(BYU Graduate School Convocation)
We have come to that moment which the program denominates as a “charge to the graduates.” The root and original meaning of the word “charge” is “to lay a burden upon” something. How interesting that the “charge” most of us experience today is the charge card, the rationale for which is to relieve us of the burden of immediate payment. But the historic meaning penetrates this pleasant illusion of burdenlessness and we discover that to postpone a burden is not to escape it but to enlarge it.
As is is with charges, so it is with intellect. Intellect, the realm of words and ideas, has its own proper burdens. If these burdens are borne with intelligence and grace, they become the works that ennoble and exalt. But if the burdens of intellect are shunned or postponed, for whatever pleasant illusion, they become stumbling blocks that lead only to misery and degradation. I would then speak to you of intellectual honesty.
To be an honest person is a burden. It is strenuous labor, the most difficult that I know and especially so in the realm of intellect. I admit that most people do not find honesty to be a burden. That is because they are not honest persons. When I say “to be an honest person,” I do not mean being honest “most of the time” or “when convenient.” People who are honest most of the time or when convenient are honest on those occasions by accident; honesty just happens to coincide with the way they are going. To be an honest person is to be honest in all things, at all times, with all people and in all circumstances. That is an accomplishment which but few men have ever attained.
But if honesty is a burden, be it also noted what great works are fulfilled by those who fully shoulder this burden. The mention of one of these works must suffice here. The greatest need in the world, as many have noted, is love. But what is needed is not the idea of love, nor the hope for it, nor the disposition to desire it or give it. What is needed is that pure, selfless love which blesses and uplifts those whom it touches. Love can be pure, selfless and beneficent only in one who is an honest person. Let us further examine that connection between pure love and pure honesty.
Honesty is the ability to discern reality as it is and describe it correctly in symbols. The reality one must discern is both himself and the rest of the universe. The description he gives must be “true;” it must correctly represent things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come.
Pure love is the ability to bless people. It is to act towards another in a manner that deliberately contributes to the happiness of that individual, and to act that way consistently. Happiness is not a thing of one moment. We would not count a person happy who, though delighted at the moment by the fulfillment of his greatest desire, was at the next moment to be wrenched from fulfillment to be in pain and misery for the remainder of existence. Nor could love be pure if it did not countenance and contribute to the happiness of total existence.
Love then is the meeting of real needs, the affecting of the reality of our fellow beings through time. Since we cannot meet needs without discerning correctly both those needs and our own ability to assist, honesty becomes a prerequisite to pure love, a necessary though not a sufficient condition.