Graduation Dinner, Left to Right: Simbo (brother), Father, Me
Dear Graduates, Guests, Friends and Family,
I am honored to have been asked to give this year's invocation. I would like to take a moment to tell everyone why BSOL is special to me and one of the many reasons why I would not have wanted to go to any other Law School but BSOL.
Two years ago, following completion of my second year, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer. I underwent treatment at MD Anderson in Houston and have been in remission for 18 months now. While we knew I had some kind of cancer, we did not know the extent of it. The early tests had come back showing it benign. We visited MD Anderson for a planned three day visit to learn my treatment program when the diagnosis came back as Stage 4, the highest metabolism of cancer, and I was weeks, if not days, away from the cancer entering my brain through my spine.
I started a web site to help keep everyone back home say informed on my condition. Sometime shortly after this Dean Bushnell posted an update of my condition and a link to my web site as a news story on BSOL's web site. The rest of that day I spent reading and responding to the 80 plus emails of good health, prayers, thoughts, love and support I received from BSOL students, teachers and faculty. The experience of love and warmth was overwhelming making me feel closer to home and making BSOL feel like a family.
I want to thank Dean Bushnell for posting my site in the news. I want to thank Kerri and the rest of the administration for your help when I learned I was sick and when I was coming back. Thank you
It has been said that “The minute you read something you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer”.
When I was asked to give the invocation I did what any good law student is trained to do, I made sure I understood what an invocation was. Which is a prayer for innovating an appeal to a higher power for assistance. To me no other profession is better suited for appeals to higher powers for assistance, so I began a search for any prayers for lawyers.
I next came across a small but interesting footnote in legal history, the story of Saint Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers.
Described as “a man for all seasons,” More was a literary scholar, eminent lawyer, gentleman, father of four children and chancellor of England. An intensely spiritual man, he would not support the king Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, in order to marry Anne Boleyn, his second wife. Nor would he acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the Church in England, breaking with Rome and denying the pope as head.
More was committed to the Tower of London for the treasons crimes of not swearing to the Act of Succession and the Oath of Supremacy. Upon conviction, More declared he had all the councils of Christendom and not just the council of one realm to support him in the decision of his conscience.
Please bow your head with me to as we pray Saint Thomas More who for being the supreme diplomat and counselor, he did not compromise his own moral values in order to please the king, knowing that true allegiance to authority is not blind acceptance of everything that authority wants.
"Lord,
Pray that, for the glory of God and in the pursuit of His justice, I may be trustworthy with confidences, keen in study, accurate in analysis, correct in conclusion, able in argument, loyal to clients, honest with all, courteous to adversaries, ever attentive to conscience. Sit with me at my desk and listen with me to my clients' tales. Read with me in my library and stand always beside me so that today I shall not, to win a point, lose my soul.
Pray that my family may find in me what yours found in you: friendship and courage, cheerfulness and charity, diligence in duties, counsel in adversity, patience in pain—their good servant, and God's first.
Amen. "
