"Gwaduation, a dweam within a dweam."

Unfortunetly that is exactly how Rice's 2005 graduation did not start. Instead, it started out something like

"Holy creator, you are the one who has created this day, and for that we are grateful. We know you by many names but in unity you lovingly brought us to this time and this place that together we might celebrate the gifts and acomplishments of these men and women who come before us today." 'holy source of all' "In all the names for you've given by all who behold you, Amen"

The closing invocation was just about as 'good' but I didn't feel like writing it all out. By the way, if you for some reason you do decide to relive its glory, you can watch the whole ceremony online here.

Katherine made a good point after remarking that this wasn't even a prayer. She said that in a sense, it would be better if they didn't even have an invocation. Having this kind of invocation just upsets those who actually follow a religion and also upsets those who object to religion in public ceremonies. The only people who actually like this type of invocation are those who claim vague spirituality. No one who takes their religion seriously believe that all roads lead to God (except maybe the Universalists and even that is questionable). So why do we have this invocation anyways? I think that would be an interesting Thresher article about how they pick the 'ministers' and what things they can or cannot say. Are there any Christians still working for the Thresher that might be interested?

Let's see. Some of the highlights from Shelly Williams' graduation speech were 'we need to raise our daughters more like sons and sons more like daughters' (actually we need to raise our sons like sons and our daughters like daughters; they're not adrogenous little cell balls), 'you are now intellectuals' (we've been intellectuals for our whole Rice career), 'you have putzah' (huh?), 'go MOB!' (nice to see that they get some support; how come we can't get them to do a show at graduation?), etc. You can probably tell that I wasn't overly impressed. Speeches are supposed to have one thing that will stick in your mind and you'll never forget. Unfortunetly, that one thing is "relationship partner". Luckily, there were friends around and I had brought my camera, so the day turned out quite nicely.