“Success In Life”

Bishop Robert Barron  recently gave a speech to the 2023 graduates of Hillsdale College. Because he doesn’t waste a word it’s very difficult to condense into a BLOG. Yet it was so powerful I thought it was worth a try.  

I’ve listened to  a number of commencement speeches over the years, yet I don’t recall much. It doesn’t mean that some were not very good, but I can’t recall them. I do remember listening to commencement talks by Steve Jobs and Dr. Ben Carson which were powerful… yet today I’m drawing a blank.  

It’s a lofty goal to somehow raise the vision of a group of graduates whose minds are usually so distracted and frazzled at the moment of graduation. Back in the day, I didn’t even attend my university graduation ceremonies…. I was off to conquer the world or at least begin to celebrate. (P.S. Today, I regret not attending.)

Well, back to the talk. Let me list a few of the Bishop’s key punchlines: 

• “Young graduates, what kind of soul will you have… will you do whatever it takes to get what you want, or will you accept even great suffering in order to do what is right….. being unjust is far more damaging to the moral structure of a person’s character than enduring the slings and arrows of injustice.”
•  “Whom or what do you worship …… everything in your life will flow from your answer.”
• Referencing Elijah and the prophets of Baal, he says, “merely worldly things cannot, even in principle, satisfy our hungry souls”.

He ends with a reference to St. Thomas Moore from the 1966 Best Picture, “A Man For All Seasons” and a dialogue with his accuser Richard Rich. Earlier Rich had resisted Thomas’s Moore’s suggestion for him to be a teacher…” You’d be  a fine teacher, maybe a great one…. with Rich responding, but who would know it?” Barron concludes: “A lost soul plays to the endless fickle audience of the world, hoping thereby to acquire the fleeting goods that the world can provide…. while the uncorroded soul plays to God and to the friends of God, seeking to please them alone.”

Our model for happiness and joy and peace and success is Jesus, who did the will of the Father. May each of us also place doing the will of the Father as our goal in life. Everything else just doesn’t satisfy… now or for all eternity.