A Light to the World: The Paradox of the BYU Graduate Student 

President Reese and Vice President Collings, thank you for your inspired leadership of this university. We can feel it. Judge Wallace, thank you for your remarkable service to the law. President Oaks, thank you for your remarks honoring Judge Wallace and reaffirming the importance of the Constitution. We recognize the significance of your participation today, along with that of Sister Oaks. We are also grateful for the presence of Elder and Sister Kearon. And to our students, congratulations on your hard work and accomplishment of becoming BYU graduates!

Just over thirty years ago, my wife, Christine, and I sat where you sit today. We loved our time at BYU. We were blessed with inspired faculty. We felt the strength of the Church as we gathered with students from all across the world. Our righteous aspirations were elevated by friends. We served in student wards, attended devotionals, and participated in university leadership programs. And of course we cheered on the mighty Cougars! Then and now, BYU is the hope of the Church and “the flagship”¹ of the Church Educational System. While not everyone can come here, so many pray for you and for your righteous impact on the world.

“Enter to Learn; Go Forth to Serve”

BYU’s motto is “Enter to learn; go forth to serve.” After graduation, Christine and I moved to Palo Alto, California, where I started graduate studies at Stanford University. It would have been easy for us to get lost in the wave of move-ins as part of our new ward’s annual intake of graduate students coming out of BYU. But the Lord sent two men into our lives who changed us forever. Hank Taylor and Peter Giles had graduated from BYU years earlier. With Silicon Valley’s ascendance, these men were always representing their alma mater and the Church with distinction. They raised their families in the gospel and helped establish the Church in the Bay Area. Brother Taylor had served in the stake presidency and Brother Giles was one of the former bishops of our ward.

By the time we arrived in Palo Alto, some might have thought these two brethren were past their prime in Church service. But no one had told them that. Both Hank and Peter looked at all these new graduate students and decided part of their service would be to teach us what it means to serve in this Church. I was called as just another Young Men advisor—one of many. But these leaders then taught me how to minister to those in need, how to welcome others into the ward, and how to embed myself in the lives of the youth. Here is a picture of the three of us years later on a return visit to our Palo Alto ward. [A picture was shown.]

I’m not sure the young men in that ward really benefited much from my role as just one extra Young Men advisor. But a few years later, I found myself across the country with a call to serve the youth in inner-city Boston. This time there was no Hank Taylor or Peter Giles to mentor me. My youth were of Haitian, Dominican, and West African descent. I loved those boys. I gave everything I had to them, ministering in their homes and helping them build their testimonies in Christ. Those young men have since served missions, graduated from BYU and BYU–Idaho, and married in the temple. They are now building their own families and building the Church. I doubt any of those young men will ever know Hank Taylor or Peter Giles, but their lives were blessed forever because of what I learned from those early mentors about what it means to serve in this Church.

Leaving the Forest of Isolation

As you leave BYU, you will need to balance an expectation for professional and academic distinction with integrity to your faith. We heard that message today from Judge Wallace.² You might consider these dual responsibilities a simultaneous call for excellence with a call for discipleship. This is similar to the charge President Spencer W. Kimball gave our faculty when he challenged them to maintain a dual heritage of both academic rigor and spiritual integrity. He invited them to “speak with authority and excellence to [their] professional colleagues in the language of scholarship” while still being “literate in the language of spiritual things.”³

If you let the call for excellence supersede your call to discipleship, you will risk mimicking the world and, in some ways, eventually apologizing for your faith. Conversely, if you let your call for faithfulness cause you to isolate yourself from the world, you may preserve your faith, but you will miss the opportunity “to be a light to the world.”⁴

C. S. Lewis described this reordering of faith by secular engagement in his novel The Screwtape Letters. In the book, a junior devil named Wormwood wonders whether to encourage the man he is trying to corrupt to engage in politics. Should he push the man toward becoming an extreme patriot or an ardent pacifist? His supervisor, named Screwtape, responds:

Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause.”. . . Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.⁵

We want you to be excellent in your professional and community engagement; however, never let others’ agendas replace or subordinate your discipleship. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell has stated regarding the hyphenated descriptor disciple-scholar, “in the end all the hyphenated words come off. We are finally [simply] disciples.”⁶

