Distinguished guests, parents and friends, faculty members, graduates of Xavier High School on this 40th anniversary of the school’s first graduation. One day as I was getting ready to say mass on Guam, I heard a small boy turn to his parents and say, “Mommy, we saw that priest in our movie last night.” I thought that maybe he had seen me on a local TV program, but after the mass his mother told me that he was watching Christopher Lloyd in “Angels in the Outfield.” It wasn’t the first time that someone said I resembled Christopher Lloyd, the slightly crazed-looking actor who played the mad scientist who was always building machines to propel people to the future and back.

Well, if the famous series of Christopher Lloyd movies goes by the title “Back to the Future,” I would like to call this talk “Forward to the Past.”

Why “Forward to the Past?”

Because today of all days, your graduation day, you’re on a march forward–to a new school, to a new community, to a new life. Graduations are events to celebrate moving on. You will be leaving old friends and comfortable old ways to set out for a distant new place (wherever that place may be). Naturally, graduation means separation, which in this very chapel has brought tears to the eyes of more graduates than I can remember and may bring some more today. If this graduation is like other ones I’ve attended, there will be promises to write or get together–promises that you will be a part of one another’s lives until the moon melts and the sea turns to vinegar.

But time passes and people forget old promises. There are new paths to be followed and careers to be made. New friends have a way of replacing old ones, and the old dreams often evaporate as we become older and seemingly wiser. Sure, when we happen to meet an old classmate, we recall the wacky stories of our Xavier days. Some years ago it might have been how we were chased around the ball field at fitness by a madman director who looked something like Christopher Lloyd. Or how the Marshallese used to gather under the lime tree, and the Palauans in the rec house, to speak their own language, until one evening in 1964 when a brown-skinned, shirtless Jesuit scholastic snuck up on a group of Palauans and campused the whole lot of them. (The scholastic was Fr. Felix Yaoch. In those days brown skins and Jesuit scholastics did not seem as compatible as they do today.)

But here’s the danger. We need more than funny stories to sustain ourselves on the journey ahead. We need a vision. You young people who call yourselves “Navigators” ought to remember that the men who sailed those seagoing outrigger canoes had a map in their head. How else could they have reached their destination after sailing hundreds of miles over an ocean without signs that say “Ettal, 40 more miles to the southeast.” Do you have a map in your head? Do you have a vision?

If you do, will you have one ten years or twenty years from now?

You should–because Xavier has certainly tried hard to give you one. Along with the understanding of the future progressive tense in English and the method for calculating cosines and tangents in trigonometry, Xavier should have given you a sense of what life is all about and how it is to be lived. It should have left you with a sense of who you are and how you can contribute to others on your island and in your country.

As you move forward through life, you will have to look over your shoulder–to your old Xavier days–to recapture this vision and the dreams you had when you were young. The vision is something priceless that you ought to cherish for the rest of your lives. That’s why I called this talk “Forward to the Past.”

What is that vision?

First, that our true destiny is never to stop trying to enrich the lives of others through what we have received. A real Xavier alumnus does not take care of himself or herself first. It is unworthy and ultimately self-frustrating to look out only for ourselves, to fill our pockets and let others go off empty-handed. We should have learned that as we grow to become genuine “men and In women for others,” we ourselves become personally fulfilled. Helping our brothers and sisters to get more, we ourselves are enriched. As a matter of fact, this is the only sure road to happiness.

Second, that we can be deeply religious without being feeble minded. A person does not have to drool at the mouth and limp down the road like the village idiot to put God at the center of his or her life. Real faith is not the monopoly of old women, unemployed village dwellers, and others whom life may have passed by. It is the pearl of great price for many intelligent, dedicated, and very lively people as well–unless you feel that none of your faculty and fellow students fit into this category.

Another part of that vision is that we all have a vocation, every one of us, to help develop our own part of Micronesia and its people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Xavier students stayed up at nights dreaming about their political future. Should the islands become independent or continue to be the stepchild of the US? Should the Congress of Micronesia opt for commonwealth, free association, or independence? What roles might these students themselves play in making these exciting new possibilities happen? How could they contribute to the political development of their country?

Today, Micronesia’s political status has been determined, and the exciting times may seem to be over. But they’re really not. We’re still asked to play a leading role in the development of our nation. Times have changed. The clock is running down on the Compact and money is running short. We’re on the verge of funding cutbacks and reduction in the size of government.

A second revolution, sparked by diminished expectations, is in the works, and people everywhere are frightened. Your participation in political development is needed just as badly as it was twenty-five years ago before your new nations were born. Will you help? The vision you’ve inherited tells you that you must. Lastly, your Xavier experience should have taught you that you can be truly Micronesian, 100% Micronesian through-and-through, and still be open to ideas and technology of the West and East. A secure identity does not mean a closed mind. More education and a greater ability to see life from several different angles does not make you any less Micronesian. Xavier has always aimed at making  you equally comfortable in the men’s house and at a Western cocktail party.

Life isn’t as complicated as it may sometimes seem. If only we stand back a little and take the time to reflect, we will see that the hundreds of strands in our lives converge. What we thought to be vastly different colored threads are woven together in а wonderfully simple pattern. One example: what is good for others is what God demands of me, and that is what really is best for myself.

So, in the future, as you journey on, you would do well to move forward to the past–to recapture the vision that you received and the spirit that moved you when you were at Xavier. It’s a bit like the everlasting flame that they lit at the grave of John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963, and a similar lamp placed at the grave site of Chief Petrus Mailo in Mwan in 1971. It’s all well and good to make a fanfare of setting up the lamp, but all this is useless unless the light is continually fed with fuel.

We need to do the same to keep alive the sense of purpose that sustained us during our Xavier years–to keep our lamps lit and the darkness at bay. For our ideals are the most precious gift we have received from Xavier.

You will be faced with many choices in the next few years. Some are vastly more important than others. Many of you will soon be choosing majors for college, but don’t be fooled into thinking that this is the biggest choice you will face. Whether you study to be a sanitation engineer (like the FSM Ambassador to the US), or a marine biologist (like the FSM Secretary of External Affairs), or linguistics (like the Director of Education for Pohnpei), a far more important choice will loom again and again. The choice as to whether you will continue to cherish these ideals, in practice as well as theory.

Keep your ideals alive and your vision intact. Don’t let the most valuable gift you’ve received from this school die. Keep marching forward to face the challenges of the future, but keep your eyes and hearts on these past four years. March forward proudly, Xavier graduates–to the past.

Thank you and God bless you.

Xavier graduation: April 27, 1996