Colleagues, families, friends, and students: Here we are to celebrate! That's why I wore my party outfit. But I hope you didn't come to celebrate the certificates, or the medals, or even your good grades — because we're really here to celebrate the learning: the exploring and the discoveries and the questions and the failures and the wastebasket full of crumpled paper and a little screaming, maybe, and the satisfaction of solving an equation or figuring out your thesis statement, and the wonder of noticing what you've never noticed before.

During spring break I was walking out in the country and I noticed some of those thin, wispy, high clouds. I remembered they are called cirrus clouds, and they're different from those big old cumulonimbus clouds. A few years ago at a reunion, some childhood friends were laughing about what a nerdy little scientist I'd been in fourth grade, walking around identifying cloud types. But as I looked at these clouds, I wondered how anyone could not find them interesting or be glad to notice differences and have names to name them.

We live in a marvelous world. When my friend who was in medical school opened his first cadaver, he said the first thing he thought was, “Way to go, God!” What a prayer. I think that, when I see cirrus clouds or look at how my cat's hair grows in intricate patterns, or when I stop to think about the fact that we can make words into sentences and write poems and send emails. Maybe you think it when you play a piece of music, or understand how some theorem works, or see things swimming around in a Petri dish, or notice that you remember how to ride a bike even after a long cold winter, or even stop to think about the miracle of having memory. School should be all about this experience of discovery and wonder.

A few weeks ago, I asked my students to write down some interesting things they had learned in classes. They wrote that they learned what happened in Rwanda…and that Shakespeare is actually pretty interesting…and how removing the wolf population in Yellowstone led to a decrease in vegetation…they learned about Christ's atonement…about how to commit or detect fraud in public companies (mostly detect , I hope)…how the richest 1% of people own 40% of the world's wealth… how to hit a tennis ball, how to speak German, how to sing an African spiritual, and that dust mites live in everyone's noses. And one wrote: “I've learned and been reminded of how important it is to find joy in learning.” Indeed!

Some of those things change the way you think about the world. Some might lead you to action. Some of these things you learn might lead you to change the way you live — on a big scale. Some might just make you laugh or cry or sneeze (in the case of dust mites). They all change who you are in some way, don't they?

Psychologists have done experiments where they give people a game to play — a rubik's cube or a sodoku puzzle. They do the puzzles over and over and they enjoy it. Then the experimenters start to pay the subjects a dollar each time they finish the puzzle. What happens? They start working for the dollar. They don't enjoy the puzzle as much. And when the experimenters stop paying the subjects, they don't want to play the game anymore. That's right — these studies suggest that the way to get over your addiction to sodoku or freecell is to find someone to pay you to do it!

So the argument some people make — and I find this argument very appealing in some ways — is that we should let intrinsic motivation drive our activities, not external rewards or punishments. We shouldn't be working for grades or for money. (Now someone is thinking, Hey! We don't have to pay Saupe anymore! She doesn't want rewards; maybe she'll teach for free! -- Sure, I'll teach for free. But you'll have to pay me to do the grading. )

But now others of you are rightly skeptical. You're thinking, I have to take core classes I don't want to take. I have to go to boring meetings. Someone has to do the laundry and the dishes and fill out the tax forms, or someone has to earn money to pay other people to do these things. Or you're saying, it would be nice to learn for fun and not worry about grades, but I've got to keep my scholarship. I've got to earn that g.p.a. so I can get into grad school. I've got to take Saupe's class because it's the only one that fits my schedule. I've got to take a boring job to pay back my student loans. Boring? One of my English professors used to say, “There are no boring books, only boring readers.” We get bored when we fail to bring ourselves fully to the project. Maybe we get bored when we only want the reward.

So: what if we turn the whole paradigm on its head and choose to want these chores? What if we just choose to choose what we have to do anyway? Sometimes that can work.

But let's go further here. Some of you seniors remember talking about this intrinsic motivation idea back in English 101. When we read that it would be healthy not to be driven by the desire for external rewards and the fear of punishment, you said “Well, what about obeying God? What about the ten commandments? Sometimes we just have to follow the rules!” But then we started to think about whether we could maybe choose to obey the ten commandments for intrinsic reasons, and what that might do to our relationship with God. What a great conversation we had that day! Then I ran into Chaplain Cooper and told him about this idea, and he got charged up and gave me a little grammar lesson. He told me that the tense of the Ten Commandments isn't just imperative, but it also functions as future indicative (you've got to love grammar). “You shall honor your father and mother” doesn't just mean you'd better or you must , but it means that in our lives, when we live them right, this is what will happen! When God's kingdom is restored, when we're having a good day or a good hour, we just will honor our fathers and our mothers. We won't kill or steal. Those behaviors will be what we choose to do. By extension, I think, we will do our homework in gladness and we will learn with joy .

When I was ten, my dad said to me, “Love God and do as you please.” (Which turns out to be St. Augustine … and my dad). “Well,” I said, “Cool!” But then Dad made me stop and think about it. And I understood it, and you do too: love is an incredibly powerful motivator. If we really love God, we want to do what pleases God. If we really love God, then we want to know God better, and when we want to know someone better, we try to understand and appreciate the people and the things and the activities they love.

So what if we choose to want the learning for love ' s sake? This might mean we study the details of science and math so we can appreciate the richness and complexity of God's creation. It might mean we study history and literature and social sciences so we can get to know the people God created. It might also, of course, mean that we get to know humanity's great failings so we can work at setting them right. It might mean we ask hard questions of ourselves and God. It might mean we study poetry and music and art and engineering and economics so we can enjoy the pleasures of apprehending and even creating beauty and order, or improving systems that are flawed. What we learn might lead us to make a difference, to want to restore the world.

Now: the grades and the certificates and the stripes on our robes and the medallions? They are symbols and tokens, usually hard-won. But they are not the point. You'll get your prize, but every time you look at it, I hope you will try to think of one thing you learned while you were earning it. Take the tokens and keep them to help you remember what really matters: the learning, and under and over it all the deepening of your relationship with the One who loves us most.