“Be a Straight Shooter in the Midst of This Crooked Generation”

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Monday, June 04, 2012

“Be a Straight Shooter in the Midst of This Crooked Generation”

“Be a Straight Shooter in the Midst of This Crooked Generation” | Carl E. Olson | Catholic World Report

This Keynote Address was given at the Baccalaureate Mass and Commencement for St. John Bosco High School (Silverton, Oregon), held at Mount Angel Abbey on Friday, June 1, 2012.

Thank you, Rolando. And thank you, faculty and teachers of Saint John Bosco High School for your gracious invitation to speak at this graduation. It is an honor to be here.

Good evening, graduates, and congratulations!

Twenty-five years ago this very week, I graduated from high school in Plains, Montana, a small town with a dozen churches, three restaurants, two grocery stores, one police officer, and no stop lights.

High school graduations were a big deal in that small town, and I can still remember the emotions of the moment, of being happy and excited, as well as a little nervous about the future.

At that moment, I thought I had my life planned out. And I knew I had plenty of time to accomplish all of the things I wanted to do.

But over the past twenty-five years I’ve learned that time moves very quickly. It actually speeds up as you get older! And I’ve learned that many of the things I wanted to accomplish were not what God wanted for me.

And I would tell you more about my life and all of the mistakes I made and lessons I’ve learned, but I was told we do not have the necessary ten hours for that particular talk.

So, instead, I want to talk about you, the graduates. Not that I know you well at all, of course. Tonight is the first time we’ve met. But I do know one important, essential thing about each one of you: you are a Catholic, a Christian, a disciple of Jesus Christ.

You have been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and have been regenerated in the waters of baptism, united with Christ, incorporated into the Church, renewed by the Holy Spirit, and filled with the divine life of God.

One of my favorite passages from the Catechism of the Catholic Church is the very first sentence of the first paragraph: “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life.” Each of you was created by God out of the overflowing abundance of his perfect love. It is impossible to fully comprehend that truth, but I think we sometimes take it for granted and don’t contemplate it enough.

Before I became Catholic, I spent two years at an Evangelical Bible college. In one of my very first classes, a professor made this rather shocking statement: “God does not need you.” He repeated it several times, pointing to us, staring at us. He actually yelled it! And then he said, “But God created you out of love and he loves you so much he came and died for you.” God is indeed good, despite vicious rumors to the contrary!

However, there are a lot of people, including many Christians, who think God owes them something. I know that I have sometimes fallen into that trap. I’ve learned that if we live as if God owes us something, we are implicitly saying that we, in some way, know more than God! “If only God would realize what I have already figured out!”

Being a Catholic means being completely honest about the distance between God, the Creator of all things, and myself, a creature who is limited and, frankly, doesn’t know as much as I think I do. The famous 20th-century preacher Archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote “A Catholic may be defined as one who made the startling discovery that God knows more than he does.”