"Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant chief," or "Indian chief" sometimes if that's how you happened to be feeling that day. That was how the rhyme went in my time anyway, and you used it when you were counting the cherry pits on your plate or the petals on a daisy or the buttons on your shirt or your blouse. The one you ended up counting was, of course, the one you ended up being. Rich, Poor. Standing on a street corner with a tin cup in your hand. Or maybe a career in organized crime. What in the world, what in heaven's name, were you going to be when you grew up?

It was not just another question. It was the great question. Whether we remember to ask it or not, I strongly suspect that it may be the great question still. What are you going to be? What am I going to be?

I'll turn 58 this summer, and I've been in more or less the same trade for a long time, and I contemplate no immediate change, but I think of it still as a question that's wide open. For God's sake what do you suppose we're going to be, you and I? When we grow up.

Something in us rears back in indignation of course. At 28, 58, 78 or whatever we are, surely we've got our growing up behind us. We've come many a long mile and thought many a long thought. We've taken on serious responsibilities, made mature decisions, weathered many a crisis.

Surely the question is, rather, what are we now and how well are we doing at it? If not doctors, lawyers, merchant chiefs, we are whatever we are -- computer analysts, businesswomen, school teachers, artists, ecologists, ministers even, or if the job isn't already in our pocket, it's well on its way to being.

The letters of recommendation have all been written. The resume's have gone out. The interview on the whole went very well. We don't have to count cherry pits to find out what we're going to end up being, because for better or worse the die has already been cast. Now we simply get on with the game. That's what commencement is all about. That's what life is all about.

But then. Then maybe we have to listen -- listen back farther than the rhymes of our childhood, thousands of years farther back than that. A thick cloud gathers on the mountain as the book of Exodus describes it. There are flickers of lightning, jagged and dangerous. A clap of thunder shakes the earth and sets the leaves of the trees trembling, sets even you and me trembling a little maybe, if we have our wits about us.

Suddenly the great shophar sounds, the ram's horn -- a long-drawn, pulsing note louder than thunder, more dangerous than lightning -- and out of the darkness, out of the mystery, out of some cavernous part of who we are, a voice calls: "Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenent, then ye shall be a peculiar treaure unto me above all people" -- my seguklah, my precious ones, my darlings -- "and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."

Then, thousands of years later but still thousands of years ago, there is another voice to listen to. It is the voice of an old man dictating a letter. There is reason to believe that he may actually have been the one who up till all but the end was the best friend that Jesus had, Peter himself.