On the Brink of Eternity

[This article is edited from a commencement address given to Classical Conversations graduates on May 3, 2025, in Corvallis, Oregon.]

Congratulations, seniors, for arriving at this point in your education. You have worked hard, come far, and persevered through complexity and challenges. Your education is worth what you have practiced, and you have practiced some very good things for a very long time.

Of course, one does not arrive at such an occasion without tremendous support from one’s community. And the community gathered here is a testament not only to your personal efforts but also to the efforts of the village that has worked to help you arrive at this day. Congratulations to you, village, for your love, understanding, encouragement, and support these past years. You have given a great gift to these graduates, one for which I am sure they will be forever grateful.

As you well know, Classical education is not like other forms of education. It is not designed to conform you to the world and its values. Rather, it is designed to give you the tools you need to be in the world but not of the world—tools needed to navigate your faith, relationships, and vocations with integrity.

Each of you stands not on the brink of the afternoon, the weekend, or the summer. Each of you stands on the brink of eternity.^[1] And it is your personal response to eternity that will determine how you will live your life.

In his journals, Denmark’s national poet Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “though life be lived forwards, it must be understood backwards”^[2]—a sober acknowledgment that we must live in light of eternity, understanding that we are ultimately accountable to the God of creation. This realization must pervade, condition, and calibrate your analysis of reality and how to navigate it.

Classical education is designed to teach you about how to live a good life—the kind of life that is pleasing to God. And a life that is pleasing to God is the sort of life in which a person aims to practice how to give and receive love well. In his famous send-off speech to his son Laertes, Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet lists recommendations about how Laertes should live his life, ending with this:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!^[3]

What does “to thine own self be true” mean?

To be a “self” is to recognize that your decisions are laden with moral weight—that because we are creatures who make moral distinctions, we are therefore accountable for those decisions. To be a self is to acknowledge in Whose image we are made.

When the author of Genesis quotes in 1:26 God’s intention to make man in His image and likeness, he uses the Hebrew words tselem (image) and dmuth (likeness). Used here, tselem (image) implies both a resemblance and a representation—the way a shadow or silhouette resembles a living being in its outline and movements. Dmuth (likeness) implies something concrete and physical, like a sculpture of Caesar resembles Caesar the man. In both cases, neither “image” nor “likeness” truly expresses the fullness of the original. Something is lacking. And like a shadow or a sculpture, we, as creatures, need to be completed, fulfilled, and made whole to become what God intends us to be.

In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis observes that when moderns look into the night sky, they observe only a dark, cold, lifeless expanse. However, when the ancients gazed upon the heavens, they saw a canvas dotted with light and filled with the music of the spheres. To them, the perfect, circular, harmonious movements of the heavenly bodies represented wholeness and completion that moved in response to God’s love for them. To them, the heavens sang ever of wholeness, completion, and perfection. No good thing was lacking, and everything was animated by God’s love. And so Lewis encourages us to conceive ourselves “looking up at a world lighted, warmed and resonant with music.”^[4]

The heavens served as a daily reminder of God’s ultimate plan for a human life: that each of us become whole, complete, and perfectly conformed to what true goodness is. And pursuit of the truth—following the Christ—is our given path toward this end. Life is a process in which our image and likeness are to be filled in, made complete, and, most importantly, made truly alive through God’s good work on our souls for His greater glory and our own.^[5] This process of being made whole—that is, the life of faith—is a challenging one marked with struggle, doubts, uncertainties, and tension. To wend our way into the fullness of what it means to be a human being will take an existential commitment of epic proportions. And “being true to yourself” will require that you delineate that which is within your control and that which is not.

The following are outside of your control: what other people think, say, and do, including how they feel and react to you and whether they view you charitably or unforgivingly; how God made you and is working in you and others; God’s timeline for you and the length of your life and the lives of others; your reputation, legacy, “reach,” and impact of your work; and who is given to you to love.

The following are within your control: how you observe what is in front of you, including your own emotions and inner reactions; how you talk to yourself and whether you view others charitably or unforgivingly; what you choose to say and do; whether you turn to God, trust Him, and welcome His work in you; what you pray and hope for; how you respond to what God asks of you and to difficulty, suffering, and distress; and whether you apologize and repent and forgive.

True education is not the sort of thing that makes life easier—far from it. Since education properly done gives one clarity about the task at hand and how to do it well, a true education, in making life good, also makes life hard in the sense that a love for the truth will lift the veil on our own flaws and the fallenness of our world. Yet, in addition to clarity, true education can build a storehouse of wisdom that can help us navigate ourselves, our culture, and our relationship with God with love, patience, grace, kindness, charity, and peace.

Once you step out of these doors, you will find yourselves in a world that offers up all sorts of ideas and makes all sorts of demands. You will have to use your own critical apparatus to decide how to respond. You will have to decide whether you will be true to yourself—whether you will practice in a way that will move you toward goodness, toward truth, and toward your Creator God.

You stand today not on the brink of the next five years, but on the brink of eternity. And the good news is that the God who made you stands with you on that brink at every moment, working all things for your good, spurring your soul to lean into His goodness and truth, urging you to practice well, to run the good race and die empty, having poured out into the world and into others all the good things that He has poured into you from the beginning.^[6] In this emptying of self, you will be made whole in Christ.

Trust the Lord. Doubt the world. Resist the urge to oversimplify. Resist the urge to go on autopilot. Seek to love your neighbor and your enemy the way that God loves you. Pursue always the ultimate good of whomever you find in the room with you. Forgive and ask for forgiveness. Humble yourself. Be curious about everything. Admit when you do not know. Lean not on your own understanding. Ask for wisdom, and God will give it abundantly. And most of all, be present with God in your process.

I will close with a prayer Kierkegaard wrote to his God almost two centuries ago:
O great all-knowing, almighty, all-caring God, consider that I do not smirk or smile or consort with the learned scientist when he ridicules the thought that something can be made out of nothing. You did, indeed, in the very beginning take on a universe that was “without form and void,” and in the darkness You said, “Let there be light,” and there was light! Then every nook and cranny of this vast and formless nothing responded to the touch of Your miracle-working Hand. I had better believe that You can create something out of nothing, otherwise there is no hope for me. But miracle of miracles! Even before my life manifests anything of difference or change, I can feel the mighty thrust of Your Holy Spirit working within. You have given me “power to become,” and that power is already at work, promising that I one day will be a full-grown child of Thine after the likeness and the fullness of Christ! Amen.^[7]

Congratulations, Class of 2025!

End Notes:

¹This sentiment—though reframed here in the positive—is drawn from Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
²Søren Kierkegaard, Journalen JJ:167 (1843), Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter, Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, Copenhagen, 1997, volume 18, page 306.
³Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.3.60-87.
⁴C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p.111-112 (Cambridge University Press, 1964).
⁵This sentiment is an echo of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (2:4-7).
⁶This sentiment is drawn from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:14-18).
⁷Kierkegaard, Søren and George K. Bowers. The Mystique of Prayer and Pray-er. Lima, OH: CSS Pub., 1994, 95.