see text of Hannah Mitchell's address - Patrick Henry College

Hannah Mitchell“Student Remarks”May 14, 2011Faith in Action“I ain’t got faith,” she said. She didn’t have faith that the life of a migrant California peachpickerwould be any better than that of a destitute Oklahoma farmer. She didn’t have faith thatthe “ratty little” fruits she might be able to snitch wouldn’t turn to dust in her mouth just like theAmerican farmland of the 1930s had turned to dust under the tractors. “Ma Joad’s” fears in JohnSteinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath, were affirmed by her son Tom with a simple adage:“Don’t roust your faith bird too high, and you won’t do no crawlin’ with the worms,” he told her,“I know that’s right.”That’s not right. In the words of King David, we are worms, and not men, and we will crawlwith them regardless. But at the same time, because God, through one man, has made all thingsnew, there is no height of faith that is too high.If we give faith her full wing, we will see the many ways in which the God who created thisparadoxical creature called man and set him in a garden called the earth can bring fruit out ofashes. God is no Daedalus who makes us wings from feathers and wax, and we are no Icarus,ruined by the disaster of a sun-touched flight. Rather, “His eye is on the sparrow, and not one ofthem falls to the ground except He notices. How much more will he not care for you, Oh you oflittle faith?” It is our great privilege to accept whatever will come; whether injury, or triumph,from rousting the faith bird as high as it can go.Tough-minded, Soft-hearted LearningIt takes a great amount of faith to live the life that you, Patrick Henry College students, havechosen to live. You have come to a place whose mission is to recreate the original Americancollegiate ideal with fearless learning for Christ and truth; to lead the nation and shape theculture. You have come to a place where PhDs from Harvard and Yale teach you the courses thatthey designed for graduate level students, and where your first year history professor gives youmore to do than he gave his classes at Vanderbilt.Here, we have been taught to probe the why and wherefore of every position we hold, everyopinion we give, every belief we confess. We have been challenged to “think our feelings, and tofeel our thoughts, and to “involve the whole range of human judgment.” It has been exhausting.But as J. Oswald Sanders wrote, “If the Christian is not willing to rise early and to retire late, toextend greater effort in diligent study and faithful work, that person will not change a generation.Fatigue is the price of leadership. Mediocrity is the result of never getting tired.”Leadership requires that you get tired. Just like mechanics requires that you get dirty.

We have gotten both tired and dirty here. Our ashes have been deaths and illnesses, betrayals,and physical abuses. But the fruits have been the nearness of God, and the answered prayers, andthe strength of character, and the new life we have been given to live today.So like others before us, we have set our hand to the plough. Over the last four years, we havewritten those thirty page papers. We have created a guild of young entrepreneurs. We havecommuted into the District for internships. We have had lunch with prominent journalist. All ofthis because we have watched our school’s founders erect this very building. We have watchedour parents run their own businesses. We have listened to stories told by professors who were atTiananmen Square, and who met Solzhenitsyn. And we have studied the lives of great men andwomen of the past.But there is more to it than hard work and hard thinking.In all this, we are dared to develop hearts as soft as our minds are steely. “I am sending you outas sheep among wolves,” Christ told his disciples, “Therefore, be shrewd as serpents, andinnocent as doves.”C.S. Lewis often wrote about our secret desire for something beyond all this; a kind ofhomesickness for a place we have never been. That place is a little bit like this world, butsuperior in every way. There is a painful quality to the longing for it. “So you take revenge on itby calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence,” Lewis said.In his essay The Weight of Glory, he also wrote: “Almost our whole education has been directedto silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have beendevised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.”We have chosen to take a different stand, and work at turning that shy, persistent inner voice upto full-volume.Guarding the Treasures of Wisdom and KnowledgeOne of our great American novelists wrote in The Winter of Our Discontent: “I guess we’re all,or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything itcould not measure or explain. The things we couldn’t explain went right on but surely not withour blessing . . . So many old and lovely things are stored in the world’s attic. Because we don’twant them around us and we don’t dare throw them out.”The house in which I grew up was small. The wallpaper was dusty slate blue with tiny pinkroses, and the washer and dryer were in the kitchen. There was a wood-burning fire place, and agood, Southern front porch the size of Tennessee. But the best part of the house, in a child’seyes, was the attic. Who could fail to fascinated by a door in the ceiling? My siblings and I nevermissed the once-in-a-blue-moon chance to clamber up the rickety wooden stairs when Dadfolded them down out of the sky.There was a box of picture books in that attic full of curiosities. Winken, Blinken, and Noddsailing away across the sea in a wooden shoe. The sugar-plumb tree full of glittering confectionsthat just about came right off the page. Milo and Otis, running across a field of buttercups. There

