The following address was given by Gutenberg tutor Brian Julian at the Gutenberg Commencement Ceremony on June 12, 2026.
Dear class of 2026, I feel honored that you asked me to give this address tonight. I have deeply appreciated having each of you as students and as members of the Gutenberg community, so I am delighted to speak to you officially one last time. When I started to think about what I would say to you, the first problem that confronted me was the issue of tone. I have had many impromptu conversations with each of you, and these conversations have featured heavy doses of sarcasm and absurdity. I have enjoyed them thoroughly. While I considered writing you a speech in this vein, I decided that I owed you (and the audience) something more substantial, something more fitting for the occasion. So, in what follows I want to draw your attention to what you have achieved as students and to exhort you to make use of it. But in doing so, in order to honor our friendship, I must also include a touch of the absurd.
Let me begin by congratulating you. You have reached the end, and you have accomplished a lot to get here. You have practiced (and grown in) many skills over your time at Gutenberg. Tonight, I want to speak to you about one of those skills. I want to remind you of its importance. The skill I have in view is the skill of reading.
When I speak of “reading,” I mean more than just deciphering the words of a book and articulating the author’s message. (Although you have certainly practiced a lot of this deciphering!) I also mean that, once you have deciphered the words, you have examined the ideas to be found in them. You have then taken these ideas and practiced discerning which to adopt for yourself and which to reject. In its fullest sense, “reading” means following this whole chain of ideas from author to reader.
In fact, reading does not even have to involve words on a page. You have practiced many kinds of reading, since the genres you have read at Gutenberg transcend the label “great books.” For example, you have read several great paintings. This means more than looking at the painting and deciding whether you like it. It means that you have looked for the visual cues that point to the artist’s intentions; then you have considered whether the ideas found within the painting are true. (Is Napoleon really as great as this painting wants us to see him?) You have also read a handful of great films this quarter. In doing so, you have analyzed the ways that images, sound, and story interact in order to communicate ideas.
I would submit that the skill you have gained in reading is among the most valuable things you have received from Gutenberg. It is even a candidate for most valuable. In order to make this case tonight, I ask you—and I ask the audience—to read along with me a text from a genre you did not tackle in class. You have read great books, great films, and great paintings, but I would like to consider an example from one of the more neglected genres: the great bathroom graffiti.
Now, I acknowledge that the genre of bathroom wall literature has few instances of greatness. Several years ago, however, I encountered one memorable example, and I want to examine it tonight. The text in question comes from a men’s restroom in the basement of Boston University’s School of Theology, circa 2010. It was scratched into a stall by an unknown author. For the sake of convenience, let’s call him Fred. As with most texts in this genre, Fred’s was short and to the point. It read: “I will fail at life.”
It is hard to know exactly what Fred had in mind by this statement. Context suggests that he was a college student, so there is a good chance that the pessimism stems from failing a test, having been dumped by his girlfriend, or general difficulty with balancing work and school—something along these lines. But whatever his exact thoughts, one thing was true of Fred as he scratched this text. He was implicitly answering a deep, fundamental question, one that every human must ask: What does it mean to succeed in life? In writing “I will fail at life,” he had in mind some sort of criterion for evaluating success and failure, however profound or trivial that criterion may have been.
Perhaps success in life is a high-paying job, one that requires a stellar GPA to obtain—and Fred just flunked a test. That job is now out of his grasp. He failed. Or perhaps success is having the sort of stable family he grew up in (or did not grow up in). This requires him to find a wife—and he just got dumped. He is now further away from that family. Maybe it is not obtainable. He failed. I don’t know what Fred was thinking, but he had in mind some idea of what it means to succeed at life and perceived that this success was out of his reach.
As time went on, it became apparent that other people also had ideas about success. A series of commentary texts came to be scratched around Fred’s—a miniature great conversation, if you will. Eventually, there were four such commentaries. In response to Fred’s declaration that he will fail at life, others replied: “Join the club”; “You already have”; “Life is only what you make of it”; and “Only if you let it beat you.”
The first of these—“Join the club”—appears to agree with Fred that there is an easily discernible criterion for success. It does not indicate which of these it chooses, but it could be any of the options we already considered with Fred’s text.
The other three bring new ideas to the discussion. Again, it is impossible to know from a single sentence exactly what each of these means. But given that the context is twenty-first-century American culture, we can infer some ideas that are likely in view.
For example, there may be a tinge of relativism. The comment that “Life is only what you make of it” could imply that the goal of life is movable. There is no set goal, no given criterion of success or failure, but each of us places our own goalpost and succeeds when we reach it.
Or, rather than relativism, perhaps the commentators have in mind psychology. They are thinking that there is no goal in life. There is no outside judgment as to whether we succeed or fail. Instead, we succeed if we feel successful. Fred said, “I will fail at life,” and the comment “You already have” could be remarking on Fred’s pessimism. He has failed because he is stuck in a mindset of failure.
Or maybe Fred is failing because he admitted defeat. Maybe success in life is achieved through effort. The comment “Only if you let it beat you” is proclaiming that life can be mastered through work. Fred needs to buck up, grit his teeth, and abandon his defeatist attitude. Success will not be handed to him on a silver platter, but it can be his with enough sweat.
Now, I am not saying I know for sure what Fred and his commentators had in mind with their scratchings. However, all the options I have considered are real possibilities for what they meant: success in life might be found in obtaining a good job, in having a stable family, in setting my own goal, in keeping a positive mindset, or in powering through the difficulties. And assuming that these interpretations are in the ballpark for what these authors meant, I would like to point out two observations about their messages.
