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A Light to the World: The Paradox of the BYU Graduate Student | Clark G. Gilbert | April 2025
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This commencement address entitled A Light to the World the Paradox of the BYU Graduate Student was given on April 24th of 2025 by Clark G. Gilbert, then Commissioner of the Church Educational System of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
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President Reese, Vice President Collings, thank you for your inspired leadership of this university. We can feel it. And Judge Wallace, thank you for your remarkable service to the law. President Oaks, we are honored by your remarks on the importance of the Constitution. We recognize the significance of your participation today. Along with Sister Oaks, we're also grateful to have the presence of Elder and Sister Kiran. And to our students, congratulations on your hard work and accomplishment in becoming BYU graduates. It was just over 30 years ago Christine and I sat where you sit today. We loved our time at byu. We were blessed with inspired faculty. We felt the strength of the church as we gathered with students from all across the world. Our righteous aspirations were elevated by friends. We served in student wards, attended devotionals and participated in the university leadership programs. And of course, we cheered on the mighty Cougars. Then and now. BYU is the hope of the Church and the flagship of the Church educational system. While not everyone can come here, so many pray for you and for your righteous impact on the world. BYU's motto is enter to learn, Go forth to serve. After graduation, Christine and I moved to Palo Alto, California, where I started graduate studies at Stanford University. It would have been easy for us to get lost in the wave of move inside as part of that ward's annual intake of graduate students coming out of byu. But the Lord sent two men into our lives who changed us forever. Hank Taylor and Peter Giles had graduated from BYU years earlier with Silicon Valley's descendants. These men were always representing their alma mater and the church with distinction. They also raised their families in the Gospel and helped establish the church in the Bay Area. Brother Taylor had served in the stake presidency and Brother Giles as one of the former bishops of that ward. By the time we arrived in Palo Alto, some might have thought these two brethren were past their prime in church service. But no one had told them that. Both Hank and Peter looked at all of these new graduate students and decided part of their service would be to teach us what it meant to serve in this church. I was called as just another young men's advisor, one of many. But these leaders then taught me how to minister to those in need, how to welcome others into the ward, and how to embed myself in the lives of youth. Here is a picture of the three of us years later on a return visit to the Palo Alto ward. In fact, Hank Taylor is sitting right here in the audience today. And Hank, you can stand up. Hank is here with. Hank is here for the graduation of four grandchildren children. Today. I'm not sure the young men in that Palo Alto ward really benefited much from my role as just one extra young men's advisor. But a few years later, I found myself across the country with a call to serve the youth in inner city Boston. This time there was no Hank Taylor or Peter Giles to mentor me. My youth were of Haitian, Dominican and West African descent. I loved those boys. I gave everything I had to them, ministering in their homes and helping them build their testimonies in Christ. They have since served missions, graduated from BYU and BYU Idaho, married in the temple and are building their own families and building the church. I doubt those young men will ever know Hank Taylor or Peter Giles, but their lives were blessed forever because what I learned from those early mentors about what it means to serve in this church. As you leave byu, you will need to balance an expectation for professional and academic distinction with integrity to your faith. We heard that message today from Judge Wallace. You might consider these dual responsibilities a simultaneous call for excellence with a call for discipleship. This is similar to the charge President Spencer W. Kimball gave our faculty when he challenged them to maintain a dual heritage of both academic rigor and spiritual integrity. He invited them to speak with authority and excellence to their professional colleagues in the language of scholarship while still being literate in the language of spiritual things. If you let the call for excellence supersede your call to discipleship, you will risk mimicking the world and in some ways, eventually apologizing for your faith. Conversely, if you let your call for faithfulness cause you to isolate yourself from the world, you may preserve your faith, but you will miss the opportunity to be a light to the world. CS Lewis described this reordering of faith by secular engagement in his novel the Screwtape Letters. In the book, a junior devil named Wormwood wonders whether to encourage the man he's trying to corrupt to engage in politics. Should he push the man toward becoming an extreme patriot or an ardent pacifist? His supervisor, named Screwtape, responds, whichever he adopts, your main task will be the let him begin by treating his patriotism or the pacifism as part of his religion, then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part, then quietly and gradually nurse him onto the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the cause. Once you have made the world an end and faith a means, you have almost won your man and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. We want you to be excellent in your professional and your community engagement, but never let others agendas replace or subordinate your discipleship. