The Valedictory Message: Our Search for Happiness

It was my great pleasure and privilege to officiate at our recent Valedictory Service where we farewell our graduating Year 12 students.  The theme of my brief homily was “What is your ultimate goal in life?”  I share these words with you, the community of Newington, and address them to myself as well.

On this occasion of graduation day I was very mindful that at that particular time of the year our lads may well be ‘over-cooked’ with information and advice, so I kept things very simple and succinct but hopefully with a spark of challenge as they go out into the world.

I sought to remind them of the wealthy, successful and ambitious young man who met Jesus and asked him, “How can I get eternal life?”  In our language this would be, “How can I really make it in life?  How can I achieve ultimate happiness?”  This young man was young, impulsive, ambitious and talented, like so many of our graduates.  What this young guy was really asking was this—“What must I do to find true happiness?”  He was the Bible’s great consumer, this guy, a real self-starter, self-motivated.  I am sure he would have had an “all-rounder scholarship” had he been enrolled at Newington.  He would, however, never find this true happiness—because Jesus could see that he could not “let go”(Buddhists would agree with Jesus here – he clung so tightly to his worldly possession and material success).  He could not let go his own selfish pursuit of happiness.  He had even kept all the laws of his religion in search of meaning, and when Jesus said,  “there is one thing you lack – you need to let go”  Mark’s Gospel tells us that he was so gutted by what Jesus said that he fell on face on the ground.

How hard it is for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God, to find ultimate happiness. There is no escaping the fact that we are the wealthy, in relative terms, in the world of today.  Most of us are self-made, self-sufficient, self-reliant and we don’t need God.  And so the hard message is that in order to find true happiness we need to let go – releasing our grip on wealth and our hell bent pursuit of it.  We need to allow our egotism, our self-centredness to be neutralised.  If we look at history’s great humanitarians they have this common feature.  Inspiring people like Dr Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Mahatma Ghandi whose names adorn our Chapel’s walls.

I sought to challenge our young graduates to have the courage to become outwardly focused as they go out from this school.  To become open to a whole range of new possibilities, maybe beyond our shores, or maybe being called to our society in this land. To be open to harnessing the energy that is found in God’s Grace, in Christ – to truly become open to becoming agents of change in this world.

I encouraged them to listen to Jesus’ warning that unless we can let go of the egotism and clinging attachment of material success, we will never be truly happy, and we will fall short of what it means to be human.  My last words were those of our Headmaster, given to them at the final assembly, just prior to the Chapel Service, “Will you be the thunder that rolls on through the years?”.  

My hope is that some of what I shared with our graduates will have resonance with you in your search for purpose and fulfilment.

David N Williams
Chaplain