A Declaration of Dependence

In an 1837 oration entitled “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed our freedom from slavish imitation of other times and other places. While acknowledging a focus on his own day, he insisted that the world always belongs to those who can see through its pretensions. This assertion is still striking in its suggestion that the world is necessarily a frustration to the young, for youth is an amalgam of the childlike and the childish—that which develops and that which deludes. The make-believe that provides growing youngsters with a world to match their imagination can degenerate into mere fantasy. The attractive counterfeit is often beyond youthful discrimination. The heart of an adolescent is disorderly with hope, and the adolescent mind is caught in a half-willing thrall to magic.

If the foregoing description were valid for the chronologically young only, I would be belaboring the obvious if I continued. My concern today, however, is less with age than with attitude. Our national obsession to remain in a state of arrested adolescence not only has tragic social and political consequences, but it reduces fulfillment to gratification, development to indulgence. Indeed, “Give it to me now” is the fretful demand of both old and young. Children are denied the delight—and discipline—of expectation, while their parents lose fiscal and moral responsibility in accumulating material possessions. Truly, as Emerson affirmed, ”things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Most children, I should note, are anxious to grow up. They early sense the limitations of their world. One of my favorite cartoons has a despairing kindergarten student say to his teacher: “Must I do what I want to do today?” School, which might have offered him release from the prison of his inexperience, provided only a different physical setting for his ignorance.

We cannot know precisely when young people’s development begins to be significantly afflicted by absorbing certain growth-retarding values—whether from home or the community—that lead down the desperate road of perpetual youth. Manifestations of this affliction may be crassly materialistic or deceptively idealistic. Small children with a cap pistol sagging at their belt can always tell the cops from the robbers. As verbal college sophomores, they may substitute heroes in white hats with sophisticated abstractions like ecology, but their militant, nonnegotiable stance is an unmistakable throwback to childish black and white.

When, in “The American Scholar,” Emerson exhorted the college seniors of his day to trust themselves, his words were hailed as an intellectual declaration of independence. How appropriately youthful this response! How easy to identify emancipation with independence while one is yet a student. Unfortunately, Emerson was over thirty at the time, and scholars in American literature agree that his ringing call is only superficially to increased consciousness of self. Profoundly, Emerson’s call is a frank admission of dependence, dependence on the divine spark that unites all people who heed its prompting. That spark allows individuals to trust the manifestation of godliness—the ultimate self—that each is capable of achieving.

This declaration of dependence is what I hope we are willing to affirm today. New graduates are leaving the university at a time when the mundane rewards of graduation are queasy at best. The economy appears to have lost its muscle tone, bulges appear on the body politic, and our national voice seems to get a little breathless when we talk of social responsibility. But these signs of advancing age need not be unduly alarming. Perhaps that course in American history we endure as freshmen will prove relevant after all, as it gives perspective to our present situation. For just as a beginning speaker must shake free from hypnotic reliance upon notes (often supplied by a helpful mother), so the relatively new country to which Emerson issued his challenge needed to be assured that it could forswear foreign models and look within for direction. Even if the full significance of his advice was lost on his young hearers, the seed of potential harvest was planted.

Over a century later, we hear the echo of brash, but essentially innocent, youth in such phrases as “Make the world safe for democracy” or “One World.” Such teen-age idealism should still be a summons to blood that has not had to be propped up by Geritol. But a surge of adrenalin should not make us foolish. We are mildly incredulous to remember that explorers once seriously sought a fountain of youth. Yet we seem unashamed of our devotion to the cynical blandishments of cosmetic advertisement. If the world belongs to those who see through its pretensions, let Americans begin by acknowledging the age of their country and the problems that growing older entails.

For instance, most of our large cities still lack the charm of antiquity but have long lost their adolescent freshness. I suspect “urban sprawl” is just an academic phrase for “middle-age spread.” Historians suggest that this country lost its youth when it reached its physical frontiers. This definition of youth in physical terms is a disturbing one, for it seems to focus on the childish alone. Yet the more than mock-serious speculations regarding colonizing the moon and reclaiming the sea floor reinforce the view that human beings must have the challenge of physical frontiers and will create them as necessary. My concern today is not with the desire to subdue the earth—that was humanity’s charge from the beginning. Rather, I worry about those who see in youth only the arm of flesh: they want to flex their muscles mindlessly while wearing overalls. Physical strength is hopelessly “of the world.” We grow up just a little when we recognize, with Paul, that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood” (Eph. 6:12.) The arm of flesh must hold the “shield of faith” and wield the “sword of the spirit” if we are to achieve fulfillment. Anything short of that will be a continuing disappointment.

