Learning to Cultivate Compassion:

Highlights of the 162^nd Meadville Lombard Commencement

Summer 2007

Front row, left to right: Patty Hanneman, John Cullinan, Bret Lortie, Michio Shinozaki, Mark Morrison-Reed, Jack Miles, Barbara ten Hove, Ellen Cooper-Davis, Ivanka Fiserova, and Suzanne Wasilczuk. Middle row, left to right: Margaret Beard, Anya Sammler, Kathleen Green, Julia J. Aegerter, Lisa Presley, Claudene Oliva, Carol Schneider, Eliza Galaher.  Back row, left to right:  Stephen Atkinson, Fred Hammond, Justin Schroeder, Sandra Wilson, Aaron McEmrys, Russell Elleven, France Yoli Joseph, Robert Janis Dillon, Edward Loomis.  Not pictured: Kathryn Lore, Michaael Tino, Archene Turner, and Eric Johnson.  (All photos: Seanan Holland)

Meadville Lombard held its 162nd commencement ceremony on Sunday, June 3, with one of its largest graduating classes. In all, Master of Divinity degrees were awarded to 22 graduates, two received their Master of Arts, four earned their Doctor of Ministry.

Additionally, honorary degrees were bestowed upon John Miles, PhD, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of God: a Biography, the Rev. Dr. Michio Shinozaki, President of Rissho Kosei Kai Seminary in Japan, and the Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed, DMin ’79, who also was the commencement speaker. (Photo, from left:  Rev. Dr. Michio Shinozaki, John Miles, PhD, and Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed, DMin ’79.)

Rev. Dr. Morrison-Reed told the story of walking in Switzerland in June 1965, when he was just shy of his 16th birthday.  As he was walking with a friend, a little Swiss boy saw him and went running to his mother, terrified of the young black man approaching him. Morrison-Reed told the story to give witness to the moment he credits as the point when his life changed, as did his life purpose.  Having grown up in a house where his parents were always “at a meeting,” being politically active in the late 60s and early 70s was not second nature to Morrison-Reed, but first.  He tells of how his activity changed as a result of the shame and anger he felt on that mountaintop in Switzerland.  It has charged his life’s work.  He urged the graduating class to learn the lessons he learned, though certainly not in that moment—that the hardest lesson in life is not about saving the world, nor is it about doing the right thing—“or about doing anything at all.  The hardest lesson,” Morrison-Reed said, “is about learning to cultivate compassion—compassion for you, and for me.”

After the conferral of degrees, Rev. David Bumbaugh, BD ’65 (left) gave the charge to the graduates, telling them of the Universalist General Convention of 1935 and the declaration drafted in that assembly to the world “that faith they sought to embody.”  Bumbaugh told the graduates of the world these Universalists were living in, when the great war was over and the ruins left by capitalism run amok.  Included in that declaration were some radical ideas, including “We avow our faith … in the power of men of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil, and progressively to establish the kingdom of God.”

Bumbaugh then charged the graduating class of 2007 to heed the example of these Universalists to avow and embody their faith in the work they will do as ministers:

“But in a world grown fearsome and threatening, to minister is to cry out the danger, to speak, out of a deep and abiding faith, of an alternative vision, a vision that has the power to entrain a different future.  I charge you to live and act and to minister out of that center of faith, no matter how naive it may seem, to live and to act out of that vision of possibility, out of that hope that must not be overwhelmed no matter how grim the prospects may appear; for in truth, the future we shall build together will never be more than the vision, the hope, the faith that captures us and animates us and lives through us.”

Master of Divinity

Front row, left to right:  Bret Jay Lortie, Patty Hanneman, Beth Ellen Cooper-Davis, Claudene Florence Oliva, Margaret Louise Beard, Ivanka Fiserova, Suzanne Wasilczuk. Middle row, left to right: Fred L. Hammond, Anya Sammler, Kathleen A. Green, Carol Jung Schneider, Sandra Strickland Wilson, Edward Leroy Loomis.  Back row, left to right: Justin Matthew Schroeder, Aaron Bradley McEmrys, Stephen Richard Atkinson, John A. Cullinan, Eliza Cooke Galaher, Robert Grant Janis Dillon.  Not pictured: Kathryn Elaine Lore, Michael James Tino, Archene A. Turner.

Master of Arts in Religion

Eric Johnson (not pictured)
France Yoli Maya Yeh Joseph

Doctor of Ministry, left to right:

Russell K. Elleven.  Title of Dissertation: “Divorce Education: A Curriculum for Progressive Churches.”

Barbara Wells ten Hove. Title of Dissertation: “Kindled in Community: Theology and Practice in Unitarian Universalist Worship.” 

Julia J. Aegerter.  Title of Dissertation: “Congregation Based Organizing as a Tool for Incarnational and Maturational Growth.”

Elizabeth Vaughan Presley. Title of Dissertation: “Liberal in an Illiberal World/Traditional in an Untraditional Ministry: Unitarian Universalists in Military and Law Enforcement Chaplaincy.”