It was like the opening scene in the film “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

We piled into the car and took off across Seattle’s rain-soaked Capitol Hill bound for our younger daughter’s baccalaureate Mass last weekend. We were running a tad late as it was. And we wound up arriving at precisely the wrong cathedral – an Episcopal one – before backtracking to enter the Catholic Italian renaissance church near Seattle University just as the opening hymn was under way. The other graduates had already processed down the aisle and into the front pews.

We stood there, clothed in our Protestant cluelessness, our daughter’s graduation gown still tucked into a university bookstore shopping bag, misted by the rain.

Then a former roommate’s mom standing in the aisle grinned at our daughter. She nodded at the shopping bag and urged, “Go for it.” And so we did.

With the help of some passing cathedral angel in the adjoining chapel, I helped Megan into the gown, drew the red, white and black satin hood over her shoulders and her honors cords around her neck and perched her mortarboard on her head. The angel led her down a back passageway where she tiptoed in to join the other graduates as the hymn ended. And soon the rest of the family was tucked into a pew not far behind her, radiating pride.

I settled back, gazed up at the swags of red, yellow and orange fabric stretching like tongues of fire up toward the gold coffered ceiling high above the altar and let the timeless rituals wash over me. I discovered once again the power of the words of faith to transcend the ordinary and speak to the human spirit.

After more than half a century of attending school graduations, and listening to paler versions of these messages, it took this rainy, out-of-sync Saturday to remind me of the richness of the religious tradition of baccalaureate. Here I heard words that not only inspired, but transformed the uncertainty that surrounds a college graduate’s future into a sense of reassurance, strength and hope.

The bulletin for Seattle University’s baccalaureate contained these words from Christian writer Frederick Buechner, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

The university president, Father Stephen Sundborg, described how academic knowledge leads to the divine. “Exploring literature points you to the mystery that literature evokes, but cannot say,” he said. “Mathematics is a prophet of the beauty of the mind beyond all calculations or formula.” And, “History asks but cannot answer what is the goodness that keeps humanity together in spite of so much evil and war.”

Near the end of the service, as the saxophone and piano joined the soaring voices of the university choir, I read words from the book of Micah printed in the bulletin. They struck me as enduring graduation advice. “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

I know the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against prayers in public schools, wisely discerning they’re bound to make nonbelievers feel excluded. Public school graduations have grown, as they must, ever more secular. Even church-related schools like this one work hard to be inclusive.

Yet on that rainy, discordant Saturday afternoon, I came away from a church to which I do not belong, from a service I nearly missed, to find my ears filled with alleluias and choral anthems, my mind wrapped around words of ancient texts, and my heart grateful for the chance to experience precisely that which we have nearly lost.