The Advice I Wish I'd Been Given at Graduation 44 Years Ago

(This is the speech/sermon I offered this week to a group of hometown, about to be high school graduates. I offer it here in a spirit of the optimism and hope that is graduation season.)

First from scripture, from the book of the prophet Jeremiah.  God’s people wondered if God was present in their lives after they’d gone through hard times. This is what God said, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

And a favorite quote of mine from the American film director Robert Altman, about giving advice since all of you right now are in a marathon of events where lots of people are offering lots of advice. Altman said, “I'll give you the same advice I give my children: Never take advice from anybody.”

 

Thank you for letting me be a teacher and pastor to many of you and your families.  I will miss you so much. Visit when you return home from college and whatever lies ahead, please!

 

Now, as one whose done ministry for forty years, an observer of human life, a writer, a Master of Divinity degree holder, a 62-year-old with much life experience, I should have something helpful to offer all of you. Some advice: wise, deep, maybe even profound.

 

But when I think back on the advice I got when I was graduating? On that day, I was very excited and very scared. I actually dug up a picture of me from 44 years ago, May 1979, the month I was in your shoes. Yup. I once sat where you are.  I had a lot more hair then and a lot less wrinkles and my sideburns were very seventies and I’ve no idea why I am not smiling but, I was 18. Enough of that ancient Polaroid!

 

Now--of the advice proffered to me that day 44 years: by well-meaning relatives, teachers, parents, peers? It’s totally lost to me.  I’ve no clue what they said. So, instead of presuming to be the one to offer you advice, I’ll instead offer the advice I wish someone had given to me, when I was getting ready to set off to the University of Massachusetts.     

 

So, to the John Hudson of May 1979. Here’s some advice from John Hudson of May 2023.

 

Life goes much faster than you might imagine. At 18, John, you are looking at all the days and weeks and months and years ahead for you and seeing these as seemingly without end. That’s what you are supposed to do at 18. You can’t envision yourself at the ripe old age of 62. That’s as old as your grandfather but be warned. Life does seem go by in a breath. In the tick of a clock. In the passing of sunrise to sundown. One day I you’ll be at high school church camp with your best friends in the world, playing ultimate frisbee, running like the wind. Today? I can still cycle my bike up a long hill, but the legs hurt, I get winded easier, and I bike on a new hip. Time goes by fast, very fast.  

 

So, I guess what I am saying is that in the passage of all those years, I wish you, my 18-year-old self had realized the miracle that is daily life. I wish I had savored things more, the relationships in my life. Friends. Family. Wish I had told people more, that I loved them. I wish I had been able to tell my dad before he died how much I loved him, how he shaped my life for the good. He wasn’t perfect. Well, neither was I then or now.  

 

So, John, life is finite. Pay attention.

 

And don’t be so afraid and don’t hang on so tight to life. Don’t get so hung up on what people think of you. You are going to spend much way too much time caught up in trying to make others happy, trying to be the person you think everyone else wants you to be. Instead, John, trust in who you are and who God has made you to be. God has given you unique gifts and talents. Your job is to figure out what those are. What brings you joy. What you are really good at doing. How you can make the world a better place on this great blue marble in space.

 

John--you’ll figure it all out. Trust me. You will! Trust that almost all the time, things do turn out well, for the best and just as they are supposed to. All the worrying you do, the angst, it will most often be over a fictional future. Our worst fears turn out to be empty imaginings. Try and live with courage every day. When things get hard, dig deep. Pray. Learn from struggles. You’ll make it through.

 

And finally, eighteen-year-old John, be kind and humble. Be kind. Be humble. The world is always filled with enough bullies ready to hurt others, with enough blowhards who act as if they have the answer to everything, that they are always right. Our world is overflowing with people have who so much money that they do not know what to do with it all. I’ve learned that money helps, but only to a point and what really matters is the quality and depth of all the relationship in your life. Old friends. Loyal family. God. Be humble, John. You are a good young man, but you are not “all that” and that is ok. Just be yourself.

