Remarks by President William Lahey delivered May 28, 2026 in the King’s Chapel
It is an honour to address you—the graduands—and your loved ones this morning. Baccalaureate has been part of Encaenia celebrations at King’s from the university’s founding in 1789. It is yet one more beautiful and distinctive King’s tradition. It gives us all the opportunity on this day on which we celebrate achievement, our time together at King’s and Dalhousie, and the beginning of our lives to come, to pause and reflect on what is sacred to us, in our lives and the world.
I want to start with a little part of my personal story in that connection.
Somewhere between my own baccalaureate service in 1983 and becoming president of King’s in 2016, I had mostly given up on the religious faith I had been raised in. As a result, I had largely stopped praying. Or, at least, I thought I had.
Then I took up residence in the Lodge, which, as most of you know, shares a wall with this chapel. There is a door from the dining room of the lodge into the chapel, a design feature that assumes the president will be so frequently in the chapel they would want and need the convenience of a private entrance. Then I learned that there is a seat in the chapel permanently reserved for the president, the one I am sitting in this morning.
I got the message: my regular attendance at chapel was expected. And I quickly learned that if I was to be listening to the choir from my kitchen and dining room anyway, I might as well be in the chapel to fully experience the uplifting beauty of its angelic singing. And so, I became a regular church goer again in my late 50s, at least as much as my other presidential responsibilities would allow. Increasingly, I came less out of duty and more out of a growing appetite for the spiritual encouragement I received by coming one Thursday and many Sundays after another.
What started as obligation became integral to my King’s experience. Just as I feel privileged to be here with all of you this morning, I have been privileged, and often moved, to be witness in this chapel to the spiritual awakening students and others experience here. For that is what education, particularly whole person education, is about—awakenings of all kinds, including the spiritual kind.
It has also been part of my job to spend time in other places of worship, including the Beth Israel and Shar Shalom Synagogues, our neighbours on Oxford Street, the mosque in the Ummah Masjid Community Centre off Chebucto Road, and the New Horizons Baptist Church on Nora Bernard Street, which many of you may know, is the mother church of the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. In all these places of worship and community gathering and celebration, I was welcomed with joy based on admiration for King’s. I found unifying reverence for life’s mystery. I gained a new appreciation for the importance of faith to identity in the communities we aspire to be in closer relationship with, as we seek to be a more inclusive community.
I was recently thanking Mi’kmaq Elder Anne Labilloise for leading us in prayer, in her Mi’kmaw way, at many of our events over recent years. I told her how she had helped me, like my time here in the chapel had, to open my heart to the sense of being part of an encompassing love that is divine in its source and destination. A love that is immanent in all of life and that calls us to live up to the “better angels of our nature.”
In his little book called Embers, Ojibwe writer Richard Wagamese explains how his spiritual practices allow him to honour the mystery of life and to be a good person by being humble in the face of that mystery. He writes:
There’s something elemental about sweet grass, sage, tobacco and cedar smouldering in an abalone bowl by the light of a single candle in the early morning dark. It reminds me of what is most important in my day acknowledging and embracing the sacred. Without that, I can’t walk out my door and discern the sacredness of other people, I can’t be my best self. Without that, I can’t allow myself my limitations or allow others theirs. I can’t be fair and loving and non-judgmental. Without that, I can’t feel the depth and wonder of the mystery everywhere around me. I can’t experience gratitude, worship or communion without that mystery. Those sacred moments of connection, when I choose to take them, are what set my feet on the path I hope to take right through my day. Some days, some moments, I stray from it—but I always know it’s there.
From the experiences I have shared with you, I believe that when we remember to humbly acknowledge and embrace the scaredness that is around us and in us, we become more worthy of it. We become our better selves.
I still do not consider myself to be a religious person. I have however become a person of faith in the embedded sacredness of the world. When we give and receive the love of the world around us, whatever we are doing, it can feel like praying.
Many of the songs of Canadian songwriter Jane Sibbery, evoke a spiritual embrace of the mystery and complexity of life and a reverence for the majesty of nature. Her songs are often in the key of the bittersweet—as she sings in Love is Everything, “love made sweet and sad the same.” Her songs are to me like prayers, including her song Hockey, which is a hymn to our national sport when played on a frozen river. Part of her haunting song Calling All Angels goes like this:
Oh, and every day you gaze upon the sunset
With such love and intensity
Why it’s, uh, it’s almost as if you could only crack the code
Then you’d finally understand what this all means
Ah, but if you could, do you think you would trade it all
All the pain and suffering?
Ah, but then you’d miss the beauty of the light upon this earth
And the, and the sweetness of the leaving
I have come to believe we are all called to be angels.
We are all invited to embrace the inherent goodness of ourselves and of living. That is how I understand the poem, Go to the Limits of Your Longing, by Rainer Maria Rilke, which imagines God saying to each of us:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
The hands of that last sentence are, for the poet, those of God. I have come to believe that we are the hands of God for each other.
Graduands, I think I know King’s students well enough to know each of you came to King’s out of a longing for something beyond the ordinary.
Keep chasing the limits of your longing; let everything happen to you, confident that this is what being human is.
You will know life is happening by the seriousness of things—make sure you know it also by the joy you will experience and share with others.
Remember always, the hands of all of us in your King’s community will always be there for you to take.
And … Just keep going.