Legacy and Fulfillment
I like President Kennedy’s statement that “future is not a gift; it is an achievement.” At a mundane, secular level, that statement is a useful warning and a stirring exhortation. But for those with ears to hear, it may be less a plea for individual effort than an invitation to thoughtful analysis. The key words in the theme for this year’s graduating class—“future, gift, achievement”—deserve more than a rhetorical flourish.
The very concept of the future is a highly sophisticated one. Try persuading your four-year-old brother that if he will give you the candy bar he has in his hand, you will give him three candy bars next month. He will not be impressed. He lacks the sophistication necessary to appreciate what will or may happen. Even those of us who can appreciate the concept, however, may not be ready for the future. Alvin Toffler of Future Shock fame suggests that most of us, educated or uneducated, are unprepared for the impact that accelerated change will have on our lives in the years that lie ahead.
I find it useful to remember that, in a very simple and basic sense, the future is an assertion of faith, and faith implies a belief in something that goes beyond easy evidence. Whenever I hear references to the fact that Communist countries are essentially Godless and atheistic, I deliberately remind myself that to be atheistic is not necessarily to be unbelieving. One of the most sobering experiences of my life occurred in New York City a few years ago, when I attended a small trade fair and exposition that had been sent to the United States from the Soviet Union. I wandered among earnest paintings and embarrassing copies of Western technology, smiling slightly, but I soon lost my supercilious stance when I listened to a young teacher, his eyes alight with conviction, as he described his work in special schools being developed for the most promising Soviet students. Deftly parrying the accusing questions he was asked, he returned again and again to his belief in what he was doing, and it suddenly struck me solidly and fearfully that I could not remember hearing any American teachers bear such fervent testimony concerning their teaching role. The young man might not have believed in God, but he believed in his call to teach, he believed in his students, and he believed in himself. Events since that jolting experience have not changed my mind about Soviet technology—the Soviet Union is not going to outperform us—but it may outbelieve us!
The future is conceived in faith and outlined in specific belief. I would like to leave each one of us with a rhetorical question: What do I believe in deeply, consistently, transcendently? If our faith is minimal, our future degenerates into vague yearning.
We need also to consider the suggestion that the future is not a gift. As used here, gift implies a gratuitous token that is wholly bestowed. Such romantic expectation is morally debilitating, for it aligns us with chance and makes us beggars to fortune. Surely the future is not synonymous with luck, but just as surely it is a legacy. We forget this fact at the peril of not understanding who we really are.
My grandfather once remarked that as a boy of seven working in the coalmines of Wales, he went several weeks without seeing the sun. Seven days a week, he entered the mine before sunup and came out—clinging to his father’s back—twelve hours later, after the sun had set. My grandfather’s casual mention of this experience struck my youthful independence a staggering blow, for my spoken and unspoken assertions that I had to be myself, that my life was “my own life to lead,” simply crumpled before the fact of a small, coal-begrimed boy who had helped fashion my future nearly a hundred years earlier and who had bequeathed me the sun he could not enjoy himself.
We fail to recognize much of the legacy we have received from our ancestors, but it can still be operative even when we do not acknowledge it. In a strict sense, most of the legacy is not even inherited. My genes are no more faithful carriers of what I am to be than my early experience. Indeed, overwhelming evidence supports the idea that most basic attitudes from which we act throughout life are set before we attend nursery school. Now, attitudes are not inherited; rather, they are learned—usually copied from those we see about us. May I speak bluntly by suggesting that none of us ever leaves home, no matter where we live? No future achievement escapes its origins. The twig is part of the branch, the latest expression of the tree.
I do not say the foregoing to suggest that we are simply determined by birth and background. As noted earlier, I was born into a family of coal miners—my father was in the mines of Carbon County by the time he was thirteen—but his vision for his sons was a part of my future from earliest childhood, and that vision was not bounded by what the Thomases had done for generations. We were not too good to be miners, but we were too good to be less than we might be. I have dug coal—and there must be some ancestral condition that makes me find the blackness of a coalmine comforting—but I yearned for a different life and worked toward it. The yearning alone was not enough: the word earn, which is part of yearn, is the cue.
