To prepare for this talk, I rummaged through a box of memorabilia and pulled out a clipping from the Wednesday, April 4, 1973, Daily Universe. There on the front page beside the headline “Hinckley Recipients Announced” is a photograph of the twenty smiling winners. I am standing on the far left. In those antediluvian days, all the winners were male and the total scholarships amounted to about $17,000—or slightly under $500 a semester. I recognized several friends among the winners, a number of whom have since excelled in their professions. I showed the clipping to my wife, who seemed duly impressed at what a distinguished lot we were. She then showed it to our ten-year-old daughter, who surveyed the group with a scowl and said: “Gee, Mom, you didn’t have much of a choice, did you?”
As I looked at the picture, memories washed over me of 1973, and with them a flood of gratitude for the Hinckley Scholarship. Receiving the Hinckley was a momentous event in my life. You see, unlike most of the other winners, I was not a “scholarship boy”—that is, the overachiever who is laden with academic honors from kindergarten to graduate school. Rather, I was a late bloomer academically. The Hinckley was my first major scholarship. One of thirteen children, I had always worked my way through school. In high school, I made tire paint, boxed groceries, and drove a delivery truck. At Brigham Young University, I grilled hamburgers at the Cougareat, cleaned ovens at Y-Mount Terrace, and scrubbed toilets at the BYU Laundry. Finally, in my junior year I became an Honors aide—my first academic job. But its quarter-time income proved inadequate to support me in school. The Hinckley Scholarship allowed me in my senior year—for the first and last time—to go to school without grinding financial pressure. Ah, what halcyon days! The Hinckley Scholarship underwrote this idyllic academic interlude that, like a Shakespearean comedy, culminated in marriage; it also gave me the courage to apply for other fellowships by validating my new-found identity as a scholar.
So I have blessed the Hinckley name many times over the years, and the first thing I’d like to do today is to simply say thanks to the Hinckley family. Thank you for your munificence to me as well as to so many past recipients like me. Thank you for your generosity to this latest group of recipients.
I want to speak to the 1990 recipients today about gratitude, specifically about nurturing a grateful heart along with a keen mind. According to conventional notions of the Christian afterlife, gratitude defines the central experience of heaven. I used to regard this idea of heaven as dull, static, boring, trite. But I’ve since come to respect the intent behind the clichés about harps and hymns. If heaven rings with praise, it is because praising “completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.” If heaven echoes with hallelujahs, it is because the redeemed resonate so wholly and constantly to God’s exquisite love. Gratitude is how love overflows a full heart.
Hell, by contrast, is “the suffering being unable to love”—to echo Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Dante likewise depicts Hell as a frozen realm to show that the damned have made their hearts as ice. Similarly, Milton’s Satan chooses Hell over Heaven precisely because he can neither give nor receive love; he feels God’s love imposes on him an intolerable “debt immense of endless gratitude, / So burthensome, still paying, still to owe.” Contrast this demonic response to God’s love with that of King Benjamin, who celebrates the fact that we are indebted to God “and will be, forever and ever” (Mosiah 2:24).
It is no coincidence that one so proudly brilliant as Milton’s Satan should be incapable of gratitude, nor that the cleverest characters in Shakespeare’s plays are typically the villains, nor that Dostoevsky’s bright but cynical Ivan lives out the Hell of no longer being able to love. These examples point to an occupational hazard of being a scholarship child. Intellectual achievement can invite a sense of one’s own superiority, together with contempt for the less gifted. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is a creature of such cold, contemptuous intellectual pride. He uses his genius to mount seemingly unassailable arguments against the possibility of a good God. Alyosha, his less brilliant but more loving younger brother, answers Ivan’s unanswerable skepticism with a kiss—the sign of his good heart and symbol of his Christ-like love. For Dostoevsky, to love is morally superior than to doubt, a good heart more to be valued than a razor-sharp mind. Shakespeare and Milton subscribe to the same priority of heart to mind.
