ONORABLE PRESIDENT, Matron, Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Board of FPCGI, Board of PCG Itarsi, Dear Pastors, Guests, Colleagues, Delegates

and all Friends. I count it a privilege once again this year to stand and welcome you to another Commencement Service of Central India Theological Seminary. The goal of education is the acquisition and discovery of truth. Jesus declared to Pilate His mission as being a witness to the truth. Of course, Pilate was not in a position to accept such a position as worthwhile; for brute force and wisdom are two different worlds. History is witness to the fact that brute force has often tried to silence the voice of wisdom; while the purpose of wisdom has always been to introduce order into a world full of chaos. The word is supposed to calm the storms. Man lost that power when he fell from truth and disobeyed Gods word. But, the Word of God Himself incarnated as man and men marveled that even the winds and the storms obeyed His word. They obeyed, not just because He is God, but because the Wisdom and Truth of God has its finality in Him in bodily form.

Truth is a difficult word in the modern context of things. The world is a dark habitation of skepticism, doubt, suspicion, mistrust, and fear. We arent even often able to trust ea ch other within the very Body of Christ. Falsehood is a deeply rooted problem. But, God has not willed it so. Jesus said that we must have salt among ourselves. We are called the children of light and called to walk in the light. We are called to stand out and hold out Gods word among a crooked and perverse generation. God expects us to drop our masks and behold Him with an open face, in the liberty of the Spirit. He wants us to look into the Law of Liberty and be transformed thereby.

Towards this end, we strive in our Seminary to guide and lead our learners to the discovery of truth. We have also extended our borders to embrace learners beyond the four walls of seminary, and we have done that by means of our distance education department and theological pu blications. A clear understanding of Gods truth liberates God to move in greater proportions in our life. We can only walk in the light. And, so we are grateful to you all this morning for joining us in this cause of the Kingdom. We thank you for being a part and parcel of this vision of excellency in Christian education. And, we appreciate that you have come here to share in the joy of our fruits. This graduation marks the completion of a term in education for the graduating class. But, certainly they know it that the learning goes on.

Most Welcome and May God Bless You ALL!

16 November 2012, Central India.

My hearfelt congratulations to you, Class of 2011. I share in your joy and well-earned pride as you celebrate this achievement and milestone in your life, made all the more sweet by the years of hard work, study and sacrifice you have made in order to reach this point. Congratulations to your parents and families as well for their support and encouragement and, perhaps at times, forbearance. This achievement is as much theirs as it is yours.

As you prepare yourselves for the greater world beyond the halls of your college and this University, remember always that you bear the mark of UP with you. You have joined the ranks of the UP alumni - a singular honor that distinguishes you from thousands of others. However, this honor comes with a heavy responsibility. As graduates of the National University, you have been given the best education this country can offer. In turn, you must use this education to serve the country and its people. Your knowledge, skills and superior training; your ability to analyze, to criticize and formulate solutions; and your sense of ethics and nationalism must be harnessed to serve a greater ideal. No matter what career you find yourselves in, I exhort you to embody the greatness and spirit of UP through your own personal integrity, your commitment to excellence, and your willingness to continue learning. All the ideals that UP has taught you, all the good you have learned here, you must now demonstrate to the rest of the world. Again, I congratulate you all and wish you success in your life beyond UP. (Sgd) ALFREDO E. PASCUAL President

OFFICE OF THE CHANCELLOR MESSAGE

My warmest greetings to the graduating class of 2011! Today marks a milestone in your lives. Not so many years ago, you set foot on this beautiful campus, happy beyond description because you were accepted in UP. Despite the difficulties, you mustered the courage to begin your life as iskolar ng bayan. For some, poverty was not an obstacle in earning a college degree. To this end, we are grateful UP Mindanao is here. Small as our campus is, limited in resources, underdeveloped in its landscape, and with less than a hand's count of buildings, we boast of a powerhouse of academicians, having a University Scientist, a University Artist, several national awardees, and a pool of faculty experts with a genuine desire to teach excellently and to give to you that UP brand of quality education. Recently, one of our BS Architecture graduates placed 5th in the Architecture Licensure Examination. Your life in UP has developed you into an individual, a cut above the rest. You have become more mature, purposeful, analytical, sensible, and caring. As you pursue your respective careers, value the principle of timeliness as everything significant happens at the right time and place. What you deliver comes with better value when you are time-bound. Accept too, that change is constant and recognize that obstacles are numerous, but have the

determination to rise above these challenges confident with the training you derived from the University. Continue to instill the values of honesty and diligence in your work, as these shall define your character. Remain focused on your goals and aspirations. Work unceasingly and love it. Render true service and actuate unparalleled love for people and our nation. And at all times have that fortitude to stand your ground. These are the marks of excellence the "tatak" UP. Congratulations and Best Wishes!

