Salutatory
by Benjamin Sutter
Archbishop Hoban High School
Akron, OHio ● Class of 2016
Family, friends, faculty, and fellow members
of the Class of 2016:
Welcome to the 60th Baccalaureate Mass
and Commencement Exercises of Archbishop
Hoban High School. You may be surprised to
hear that I have never gone on a Kairos
retreat. I had not gone to a single school
dance until Prom this year, and I would not
even have done that if not for the suggestion
of one of my friends. I did not go to a single
Hoban basketball game until senior year.
Even then, I only went to three. As for
football games, I went to a handful freshman
year but did not start attending regularly until
this year. Above all, I wish I had taken a
refreshing swim in the pool on the roof at
least once.
I have been thinking about all of this
recently, all that I have missed out on in my
time at Hoban. In other words, I am saying
that I regret some of my time at Hoban. I
wish I had done certain things differently and
I wish I had taken advantage of certain
opportunities. Of course, my natural
inclination is to dwell on this regret and pity
myself. For example, rather than be content
with the fun I had at Prom, I allow myself to
be upset by the fact that I had not attended
any dances before that because I am certain
that they would have been extremely fun.
Yet, I have learned that I—we-cannot focus on the past and what we might
have done differently. In many respects, we
just have to forget about the past and look
toward the future, which, as Pope Saint John
Paul II reminds us, starts today, not
tomorrow. If we are tempted to look back at
high school with regret or disappointment,
then we must instantly stop and bolster our
hope for the future.
Like me, Jay Gatsby’s main fault was
his obsession with the past. In The Great
Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the fictional
story of Jay Gatsby to make a simple point:
despite any temptation to live in the past, we
must look with hope to the future. For us, this
means looking hopefully toward college. We
might want to worry. Will we fit in? Will
classes be too difficult? Will we be homesick?
Such anxiety is destructive. Instead, we should
listen to Fitzgerald’s call for hope: “Gatsby
believed in the green light, the orgastic future
that year by year recedes before us. It eluded
us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we
will run faster, stretch out our arms
farther...And then one fine morning--”.
It is this hope which propels us onward
toward college, toward a future when we will
have conquered our regret.