What we ask of you as students of New College Franklin is not easy. But if you leave here at the end of four years with finer phrases, with quick answers, and good grades, you will have purchased relatively little for much. You will have squandered a very special opportunity.
You are here to do what every Christian is called to do, to take more perfect possession, to seek out a greater share of that wisdom which is your inheritance as a Christ’s. For wisdom is a charism, a gift which you have received if you are indeed Christ’s. It is something you possess both individually and corporately.
Wisdom speaks to us specially in two places: in the body of Christ and personally in the wilderness—in our private endeavor to know and love the truth. We need both if we are to be adequated to the truth in some measure. We need both personal appropriation and a community in which our share is tested, increased, corrected, and affirmed. Thus the good one seeks in a Christian education is not private, but rather, personal.
You are here to become a person in whom truth takes a new and profound living residence. This is because you are a place, a house, a locus in which truth is intended to dwell and take up residence.
We are made to live in the truth by means of the truth which resides in us.
Truth must be heard and loved deeply within such that every power and act of the soul is informed and actuated by it. The whole soul, the whole person is intended to be informed by testing, grappling with, clinging to the truth in a living and prayerful appropriation, in both practical and intellectual experience.
Thus we ask that you pass beyond memory alone, not to abandon memory and discursively known facts, but that, by faith you come to grasp them, to possess them and to be possessed by them in such a manner that you to say within yourself, “Jesus, you are my salvation.”[1]
Again, this is simply the calling, the end and beginning, of the Christian life.
Such a light, a flame, a Spirit, such a faith, will not remain hidden.
[1] The Power of Silence, p. 59: “For God has a secret language, in many people he addresses the heart, and it is a might murmur in the great silence of the heart when he says: I a your salvation.”
Same & Other 