2016 High School Graduation Address
I pray that God watches over you as He watches over and has awakened the dawning of each of my days. This day overwhelms me in the simple fact that I have lived to experience it. How did I get here? Unlike Shakespeare in his “To Be, or Not to Be,” I did not ask the question, “To Die or Not to Die.” God has granted that “Death Be Not Proud.”
Similar to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43,” how can I count the ways that God has loved me these eighteen years?! Is there a limit to the depth and the breadth and the height of His love? He is my “Principle Within” who sustains my life. Every awesome day that God gives me breath I will thank Him for my education, for it is by this gift of knowledge I feel proud and excited for the future. And in thanking the Almighty God of truth and love, I am thanking you. My graduation congratulations belong to you also.
When I consider how my life could have been spent, entrapped in a covert desultory “special” education system, I shudder in fear at the thought, but rejoice in joyous relief of having been delivered out of the fowler’s snare. I was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall” plucked out root and all that I should know what God and man is. Having these freedoms that make me less forlorn, I bear the mild yoke of blindness, deafness, and pernicious illness, that as in John Milton’s “On His Blindness,” I will also serve God as those who may only stand and wait.
The castigation from disease permeated my life with understanding. To the abdicable doctor with illusive cures…
Physician, heal thyself;
Fear God, and not thy pelf.
To the pastor who loves not the poor, the blind, the infirm…
Oh, antics of hypocrisy,
How well they fit thee.
To the self-serving wealthy, the glorious man…
Capricious lines of the garish
Shall all in one way perish.
But not a pedant or a dilettante do I want to be. Since scarcity is the scourge of secularism, put my name providentially with those who peacefully and prayerfully persist pursuing perpetuity with God.
In Physics I learned that God is Light, as life-giving energy traversing in upright sine waves of both spirit and matter. All is composed of energy, His light power, whether matter waves, electromagnetic waves, gravitational waves, or the sine wave of each elusive electron. What is the universe without Light? What is man without God? Across the sine waves of my life, there are sequesterings of hope to my predicament. I felt expensive when I calculated my worth in algebraic summary of His mercy. He has solved for the unknowns and provided. We are learning to walk in phase with each other…not canceling the other’s wave energy. Crest, trough, and equilibrium together in harmony of oneness, like the zeroth law of thermal equilibrium, it is the true measure of abundant life. I pray that the eclipse of God will soon be over, and the light of righteousness will shine forever unbound by time or space, just as is God.
In taciturn awe, I reflected on geometry and chemistry in God’s creation. The butterfly wing’s vivid colors diffract light and disperse it into different colors, an operation of light wave optic interference. Approximately eight degrees apart the rainbow and its reverse double bow emanate their colors from light refracted through a water drop. Water and light. Light and water. Living colors of promise…each color identifying each element in the periodic table.
What would my life be without knowing about the quadratic equations of surfaces or rectangular and polar coordinates? Besides the ellipses evident in God’s creation, science, architecture, and engineering all use applications of the conic sections. Without trigonometric identities and formulas along with their inverse functions we would have no way to account for the similarity of molecules. Without the disciplined logical and systematic thinking of the world’s oldest science of geometry, how could we appreciate the beauty of the Nautilus shell’s spiral reflected in the Milky Way? The gift of mathematics is a gift to understanding God’s algebraic language of the created universe. But language itself is God’s gift.
Grammar, composition, and research papers—the delights of my soul—fuse my thought into print. With joy of unity and disciplined cohesiveness my paragraphs figure life’s deep secrets. Exactness, vividness, figurative language and idioms triumph over gobbledygook, jargon, and triteness. Acrimonious, pusillanimous, surreptitious…what would my life be without these?! The glory of words and thought is the glory of conciseness, emphasis, and variety in articulating credence as a mirror to the glorious creation of God. The possibilities are endless, and ideas are infinite; to express the mind transcends the human state.
Studying what great minds have written betrays our intimate likeness to God. From Frances Bacon’s essays on human conduct to Sir A. Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow literature is God’s reminder that we are His. From the poetry of John Green Leaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell to Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson poetic diction flows exposing the hearts. To understand a kenning or lyric or rhyme schemes or the foot of poetry put tools in my writer’s hands that perhaps I too might connect to the Almighty. What is more, the sounds and rhythm of language are the same as the language of the music of the universe.
Music, that universal language of emotion, is framed on the same planar axis of geometry in trigonometric function. But who has heard the polar dimensions, or 3-D, of music?!!! Who has listened to the thunder of His voice? Pitch, tone, meter, and frequency can be graphed on the coordinates of the mood genre of the heart. Motives in melody energize themes of the galaxies in glorious triumphs of color octaves. What God has spoken is what exists. All begins and ends with the language of the Word, the living power of Light. All begins and ends with the beautiful sound of God’s voice.
All that has happened has been deliciously written. History, the events of human past with its victories and defeats, with its heroes and its craven characters, painted life’s lessons that shape my decisions today. Cowardice, unbelief in the very nature of our great God, is to walk in vanity outside of God’s will. To walk with God fulfills all the desires of the heart. Few see that God’s hand is sovereign in the affairs of men and will bring all things to His good pleasure and rest. This…is my life management.
Graduation is a commencement of the future… built on the knowledge of God and built on the investment of merciful supports. The future is vast, a luxury to be certain. When I consider the gift of my education, I consider my awesome future with a loving God and my loving family. My mind imagines God bringing His limitless purposes to pass in me. To God my life has meaning and significance, for in my weakness His power is made evident to all. I am His servant, pitiful as I may be, ready to show forth the light of His lovingkindnesses to all humanity. Thank you for coming and sharing these moments with me.
Matthew Andreas Wulf
May 15, 2016