What Are Knights and Ladies For?

A Preview of My First (and maybe Last) Commencement Speech

The following is the opening few minutes from the 2025 Commencement Speech I gave at Trinitas Christian School last week. The full thing will be published soon, which I will link to at the end.

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Kurt Vonnegut gave a commencement speech towards the later end of his career, and he advised that all such speeches should begin with a joke. I toyed around with possibilities for this venue, including the much beloved green ping pong ball joke, the always appreciated purple kingdom joke, and the new-to-many-of-you story about lil’ Johnny and the Noodle Man. However, none of them seemed quite right for the occasion, so I thought I’d do something completely different: let’s start out tonight by defining our terms. I promise, if you’ll bear with me, that this will be over quick.

It may not come as a surprise to anyone here, particularly to the graduates, but I happen to think the meaning of words is one of the most important aspects of a proper education. For instance, what we are celebrating here today is most properly called commencement, signifying that this is the beginning of something rather than an ending. Graduation, after all, is simply the completion of any given set of requirements, indicating you’ve done everything asked of you to that point (even if sometimes you’ve done it begrudgingly). So, congratulations on that part of your education, graduates. This usage of commencement is found in American schools as early as 1850, though it was originally reserved for colleges (as what we might call high schools back then did not have such celebrations). But as more and more secondary schools began to honor their seniors, the term made its way down to this earlier stage. That original sense, reserved for colleges, is important because it meant the beginning stages of those privileges associated with entering a Master’s degree program or with beginning doctoral studies. Commencement was originally one step towards the next thing, recognizing that by completing the steps outlined you were invited into a new set of challenges, a new set of privileges, and a new set of responsibilities. That’s why what we’re doing here tonight is really commencement; each of you will leave this building and enter into more responsibilities, more challenges, and yes, more privileges. Graduation at any stage then is the completion of one thing, and it acts as a herald for Commencement, which is the beginning of, well, everything that comes next.

Because of this, graduation ceremonies often make me think of the Preface found in A. A. Milne’s House at Pooh Corner, the second and final of the Winnie-the-Pooh books. Hopefully, you are familiar with it. Milne explains to his young readers, “An introduction is to introduce people, but Christopher Robin and his friends, who have already been introduced to you, are now going to say Good-bye. So this is the opposite. When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said ‘The what of a what?’ which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.” I’m not sure if a commencement is the same thing as a contradiction, but there is something fitting about celebrating the completion of high school by focusing on what lies ahead, rather than what lies behind. I’d even go far as to say that any commencement depends upon a contradiction at its heart. For years, students approaching those final days of senior year would ask if I would miss them once they were gone. And my response often surprised them, though it probably shouldn’t have. I would reply, “my job has been to prepare you to leave this place; it would be much harder to do if seeing you leave wasn’t a kind of reward.” This is true for your parents and teachers and family members present today, living in that tension between gladness that you have completed one phase of life so that you can move on to the next, which inevitably brings a sort of sadness.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Read the rest here: https://www.bezainstitute.org/blog/what-are-knights-and-ladies-for