was always something new in that box, and of course, there were always the pages I and mysiblings re-visited, because they were just that good.College is like the world’s attic. Here we climb the wobbly ladder of young adulthood to find theriches of things we never knew before. The hope is that we take delight in them, are changed bythem, and bring the best of them down with us into our everyday lives.All the Reasons WhyWe are all the keepers and the carriers of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. But we mustnever forget that the whole purpose of taking in knowledge, or of gaining street smarts inbusiness, or politics, or education, or the arts, is to point to the source of all earthly excellence.Our goal, as Paul writes in Colossians 2:3, is “Christ himself, in whom are hidden all thetreasures of wisdom and knowledge.”Continue LearningMy prayer for each of you here today, is that you would desire and seek those treasures. I praythat they will pursue you until you have wrestled them as Jacob wrestled with God, and not letthem go until they have blessed you. In that striving, you will begin to see the world as it reallyis, and begin to recognize the Author everywhere. You will see that all the rivers of thought runback to Him, and that He is the whole sea.As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets, "We shall not cease from exploration / And the end ofall our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."Thus, the author of Proverbs exhorts us: “Acquire wisdom! Acquire understanding! Do notforsake her, and she will guard you; Love her, and she will watch over you. Take hold ofinstruction; do not let go. Guard her well, for she is your life.” She is your life. Christ, the author,is your life. He will watch over you.The Constants of LifeSo when it is our turn to crawl with the worms, we must look to the things that will not change.When the currents of life are beating about our little boats in confusion, and all our cries seemlost to the wind, we will let down our anchors to the solid place that will not move.Growing up and setting sail in the big wide world comes with a lot of painful falls. But they arenot ultimate. Not even the first fall of man was ultimate. And by grace, we do learn, and evengain. The last time I was at home, I remember walking out of the house with my seven year oldbrother. He had his feet half way into his shoes, and because of this, when we got to the stairs, hefell down them. After lifting himself up off the sidewalk, inspecting his knees, and brushing thedew from the flowerbed off his face, he assured me matter-of-factly that he was ok. “Thathappens a lot,” he admitted. And then he said something very simple, but very profound: “Butit’s not new, so it’s not scary.”There will always be those moments where we will feel suddenly and surprisingly out of control.The faith bird will seem like a fiery phoenix, an Icarus, crashing into the dust again. But that is

not the end of the story. We learn to recognize the pattern of redemption every time. And we geta little bit stronger.We Band of BrothersFellow graduates, reams of paper and hundreds of coffee cups later, here we are. Our familiesand friends and coworkers are here with us: every one, a soldier in this great fight for Christ andfor liberty. And we are not of those who shrink back, as the author of Hebrews says, but of thosewho have faith to the preserving of the soul.Shakespeare’s King Henry V said to his soldiers on the morning of the battle of Agincourt:We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,This day shall gentle his condition;And gentlemen in England now-a-bedShall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.This of course is old English for “get in the game!” Our class has been a happy few, a band ofbrothers. And all of the believers in any community are likewise. Whatever the task before usmay be, we are the live ones. This is our chance.Pressure, Travail and Imperishable Inheritances.Today, some of us are trading in the pressures of academics for the rush and the weight of theworking-world on the oyster shells of our lives. This day is our initiation into a brave new world.But in the unlikely way that God has of making beauty come of anything, in time, the silt of ourinadequacies and our greenness will be turned into the pearl of success. No grain of dust iswasted by our God. Our treasure is hidden in the heart. It is hidden in a field, which a merchantfound, and ran and sold all the he owned, and bought. This is the price we too must be willing topay, and the treasure for which we must fight against the tide.This is the moment when our educational foundation, and the faith that we have forged while wehave walked these halls, must come into full stroke. “Compassion.” said Flannery O’Connor, “Is“being in travail with and for creation in its subjection to vanity.” It is a recognition of sin thatsuffers-with, but “blunts no edges and makes no excuses.” This should be our attitude toward thedust bowls of our God-starved world. From dust we came, and to dust we shall return. Yet we dotaste the fruit of triumph here below, and we must bring it to those who have never known it. Itwill point them to God, and to our eternal reward, which shall never fade.In that regard, the skies are ours for the taking. So let us reach with our minds for theimperishable treasures of wisdom and knowledge. “Knowing that you were not redeemed withperishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers,but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.” Let uspress on to know Him more. Defying all doubt, roust your faith bird to places even more secureand more fulfilling than man can ever imagine.