David Bereit’s Summit Academy Commencement Address

In praying about what to share with you today, what lesson can help to send you forth into this next chapter in your life? I was reflecting back on my own life and thinking, What do I wish I had known when I was sitting where you are? Well, let's be fair. I was not sitting where you are because I did not have a Summit Academy education.
But when I was graduating from high school, getting ready to go off into the world, going off to college and then preparing for life, what do I wish I'd known then that I know now? And it took me to a moment. It was actually nine years after I graduated from high school, and it was actually five years after I graduated from college in 1995 when I learned one of the most impactful, if not the most impactful lessons of my life that I hope to be able to impart upon you today.
I was working at the time in sales. I was scrambling to make a living. Margaret and I were married for only three years, so we were new in our marriage and we were living in a little dumpy four plex in College Station, Texas. It was built in the late sixties. Early seventies was an ugly brown on the outside.
And you went inside, you were greeted with more shades of brown in the window, in the floor, the brown carpet and the peeling wallpaper in the bathrooms. But that was our home as a young couple trying to build our life together. In one night, Margaret and I were in one of the upstairs rooms that we converted from a bedroom into a little office, and we were working on preparing a talk, a talk that we had been asked to give to a group of young married couples about how do you live out your values in your marriage?
But there was a problem. The problem was we've been asked weeks before to prepare this talk and we waited till the last moment. I know you never did this during your education at the summit. As a result of waiting. We were very anxious. We were struggling, we were scrambling, and that anxiety was building to where we were getting angry.
And it broke out into the biggest argument of our three year old marriage. We had a big blow out flight and we were sitting there because we wanted to give a good talk that would help and inspire these couples to live out their values in their marriage. But it just wasn't coming together. We couldn't figure out what to say.
And the hour kept getting later and later, finally, Margaret, my beautiful wife, had an epiphany and she said, in the midst of our fight, she said, Wait a minute, David. I think I figured out why we're having such a hard time putting this together. How on earth can we talk to other couples about living out their values in their marriage when we don't know our own values?
And it was like a white went off and we realized very quickly that that would be a challenge, because first we would have to identify our values. Then we have to identify how are we living by our values and then communicate it just a few hours later the next evening. So the pressure continued to mount. Well, the first thing we thought we would do is, is we're thinking about this.
We thought, let's just try to wing it, let's try to put it together, which is kind of give generalities. Let's just kind of talk around the issue or or just kind of talk about it in a way that doesn't really reflect that we've done this hard work. And we realized very quickly that's a recipe for failure. It would fall flat.
We would humiliate ourselves. And also in the midst of this, we realized this growing tension that we now knew we hadn't identified our values. And if we were to say to other couples how they could move by their values, it would be a line, How would we do this? So the hour kept getting. Later, we kept doing more stress.
And finally I said, We've got to do something. I think we're gonna have to roll up our sleeves and do some really hard work here. And I went to my bookshelf and I grabbed off a book that I just finished reading. I'm not going to tell you the book. It was not a great book. It was not a classic book.
It was a book about succeeding in business and making money. But something in that book, one chapter had struck me profoundly just a few weeks earlier. And so when I pulled the book off the shelf, I went to that chapter. It was a chapter about values. And in the book, the author talked about one day he had met one of the most successful attorneys in the United States of America at a cocktail party in Washington, D.C. The man was in his seventies, had reached the pinnacle of success in the legal profession.
And so the author went up to him at this party and said, You must be so proud of everything you've accomplished. He said the man's face fell, and he said, Let me tell you how I feel about what I've accomplished. He said, Yes, I built a successful law practice. I've made lots of money, but my marriage fell apart.
My children never knew me because I was always gone. Building the business. They haven't even ever brought my grandchildren to meet me. He said, I have no friends. My life is miserable. I've turned to drink. He said if I were to go back and do everything all over again, I would do it totally differently. I would start by identifying my values and then I would build my life on that foundation rather than what the world told me was important.
And so the author then proceeded to have an exercise on how to do exactly that. And so Morgan, I, out of desperation, said, we've got to give a talk. Let's do this exercise. So the first step of the exercise was get a blank sheet of paper. And on that piece of paper, brainstorm everything in your life that you value.
