For the Graduates

This is the transcript of a speech I gave in an English class I took as a student at Belmont University. My classmates and I were given an assignment where we had to pretend that we were the chosen commencement speakers on our graduation day. We wrote our speeches towards the middle of the semester and delivered them on the day of our final exam. I’ve posted mine here to share it with the graduates in my life, and you can do likewise if you wish. You can adapt it to your own situation as you see fit. Enjoy. 🙂

Nascantur in Admiratione: Let Them Be Born in Wonder

Distinguished guests, faculty and staff, family and friends, and my fellow classmates: If you will, let me begin by promising that the speech I’m giving is brief. Or, as the late actress Elizabeth Taylor said to her eight husbands, “Don’t worry, I’m not keeping you long.” Truth be told, I made this up. But we’ll just go with it for yuks and giggles. 🙂

Two months after their voyage to the moon, the Apollo 11 space crew addressed a joint session of Congress to discuss the significance of what they had accomplished. Commander Neil Armstrong was the last of the three men to speak. During the course of his short speech, he said that, “Mystery…is a very necessary ingredient in our lives. Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis for man’s desire to understand.”

Given the context in which he had spoken, any of us gathered here immediately would say that those words came from an American hero or a fearless explorer. But I would like to think that a younger Mr. Armstrong came back to speak on his behalf that night. For when Neil Armstrong was a teenager, he was so enraptured by flight and so consumed by imagining what lies beyond the clouds that he learned to fly a plane before he ever drove a car. I would like to think that perhaps that Ohio farm boy fell madly in love with the heavens without looking back, and I hope similar things will be said about those of you who are leaving. My wish for the graduates is that your time at Belmont has awakened that same sense of wonder in you and spurred you towards your own life-long pursuits of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

It could be said that wonder is a virtue. We all know that something wondrous is often attractive and aesthetically pleasing. But to focus solely on those aspects of such a thing is to lust after it. On the other hand, to be struck with awe involves self-forgetting. Wonder is the sense of humility and reverence that comes with beholding the goodness of something outside ourselves. It is what inspired Jules Verne’s readers to circumnavigate the world in 80 days, what drove Sir Edmund Hillary to the snow-capped peak of Mt. Everest, and what moved Katharine Lee Bates to pen the song “America the Beautiful.”

Now, many of you have come to Belmont probably because you’ve been told that going to college is your key to success; that it’s your ticket to the world; that college graduates earn more than their non college educated counterparts. It’s like what one of my professors told me when I was a student: When you’re in high school, you burn yourself out and go into debt to get good grades and get into the college of your choice. And as a young adult, you burn yourself out even more and go even further into debt to buy yourself a Ferrari, a penthouse apartment, an in home movie theater system with surround sound, and an extra fridge to hold your snacks and beer. And after that, you have a midlife crisis because you don’t know what else to do with yourself.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. There is nothing wrong in and of itself with having a college degree. I have one of those. And it’s always a good thing to at least be able to put food on the table. We all need to eat. We all need to support ourselves financially. We all need to survive.

But there has to be so much more to life than just that. Deep down, if we’re honest with ourselves, I don’t think any of us want to live just for the sake of surviving day to day. I think it’s the other way around. We aim to survive in order to truly live: to fully live life in all its glory and its pain; to experience love and joy and happiness and share it with others; to suffer and mourn when it’s needed; to build families and friendships that last a lifetime; to discover the purpose and meaning of our existence; to grow in wisdom and understanding; and, as the prophet Micah said: “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.” In short, we aim to take in all the truth, beauty, and goodness that life has to offer. It’s what we’ve been made to do.

The ancient Greeks understood this well. Aristotle said that “The search for wisdom begins in wonder.” Furthermore, he observed that man is the only rational animal on Earth and the only creature built to stand upright. We’ve been made, along with Walt Whitman’s astronomy student, to “look up in perfect silence at the stars.” We’ve been called, as Pope John Paul II put it, to “direct our steps towards a truth that transcends ourselves.” It is as the esteemed author G.K. Chesterton once wrote, that in order to imagine man as the type of being who appreciates beauty, we must treat him as something separate from nature. We must describe him as standing absolute and alone from all other creatures.

