It's great to be back here for such a happy occasion. All of you graduates deserve congratulations for a very significant achievement. To support you today, I wanted to share something that could provide help and encouragement as you begin a new chapter of life’s great adventure.

I first thought I’d talk about some things that I have read. But I ruled that out as redundant because you, also, have read a lot since you’ve been here. So I decided to share something more tangible today—namely, some things I’ve learned firsthand. These eye-witness experiences have made my own reading and studying come to life, and made them much more useful. I hope they will do the same for you.

Forgiveness will play a large part in determining your futures, and like you, I’ve read a lot about it in Bible stories like Jacob and Esau and the crucifixion of Jesus. But I really learned about forgiveness from a friend of mine named Eva Brown. Eva was a Hungarian Jew during World War II. She went into the war years with sixty-seven family members. At the end of the war she had seven left; the Nazis murdered the rest. Though sad, Eva’s tragic experience is not unique. What is unique is that she chose not to hate the Nazis, but to forgive them. “You must forgive,” she says. “You cannot be a full person if you have hatred in your heart.” Eva Brown’s example helped me with something I needed to forgive.

One of my students was shot and killed at my school a few years ago. He died in my arms. The boys who shot him have never been caught, and for years, I carried an unyielding hatred for them. With Eva’s example supporting what I had read and studied for so many years, I finally learned to forgive my boy’s murderers. No matter who or what might have wronged any of us, forgiveness is always possible.

We’ve all read a lot about redemption and being reborn in Biblical passages like the conversion of St. Paul. But I really learned about redemption from a modern day St. Paul, a friend of mine from East Los Angeles named Noni Perez. On the surface, Noni would not seem like the kind of person you’d learn good things from. He was in and out of prison almost his entire life, and didn’t get out for good until he was nearly seventy. He was a gang leader, a drug addict, and a bank robber. He shot and stabbed people and was shot and stabbed in return. But one day while this very bad man was sitting in solitary confinement in prison—naked, dark, and alone—God touched his heart. Right in this horrible spot, Noni finally decided he didn’t want to be bad anymore. He prayed to God with all his might to change his life, and God did.

Today, at almost 80, Noni is totally transformed and as pure as a snowflake. He’s out of prison, off parole, drug- and alcohol-free, and full of joy! He spends every waking moment working with troubled kids. He teaches them not to waste their lives like he did. What I love best is Noni’s description of how he wakes up every morning. “When I first open my eyes,” he says, “I say, ‘Thank you, God. What do You want me to do today?’” Noni was reborn when he started to listen humbly to God’s will, rather than stubbornly trying to get God to listen to his. You and I haven’t experienced anything like what Noni has, but we still have much that we need to redeem in our lives. Examples like his prove that it’s achievable.

Courage is another quality we’ve all read about in Bible stories like David and Goliath and Daniel and the lions’ den. But I really learned about courage from a teenage boy you might have heard about named Ben Underwood. Ben visited our school awhile back and did all the normal kid things with my students: played video games, rollerbladed, rode a bike. Not too unusual, except for the fact that Ben’s eyes were removed, due to a disease, when he was three years old. The technique Ben uses to get around is echolocation. Just like dolphins, he makes little clicking sounds, and by hearing their echo, Ben can tell where things are located and can do anything that any of us can. He doesn’t use a cane or a Seeing Eye dog.

But the real reason Ben is able to demonstrate this courage is that his rock-solid faith in God has rendered him practically fearless. If you aren’t amazed enough at how Ben has overcome his physical blindness, consider that a year ago the doctors told him he had a brain tumor. Even his mother, who’s tough as steel, broke down and sobbed when she heard that he was now going to have to deal with still another seemingly impossible challenge. “Oh, Mom,” Ben told her, “quit crying. If what we say about God is really true, then there’s nothing to be afraid of.” And a year later? The tumor is gone, and Ben is back on his regular schedule, attending high school and traveling all over the world as a motivational speaker. His message is simple: live with courage and total trust in God’s love, and you can accomplish anything.

