Be Not Afraid! A Message from Father to Son on Graduation Day

Dear Son,

Earlier this weekend, I watched with pride as you walked across the stage to receive your diploma. They called your name and listed your majors and your status: “majors in English literature and history, magna cum laude.” It was a proud moment for all of us in the family—even for the siblings who profess to find you a terribly irritating big brother sometimes.

While many institutions in American higher education have chosen to treat university education as an expensive credential, bought in a combo meal package along with some consumer experience and some “progressive” indoctrination, your degree from the University of Dallas represents something of older vintage and conception. And far more valuable. The extensive and traditional core curriculum you went through covers the Bible; the western tradition in literature, the arts, and philosophy; a grounding in economics and the American political tradition; and, most importantly, a Christian formation in the Catholic tradition.

People often throw around the term “epic.” You actually read the epics, both classical and Christian, as well as a good many of the tragedies and the comedies, in plays and novels. And though that double major you pulled off sounds impressive generally, knowing the standards required of you makes us doubly proud. In an age of AI, you chose to write your own work and master it—evidenced by the fact that in the oral examinations in English, you could defend your writing even in the face of strong challenges by Professor Waterman Ward!

I think I told you about that guy at the party who (like you, now) is an alumnus. He couldn’t believe they let you major in two such intensive subjects at that school. He may be right about the wisdom of double majors at University of Dallas, but I have to say that your willingness to take on that challenge made your parents extremely proud, even if it worried your mother a bit how hard you had to work.

Instead of seeing your coursework as a mere set of pointless hoops to jump through on the way to a credential, or perhaps some expensive job training, you took it as a challenge to accomplish the true goal of a university education: the cultivation of your mind.

I’m fairly certain that in your four years you came across the words of St. John Henry Newman from his classic The Idea of a University. He wrote there about that goal as being “a connected view or grasp of things” that generally “makes itself felt in the good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view, which characterize it.” While the person who is truly intellectually formed will demonstrate greater strengths in one or another form of work, Newman writes, he will demonstrate “a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession.”

You’ve begun to demonstrate that faculty in many ways already. It’s been shown in the fact that you have been managing your own money, getting your own summer jobs, campus jobs, and internships, and generally taking on the responsibilities of adulthood in a way that makes us as proud as we are of the impressive grades you’ve earned. You’ve started to realize that the challenges you’ve faced are, with the help of God and the people who love you, things that you can face with all those characteristics Newman mentioned—along with courage, good cheer, and perseverance.

We want you to keep developing that realization. Being the kind of guy who keeps up on current events, trends, and the narratives being promoted, you have seen plenty of reports of the headwinds that young people face these days in terms of jobs, opportunities, finances, and social realities. I won’t lie to you and say that these hurdles are not real. Some of them are more challenging than the ones my generation faced.

What I will say to you, however, is not to let yourself be cowed by the challenges you do face. You have heard your grandparents say this before, but I want to repeat it: the biggest regrets in life are rarely the failures we experience when we act; they are almost always the times when we fail to act because of fear.

This is true of the challenges you find that might benefit you. Go ahead and apply for the job, the fellowship, the promotion, or whatever it is. You may not get it. Then again, you just might. Don’t give up without a fight—or at least a cover letter and resumé.

What is true of the situations that benefit you is going to be true doubly of the situations in which you find yourself dutybound to act for others, perhaps even at a cost to yourself. When you do have a job or a position, you will face moments that call for you to try out something despite uncertain and even very desperate odds. In those moments, I want you to remember what Mother Teresa of Calcutta liked to say: “God does not require that we be successful, only that we be faithful.”

Faith and reason go together. If you have thought it through and prayed for guidance, and you have determined that what God wants is a venture of faith, take it.

“Be not afraid” is repeated sixty-five times in the Bible. There’s a good reason for that. Courage is a virtue that has always been in high demand. It is certainly so today. If you exercise it with faithfulness, you will always succeed, no matter the external result.

We love you. We are proud of you. May God keep you always as you start the next phase of your life.

Dad

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.