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell has stated regarding the hyphenated descriptor disciple scholar, in the end all the hyphenated words come off and we are finally simply disciples. Of course, Elder Maxwell's call for discipleship is not an excuse to abandon our engagement with others. Preserving faith should never be a catalyst for isolation. This would be a misplaced application of what has been termed the Benedict option where, like St. Benedict, we are tempted to isolate from the increasingly secular world in protected cloisters of monastic separation. I hope none of us will become like the monk in Friedrich Nietzsche's narrative. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche's protagonist, Zarathustra, travels from town to town championing his anti religious philosophy, declaring God is dead, God is dead and we have killed him. Then one day he stumbles upon a lonely hermit who has isolated himself in the forest, almost imperceptibly mumbling his praise to God. Zarathustra has pity on this lonely monk and leaves him be in what he viewed as a quaint, even naive expression of private worship. Every year, a wave of BYU graduates moves to Palo Alto or Cambridge or a host of other locations with graduate programs across the country. Within three years of graduation, 45% of BYU graduates will have completed or started a graduate program. But whether for graduate school or for other opportunities of work or family, most graduates will move away from the strength of this campus. How will you serve and how will you engage once you leave this remarkable setting? Consider what I will call the paradox of the graduate student. Imagine a matrix where the vertical axis is faith integrity. The horizontal axis is engagement with the world. Let's examine three examples of future BYU graduate students. Starting in the upper left hand quadrant, imagine a new married couple leaving byu. I think I saw them walking in today. They both served missions in this example in the Philippines. They loved everything about their time at byu. After graduation they moved to Chicago for law school. They maintained the integrity of their convictions, but the only people they really interacted with were their friends in the ward and church members in their graduate program. I'll call these graduates the isolators. They came and left Chicago with their faith intact, but they rarely extended their service beyond their own faith community. Now let's turn to the lower right hand quadrant. I'll call this quadrant the Apologizers, not in the traditional definition of a Christian apologist, but more to the idea that their engagement with the world leads them to embarrassment. Imagine a bright student admitted to a competitive graduate program on the East Coast. His frequent social engagement reveals that his beliefs are often in conflict with with the strongly shared position of some of his peers. Rather than represent his own beliefs with courage, he often becomes silent, sometimes embracing others secular agendas. Finally, let's explore the upper right hand quadrant. These are graduates who maintain the integrity of their beliefs while fully engaging with others. I will call these alumni lights to the world. They live their beliefs confidently and courageously even as they learn from others and engage in their communities. They build friendships with others of differing beliefs and invite them into their lives, always representing the restored gospel of Jesus Christ with courage, faith and dignity. To paraphrase New York Times columnist David Brooks in a message given right here on this campus, BYU has given you a rooted and secure spiritual base which should provide you the courage to become daring explorers and examples to the world around you. The Savior has declared, ye are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid as you leave today, we invite you to be that light on the hill. Some of you will face pressures to seclude yourself in the forest of isolation. Others will engage wonderfully with the world but will be tempted to apologize and back away from the very faith that helped define who you are. We know overcoming these pressures can be challenging at times and even lonely. Rabbi Joseph Solovitchik, the great Jewish philosopher, spoke of this tension by saying, who knows what kind of loneliness is more agonizing? The one which befalls man when he casts his glance alone at the mute cosmos or the one that besets the man exchanging glances with his fellow men in silence. But you are not alone, as you've heard today. You have so many examples in the BYU alumni who've gone before you. As graduates of byu, byu, you will forever carry the responsibility to represent this university and its sponsoring faith. Your predecessors have helped bring this university and this church out of obscurity and darkness. As you leave BYU today, have the courage to stand up and be that light to the world. Maintain your spiritual integrity even as you engage as an ambassador and peacemaker that our prophet has asked us to be. Remember the Lord's for those who are on his errand. I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left and my spirit shall be in your hearts and mine, angels round about you to bear you up. This is our hope and our charge to you today. Hold up your light that it may shine into the world. I say these things with hope, love and gratitude in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
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