Then there’s humility. Who doesn’t need and want that in their lives, the ability to live with gratitude and without pride? We’ve all read about humility in Bible stories like Naaman and the prodigal son. But I really learned about humility from Chenchal Singh and Maria Medina. Chenchal mows lawns; Maria cleans houses. Both of them immigrated to America with almost nothing. Chen arrived here from the Fiji Islands with three children, no job, and his whole family crammed into his brother’s house. Maria, the cleaning lady, moved here from Mexico. She never had electricity or saw a TV until she was sixteen, when she came to America alone.

Chen initially made only a few dollars mowing lawns with his brother, and Maria started off cleaning hotel rooms for minimum wage, but they never complained. No matter how menial the tasks, they did them with the excellence, dignity, and integrity of a king. Chen saved his money, bought his own lawn mower, and was soon mowing eighty-five lawns every week! Maria started her own housecleaning business and was able to triple her previous income. Today, they’re both successful entrepreneurs, own nice homes, and have raised educated, high-achieving children. How did Chen and Maria build their careers? Every person they worked for simply enjoyed being in the presence of the humility and character they express, and each customer would tell all their friends, and so on.

The temptation has come in my life (and will come in yours) to believe that certain types of work are “beneath you.” Don’t ever believe that! Examples like Chen’s and Maria’s echo the truth of Mother Teresa’s well-known saying that what matters in life is not what you do, but “how much love you put into doing it.” We have all read in the Bible about the need to have a broader worldview, a sense of every man as our brother. Nowhere is this more strongly emphasized than in the words of Jesus, when he told us that our lives will be judged by how we respond to strangers in need (see Matt. 25). I really learned about the importance of a worldview from our newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor. I was serving as a teaching principal at a small, highly-enriched elementary school, and was troubled that my students hadn’t learned that the purpose of life is to serve and help others.

In my Current Events class, my students and I studied the Monitor every day. This was about the time of the Burundi/Rwanda massacres, the events described in the movie Hotel Rwanda. Well, an amazing thing happened. This African crisis really touched the hearts of my students and made them want to do something to help. Simultaneously, a Burundian family arrived as refugees in our small, almost totally white town, and their children enrolled at our school. With the Burundian parents’ help, our school established a personal relationship with their president and declared a “Peace Offensive” on behalf of the Burundian people. Our project became a national news story. Public awareness of this issue was greatly increased, and our efforts were ultimately featured in the Monitor, where we’d learned about the problem in the first place.

My elementary students who were involved in this activity are now much older than you graduates, and several of them have chosen careers related to that peace project. Interestingly, Mary Baker Eddy, the Monitor’s founder, said that after writing Science and Health, establishing the Monitor was her “greatest step forward” (Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977, p. 311). How can regularly reading the Monitor help our worldview and improve our futures? According to Robert Peel, one of Mrs. Eddy’s biographers, the Monitor shows us we can “no longer pass by the world’s collective needs on the other side.” He goes on to quote a Monitor reader near the time the paper began: “Things we did not like to look at nor think of, problems we did not feel able to cope with, must now be faced manfully, and correct thinking concerning the world’s doings cultivated and maintained” (Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Authority, p. 313).

Church. We are all told and hear so much about it, and at times we are even pressured to participate in it. I’d be surprised if any of you haven’t questioned the importance or relevance of church in your future. I really learned the urgent need for regular church activity from a visit to a park near my home. This park is the primary hangout in my county for gangs, illegal immigrants, the homeless, prison parolees, drug dealers, and addicts. It’s also the place where I’ve held informal Christian Science services for the past three years, every Sunday morning at 8:00. My “church edifice” is a picnic table near the basketball courts. My “fellow church members” are a rotating group of those searching souls who choose to join me at the picnic table when I ask them if they’d like to “talk about God.”

Some Sundays I have half a dozen visitors. Some Sundays I have none. When it rains, we get wet, and in the winter, it’s cold. When the wind blows hard, the book pages get twisted. To top it off, almost no one who stops by speaks a word of English, and my Spanish is muy malo. Yet we have no trouble conversing and sometimes go for more than two hours! Talk about a Day of Pentecost! My life experiences have been so different from these mostly poor and uneducated men and women. No one in the park looks like me or was raised the way I was.

