We should remember the oyster
I didn’t receive any invitations to make a commencement address this year. Maybe it’s just as well. What could I tell today’s graduates that would inspire them?
When I graduated from college, the commencement speaker told us, “The future will not be easy but it is bright.”
You couldn’t tell that to today’s graduating seniors. True, I could tell them the first part — that life will not be easy. But bright?
It isn’t only that the world outlook is bleak with news of terrorism threatening all of us who occupy the planet. And here in the United States, those standing in the long unemployment lines must now make room for record numbers of college graduates looking for work. More often we feel that waste, deceit and violence are all around us and there are few signs that things are going to get remarkably better.
So what can we tell today’s youth who are going out into a hostile world? Had I been asked to give a commencement address this year I would have told the graduates to go home and copy down the words of English Victorian poet Matthew Arnold and paste them on the bathroom mirror to read every morning.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The words are from “Dover Beach,” which Arnold wrote in 1867, and they place the source of our happiness on the fidelity and closeness of our human relationships and force us to ask “Have we been looking in the wrong place for life’s satisfactions?”
Today’s young people may never know the affluence and comfort we knew. But they may be better off for it. Hardship often brings out the best in us. Hugh Studdert-Kennedy, another British writer, said that when we get to the eternal judgment seat, God will ask us not “How did life treat you?” but rather “Well, what did you make of it?”
What did you make of your disappointments, the hard times, the tragedies in your life? Did they remain disappointments and tragedies or did you change the quality of these experiences so that in the end they blessed your life?
Maybe we have said too often to young people, “The world before you is bright with promise.” Perhaps we should have been telling them all along to make friends with pain, instead of encouraging them to flee from it (when really that is not possible).
We should tell them about the oyster. When this remarkable creature finds itself irritated by a grain of sand within its shell, it secretes a material that coats the foreign substance, not only relieving the pain but producing a pearl of great price and beauty.
Following the example of the humble oyster, we can make our own pearls by coating the sharp vexations of life with qualities such as patience, serenity and good humor — and the love that never faileth.
Unable to assure today’s graduates of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (or even a rainbow), we can tell them to “remember the oyster.” If they do that, they may find the happiness and peace that tomorrow’s world cannot give or take away.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)