Thank you very much for allowing me to share this important day with you. We have something in common this afternoon, in that just as this is your first time graduating from high school, this is my first time delivering a commencement address. Now, as you heard in my introduction I am a politician and a lawyer and as such I love a captive audience and when I have one it is always a great temptation to address myself to some pressing public policy issue of the day and then attempt to somehow relate it to the audience at hand.

I’m going to try to avoid that temptation today and pursue a less overtly practical, but I hope an ultimately more useful topic. To help us get started I’d like to ask something of a rhetorical question; has anyone here ever experienced a moment where time seemed to stand still? Sometimes we talk about that happening during a traumatic event like a car accident. Just a few months ago I was driving my family down to my law partner’s vacation home for a weekend get away. Things were sailing along nicely when we hit an icy patch on a back road. The car started to spin and as it did so everything seemed like it went into slow motion for a few seconds. Perhaps you have had a similar experience.

But what I’m actually thinking of here is something different and it’s a bit hard to explain, but if you’ve experienced it you’ll pick up on what I’m getting at. Not a moment where a traumatic event causes you to experience a perceived time distortion, but something that is almost the exact opposite. What I’m wondering is if you have ever had a moment, even in the midst of a very mundane activity like talking a walk in the woods, or writing a letter, or talking to a friend, time seems to stand still and you experience that moment with some sort of sublime hyperawareness, and the constraints of time seem to fall away, however briefly. I think most people have had such experiences and I hope each of you will have many of them.

On an occasion like a graduation one can hardly help but to think about the idea of time and how we perceive it. Your parents are all thinking back to things like the day they brought you home from the hospital and are wondering where the time has gone. Some of you may be thinking about what a long road high school seemed and how this commencement address has already gone longer than you would have liked.

I’m certain that many of you have been thinking about time in the context of your future plans, college, work, military service or whatever else may lie before you. Given how natural it is to be thinking of such issues at this stage of life I would like to take a step back and reflect for a moment on this strange thing called time.

The great English novelist and Christian apologist GK Chesterton pointed out something that I think is obvious to all of us from our own experience, that time, which at first glance seems as precise and objective a thing as one could imagine, seems very imprecise and subjective in our actual experience of living. We have all known hours that seemed to last days, and days that seemed faster than a normal hour. Of course it’s possible to downplay the significance of this relatively mundane and common experience. But Chesterton saw in this something more, he looked at the fact that we humans are not quite comfortable with time; that we seem to chaff against it and asked whether or not this might not point us to a greater truth. The truth that we are not comfortable with the limits of time because we were created for the enjoyment of God in a timeless eternity.

But if this is so does it or should it mean anything to us in terms of how we think about living life in the time bound word we occupy? Let me suggest that it does, but not perhaps only in the way we first might think. Yes, and of course, we should look to always use our time in a fashion that gives glory to God. But perhaps something less obvious is at work here as well, perhaps in order to use our time so as to give glory to God we must, as much as possible, live with a pressing awareness of and openness to those moments, like we talked about a few moments ago, where one seems to find themselves living, however briefly, outside of time. It is in these times that we come to realize that a mere moment may partake of eternity. That is to say that there are certain rare moments in life when true consciousness breaks in, when we seemingly escape from the clutches of time and perceive the reality of our own eternal natures and the creation around us within a concrete moment. C.S. Lewis hinted at this idea when he spoke of being ‘Surprised By Joy.” Edmund Burke referenced such moments as part of the “unbought grace of life” those free and gracious gifts of God by which we occasionally seem to grasp the eternal. T.S. Eliot dealt with this theme repeatedly in his poetry, the idea that time present and time past are present in time future, and that time future is itself contained in time past. Or put less obscurely, for God all time, past, present and future is know to him, is available to him at all times, and as such the strange interactions we see between past, present and future are not mysterious to him.

Now perhaps all I have achieve to this point is to thoroughly confuse and/or bore you. But I hope you’ll hang on a little longer because my point is really a simple one. That the experience of timeless moments within the everyday pattern of mundane tasks is not an ephemeral pleasure, but rather a profound taste of eternity of which we should be aware and for which we should be grateful. Yet we spend comparatively little emotional or intellectual energy pursuing such impractical things. We are perhaps overly interested in achieving success within an economy of material excess. Forgetting that there are various economies (when economy is taken in the sense of “a system of harmonious interacting elements”), and that participation in the moral/spiritual economy of the body of Christ must be our first priority. In this economy our common experience of God’s gracious gift of small glimpses of the eternal is no small thing.

To go through life blind to such gifts, too focused on the task at hand to make room for the graciousness of God seems to me the tragic fate even of many Christians today. I’d like to suggest one further thing in this regard. That the best way to live a life open to such divine gifts is to exercise the virtue of humility, for God gives grace to the humble. But the very idea of humility is counter-cultural. I think back to my own graduation in this regard; where I remember being told about the importance of believing in oneself. Fine as far as it goes I guess, though of course belief in oneself is not advice I would care to give indiscriminately. Such advice forgets the reality of evil in the world, and within the hearts of men.

Christianity does not encourage us to any vacuous confidence detached from an underlying concern for the moral content of that which we have confidence in. The Christian maxim is not believe in yourself; rather it is “humble yourself.” Today we have not so much forgotten the concept of humility as inverted it. Biblical humility is largely about recognizing our status as creatures, over against God’s status as creator and source of all truth. We were meant then to be humble about ourselves, but bold in our adherence to truth. Today we often see this divine pattern exactly reversed, we are encouraged to be bold in self assertion, but humble and doubting as to the objective reality of truth established by God for all eternity. Now this strange reversal is much more dangerous than one might first think.

The concept of humility set before us by God made man doubtful of himself and his own efforts, and thus inclined to work all the more diligently because of this awareness of our limits. But humility or reticence regarding truth itself makes men doubtful about his very purpose in the world, and as such inclines men to stop working at all.

The perniciousness of this idea is that it sets before us the prospect of a sort of intellectual suicide, perpetrated by one generation on the next. Just as one generation could prevent the existence of the next generation if we all decided to jump off a cliff, so we can prevent the intellectual development of the next generation by teaching that there is no ultimate purpose of, or validity to, human thought. And it is this very tendency that is encouraged by the false and inverted humility of our age. A rejection of objective truth does not free our minds by opening up previously unknown possibilities; rather it has the opposite effect of producing a downward spiral of skeptical despair that ends in making all thought meaningless.

Now this is bad enough in and of itself, but it too has further and more dire consequences. For if truth is relative and unknowable then where can human dignity be grounded. Some of you may have read the Brother’s Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and might recall this brief passage, “for the mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth.” We live in an age where many, especially among the elites, have abandoned the notion of truth and as such have no idea what they are living for. The result is an emerging and aggressive culture of death in which a concept of social utility has replaced the notion of human dignity. The losers in this ethical sea change are the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the terminally ill and the unborn . None of whom pass the utility test and as such become expendable.

But now I’m on the verge of doing what I set out not to do, of delivering a political speech. So let me stop right here and return in conclusion to my main point.

That the experience of timeless moments within the everyday pattern of mundane tasks is not an ephemeral pleasure, but rather a profound taste of eternity of which we should be aware and for which we should be grateful. And that the purposeful exercise of humility is the surest gateway of access to such moments out of time. For it is in humbling ourselves that we receive the many graces that God is so willing and even eager to lavish on his people. But in adopting humility about ourselves, we must all the while maintain a posture of boldness regarding the objective, tangible and eternal nature of truth itself.