None of them has ever heard the words “Christian Science” before. Yet, as we come together to humble ourselves and let God’s words “sink down into [our] ears” (Luke 9:44), these human differences just melt away, and we see, understand, and love each other as children of our one Father. Best of all, we have healings of alcoholism, work injuries, family problems, and more! I’ve spent my life in the Christian Science movement, in many locations and capacities, and this is the most holy church experience I’ve ever known.

Whatever form church may take in your future, never doubt its importance. Church is not about ritualized behavior, or organizational minutiae, or grudging attendance. Real church is a radically committed structure for saving our world! The commandment to keep the Sabbath holy is on the same list with don’t kill, steal, or commit adultery, for a good reason. Church is not about doing something for ourselves! If we don’t participate in providing, in some form, a “structure of Truth and Love” in our communities, if we don’t maintain our publicly visible, spiritual “light,” how will all those wandering souls, lost in the world’s ignorant fears of sin and disease, ever find their way to safety, health, and peace? (See Science and Health, p. 583.)

And finally, love. About no other topic, have we read more. And no other topic has more effect on our future. Jesus provided the ultimate test for determining whether or not we’ve learned anything about love when he said that the greatest love we can express is in sacrificing our life for someone else (see John 15:13).

Ironically, I first really learned about love in a little town about 175 miles east of here. Tipton, Missouri, a small, farming community where all my family comes from, was a place I visited almost every summer when I was a kid. And one of my favorite places to visit was my Aunt Helen and Uncle Maynard’s house. They had two children. Barbara was their successful, pretty, high-achieving daughter. And then there was their son, Butch.

Butch was born with many physical and mental problems, and in his entire life he never took a step, never spoke an intelligible word, never went to school a single day, nor could he do anything to take care of his own physical needs. One hundred out of one hundred people would have looked at Butch when he was born, heard the doctor’s diagnosis, and institutionalized him forever. But Aunt Helen and Uncle Maynard didn’t understand that kind of thinking. Butch was their son—they loved him—and they showed that love by devoting their entire lives to caring for him at home.

Butch was gotten out of bed early every morning—and bathed, shaved, brushed, combed, and dressed in nice clothes. As the years went by, my tiny little Aunt Helen continued to wrestle this big, strapping man into a wheelchair every morning, tie him upright, push him up to the dining table with the whole family, and hand feed Butch every bite of food he ever ate, three meals every day. After each meal, she’d lay Butch out on the floor in the living room, surrounded by toys he couldn’t play with and books he couldn’t read. As she went about her chores throughout the day, my aunt talked, hugged, and laughed with Butch constantly.

This was the commitment to loving their son that my aunt and uncle made, every day, 365 days a year, for the fifty-six years of his life. And yet Butch’s mom and dad were two of the most joy-filled people I ever knew! They never complained about the vacations they didn’t take, the worldly goals their son never achieved, or the backbreaking labor it required to care for Butch’s physical needs. To my aunt and uncle, it was not a sacrifice. Taking care of him was just what you do when you really love someone. Butch’s parents believed that if love requires you to make some adjustments to your lifestyle or personal comfort—and it certainly does—then you do it. This overwhelming example of living love had a lasting impact on my life. But it gets better: the world around us is full of selfless, loving examples of how to live our lives, and we can learn from all of them, if we choose to.

There’s an unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from these examples I’ve mentioned. For any of us here today who profess Christianity, this kind of action is expected to become our life’s goal as well. The trailhead for a happy, productive future is found as we renew our efforts to redeem our lives, to exchange the un-Godlike parts and daily start practicing a greater sense of courage, humility, forgiveness, and love for our fellow man.

We aren’t Christian Scientists until we stop merely reading or talking about the teachings of our faith and start living them. And when we do, when we become willing to make “walking with God” our number one future goal, then it won’t matter what careers we choose, or where we work or live, or whom we live with, or how much money we make. It just won’t matter, because when obeying God becomes of supreme importance to us, everything we do will be satisfying, everywhere we are will feel like the “kingdom of heaven,” and everyone we touch, will be blessed—just as I have been by being invited here today. Thank you, and congratulations.