First, they are all false. This is not to say that jobs and family and hard work are bad. But none of the options under consideration, including these, define success for the whole of life.
In order to define this sort of success, we need to know the purpose of life, what life is for. And in order to know this, we need to consult our creator. That is, to succeed in life is to be what God created us to be, to do what God created us to do. So, let’s say, as a decent approximation, that the goal of life is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. To succeed in life is to do these. To fail is not to do them.
And this standard for the goal of life, for the measure of success, is very different from the options given by Fred and his friends. For them, loving my neighbor is, at best, a piece of the picture. Perhaps I have to love a few of my neighbors—those who are family members—in order to have a stable family. But if success is defined by a job or by setting my own goal, I might not need to love neighbors at all. And, setting aside the issue of loving people, none of their options even mention loving God. If the Bible is right in its prescriptions for humans, all of the options to be found in that bathroom stall are based on false measures of success. They are not ones that we, as Christians, should adopt.
Second, besides being false, I would like to note that these candidates for measuring success are everywhere. In part, I have been looking at the ideas found in an instance of bathroom graffiti in order to emphasize this. I have been speaking of a one-square-foot area on one wall in one city in this vast world in which we live. This world is filled with billboards and books and movies and songs and conversations with friends, family, and coworkers. All of these media contain messages about what is important in life. We are surrounded by them. Not all of these messages are false—hallelujah for those that proclaim the truth! But many of the messages are, like those of Fred and his commentators, at best, partially true. At worst, they are outright lies.
We are all swimming in a sea of ideas—an ocean of truths, half-truths, and falsehoods—and with messages swelling up in towering waves, there is a constant danger that we will drown. That is, that we will believe the lie and make it the basis of our life.
And this, graduates, brings me to why I am so excited for you. As I said at the beginning of this address, you have been practicing the skill of reading. In other words, you have been practicing navigating the turbulent sea we all live in. You have been working to identify the ideas that lie behind various forms of communication, and you have been examining and evaluating those ideas once they are identified. You have tackled reading many books over your time at Gutenberg and strengthened your ability to read. This practice will allow you to evaluate not only books, but films, advertisements, and, yes, even bathroom graffiti. It equips you with a boat and paddles as the ideas surge up around you. There could be no more important skill, no skill more practical, than the skill of reading.
I have been speaking at such length upon this skill in order to draw your attention—and the attention of your friends and family—to the immense value of what you have gained, to the value represented by this degree you are receiving. You have a skill worth celebrating. But I want you to do more than merely have the skill. And so, I would like to give you three brief exhortations.
First, you have been practicing the skill of reading as a college student, so now that you are graduating, use it. As you transition from the undergraduate world to the world of work or the world of further education, consider the implications of the messages that will be handed to you. Don’t simply absorb those messages. Examine the ideas that will swell up around you—the ideas that will try to drown you, to force your belief before you even realize they are there. Don’t just drift along with the current, but read the world around you, so you can navigate your life on purpose.
Second, you have been practicing the skill of reading in an academic environment, but don’t let your use of this skill become academic. You are all smart. You can find ideas embedded in many forms of communication, and you can debate the merits of those ideas. But never forget that the purpose of ideas is to understand life, and the purpose of life is to live it. Don’t use your considerable skill at reading merely to play the game of argumentation. Instead, use it to face into the waves and steer your course.
For the third exhortation I would like to misappropriate from one of Fred’s commentators. I exhort you to join the club. By this I mean that you should seek out the church. We are not left to navigate the sea of life on our own. Importantly, we need reinforcements that go beyond our own skill at reading. Reading takes work—navigating the ocean waves takes work—and it is easy to become exhausted. We need other people around us who will regularly help us to stay afloat by reminding us of the truth. Even if they do not have your skill at reading, when people are trying to follow God and live out the message of the Bible, they are charting the same course as you. Sometimes you will need reminders of this course from fellow sailors, and at all times it is more encouraging to see your own little boat as part of a fleet. What is more, you can use your skill at reading not just for yourself, but you can help your fleet-mates steer clear of waves which may otherwise have set them adrift.
To conclude, I would like to return to Fred. He declared that he would fail at life, and here, at the end of the address, is where I am supposed to tell you that now, because of your newly-acquired degree, you will instead succeed. But I am not going to say this. I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that I have been praising your academic accomplishments because academics is the key to success in life. Rather, as we established earlier, the goal of life is to love God and love our neighbor. I do think that the skills you have gained at Gutenberg will aid you in your pursuit of God. The skill of reading will be an invaluable tool as you try to discern what following God looks like while you are floating in the sea of ideas that surrounds us. But at the same time, we know that naturally, apart from God, none of us will succeed at this task. No matter our academic accomplishments, the key ingredient of our success is the mercy of God. This is so much the case that it almost seems inappropriate to call a life of following God one where we succeed. Perhaps instead we could call it failing well. We will all fail at life due to sin, but we fail well when we turn to God in the midst of our failure, when we strive towards him with every resource we have available, striving, yes, also with the skills we have acquired academically.
So, graduates, I leave you with this thought: I applaud your accomplishment at arriving to this point, and I exhort you to make use of the skill of reading that you have been practicing. But, nevertheless, you will fail at life. I pray that you fail well.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of Colloquy, Gutenberg College’s free quarterly newsletter. Subscribe here.
