One!  Isn’t it great to fail when you are 19 years old in front of your parents, peers and professors, and then to discover that life goes on, that the sun comes up again, that there is much more ahead of you?  Some people don’t conspicuously fail until they are 45 years old, and it devastates them. That’s what I want to tell you graduates. Fail early and get it all over with!  If you learn to deal with failure, you can raise teenagers, you can abide in intimate relationships, and you can have a worthwhile career.  You learn to breathe again when you embrace failure as a part of life, not as the determining moment of life.

There was a second learning that the three of us thought was worth knowing.  We figured…. wasn’t it great to spend a lifetime working firsthand on your own passion, rather than working secondhand or third hand on somebody else’s passion?  Whether comedy or faith or youthful idealism or whatever, be an apprentice in something that beckons your heart to pursue with endless fascination.  None of us was an expert in many things, but all three of us were passionate about one thing.  Some unique one thing.  My advice to you…stay with things that draw you like a magnet. Trust your DNA.  Pay attention to your daydreams.

Because of that experience I have always been on the lookout for the two themes of passion and failure.  And because I have spent a lifetime in the field of religion, I have witnessed a boatload of religious passion and religious failure.

First, religious passion.  Even though you graduates have spent four years in the Bay Area where religion seems like a quaint elective, let me point out that in vast parts of the world the passion for one’s faith forms the core of one’s life.  What does this have to do with you?  It means that people of various religions are going to challenge you – on the battlefields, in the field of science, in your bedroom.  You don’t want to be playing religious Frisbee while they are playing religious life and death.  Religious passion has been unleashed in the world you will be living in.  And everybody here will have to come to terms with it, sooner or later.  “What do I do about this hot fervor of religious passion that stands directly in my path, in the path of my nation, and looks directly in my eyes?” That’s the religious passion question for you.

Second, religious failure.  I said, ‘religious failure.’  Look, I’m a company man.  A bishop, for heaven’s sake.  I could talk endlessly about the significant, brilliant, heroic dimensions that religions contribute to ordinary life.  And I would be on target.  But in the face of the religiously motivated violence exposed daily in our newspapers, I have to admit…there is something radically wrong in the interactions between religions.  The nations of the world have gathered every day for 62 years to struggle together for global good.  The religions of this world in those same 62 years have not gathered one day to struggle together to pursue global good.  Never!  What do we do about all of those other religious spiritual traditions that exist throughout the earth?  Religions that seem so foreign and misguided and potentially dangerous?  Life is going to give you Stanford graduates a test.  “What do I do, we do, about all those other religions?”  The religions themselves have failed this test.  But we are never going to make it as a civilization unless vast numbers of people come up with the right answers in the near future.