Every Commencement weekend the college hosts many special guests. Perhaps none more reflective, however, than the 50-year reunion class.
The class gathers for dinner and conversation on Commencement eve and spends the following day together for a stirring chapel service led by class members, a re-enactment of their graduation with names read and medallions distributed, a class picture and then participation as honored guests in the 2017 Commencement ceremonies in the arena.
The Class of ’67 reunion dinner began with classmates Glen Walstra and Russ Palsrok offering opening comments and devotions, respectively.
Class members Paul Van Wyke, Judy Van Dam De Vries, Peter Kok and Wendy Elgersma Helleman gave reflective talks about the Calvin experience and the meaning of it all 50 years later.
Some 20 classmates presented musical selections, gathered by Larry Ten Harmsel and Ron Warners, calling themselves the “Cantus Infirmus Choir.”
Saturday’s chapel service featured a meditation from class member Neal Plantinga titled “Intellectual Love.”
Plantinga concluded with a reminder of the command to “love the Lord your God with all your mind,” which included a call to “defeat every anti-intellectualism” and to “defeat every selfish intellectualism.”
He told his classmates, “The life of the mind is an act of love and act of reverence. It’s an act in which we get pulled out of our nervous little egoisms and combine together in a kingdom project so much bigger than any of us, so much grander than all of us, that we cannot help getting stretched by this move.”
It will be the Class of 1968’s turn to reunite on the Knollcrest campus on May 18–19, 2018.
