There are three pillars upon which the American liberal arts college sits: the primacy of the close relationship between student and teacher; the importance of the residential experience; and the commitment to an educational model, in college and beyond, which places great value on public service.

The last principle takes on especial valence in a college which has, as we do, its roots in the Christian Church. And the fruits of our labor, ours and yours, in this educational commitment, will be perhaps more obvious and certainly more important than any other result of your formal education. Let this ceremony, this final spiritual ritual of your undergraduate education, recommit you -- and us -- to lives of public service: Lives that value, even more than worldly success and riches (and we pray you will have plenty of both and share them with the college!), lives that value service to your fellow men and women over all else.

Many of you, no -- most of you -- have engaged in voluntary service activities in college and in high school. You have gone to Central America to build houses and shelters; worked at soup kitchens in St. Petersburg, helped out at schools and hospitals and hospices and shelters of all kinds for the poor, the battered, the hungry, the injured, the illiterate, the homeless -- the least of our brothers here.

You understand, in ways college graduates of my generation did not, the various ways men and women are imprisoned, at home and abroad, by drugs, by poverty, by ignorance and by slavery -- whether in the human trafficking in the rubble of the Soviet Empire or a hundred miles south of here in the citrus and vegetable fields of Immokalee.

Christian and Jew, Muslim and Hindu, agnostic and atheist -- you graduate this day to the world of privilege inhabited only by college graduates. With your college loans, worries about graduate school success, jobs, the faltering economy -- you may not feel privileged, but you are, and you always will be.

Remember St. Paul's difficult words -- difficult particularly to those of us who think that knowledge is important:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. . . as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away . . . Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Resolve now always to remember the third principle of your education: Resolve now to remember that you were educated, and you are called, to serve those less fortunate than you, no matter how high you rise in the eyes and estimation of the world. Resolve to remember that such service is called love.

Today, you graduating students will join "the company of educated men and women." More significantly, you will join the company of educated men and women dedicated to serve, in various ways, the poor, the hungry, the naked, the sick, and the stranger. Such men and women have been the greatest force for good in the entire history of humankind.

Welcome to their company on this Graduation Day.