I earned the right to change the vocational focus of my forebears by repenting. All significant change is a result of repentance. This concept is not limited to theology. Whenever I discriminate and choose the better part, I repent. May I make a distinction here that has been useful to me? Regret may be a part of repentance, but regret is far from the whole of repentance. Regret alone locks me into the past, keeps me plucking uneasily at threads that are beyond my re-weaving. Repentance, in contrast, provides a present tense for regret, a vitalizing immediacy that not only digests the past but anticipates the future.
While I cannot repent of circumstances over which I apparently have little control—many choices seem to have been made for me—I can always choose to move in my strengths. All of us have and can recognize these strengths if, in the memorable phrase of Henry James, we are the kind of a person “upon whom nothing is lost.” If we come from a home in which education has not been prized, we can move on to college or to additional training with a fresh perspective that is denied those raised in intellectual affluence. If underneath the bravado of high-school commencement we have an unruly conscience whispering insistently that our training is deficient, we will only waste time in bemoaning and blaming. Our teachers did what they could with what we made available. If we feel a bit cheated, I daresay they do too. What we can become is limited less by our “innate” ability—a dubious concept at best—than by our desire and determination. Both of these are totally within our control, and both are critical components in repentance.
The final word, achievement, calls forth appropriate images of goals reached and tasks completed; and in a society dominated by material things, faulting quantifiable accomplishment is difficult. But the faint whisperings of the Spirit have swelled into a bugle note of concern during the past few years. Words like ecology and environment have taken on connotations that were unheard of five years ago. Frank questioning of progress itself as a desirable end is rampant. Advocacy of alternative lifestyles that flout traditional standards is now so common as to be itself a standard. In all the desperation and disorder, however, we see a common emphasis on people as individuals, an almost touching insistence that individuals are their own measure.
One of the dangers here, of course, is that we play at being simple and free and artless. Heads made from dried fruit may have a quaint charm, but necklace makers who must be subsidized by welfare payments or checks from home are accessories to their own frustrations. A current comic has suggested that there may be more than one way to skin a cat, but we cannot expect the cat to cooperate. The joke would be funnier if I did not see cooperative cats all about me wearing carefully faded jeans and precisely distressed leather. Fashioning a few organic baubles may appear to disdain modern technology; indeed, doing so may require skill and even be profitable. But it usually reflects achievement without fulfillment. That is, because so much of such activity takes its meaning in rejection or scorn, at best it implicitly recognizes that which it seems to hold in contempt. That which attempts to repudiate inevitably ends by highlighting its target.
I have belabored this point a bit to underscore the moral neutrality—or even negative possibility—in achievement. Fulfillment adds wholeness to achievement. And I would remind you that wholeness and holiness really have the same root. Achievement may require mastery of technique; fulfillment demands mastery of self as well. Beware of any enterprise that underplays its own moral significance, for the spirit as well as the body require nourishment, and the spirit will not be starved with impunity.
Earlier today I mentioned Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock. He visited BYU a few weeks ago, talked in our forum series, chatted informally with a number of students for another hour, then had lunch with several of us and, in fact, lingered on campus until he almost missed his plane. Unlike many lecturers who feel they must husband their strength, Mr. Toffler talked to as many students as he could and then confronted me with the following comment: “I have never spoken to a group who listened more attentively, understood me better, or dismissed my main thesis so decisively. I have decided that it’s their unbelievable moral earnestness that effectively counters everything I say.” As gently as I could, I explained that these young people faced an uncertain—and possibly catastrophic—future without panic because they shared a belief that provided perspective for success, comfort for grief, and an unshakable conviction that circumstance can be controlled by personal worthiness.
If not obviously persuaded, Mr. Toffler was thoughtful when he left. And I commend to you the frank necessity of thinking through your own goals in the light of standards in which you believe or in which you would like to believe, lest your dreamed-for achievement become a facade for despair. Fulfillment is never hollow, and it need not explain or apologize. It awaits all of us as we thoughtfully consider the future, appreciate God’s gifts, and outline a course to achieve goals of eternal worth.
