The ungraduates

Ongkingco

In these months, there will be another generation of students marching to graduate.

The long years of hard work rendered with successes and failures, camaraderie and much more have hopefully coalesced into an identity creating career for the graduates.

Parents too will cherish a sense of accomplishment and relief now that their sons or daughters are better equipped to face life and can now count on them for some support.

There are some graduates, however, who consider this stage as simply getting over and done with something.

They believe it is just a conventional label or mark that gives nothing or little of the much-needed street-smart skills to survive a ruthless and competitive world. In any case, for them, it’s done and over with!

Whether graduation is seen as the beginning of one’s participation in the more engaging challenges of socio-professional life, or finally one’s escape from a series of unbearable lectures and inflexible harassing exam schedules, there are realities in life we cannot graduate from.

No one can deny that graduating was made possible by individuals who have never graduated from their chores for one to finish his studies.

There was the driver who patiently waded through traffic to bring to and fetch us from school, the mother or helper who silently washed our uniforms and prepared meals. Even for working students, there are those who are their constant source of encouragement and support up to the end of college.

Thus, behind every person and career, there is a myriad of hidden individuals who will never walk up a stage, receive a diploma or a medal for their daily sacrifice for many who have finished an education.

Aside from these hidden individuals, there are realities that we can and should never consider graduating from.

These are called life’s golden lessons and realities, for example: love, sacrifice, prayer, diligence, meekness, patience, fortitude, and so on.

Anyone who believes that he can casually “pass” these “subject matters” and forget them will only gain one degree: egoism.

Egoism will automatically wall him within a prison of individualism that seeks to satisfy nothing but his self.

Thus, Pope Francis constantly reminds us to learn and relearn the basic lessons that can be derived from life’s golden lessons and realities like the family, friendship and compassion for the less fortunate and oppressed.

In most cases, the Pope says our sadness in life, family and work is rooted in our self-centeredness. Only by breaking down our egoistic walls and allowing Christ to enter can we have genuine happiness and share it with others.

But there is still another attitude that is subtler but more dangerous: indifference or lukewarmness. It is a stubborn student who is complacent about what he learned. He believes that he need not exert more effort to improve or gain more knowledge.

He is satisfied with getting by despite his talents to do more and give more. Furthermore, this condition also foments the malice of ingratitude and appropriates every good to oneself.

With egoism, lukewarmness and ingratitude combined, the person’s life becomes a black hole of selfishness and barrenness.

Unless he wakes up to learn and grow in the golden lessons of life, he will remain an “ungraduate”: one who may hold a title to some career engraved on parchment paper; but the parchment of his life shows that his head is full of himself, his heart incapable of loving and his hands and feet are paralyzed from venturing into the path of serving his fellowmen.