TEXT: Senior Lecturer Jan Taylor’s Baccalaureate sermon to the Maryville College Class of 2026
May 8, 2026
Maryville College Senior Lecturer Jan Taylor, who retired at the conclusion of the 2025-26 academic year, was selected to deliver the Baccalaureate sermon to the Maryville College Class of 2026 on May 8, 2026, at the Clayton Center for the Arts. Here is the full text, titled “As If It Were Nothing at All.”
Thank you for the invitation, President Coker.
I have 3 stories for you today.
Maybe you were watching in 2021 when Simone Biles walked away from the Olympic floor.
She was arguably the best gymnast in the games that year. And the world had very specific plans for her that night — plans that included a performance and multiple gold medals, essentially a coronation. The crowd was ready.
But Biles wasn’t.
Not because she had failed to prepare. She had prepared perhaps more than any human being alive. But somewhere in the intensity of that moment, her mind and her body lost their connection to each other. Gymnasts call this “the twisties” — a sudden loss of spatial orientation mid-air, where you can no longer feel where your body is in relation to the ground. For a gymnast attempting a vault, that is not just a bad night. That is life-threatening.
She stopped. In front of the entire world, she chose herself over the performance.
Here is what I want you to understand about that choice. This was not doubt. Doubt questions preparation. Her preparation was not in question. Her choice required more than pushing through doubt. She listened to information coming from deep inside her — information that said: the thing you know how to do is not available to you right now — and she trusted that enough to act on it. She knew what readiness felt like. She had felt it ten thousand times. And she knew, in that moment, that this wasn’t it.
She said later: “I knew the backlash I would face. I worried about being cancelled. But I also knew I wasn’t letting myself down.”
The pressure to not let down her teammates and her coaches and millions of fans was enormous. The pressure to let herself down instead — she wouldn’t go there.
This kind of self-knowledge under pressure is not a trait. It’s a practice — the daily work of questioning what the world is telling you against what you actually know to be true. You have been doing that kind of work for four years. In the papers that asked you to defend a claim. In the classes that asked you to change your mind when the evidence required it. In the moments when you pushed back on an idea.
That practice does not end at graduation. It deepens. And the world you are walking into will give you no shortage of moments to use it.
Biles’s story is about a single night. What do you do when the pressure stretches across years?
You may know this next story too. Joseph is the son his father loves best, which makes him the brother that his brothers love least. Those brothers throw Joseph into a dry and dusty pit. He is sold. He ends up in Egypt, in a household not his own, then in a prison in a country not his own, serving a sentence for something he did not do. His circumstances are entirely outside of his control from the moment his brothers lay hands on him to the moment Pharaoh finally calls him up out of the dark prison.
The record tells us God was with Joseph. But the subtext is the point today: Joseph was with God. He stayed connected to the God he had come to trust no matter what was done to him or required of him.
In the pit he didn’t scheme for revenge. In Potiphar’s house he acted on principle and it cost him his freedom. In the prison, where he had every reason to sulk in bitterness, he looked at the men around him, noticed their faces, asked about them, and listened.
Each time, he remained himself. Not a diminished version, not a performance calibrated to whoever held power over him. His integrity traveled with him. His gifts traveled with him. His capacity to listen, to interpret, to serve — none of that disappeared because his address changed.
And when Pharaoh summoned him, his character was still intact.
That kind of integrity is what you’ve been practicing here. It is built in the friction of living and working alongside people who see the world differently than you do. It’s built in the discipline of showing up for commitments when doing so feels inconvenient. In assignments that asked you not just what you thought but who you were. In relationships that required something authentic, even when that was scary or difficult.
You have been building that. Here. On the inside.
______________________
My story takes place about ten years ago. I was invited to teach yoga at a writing retreat.
So, I prepare carefully. I write the guided meditations, plan the sequences, and purchase the props. But when I arrive, I learn that the director has a vision for how things should go, details she has not shared with me. She is specific and directive. At one point she takes my phone out of my hand and downloads a music app.
I roll with it as best I can, but I am a thousand miles from home and feeling a little rattled. I need a way to keep myself grounded, to hold onto some confidence so that I can actually serve the people who show up for my sessions.
I start a journal. After every session, in my room, I note what went well and what I might do differently next time. Instead of fretting about getting it wrong, I am checking in with myself, reflecting on my training, my practice, and what I am observing.
At the end of the week, participants found me to say goodbye, to say thank you. Some brought small gifts. Not because I had performed well for the director. But because I had focused on my training and the people in the room.
Reflection didn’t remove the stress of new and different expectations. Reflection gave me a way to navigate that stress.
You likely have a version of that story already. And you will have more.
In moments of disorientation and pressure, external assessments can tell you how you performed. It cannot tell you whether you acted with integrity. For that, you need your own honest self-assessment. Did I do my best? What would I change? What do I still need to learn?
The philosopher Kierkegaard warned: “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.”
Only you will know if that starts to happen. The writer of Proverbs knew the same hazard, and counseled “above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
Everything. Your work. Your relationships. Your capacity to serve.
You have been practicing. Keep going.
We need you.