About 100 students and their families attended the Interfaith Baccalaureate Service at Western Presbyterian Church Saturday morning to celebrate the importance of faith in their lives at GW.
Reverend Adam Park, the pastor of the Immaculate Conception Church on 8th Street and the Chaplin of GW Catholics, delivered the invocation and spoke about how education encourages students to become closer to God during their time at GW.
Graduates from Jewish, Muslim and Christian backgrounds looked back on how their faith helped them through their college experience and performances from jazz bands and baritones provided musical intermissions during the service.
Here are a few highlights:
Chaplain Meraj Allahrakha, the community adviser of the GW Muslim Student Association who received his master’s from GW in 2010, drew parallels between the Christian and Jewish hymns played at the service and messages from the Quran.
This similarity, he said, is a reminder for the interfaith community that these words all come from the same source.
“I may call upon Allah and you may call upon Adonai, but when you’re failing your classes and you haven’t studied for finals and realize you haven’t done any of your papers, you say ‘Oh my God,’” he said. “You can call him by as many names in as many traditions you like but we’re talking about the same thing.”
University President Steven Knapp said the differences across faiths are less significant than they sometimes appear and that members of different religions can come together to build compassion.
“Treat others as you want to be treated yourself. A very simple and obvious statement, you might say,” Knapp said. “Part of what makes it so obvious is that it is equally ingrained in all of these great traditions.”
Marcus Andrews, who is graduating with a master’s degree from the Milken Institute School of Public Health, said he came from a neighborhood filled with crime and lacking opportunities, but at GW he found his passion for community health through his foundation in faith.
“One of my grandmother’s biggest fears was that I would go to college and forget about faith and God,” he said. “But little did she know that like the scripture trained me up in the way I should go.”
Former Student Association Executive Vice President Thomas Falcigno used his speech to remember Benjamin Asma, a student who died by suicide in the spring of 2014 and would have been set to graduate this spring. Falcigno, a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity with Asma, said that faith in each other and, for Falcigno, faith in his fellow fraternity brothers, can be as powerful as faith in a higher power during difficult times.
“In those difficult days, my fraternity learned the meaning of faith, how it can bring people closer, how it can strengthen the bond between one another and how faith no matter what kind binds us all together,” Falcigno said.
Colin Murphy, the president of GW Catholics, recalled his faith director once telling him that college was a time when you pick yourself apart and put yourself back together again, a lesson he found to be true during his time at GW. He said that many students at GW want to improve the lives of others but without a relationship with God, it is often difficult.
“This reality is precisely why the interfaith community at GW is so important,” he said. “We believe there is something bigger than us happening here, that our lives have purpose and beauty and truth.”
Go to hatchetphotos.com to view photos from commencement ceremonies throughout the week.
