That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
(Ecclesiastes 1:9)
So says the writer of Ecclesiastes, and
so say I about graduation speeches.
Two years ago, on this same stage, I reminded
the 2016 graduates of their own mortality.
Since that day, we’ve lost at least six
members of our extended community—including a loving mother who was in the
audience that day to watch her son James Keaten graduate. She listened as I
said that one’s quality of character is more important than great
accomplishments (like curing cancer). As I left that evening, she gently
harassed me for having the temerity to say such a thing in the presence of someone
fighting so ardently against brain cancer. I felt duly sheepish. Heather Keaten
died the following December at the age of 47. That same month, another Liberty
family unexpectedly lost a father and husband in Richard Sinley. Last summer, Mr.
Curry lost his beautiful wife Jean; shortly after, the school lost its beloved
librarian and colleague Ms. Connie Behr. This school year our dear Emma Salas
lost her brother, and Mrs. Janice Garland lost her incomparable daughter—our
own precious Mariya, who was a friend and spiritual exemplar to so many here tonight.
May all their memories be eternal!
I realize it may seem incongruous to
evoke these remembrances tonight. I certainly do not wish to aggravate fresh
wounds. However, should we not let these memories of both pain and beauty, incite
us all to shed our trivial preoccupations and examine the point of all this
“pomp and circumstance”? We must take nothing for granted; we must be conscious
of the time afforded us.
Mariya, in 2015, standing roughly where
I am now, offered the now familiar words of Maya Angelou: “People will forget
what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget
how you made them feel.” I have thought
since then (to my horror) that I have made some people feel pretty awful—and I
hope they don’t remember.
I only half-jokingly told some of you
this year that if (God forbid) I were ever asked to speak at graduation again,
I might simply offer one long apology. Indeed, I am sorry. I’m sorry that my words have hurt some of you. I’m sorry
that I’m not a better teacher and a better human being. I am especially sorry if
I have ever implicitly endorsed a cynical or destructive posture toward life
My difficulty is a common one: It is so much
easier to be negative. The pessimists
and skeptics of the world persist mostly because they risk nothing. They can
project a confident, intellectual veneer without ever placing so much as a twig
upon the chopping block of reality. And I, too, have often lacked the courage
to commit too publically to what is hopeful and vibrant and good.
Let me now do what I can to remedy that.
I was recently reminded of that famous
teaching in the Gospel of Luke that describes a man who, being rid of one demon
and having thereafter tidied up his life a bit, ultimately renders himself a
more commodious dwelling for other demons. I offer this as a rough analogy for
the heart or mind that is ever negating, but never affirming. Such a cynical
disposition may protect us from certain forms of error or weakness, but more
often than not, it creates only a vacuum for whatever manipulative forces,
distractions, and products are poised upon the periphery of our lives, ready to
supply their substitutes for legitimate desire.
It is fair to say, desire divorced from purpose is a kind of madness. It is not the
madness of expecting different results from a repetition of the same actions,
but the madness of expecting no more than the products of our own activity,
expecting much less than what the human heart requires. Each of us is, as C.S. Lewis
once wrote, “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a
slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the
sea.” We often miss that better offer, that fuller purpose because it is
rooted, not in what we want, but in what
we are. However, what we are (and even who
we are) is substantially independent of our wants and so these are the topics we tend least to comprehend.
I
didn’t ask to be born, and so my life began in disappointment.
Of course, I was not really disappointed
(at least not until a few years later), but it is true that I was not allowed
to select my family or my country, I had no say in my early socio-economic
context, and, as you can tell, I was granted absolutely no input concerning my physical
appearance. Of course, learning to love what is generally disappointing is exactly
what family is all about. And, in recent centuries, it is perhaps what school
has become as well.
After all, most
of you have had a chance to disappoint me, and yet somehow I still love you. I
know it sounds weird coming from a teacher—at least teachers not named Mrs.
Karr or Ms. Deitrick—but I do love you.
No, the truth is, not one of you is a
disappointment—the more likely case is that I’ve been a greater source of
disappointment to you. None of you got to hand-select your teachers. Outside of
your own thoughts and actions, there is so little you get to choose. You were
thrown into a life you didn’t choose, into a family you didn’t choose—some of
you are graduating from a school you didn’t choose—you’ve made some mistakes,
admissions officers have made some mistakes, and the avenues now before you
have been determined by many things outside of your control.
In this vein, allow me to remind you that
none of you can take credit for your own
existence. And this should make you grateful. Disappointing or not, existence
is an absolute good. I recommend it for everyone. However, as you know, it
doesn’t always feel good, and the
moments when our lives grow especially irksome are the moments when we are most
likely to utter such remarks as, I didn’t
ask to be born.
However, we could only contemplate such
a complaint if we were to forget that, for every disappointment, we possess a
host of blessings that is equally independent of our choosing. Is not the air
we breathe; are not the mountains we love gifts sufficient to stultify our
complaints? Apparently not. The inner response both to life’s gifts and to life’s
disappointments is shaped by our mental habits, which will conform, generally
speaking, either to a spirit of rebellion
or a spirit of thanksgiving.