In a contemporary poem entitled “To Posterity,” Bertolt Brecht memorably phrases this disappointment—the frustration and the cost of effort that have earthly sanction alone. After reviewing what it was like to be involved in militant, physical reform, Brecht concludes:

Remember how we walked through the clash of classes,
Wearing out our passports quicker than our shoes,
Desperate
When there was evil without upheaval.
Still we know
Even hating the hateful 
Scars the face,
And talking against injustice
Roughens the voice.
Oh, we who wanted to make our soil ready for kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.¹

It is sobering to remember how old I was before I appreciated kindness. Kindness has a reassuring, middle-aged quality that I was unprepared to recognize when I was preoccupied with fairness—fairness being the prime concern of the young. Yet fairness is appropriate preparation for an understanding of kindness, just as Old Testament law must precede New Testament love.

In years of teaching a course entitled “The Bible as Literature,” I was often struck by how much older—how much more grown-up—the New Testament seemed than the Old Testament. Many Old Testament heroes, for example, are often memorable because of the qualities we associate with youth: the selfishness of Samson, the impetuosity of David, the stubbornness of Saul. Compare these with the list of godly qualities Paul provides in 1 Corinthians 13. In identifying charity—or the pure love of Christ—as the greatest of attributes, Paul further describes it in the following terms: “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil” (1 Cor. 13:4–5.)

The qualities Paul describes seem appropriately adult, since each hints of the development by experience that is the hallmark of maturity. We should remember, nevertheless, that the Old Testament also illustrated profoundly simple faith (prophets such as Amos) and unforgettable devotion (Ruth). Youth is a complex compound of the childish and the childlike, and we require the full range of adult experience to learn the implications of this distinction. As T. S. Eliot has suggested, “The end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (“Little Gidding”). When we become sensitive enough, we will be able to make unequivocal decisions. Gray is composed of black and white if we have developed eyes to see. When we become as a little child, we will have earned childlike simplicity.

I imagine, however, that the real frustration for most graduates today reflects a feeling of being in mid-passage. How do we move suitably from college to a world full of attractive illusions, to an environment undergoing the trauma of accepting its own maturity, and—most important of all—to a rethinking of our dependence? Not research but first search is the straight and narrow way. No voice from without will carry the force of the still, small voice, which is apprehended in the mind and heart of those worthy to hear it. Relative truth—and this is what secular education can provide—is only relatively effective as a gauge for the real. That which is comes through testimony. Truth is always revealed. Training can build the temple, but training cannot provide final illumination. The only knowledge I truly possess comes from the Lord. In the radiance of that knowledge, I can feel confident in my perception of reality; I can fit myself to a world whose age does not match my own, for I know that, fundamentally, we are expressions of the same principles and share responsibility for each other. My dependence upon the immutable laws by which the universe is framed gives as much significance to my acts as I choose to deserve.

We cannot achieve intellectual perspective when we are limited to a frame of reference that wholly encompasses us. We must have the detachment that dependence upon the Lord can provide. The scriptures tell us that one of the Holy Ghost’s functions is to bring all things to our remembrance. Surely we limit the extent to which we may be inspired when we limit our “remembrance” to that which we have studied. As children of God who exist in premortal, mortal, and postmortal completeness, we are resources beyond easy comprehension.

I trust that the graduates leaving BYU today are trained for achievement and prepared for fulfillment. The first may not come quickly and may not be wholly within their control; the second is not restricted to time, place, or circumstance. We can make whatever we do answer to what we want to be. If what I am saying seems not to recognize the intensely practical concerns today’s graduates face, let me conclude with a tribute to my father, who surely knew more frustration than achievement during his working life.

An intelligent, sensitive man, my father had little choice but to follow his father and older brothers into the coalmines at the age of thirteen. Such opportunities for advancement as the mines afforded soon came his way, but the demands of ailing parents and, later, his own family precluded the professional development that he so obviously deserved. Yet I never remember hearing him complain. Not until I was in my late teens—and had to forego college for several years—did he tell me of his life-long yearning to be a physician. In retrospect, I honestly do not believe that what my father did for a living would have made much difference. At least I am aware of no happier family than the one to which he gave leadership. Self-taught, he developed a gentleness in instructing his children that reflected an awareness of how difficult some concepts are to understand. Forced to test what he learned in constant practice, he had no patience with shabby performance, but he had unfailingly tender concern for the self-conscious performer. He told the truth without embellishment. He never smiled at an off-color story. If he did not often speak his testimony of the gospel, he lived it quietly, totally, and convincingly. My brothers and I worked at his side whenever we had a chance, and we shared some difficult and frightening experiences with him. He never panicked, and he did not expect us to. During a fatal illness, in which he had to relinquish much of that which he enjoyed most, he never lost confidence in the principles by which he had lived and by which he was prepared to die. Circumstance might challenge, but it never thwarted him. I always hoped to be like him, and I still do. Husband, father, elder—all the titles that have eternal significance he held with distinction. He was what he wanted to be even if he did not succeed in all that he hoped to do. My prayer for each of us this day is that we go forth in the strength of utter dependence upon God, “redeeming the time, because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:16), in glad subjection to His will, and in personal knowledge of His approbation.