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Almighty God, we bless you for this college, and for its
enduring capacity to touch and shape the lives of young women and men for
good. We thank you for the impress of its character on each one of us, and for
the persons it has enabled each of us to become.
By your Spirit, we pray, let Davidson continue to be a
useful instrument in the service of your Kingdom. And to this end, deliver its
faculty and administrators from every insidious form of academic arrogance,
saving them from the damning assumption that being smart is the same thing as
being good. And deliver us, its alumni, from the self-serving notion that
being successful is the same as being faithful. And for each proficient,
competent, achieving one of us gathered here, do especially forgive all those
virtues which mislead even the faithful folk into deceptive convictions of
self-righteousness.
With deep gratitude, we recall those classmates whose
presence once enriched our college years, but have not lived to join us for
these reunions today. Though they are absent in body, we would nonetheless
reach out to include them in this present fellowship, as they yet live in our
hearts, and memories.
From among the many classes gathered here today, we ask a
special measure of Divine grace for the dogged survivors of the Class of 1951.
It surely, O Lord, is not their fault that time, circumstance, fate,
Providence and Divine Election conspired to make of them perhaps the finest
class ever to stumble through Davidson College - so that from their earliest
days on campus an appropriate, creaturely humility has proven itself a
remarkably elusive goal for any one of them. Yet, even at this eleventh hour
of their earthly sojourn, O Lord, open their minds and hearts, we pray, to the
possibility of setting aside the quite justifiable pride-of-place they claim
in the great procession of Davidson graduates.
And now, we thank you - O, Heavenly Father - for this
meal, though it in fact be only a cold, boxed-lunch - dearly priced and
bought, but marginal fare indeed for a gathering as auspicious as this one.
True, that since that long-ago graduation we all seem to have added unneeded
pounds. Still, an administration more sensitive and less penurious just might
be led to follow a Divine call to indulge its loyal sons and daughters in a
fashion more akin to the nature and extent in which it hopes to share in their
prosperity and largesse.
We bless you, O Lord, for the graciousness that has
sustained us and brought us, with this our beloved school, to this day and
this place, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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