Founders Day Invocation
West Virginia Wesleyan College
11 October 2019
Let us pray:
For the gift of this place, O God, we are grateful:
For golden light of a warm October afternoon.
For piercing blue skies.
For the trees we love on these grounds:
white oak and spruce, linden and red maple, dogwood and tulip trees and so many more.
And for those who keep this place beautiful through every season,
whose daily work often goes unnoticed, unnamed.
We are grateful for spaces outside and in that we remember today with deep affection—
where teachers and texts, class mates and conversations changed us. For good. For ever.
We love this place.
And like any place we come home to, it is both familiar and complicated, enchanting and exacting.
We give thanks this day for those whose vision birthed this place:
founders who could not have foreseen the countless persons who would find themselves here—
find their voice, their vocation; find purpose, find a partner; find a lifelong love of learning.
And in the passage of time we are mindful
that there are always both achievements and disappointments,
tragedies and graces, setbacks, comebacks, and the gift of coming back even now
to be with friends, to remember and give thanks.
With gratitude, we reflect on how the passage of time can both soften our hearts
and strengthen our resolve:
how it is we have learned or at least longed to be more charitable to ourselves and to others
and how we continue to care about—because this place and its people taught us to—
justice for the mistreated, inclusion for the marginalized, dignity for all those robbed of it.
And so may we live more fully into these callings, discovered and nurtured in this place we love.
Give us grace this day and every day, we pray, for this joyful, purposeful, life-giving work.
Amen.
Dr. Debra Dean Murphy, Class of 1984