Welcome, everyone, welcome to the One Hundred Thirty-First Commencement in the proud history of Carleton College. Welcome Carleton faculty, staff, students, Trustees, family members, and this most of all welcome to the Class of 2005. We will pause again in the course of the hours ahead to congratulate all in the Class of 2005, a class which personifies those Carleton qualities of intellectual curiosity and an engagement with life and learning which are this Colleges most distinctive and defining traits, and a class whose diversity, from this county and from across the globe, is, I am proud to say, without parallel in Carleton history. Even so, I wish still to begin with a hearty congratulation to all of you and to your families: Congratulations to all assembled here this morning. If you, members of the Class of 2005, owe more than can readily be said to the Carleton faculty and staff, you owe as well a debt beyond repaying to your families. Hence, let me ask everyone in the Class of 2005 please to rise, face your families, and give to them the ovation they deserve. With all of you, I dearly wish we were gathered beneath the oaks and maples on the east side of the Bald Spot, but that was not to be. Not long ago, we heard again and again that Minnesota needed rain, and needed lots of rain. That we received. For that rain, we give thanks even as we acknowledge as acknowledge we must that all that rain has moved us to the Recreation Center today. The Class of 2005 accomplished much never dared before. Among your accomplishments is that today of inaugurating the Recreation Center for one of its intended uses, the rain site for Commencement. Other graduating classes, in years ahead, will hold Commencement exercises here when it is wise; but no other class will the first so to do.

For sixteen years now, and ever since I ceased to be a full-time professor and assumed a position like that I am privileged to hold today, as I have greeted graduating Seniors in opening Commencement exercises, I have routinely asked graduates to recall their initial days at their college at once to remind all of how impossibly swiftly four years can pass, and also to recall how much graduating seniors have changed and grown because of the faculty and staff with whom they have learned. I ask you, too, to recall your first days at Carleton for just these reasons, but today I ask you to remember those days for another reason as well. For many of you, your first full week at Carleton was the week of Monday, September 10, 2001, and you began Carleton classes the following day. And this means that if none of us can or will forget Tuesday, September 11, 2001, your memories of that days tragic events are forever mingled with your initial sense of college and of Carleton. I learned first of what was that day transpiring when our son called from New York and said something like the following: Dad, I know you dont like television, but youd best turn it on now. And at the college I was then leading we gathered first around television sets around campus and then together in the chapel. We concentrated first, and for long days, on shared sadness and sympathy, and only later on attempts to understand more fully what had happened and why. I know that you engaged in similar rituals here at Carleton. I also know that ones initial days at college are uniquely challenging, as one embarks upon one of those rare moments of beginning anew and of defining ones best self in a new setting. Whatever the routine challenges of beginning ones college career, those challenges were multiplied and sharpened for you because of September 11. You met and surpassed those challenges, challenges which for none of you can have been easy, and it is right, I think, that we recognize that you, members of the Carleton Class of 2005, faced uncertainty and challenge as have few before you because of September 11. And I want to remind you that others went through rather different dramas and challenges that same week. During this past spring break, in March of this year, I

was in Cairo, exploring how we might begin to offer Arabic at Carleton, and I met in Cairo with a Carleton graduate living in Cairo. The week of September 10, 2001, she, a Muslim and an Egyptian-American, was in this country, and she had a very tough time of it. It was not she who had cost the lives of thousands in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, but she often felt that those around her were convinced that her religion and her background were centrally responsible. They were not; this she knew and knows, and we would that all the world knew the same. For all who suffered, directly or indirectly, for the irretrievable change that September 11 made for your Carleton careers and for lives across the globe, we know that our task is at once to remember and to move on. We know that either moving on absent memory or remembering absent moving on would be wrong. And so, we move on, on to Commencement Exercises for the Class of 2005. When I was where you, members of the Class of 2005, have just been, when I was an undergraduate, I met once with a treasured teacher and advisor, and I met with him to complain. The complaint went something like this: Ive been doing pretty much the same thing for a number of years now, researching and writing lots and lots of papers, and Im wondering if I should rather be doing something different, because this stuff Ive been working at has become something of a habit. Ah, Robert, my advisor replied, So working on all these research papers has become something of a habit. There is such a thing as a good habit. Well, he, my advisor, was right about this, as he was about so many other issues. There is such a thing as a good habit, and I want here to define for you another good habit, one those in Class of 2005 have mastered admirably. Let me get to this good habit via several illustrations from the academic year past. First, the Senior Art Show, this Spring Term. Again this year, as in years past, the Senior Art Show opened to standing-room only crowds, and I thought again this year that Carleton students support the arts and support their friends through attending the Senior Art show opening in numbers which obtain at other colleges