We celebrate here today intellectual achievement, and that of a very high order. I commend and honor you for your accomplishments. I would not give this talk to a group predisposed to undervalue academic achievement. But because you are already academically accomplished, I want to remind you of other ways to measure achievement. I do so in the spirit of the Hinckley Scholarship, which has always aimed at rewarding young scholars committed to goodness as well as greatness. To become a Hinckley Scholar is to enter a fellowship founded “to perpetuate in each new generation the . . . spirit of service.” It is therefore fitting to recall that “character is higher than intellect” and that there is no true greatness without love.
Thomas à Kempis, author of The Imitation of Christ, a sublime medieval meditation on Christian spirituality, says this about achievement: “Without love, the outward work is of no value; but whatever is done out of love, be it never so little, is wholly fruitful. For God regards the greatness of the love that prompts a man, rather than the greatness of his achievement.” Elsewhere, à Kempis adds that “he is truly great who is great in the love of God.” I concur with these sentiments. True greatness is finally a matter of what and how well we love. A friend taught me this lesson even before I read it in The Imitation. In 1974, my friend applied for and won a Rhodes Scholarship. In the final interview, the examining panel asked him to define his lifetime goals. This ordinary question elicited an extraordinary answer. My friend remarked that his highest aim in life was to love wisely and well. He would count his life well spent if he could feel at the end of his days that (1) what he had loved was worthy of love, and (2) he had loved fully and well.
His was a rare perspective on success. Few people today measure greatness as my friend did or as à Kempis thinks God does—by “the greatness of the love that prompts a man, rather than the greatness of his achievement.” Our culture worships the idol Success. We suppose that only the outcome matters, rather than the attempt, thereby perverting even worthy goals. Thus some seek even the Celestial Kingdom as if it were yet one more honor—the last and best—to add to their résumés, rather than seeking to become celestial by the imitatio Christi. But genuine Christian concern lies in living well, not in lining up rewards. As T. S. Eliot observed, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” No matter what you and I achieve, after all we can do, we shall be saved by grace (2 Ne. 25:23).
It took John Milton a lifetime to learn these lessons. A scholarship boy if ever there was one—so eager to make his mark on the world, so tempted by the siren fame—“That last infirmity of a noble mind”—the young Milton regarded God as a great taskmaster who had endowed him with extraordinary talents. What return did God expect on these talents? One setback after another forced Milton to think long and hard about this issue. In his middle years, he was repeatedly compelled to defer and redefine his dreams according to the vagaries of God’s timetable. In his declining years, he saw the revolution for which he’d given his life defeated, his fond millenarian hopes for England blasted. What is more, he found himself crippled by blindness that threatened to thwart his long-held ambition to write the greatest poem in English. “What does God expect from me, his erstwhile child of promise,” Milton asks in a poignant sonnet on his blindness:
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
When Milton wrote these lines he was blind, nearly fifty years old, his literary reputation still very modest, and all his great poems yet unwritten. The aging, blind, would-be epic poet revisits the parable of the talents and again asks what return God requires from our talents. Does God measure us by our success, inspecting our accumulated day-planners to see how many daily, monthly, yearly, and lifetime goals are neatly scratched off? Or does he, rather, judge us, not by our success in reaching goals, but by the goals themselves and our desire to reach them? Perhaps for God, as Hamlet observes, “The readiness is all.” Perhaps, a mature Milton comes to realize, God does not need the great poem that Milton had spent a lifetime preparing to write, nor the cure for cancer or the great Mormon novel to which we may aspire. The world needs such work, and we need to work as mightily as we can. God, however, needs not our work but our willingness. Hence, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Milton underscores this lesson in Paradise Lost. There, the good angels think they will serve God by winning for him epic battles against Satan and the rebel angels. But the good angels’ efforts prove ineffectual militarily; the battles result in a standoff. Nevertheless, God approves the angels for standing faithful. It turns out that they were required to fight not because God needed the force of their arms (as they presumed), but because they needed a chance to prove the faith of their hearts. Evidently Milton’s God, like Thomas à Kempis’s God, is interested in the greatness of the love that prompts the angels, rather than the greatness of their achievement. He bids us fight, not necessarily win. Then after all we can do, we are saved by grace.
