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 From Sheridan Voysey, Writer and broadcaster:

On a visit to Michigan recently, I was invited to watch the local high school marching band championships. I imagined a few kids playing Stars and Stripes in a hall. Instead, I sat in a football stadium watching choreographed bands blast their horns and twirl their flags. Americans do things big!

In a few years those students will experience something else America does big—the graduation speech. Hardly a week goes by when a video doesn’t appear in my social media feed of a celebrity in academic regalia telling a crowd of students to take risks and be true to themselves. Some have called these graduation speeches secular sermons that pass on society’s values.

Author David Brooks likens these speeches to boxes. Through them, he says, speakers pass on the box of possibility: ‘Your future is limitless!’ they say. ‘Dream big!’ But, Brooks says, that’s empty advice if you don’t know what to aim for. Then there’s the box of authenticity: ‘Be your unique self! You do you!’ But the ‘you’ they’re told to do hasn’t yet formed. Then there’s the box of autonomy: ‘Find your own answers by looking within!’ According to Brooks, this is the emptiest box of all—one that fuels anxiety and purposelessness by telling graduates they must figure life out on their own.

Brooks’ critique got me thinking about another speech—first given to peasants rather than graduates. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus addresses similar topics, but says we’re not left to figure life out alone, that personality is formed by giving ourselves to others, and while the future is limitless fulfilment is found pursuing God’s dreams rather than our own. A few years ago I read these words of Jesus every day for a month. It shaped me profoundly.

Last weekend a guy shared some deep problems with me before saying, ‘I guess I just need to look within.’ When I asked how well that had worked so far he laughed and said it hadn’t. Before we left I shared something I’d taken from the Sermon on the Mount that’s most shaped me: ‘Maybe some answers are found looking up, rather than within.’