I didn't come to give advice—— I'm too old to give advice. If you had asked me a few years ago, I was just full of it and would have been glad to have given you more than you wanted to hear. Now that I am old I only exchange ideas.
The size of the crowd and the auspiciousness of the occasion generally tempts a speaker to select a subject too heavy for himself and the crowd. I must remember that you came in as individuals and you will leave as individuals, you are more than just one in a crowd. Therefore! Want to give you something that you can take with you to use personally.
Of course, I want to congratulate you graduates, but not just congratulate you but thank you. Thank you for what? For graduating. We parents don't believe we could have taken one more year of the financial strain. Now mama can redecorate the kitchen and daddy can have that new suit he has wanted to buy. I also want to thank you for those wives who have worked and struggled to put some of you fellows through, as well as you husbands who have sacrificed to help your wife get a degree. I notice some of you have brought some balloons to release when the big moment comes. Could I ask some generous soul to release just one tiny little balloon for the parents, the wives and husbands who supported? I see you have done that and I want to thank you very much. (The audience applauded while the balloon ascended.)
Any secular school could have educated your head. Without heresy I think 1 could say there are some secular schools that may have given your mind a greater honing. The unique ability of the Christian school is to educate the heart: knowledge is in the mind, but wisdom is in the heart. "Out of the heart come the issues of life."
The problems we see today are not due to dull intelligence but to cloudy hearts. The financial scandals, the international intrigue, the nuclear confrontations, were not been created by people who were not intelligent nor well-educated in their minds. The problems have come out of our hearts.
Often you hear somebody say, "how could anybody that smart do something that dumb?" They have a smart head but a dumb heart.
Samuel Johnson said, "The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things… the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad or the counterfeit."
Professor William James said the justification for higher education is that it "lets us recognize a good man when we meet one."
The important decisions of your life will be heart decisions: who you marry, what you give your life to, the family you have, the attitude you have toward life, and even the determination to go as far as you can with your talent——all are heart decisions. Just before coming out here I had lunch with a friend who even in his retirement has an income of over a million dollars a year. We were discussing the importance of the heart and he said, "you can tell them for me that every major decision I've ever made in my life I made with my heart and not my head." Our head is very useful to rationalize what our heart decides to do, Mother Teresa, riding on the train to the retreat, decided in her heart that she would give her life to the poor of Calcutta. Students at Harvard, when interviewed about her decision, said they didn't think it made a lot of sense, and it didn't in the head but it does in the heart. "What was darkness to my intellect is sunshine to my heart."
Ken Venturi and Pat Sumerall doing a national golf tournament were discussing a brilliant young player and Pat asked Ken, "He's going to be a real champion, isn't he?" To which the mature Ken Venturi said, "We certainly know he has the skills but we don't know what's in his heart, and championship is in the heart."