 

Dare to believe in some awesome power working for the good, in a higher power that wants the best for you, in an all-loving power giving you the drive to make this world better. Have faith. God will be there for you. God put you here for a reason.

 

Good luck and God bless 1979 John.  You are going to have a good life, not a perfect life, or a life without pain, but still, a good life.  Trust that. And remember to say thank you to God at least once a day for at least one thing you are grateful for.

 

To you, the class of 2023: God bless you all. Let everyone say, Amen!

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

 

The Seasons Turn. Life Turns. God Grant Us Faith In The Turn.

“I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does.”--from “Anne of Green Gables” by L.M. Montgomery

Spring comes. It absolutely does. It always does. But it takes its time too.

I’m just finishing up my yearly trip to central Minnesota in the spring, a visit to the Collegeville Institute, a writing, research and retreat center on the campus of the Benedictine Saint John’s University in Collegeville. I always enjoy my time here, in part, because of how different it is in this part of the world, from my part of the world.

Geographically. The landscape is so flat here! Culturally. Why are these people so darn nice all the time? Gastronomically. Of course there are tater tots on the menu! And definitely, meteorologically. Has it stopped snowing yet!?

You see this corner of God’s creation is as far north as Montreal, so even as back home in southern New England we’ve been reveling in the daffodils and balmy temperatures for weeks, folks in these parts are just making the turn.

The Turn.

That’s the day or days when Minnesotans know that winter has finally turned, and that spring is here. The earth has turned. Life has turned. The world here has turned away from the chill and towards the sun.

Yes, spring’s arrival might be slow or tentative. The day I arrived here a little more than a week ago, seven days into May, the trees, and bushes out back behind my little apartment were almost bare, with the tiniest of little green buds, still not blossoming. Now, just eight days later, those buds have popped, awakened, burst forth, opened up, exploded, all signaling that yes, old man winter is finally retired.

At least for this year.

Because while we in the Boston area had that most wimpy of winter wonderlands (try 11.4 inches, our lowest total in 50 years) Minnesota got whacked by winter. Try 86 inches here in Collegeville (2^nd most ever in 100 years), 90.3 inches in Minneapolis (3^rd most) and Duluth at 139 inches, the most ever recorded since snowfall records have been kept.

That’s a lot of snow. 

That’s why people here are so happy, joyful, even giddy (a term not often used for Midwesterners) at this turn of the seasons.  I imagine that just weeks ago, it might have been tempting for residents of the north star state to wonder if winter was really ever going to end. If life would ever turn. Go from cold to warm, dark to light, and buried to liberated.

That’s not just a temptation for people who so much want one season to end and another to finally begin. It’s also a temptation for all humans, for we who can easily wonder during a difficult season of life that we find ourselves living within…is this ever going to end? Is this ever going to turn? Will spring ever come back to me and my soul?

When someone we love has died and we wonder if this harshness of grief will ever lessen, if the pain will ever soften. When a relationship has ended and our feelings around it are still so raw, so hurt.  When ill health keeps us down and taxes our bodies and makes us weary. When the kids won’t stop bickering and my job feels so mind numbing and the politics in our country are so toxic and, and, and.

It’s almost easier to fatalistically think none of these realities will ever turn.  That life will just keep on being stuck. Buried in a way. The harder thing is to instead trust and believe that the seasons will one day soon change, and the snow will melt, and the buds will bloom, and the flowers will come alive, and yes, life will be renewed.

Things will turn. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”  We are told of this spiritual wisdom by the author of book of Ecclesiastes.  That if we wait, that if we trust in the surety of the seasons, that if we look for God’s good in all seasons, that if we have courageous faith enough, life does turn.  It turns.

And if the circumstances do not turn, well, then God willing, and God inspiring, how we are dealing with those challenges will turn. We’ll somehow be stronger. We’ll ask for help. We’ll dare to look for the good in the midst of the bad. We’ll pray and pray again. Maybe we’ll just hang on, hang on, with all we’ve got, until spring arrives. 

The Turn. It comes. Thank God, it does come. Not necessarily in our human time of understanding and not always on our schedules but the seasons—they do turn. They turn under the mysterious sway and the faithful watchfulness of God. Our God of the seasons.

