Each spring, I feel a thrill as I watch our graduates cross the stage in triumph. Seeing them gloriously appareled in academic regalia and receiving their graduates’ laurels, I am reminded of a moment in Dante’s masterpiece The Divine Comedy.

At the end of the second part of the epic poem, the pilgrim narrator, who completes a journey of training and discipline, is finally able to enter an Edenic garden. Now become a kind of restored Adam figure, his will and desires are no longer sinful, but rightly ordered and entirely reliable. His teacher, Virgil, who has guided him until this point, declares him his own authority, proclaiming, “Lord of yourself, I crown and miter you.”

As I send off undergraduate students that I have taught and mentored over the course of four years, I find myself hoping that the education they have received has equipped them to develop their judgment, and to become, like Dante’s narrator, wholly good and self-sufficient. Surely the parents and grandparents, who have guided them for much longer, also share this hope. But I know that this kind of crowning of true perfection is not easy, and, as shown even in Dante’s own life, may often be delayed. The exiled poet, during his life, was never able to wear the poet’s crown in his beloved homeland. Dante, who is almost always depicted by artists as wearing a laurel wreath, is shown this honor as a posthumous consolation.

For Christians, our consolation is that our laurels are not won by our perfected wills, or even by our suffering, but by Christ’s. As Charles Spurgeon reminds us in Morning and Evening: “Only Jesus can do helpless sinners good, and helpless saints too. You must be conquerors through Him who has loved you if you will be a conqueror at all. Our laurels must grow among His olives in Gethsemane.”

When I first arrived at Biola a little over 10 years ago, I was given a brief tour of the campus, including the Olive Grove, which, I was told, was the last remaining olive grove in La Mirada, once known for its olive trees, and would be a place where I could pray. Thinking of Spurgeon’s exhortation to draw our laurels from Christ’s olives, it strikes me that Biola’s graduates receive, in a way, their laurels from an olive grove. And I pray now that they may rely on Christ, who suffered in an olive grove, and who wore a crown of thorns, so that he could offer us, not a perishable crown, but a crown that will last forever (1 Cor. 9:25), the crown of life (James 1:12).

In the graduation ceremony for the Torrey Honors College, we have a tradition where our seniors, before stepping on stage, kneel and are tapped on the head with a Bible. In this act, our students indicate their obedience to Scripture. For our graduates, I hope now not for their self-sufficiency, but rather for the freedom that comes through dependence upon Christ.

Even as I celebrate their well-earned honors, I hope to remember that Virgil’s glorious words to the conqueror — “Lord of yourself, I crown and miter you” — are achieved only through Jesus’ prayer in the garden: “Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matt. 26:39).

Dr. Jane E. Kim is an associate professor in Biola’s Torrey Honors College, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.