He described the response of people facing transitions as an instinctual practice of ritual. "We suspect you would rather be celebrating in some less restrained manner right now. But for these two days we have managed to get you washed up and in solemn garments. We are walking you around, ringing bells, blowing horns, carrying big sticks with flags on them, playing the organ and shouting and singing. In short, we're doing about as much ritual as a university with Protestant roots can survive."
Using text from the Old Testament book of Isaiah, Johnson described the world facing graduates as "harsher and more demanding than college" where "still harder and more perilous work awaits you." That world, according to Johnson, is one that will test reading skills, not of books but of "the complex, tangled, ever-moving, often threatening world of human culture and politics," a world where "missing the meaning leads . . . to disaster, loss, ruin, death. . . . The skills you have learned here will be necessary, but they will not be sufficient." But, according to Johnson, despite a world "not entirely committed to transparency and truth . . . Isaiah insists that God is doing something marvelous," and he challenged graduates to include that idea in their reading of reality.
Johnson translated the rituals of commencement as a desire to "summon . . . some momentary glimpse of a vision that will sustain you and us in the dark and dangerous transitions you and we must still negotiate, a vision of presence other than our own in this world, a power greater than ours, a wisdom beyond our capacity to grasp, in whose service all our passion is well directed, is joyfully expended."
"And so doing," Johnson concluded, "we dance with delight in the face of danger, celebrate cheerfully before the challenge."