Of course Elder Maxwell’s call for discipleship is not an excuse to abandon our engagement with others. Preserving faith should never be a catalyst for isolation. This would be a misplaced application of what has been termed the “Benedict Option,” in which, like St. Benedict, we are tempted to isolate from the increasingly secular world in protected cloisters of monastic separation.⁷

I hope none of us will become like the monk in Friedrich Nietzsche’s narrative Thus Spake Zarathustra. In an earlier book, Nietzsche had described a madman rushing through a marketplace declaring, “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”⁸ In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s protagonist, Zarathustra, travels from town to town championing his anti-religious philosophy. One day he stumbles upon a lonely hermit who has isolated himself in the forest, almost imperceptibly mumbling his praise to God. Zarathustra has pity on this lonely monk and leaves him be in what he viewed as a quaint, even naive expression of private worship.⁹

The Paradox of the Graduate Student

Every year a wave of BYU graduates moves to Palo Alto or Cambridge or to a host of other locations with graduate programs. Within three years of graduation, 45 percent of BYU graduates will have completed or started a graduate program.¹⁰ But whether for graduate school or for other opportunities of work or family, most graduates will move away from the strength of this campus. How will you serve and how will you engage once you leave this remarkable setting?

Consider what I will call The Paradox of the Graduate Student. Imagine a matrix in which the vertical axis is faith integrity and the horizontal axis is engagement with the world. Let’s examine three examples of future BYU graduate students.

The Isolators

Starting in the upper left-hand quadrant, imagine a newly married couple leaving BYU. In this example they both served missions in the Philippines. They loved everything about their time at BYU. After graduation they moved to Chicago for law school. They maintained the integrity of their convictions, but the only people they really interacted with were their friends in the ward and Church members in their graduate program. I’ll call these graduates “the isolators.” They came and left Chicago with their faith intact, but they rarely extended their service beyond their own faith community.

The Apologizers

Let’s turn next to the lower right-hand quadrant. I’ll call this quadrant “the apologizers”—not in the traditional definition of a “Christian apologist” but more to the idea that their engagement with the world leads them to embarrassment. Imagine a bright student admitted to a competitive graduate program on the East Coast. His frequent social engagement reveals that his beliefs are often in conflict with the strongly shared position of some of his peers. Rather than represent his own beliefs with courage, he often becomes silent, sometimes even embracing others’ secular agendas.

Lights to the World

Finally, let’s explore the upper right-hand quadrant. These are graduates who maintain the integrity of their beliefs while fully engaging with others. I will call these alumni “lights to the world.” They live their beliefs confidently and courageously, even as they learn from others and engage in their communities. They build friendships with others of differing beliefs and invite them into their lives, always representing the restored gospel of Jesus Christ with courage, faith, and dignity.

To paraphrase New York Times columnist David Brooks in a message given right here on this campus, BYU has given you a rooted and secure spiritual base, which should provide you the courage to become daring explorers and examples to the world around you.¹¹

Be a Light to the World

The Savior has declared, “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”¹² As you leave BYU today, we invite you to be that light on the hill. Some of you will face pressures to seclude yourself in the forest of isolation. Others will engage wonderfully with the world but will be tempted to apologize and back away from the very faith that helps define who you are.

We know that overcoming these pressures can be challenging and at times even lonely. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the great Jewish philosopher, spoke of this tension by saying:

Who knows what kind of loneliness is more agonizing: the one which befalls man when he casts his glance [alone] at the mute cosmos . . . or the one that besets man exchanging glances with his fellow man in silence?¹³

But you are not alone. As you have heard today, you have so many examples in the BYU alumni who have gone before you. As graduates of BYU, you will forever carry the responsibility to represent this university and its sponsoring faith wherever you go. Your predecessors have helped bring this university and this Church “out of obscurity and out of darkness.”¹⁴

As you leave BYU today, have the courage to stand up and be that light to the world. Maintain your spiritual integrity, even as you engage as the ambassador and peacemaker that our prophet has asked you to be.¹⁵

Remember the Lord’s promise for those who are on His errand:

I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.¹⁶

This is our hope and our charge to you today: “Hold up your light that it may shine unto the world.”¹⁷ I say these things with hope, love, and gratitude, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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