and universities across the country only when students are standing in line for tickets to attend national championship athletic events. Enthusiastic support for athletic competition I wholly endorse, but at Carleton, we demonstrate similar enthusiasm and appreciation for the life of the mind and for art. As I have viewed the art produced by Senior across campus this spring, something striking I noted again this year, and this is how much the art many of you produced owes to your off-campus experiences. Living and studying beyond the campus, living and studying in settings across the globe and outside the routine comforts of homeland, has changed how you think and what you think and the art you shape, and that art, in turn, changes all of us. Your and our intellectual development are incomparably the different because of your time across the globe. Illustration number two, this from the Fall Term. On September 25 of last year, just a mile from where we are this morning, a mile to the East and on a small prairie hill, many of us gathered together to dedicate the first college owned utility-scale wind turbine in the country. We dedicated the wind turbine, some of you may recall, on the first, last, and only completely windless morning in recent Minnesota history. I entered the control room and read the gauge indicating wind speed, and it read zero. I pushed a button so that the same gauge assessed the average wind speed over the previous four hours, and it again read zero. But its been turning out there ever since, and with every revolution Carletons wind turbine is at once providing something like the equivalent of half our electrical needs and also offering tangible and symbolic testimony to a greater goal, that of our leading the way toward clean and sustainable energy production, that of reminding us that the earth is the only home well ever have and that wed best take good care of our home. That beautiful piece of Scandinavian Sculpture on the Plains, as Ive come to call our wind turbine, moved from a distant dream to a waking reality because of many here at Carleton, many on the staff and faculty, and many on our Board of Trustees. But, but the dream began and the dream was sustained by you, by Carleton students. Further illustrations of the habit I have in mind arrived every term this year. On campus and across the globe, you Seniors have engaged this year and before in academic research, you have engaged in defining and solving real problems, and

with the larger aim of making our world a better place. Your research, often supported by fellowships and internships, were in the interest of increased cultural under-standing, and in the interest of public service, of applied and theoretical research in the sciences and mathematics, of international community development, of preparation for graduate work. Members of the Class of 2005 have:

explored the meaning of being Chinese in mainland and overseas Chinese communities; collected an endangered medicinal plant in China to discover which chemicals are medicinally active and how compound concentrations vary with respect to life stage in an effort to protect the species from overharvesting; explored the impact that new laws forbidding the wearing of religious symbols in public schools have had on the situation of Muslims in France and how secularism affects dynamic tensions between integration and assimilation; participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates program in mathematics to conduct research in probability, topology, geometry, dynamical systems, and mathematical programming; studied geothermal swimming pools and hot springs in Iceland to gain an understanding of how hot water provides places for people to socialize, stay healthy, and get warm during the cold of winter; interned at a non-profit NGO in Ecuador that was founded to fight poverty by providing homeless and working children with access to education, basic health services, and vocational skills; studied the concept of workers pride during the Luddite Rebellion in the Midlands of England by visiting various museums, working mills, and the towns of longstanding fiber arts tradition; and studied ecotourism in Australia for the purposes of understanding and developing ecotourism in Vietnam.

And this is but a beginning.

Further examples of the good habit you have practiced I have also in mind. Our Winter Term we opened just as newspapers around the world told of the untold devastation and death from an earthquake-produced tsunami, death and devastation throughout much of Southeast Asia and far beyond. Almost immediately, people here at Carleton began to organize both information sessions and relief efforts. Given the scale of the tragedy, our efforts were perhaps small; but your efforts were at once tangible and symbolic, and the symbolism was heard from afar. This Spring, national newspapers, and especially and to its credit, the New York Times, spoke repeatedly of the unspeakable tragedy unfolding in a place whose name was unknown before to many, in Darfur in western Sudan. And the same moving tale unfolded here at Carleton: it was again you, Carleton students, who reminded us repeatedly of the unimaginable scale of forced migration and suffering and death in Darfur. Each of these narratives and many more there are -- speaks to the good habit I have in mind, and it is this: your habit of passionate and hungry engagement, your engagement with the life of the mind and with the wider globe. Throughout your years at Carleton, members of the Class of 2005, you have been engaged: engaged with one another in learning, to be sure, but more, engaged in learning with one another on the behalf of your sisters and brothers across the globe. This Carleton habit of engagement means that you have rarely viewed yourselves as the center or the goal of your lives efforts. You do as you have done because of your engagement with those beyond yourselves. This is a good habit, and my central bidding to you today is that we are all of us in this together, and that you not neglect the good habit of an active and passionately curious engagement with others. Its what defines Carleton. It is what has defined you throughout your time at Carleton. For this past and future engagement, congratulations to the Carleton Class of 2005, and thank you.

The Most Popular Commencement Address

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