Yes. Life turns.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

 

 

 

Why the Hurry? How Our Fast Lives Keep Us From Enjoying Life.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.”  --Mae West   

You have no record of my prescription!! I thought to myself, did not say out loud, thank God.

That happened this week after standing in a twenty-minute-long line at my local chain drugstore, waiting to pick up a solution I was supposed to drink to…well, let’s say help evacuate my innards…so, the last thing I wanted to hear on this day before a lovely hospital procedure was that things were not clockwise lined up. Not ready to go. Not happening now.  Not on my schedule.  Not timely. Not on the dot.

I called the doctor’s office in a righteous huff. The administrator quickly apologized. The doc was so busy with caring for other patients, he’d missed signing off on the script. My ego and my anger deflated quickly.  And I thought, “Why am I such a jerk sometimes when things don’t happen in my time and on time and fast?”  

Like when I am standing in line at the grocery store or stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike or waiting on hold with my airline or twiddling my thumbs when an appointment is late or even a no show.  So many times, when these normal hiccups in life happen, I get miffed. Annoyed. Hassled. Fuming. Convinced that if the world only went at the speed I demand, things would be so much better.

Which isn’t really true. The reality is that almost all of the time when I am stressed because of the clock or when I am rushing to get from here to there or when I am impatient with another person because they are too slow for me, I buy into one worldly myth.

Faster is always better.  Faster.

As in faster internet speed or faster driving for our commute or faster service at a restaurant or faster answers to a late-night email or text or faster attention at the doctor’s office.  Always it feels like our frenetic culture demands that things speed up, no turning back or dialing it down. Fast food. Fast home grocery delivery and fast ordering on Amazon. Who has time to go to the store? We overpack our schedules and see weekends and holidays as times not to slow down but in fact to try and do even more and faster.

One winter I was in such a rush to get to work that twice in one week I zoomed out my front door onto an icy February walkway, slipped and fell in a dramatic upward arc and then landed in a heap on my back. Coffee flying one way. Briefcase tumbling the other. Me staring up at the sky, wondering if I broke my tail bone. I asked my spiritual director what he thought it might mean. He said the obvious I was blind to.

“Maybe God is telling you to just slow down, John.”

Yup. Yet how rarely do I slow down. I forget that the things I do well and really enjoy in this life, the activities and relationships that bring me meaning, these always involve taking my time. Being thoughtful. Paying attention. Pacing myself. Not being such an impatient self-important jerk.

Good sermons and good writing take time, many hours, can’t just be instantly ordered up on CHATGPT. Prayer is not like a hundred-yard dash. I have to sit in the quiet and be still and listen. When I’m with loved ones, like Bridget who I play catch with when I visit her out in Minnesota, if I rushed this beautiful ritual, it would ruin it.  My woodworking in the basement? My baking bread, trying out a new recipe? My counseling the people I serve?

I have to slow down, slow down, slow down.

Soon I’m taking my yearly writing retreat at a Benedictine college in central Minnesota, nestled among the plains and the lakes of that bucolic place. I’ll stay in a spartan one bedroom apartment for ten days.  I’ll write. Ride my bike. Talk to God. Rest and sleep. Visit old friends. Most importantly, I will turn off my email, leave the calendar back home, shut off the news, and jump off the treadmill that is life for too many of us in 2023.  

I know I’m lucky. I am so grateful to be able to do this. I so wish that more of us would find creative ways and time to just chill. Stop rushing. Why do we believe that if only we go fast enough, well then, then we’ll absolutely be a good parent, a good worker, or a good child of God? That’s the devilish spirit of the world trying to trick us into believing fast is always good and slow is always bad.

Perhaps we should take a cue from the Almighty.  Even God rested and slowed down after a long week. God worked six days to bring forth Creation. But as Genesis tells us, “On the sixth day God finished the work that [God] had done, and…rested on the seventh day…. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work of creation.”

Even the Creator slows down sometimes. That’s wise spiritual advice for us. We are just human creatures made by God to enjoy this miracle called life.

And slowly. Slowly.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.