If you choose the first, rebellion, you are declaring war on your
lot. You are asserting your preference to customize a life according to your
own perceived advantages, to tailor your reality to your personal goals and
perspectives. But there is a problem: how can you—by yourself—know what is really worth
wanting? And even if you did, would it necessarily follow that you’d actually want it?
One of my favorite recent philosophers
casually suggested in one of his talks that the whole point of life might very
well be to get our “wanting” straight, yet if you look to yourself for guidance,
you’ll be looking to the very person who has the problem—not the solution.[1]
Now, this is a rather unpopular view
these days. Our culture and its “noisiest authorities” have convinced most of
us that the self is the only valid source
of meaning, that you are the inventor of your own identity, the creator and sustainer of
your own reality. It’s a lie. It’s a lie designed to keep you an ever-swirling vortex
of cravings—always hungry, never filled: the
perfect consumer. It is no coincidence that one of the most pervasive
themes of western advertising is, Follow
Your Heart, Choose Your Life, Have it Your Way, It Just Feels Right! The
very companies (and politicians) flattering your autonomy are standing at the
ready to supply a glittering spectrum of prefabricated identities and
attractive placebos. Sip long enough from their ladles of saccharine bilge, and
you will confuse it for the flavor of your own soul. You will identify most
deeply with your malformed urges and prize most highly the means and license to
indulge them. In short, you will be insane, and you will think it is normal.
On this point, our very own James Robinson
wrote recently that the process of “tailoring certain traditional aspects of
human life to the collective, consumer-minded desires of the people… distorts
them into a glamorous and competitive false reality.”
This is the pathway of self, the pathway of rebellion against what is already good and real about you. This
path makes you god of your own universe, dictator of your own ontology, but
slave to your own appetites. Aptly does John Milton have Satan in Paradise Lost insist that he is
“self-begot, self-raised,” for to admit otherwise would be to concede that he
owed his existence, his very nature, and therefore the exclusive source of his
own welfare to something (or Someone) besides raw will and private
conviction. But raw will and private conviction have no lasting power over
reality; these will not make your car run when the tank is empty, they will not
turn endless consumption into joy, and they will not make Mr. Lovely’s hair
grow back.
But as I said earlier, it is so easy to
negate, to criticize. And I promised you some affirmation. Here it is: Rebellion
is not the only path.
I now set before you the path of Thanksgiving.
This may be the most idiotic observation
ever written, but Reality is really real. You don’t have to make it up. Properly
understood, that truth should be regarded as very good news. As artist Lydia
Muse puts it, “Perhaps
the greatest obstacle to one’s own good is too much assurance in one’s own
earthly set of blueprints …drawn with no inspiration but one’s own.” Fortunately, the
burden of inventing an identity can
and must give way to the blessing of discovery.
One may invent all manner of
delusions, but one can only discover
what is actually there.
I propose that you are all more than you
yet understand, but the deeper self that awaits its future unveiling is, in
seed form, already present within you. All of those things outside of your
control—your family, your country, your face, the accidents of time and fortune
(whether you like them or not)—are no less part of who and what you are. No
matter how disappointing it all might seem, you can still say yes to your lot, even “embrace the suck,”
as I heard someone say, without despairing of real and positive change. Let me abridge
this perspective by quoting superb American poet, Richard Wilbur:
I feel that the universe is
full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and
that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware
that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must
be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that’s my attitude.
My feeling is that when you discover order and goodness in the world, it is not
something you are imposing—it is something which is likely really to be there,
whatever crumminess and evil and disorder there may also be. I don’t take
disorder or meaninglessness to be the basic character of things. (Interview, Paris Review)
In spite of what common phrases like “Get real”
or “The truth hurts” may imply, I am pleased to think that most of you, class
of 2018, agree with Wilbur in affirming that what is real is also really good.
For example, Ms. Sadie Overturf offers this
observation, “One becomes unhappy when one is constantly distracted from the real world.” Similarly, Ms. Keara Howley notes,
“I think the ability to get real with yourself is so difficult that most people
never do it and spend their lives in never-ending turmoil.”
True, along with the pain and loss we have seen
and suffered the past few years, there has also been plenty of ordinary
struggle. But in it, and even because of it, there is genuine meaning—organic, free-range, non-GMO meaning—revealed right here in this
actual world. How this can be is
perhaps a matter for philosophical debate, but I believe its discovery begins,
as Aidan Allen suggests, when we give up “the worship of things with little
power” and “actively seek truth, goodness, and wholeness.”
Let me conclude with the words of one my
favorite writers. Sedang Park writes,
As we walk through life in
our own personal pursuits of existential meaning, in our quests to build
grooves for ourselves in the barren sand that may seem to be our universe, we
must never forget to seek above all, perfect love—a perfect love of fellow
mankind, a love of hope, and love of faith in the existence of true good in our
world.