There is a reason why billboards are eyesores, why the inanities droning from the radio and the TV and the internet are white noise, and why clichés are stupid. It is because they provide absolutely nothing that is valuable for the soul. You’ll never see anyone become awestruck by the doggerel spewing from Lena Dunham’s mouth. No one does that, ok?! The only exception is wondering if she ate paint chips when she was little.

But so much of what we see and hear today is idiocy and distraction. It seems odd to me, then, that so much time is spent teaching young people to produce more of the same. For there are things that are far more valuable to learn than how to cultivate an ever-shortening attention span or how to create the newest device that allows the masses to do just that. The human mind was meant to pursue truth. The human heart was made to seek what is good and aches to be overwhelmed by goodness.

Any effort you’ve spent pursuing an education here, then, has been a waste of time and of an intellect if it has not directed towards a search for that trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty. A genuine education is not utilitarian, where knowledge is used to help students exercise power over someone or something else for money or for pleasure. It does not teach the young their functions as gears and pulleys in the great political-economic machine of society. And it needn’t necessarily be marked by earning various credentials or degrees.

Instead, it is unqualifiedly and thoroughly democratic. It requires no age limits, and anyone can partake in it, regardless of his I.Q. There are no prerequisites, besides a willingness to learn. It is elementary in that it seeks to reintroduce its pupils to the world, as if it were brand new. And its ultimate aim, to borrow a phrase attributed to Cardinal John Henry Newman, is “a true enlargement of mind: the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values; and determine their mutual dependence.”

It follows, then, that a lack of such an education is unnatural; which is to say that it violates the very nature of who mankind is, and what we’ve been made to do. A student whose erudition has not been rooted in wonder may have taken a few courses here and there to learn a trade with which he can support himself and his family. He might walk away with a calligraphy-engraved piece of paper that represents his ability to show up to work on time and complete his assigned tasks. But he is not capable of much else, nor does his schedule dominated by the punch-clock’s daily grinding allow him to tinker with a car’s innards or be transported to the spirit-infested forest of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His schooling in matters of love might have been flattened into blathering about condoms and diaphragms, and that was likely mowed down even further into discussions of health and hygiene, leaving him unable to explain why the poet Dante once said of his beloved Beatrice that every man who beholds her either turns into a noble creature or he dies. If there’s a motivation for such a person to learn anything, it is not born from curiosity, but from a heart hardened by cynicism and skepticism.

I hope you have not been students like that. I hope that you are not the type of people who think that enlightenment and being jaded are one and the same. I hope that you have not traded a hard-fought search for truth for the ease, comfort, and false humility of relativism. I hope you know that there is no joy in only living hand-to-mouth, or in that endlessly frantic struggle to “make something of yourself.” I hope that you don’t develop the soul-crushing habit of defining yourself entirely by what’s listed on your résumé. Personally, I think you all have infinitely more dignity and worth than that.

I hope instead that from time to time that you won’t be afraid to step off that stationary bike of your daily drudgery of eking out a living to see what marvelous things are happening in the world around you. I hope you understand that your feelings about reality don’t change reality itself. I hope you realize the irony in being absolutely certain that there are no such things as absolutes. I hope you don’t mind trading the lights of your TV screen and the mind-numbing chatter of the overrated stars who appear on it for the lights of the moon and the real stars every once in a while. But perhaps my greatest wish for all of you is that when the time comes for you to cross the great divide between life and death, you can say along with the poet T.S. Eliot that “we shall not cease from exploration/ and the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

This is your chance to make it happen, and I know that you can do it. I wish each of you the very best for your futures, and may you all have a wonderful and wonder-filled life!

Congratulations and best of luck to you all. 🙂