Most of the audience at Eastern Mennonite University’s 98th Commencement ceremony Sunday, May 1, didn’t realize the special music provided by the string quartet was a world premiere composition of retiring President Loren E. Swartzendruber’s favorite hymn.
While juniors Isaac Dahl, Quinn Kathrineberg, Jacinda Stahly and Maria Yoder played Professor Ryan Keebaugh’s arrangement of “Be Thou My Vision,” the graduates in attendance settled in for a two-hour ceremony that marked the end of their time at EMU.
A total of 556 degrees and certificates were conferred, inclusive of students at the Harrisonburg campus and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, site. This included 378 undergraduate degrees, 169 graduates degrees and nine certificates in pastoral ministry studies.
Among those were 139 Adult Degree Completion Program (ADCP) graduates, including speaker Letitia Bates, who praised her fellow graduates as “skillful believers.” In 2008, she was electrified by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can” speech. His energy and enthusiasm, and then the work of ADCP graduates before her, helped to inspire Bates to work “word by word, line by line, page by page” on her long journey towards graduation. Such confidence and “skillful belief” will stand students in good stead in the coming years, she said.
Graduates in this program earned bachelor’s degrees in management and organizational development and RN to BSN degrees.
Swartzendruber: All conversations are ‘sacred’
In a Commencement address titled “Sacred Conversations,” Swartzendruber reprised his EMU inaugural address of March 2003. He spoke of how “our lives are often shaped most profoundly by our human interactions and by conversations that are often most meaningful only in retrospect.”
Technology is not the best mediator of such conversations, he noted, adding that new innovations in technology, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become part of our daily communication in the years since he became EMU’s president.
On campus, however, graduates have engaged in conversations “that go to the heart of what it means to be human and to be human in relationship to the other,” at the same time, learning about and honoring difference. “In reality, almost every conversation has the possibility of being sacred when we see ‘the other’ as a person of dignity.”
He charged the class of 2016 to go forth “with a deep commitment to foster sacred conversations, to be exemplars of hope rather than fear, of calmness rather than anxiety, of grace rather than negativity.”
Podcasts and photo galleries of all the commencement weekend activities can be found at emu.edu/commencement
Story by Lauren Jefferson
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