This doctrine bears anti-elitist implications, well known to Milton and to the early Protestant Reformers, as well as relevant to my topic today. In a poem entitled “Faith,” the saintly Anglican poet George Herbert observes that “a peasant may believe as much / As a great clerk” (29–30). Likewise Richard Baxter, a seventeenth-century English Presbyterian minister, affirms that “thousands believe savingly, that have not wit enough to tell you truly what believing is”; while John Bunyan similarly asserts that “it is possible for a soul that can scarce give a man an answer, but with great confusion as to method, . . . to have a thousand times more grace, and so to be more in the love and favour of the Lord than some who . . . can deliver themselves like angels.” In matters of devotion, heart-work matters more than brain-work. Hence, George Herbert claims that “if truly said,” a heart-felt expression of love “may take part / Among the best in art.” These comments challenge us to reexamine how we measure achievement. Perhaps doggerel written from a full heart possesses a beauty surpassing that of a technically accomplished love lyric written merely out of vanity; perhaps a casserole given in genuine charity has a moral splendor surpassing that of the most elegant feast given for display.
Now, I do not intend to disparage technical excellence in art or science or in any worthy discipline. We depend on trained hands and minds every day—whether from the mechanic who changes our plugs or the surgeon who changes our kidneys. Good intentions are no excuse for incompetence, a good heart no substitute for a trained mind. Moreover, God surely delights in our minds, whose intelligence reflects his own glory (D&C 93:36). As Thomas More remarks in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, God made man “to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind!” My intent is not to belittle intellectual accomplishment, but to try to see all human achievement through God’s eyes, sub specie aeternitatis (from an eternal perspective). I suspect that when heaven looks upon your lives, goodness matters more than greatness. The Lord hears your arias, but also the songs you cannot sing; the prayers you voice, but also those you truly feel. Doubtless, God rejoices in our achievements; but, above all, he regards our hearts.
Let me conclude this exhortation of nurturing grateful hearts to match your brilliant minds by recounting the climactic scene of Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen. You will recall that Reb Saunders, a Hasidic rabbi, has a brilliant son Danny—a boy “with a mind like a jewel,” “like a pearl, like a sun.” Reb Saunders first recognizes his son is a genius when Danny, still a child, devours a book and then repeats it verbatim back to his father. Danny is triumphant in his accomplishment. But his father is heartsick, for the book told of a poor Jew’s suffering, “And my Daniel enjoyed the story, he enjoyed the last terrible page.” Reb Saunders reminds young Danny of his own brother who eventually became a great mathematician but, in the process, abandoned the faith of his fathers. His brother’s mind “was a cold mind . . . almost cruel, untouched by his soul. It was proud, haughty, impatient with less brilliant minds, grasping in its search for knowledge the way a conqueror grasps for power. It could not understand pain, it was indifferent to and impatient with suffering.” Reb Saunders fears that Danny will grow up to be like his uncle unless the boy learns to feel as well as think. So Reb Saunders imposes upon Danny a regime of silence in order that his son may learn to take communion with his own soul and hear the human cries that lie beneath language: for “words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal the heart, the heart speaks through silence.” In this fashion, Reb Saunders hopes to create in Danny the heart of a tzaddik—that is, a Hasidic holy man. A tzaddik “must know of pain. A tzaddik must know how to suffer for his people . . . take their pain from them and carry it on his own shoulders.”
I wonder if God feels toward some of his scholarly children as Reb Saunders did toward Danny. Does he cry to us in the words of this father: “A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul.”
“Not a mind without a soul.” This phrase sounds a fitting charge for all who learn and teach at Brigham Young University. May we, like Danny, have the hearts of tzaddiks no matter what we do with our lives. May we be men and women of compassion, righteousness, mercy, and strength to suffer and carry pain. And may we remember that no matter what we accomplish (and I hope it is much), it is finally through the love of Christ—ours for him and his for us—that you and I shall be saved.
