed up on earth and ate with sinners and tax collectors, and broke all the rules by talking to women and outcasts, who touched and healed the “untouchables” and gathered together a motley crew of mis-fits as his disciples. Because he knew who they were and in community together, they could say, “You know who I am.”

And maybe that’s why all of us are here, whether we’re seminary students or education majors, chemistry wizzes, or immersed in intercultural studies. We are Earlham graduates because we give a damn about people and we are moved by a desire to bring more peace and justice, compassion and love into the world.

Thank you Earlham for being a place where we can say, “You know who I am” and for challenging, equipping, and inspiring us to go out into the world to do likewise.