Banquet Speech

Saint John’s University
School of Theology*Seminary Summer Graduation Banquet
July 22, 2005

By Diana Macalintal

Years ago, as I was preparing to begin my first real full-time liturgy job, I did a very Californian, Gen X thing and got a tattoo to mark the transition. And two weeks before I left for Saint John’s for this last summer of study, I did another very trendy thing and got my navel pierced. I figured if I could survive poking a hole in my belly-button, I could handle comps. These may sound like strange ways to mark these significant events, but someone told me that my last name, “Macalintal,” means “marked.” So marked I would be.

I wouldn’t have believed it back then when I started five years ago, but I believe it now. I believe we have all been marked by this place called Saint John’s, marked by something deeper than superficial tattoos and piercings.

We have been marked by feast and vigil, stone and colored glass, piercing bell and penetrating silence, wooden jubilee canes and simple pine coffins. We have been marked by the rhythm of morning and noontime, evening and night, hot sticky days of summertime heat and welcomed breezes on lazy afternoons. Mosquito and deerfly have left their marks on us, calligraphied rainbows of God’s Word have illumined us, potters hands have shaped us, music has infiltrated us, and teachers have breathed Spirit back into us.

In this place, we have been measured by the rule of Benedict, scrutinized by the alien figure of John the Baptist, and pondered over by the gaze of Mary, the bearer of Wisdom. Here we have breathed the same Spirit-filled air as those named Virgil, Aelred, and Godfrey, and we have been revivified by the loving spirit of those such as Patty, Bill, and Abbot John.

I will forever be marked by the memory of professors named Anthony, Dominic, and Theresa, Max, Christian, and Jim, Thomas, Martin, Kevin, and Charles, and by the stories of so many who have come through the summer doors of the School of Theology.

But most of all, I will be marked by the profound beauty that I have witnessed here during my five summers—that deepest beauty of creation and humanity, time and space struggling to live together in harmony; the beauty found in the cultivation of flower and harvest, in the discipline of musicians and the expectant hope of the potter and kiln, in the lectures that become poetry and you just have to put down your pen and listen. It is the beauty of student and teacher striving for truth and clarity and in the end realizing that it is all tremendous mystery. It is the beauty of a community of faith, living daily in work and prayer, struggling to be faithful through abuse and accusation, apathy and agedness. It is people of faith, working in parishes and schools, beaten down by despair and disappointment, disrespect and division, living through divorce, debt, and doubt, yet still loving this sinful and holy Church of ours, and giving all they have to see it breathe life again into our weary world.

It is this beauty that I will live for and work for and strive for, Sunday after Sunday, through word, music, movement, and environment, through action and stillness, time and timelessness—the beauty of tired hands presenting broken gifts and broken lives and knowing that they are the best we can offer before the aching beauty of the cross.

I give thanks for all of you, especially for my conspirator, Nick, the one who breathes with me. I will miss this place and all of you connected with it, but I will take with me the mark of beauty that you have impressed upon me. I believe we have come from Beauty, and I believe we will gather once again in Beauty.

My first day here, I came to this Great Hall and fell in love with these angels—not your Hallmark card angels, but angels you don’t want to mess with. Now the circle has closed and I return here again to this Great Hall and offer to you these words of love by Annie Dillard.

Angels, I read, belong to nine different orders. Seraphs are the highest; they are aflame with love for God, and stand closer to him than the others. Seraphs love God…. The seraphs are born of a stream of fire issuing from under God’s throne. They are, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, “all wings,” having, as Isaiah notes, six wings apiece, two of which they fold over their eyes. Moving perpetually toward God they perpetually praise him, crying “Holy, Holy, Holy…. But according to some rabbinic writings, they can sing only the first “Holy” before the intensity of their love ignites them and dissolves them again, perpetually, into flames. (Holy the Firm)

May we all be marked by beauty, ignited by faith, and dissolved by love for all those whom our God loves.