The big things, the little things. Don't prejudge it. Just write it down, capture it. So we went into two separate rooms. We didn't want to copy off of each other. And we each of us brainstormed all the things that we value. Then we came back together. We didn't look at each other's papers yet. And the next step of the exercise said, Now look at your entire sheet.
And on that sheet, if you had to give up every single thing on there except for one thing, what is the last thing you would be willing to give up such that you would even be willing to die before you gave that one thing up? Put another one next to that. And then it said, okay, if you could have two things on that list, what would be the second thing?
Number two and so on. And it encouraged us to identify our top ten values. So we decided, since we had to give a talk in just a few hours on this, let's do this. Let's actually treat this seriously. We go back into our two separate rooms. We brainstorm, we prioritize, we come back with our lists that are numbered 1 to 10.
And this is the first time we looked at each other's answers and we had the same first few identically prioritized. We thought, we're doing great. This talk is going to be amazing tomorrow because number one thing we identified as our value was our faith. It was our relationship with God, with his son, Jesus Christ. That was the number one priority we identified.
The number two priority we both identified was our marriage or vocation. Our relationship with one another. And we said we're doing really good. And then number three on both of our list was we didn't have children at the time, but eventually children was number three. And then number four was two different versions of the same thing. Our mission, our service of others, and then everything else came after that.
Financial success, health, fame, popularity, all of that fell way down the list. But we had the same top four values. And then we turned to the book for step three of the exercise, thinking we were doing good and we got hit with a spiritual two by four because the next step, the exercise said, Now take your top ten and look back on your calendar last week and put the letter A by where you spent the most time and focus and intention on your list.
I will do my list to it was number nine or ten eight now where you spent the second most time put it be third most time and so on. And when we created our lists and we looked at them, we had it almost inverted from what we said was most important was getting the least amount of time and energy and focus in our lives.
It was almost flip flopped. I was saying that God was the number one thing in my life, and yet, other than going to Sunday Mass with Margaret and maybe praying once or twice during the week, that was it. I said my marriage was number two, and yet I was treating my customers and my sales job better than I was treating Margaret because they were my paycheck.
We didn't have children. We realized we were struggling with infertility, but we'd done nothing about that and we had no sense of mission and service of others. We had no idea how to even begin doing that. And we realized at that moment that we were living a lie. We said, We've read certain things, but we were living something totally different.
And we realized that either we would continue to live a lie and sell a lie the next night in our talk, or we would have to do the really hard work of beginning to rearrange and reprioritize our life. And we made the decision that night in 1995, to begin making those hard changes. We realized we would have to be completely upfront with the other couples at the presentation, but we had to rebuild our life on the foundation of our values.
We had to put first things first. I was reflecting on this, even praying this morning, and I went to the Gospel of Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount, and I'm struck by the words when Jesus is saying, Do not be anxious about your wife, what you will eat, what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on Your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all but seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.
The visual model that this helps me to create in my mind. I don't know if you've ever been to a fancy wedding reception or maybe you've seen one of these on TV where they have the big pyramid of champagne glasses. If any of you seen that, you know what I'm talking about. There's one glass up at the top and then a few underneath and a few more underneath it all the way down.
It looks pretty precarious. It's somebody from the event facility comes out and they get a ladder and they go up and they start pouring champagne into that top glass. And when it fills up, it spills over and then it begins to fall. The glass is under it. They get another bottle and they keep pouring and they keep spilling over until eventually every single glass in that pyramid of glasses is full.
It's a beautiful thing to see, but imagine if the person at that event facility came out and said, I don't want to start at the top. I want to start with the glass down at the bottom. And they poured bottle after bottle into that glass. The champagne would fill the glass and then spill over onto the floor. They would never fill all the other glasses, even if they started midway on that pile, they would fill some of the glasses, but they would never fill all the glasses.
There is only one glass in that pyramid that is key to fullness of every single glass, and it's the one at the top. It's putting that first thing first. And in our lives, that's our relationship with God. That is our faith. Because if we start there and we make that our first priority, if we seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, then all of these other things will be added unto us.
Our vocation, our mission will be better students will be better, employees will be better friends. We have to begin by putting God first. And so for us, when we had this epiphany, we said, we've got to begin reordering our life. We've got to prioritize putting God first. We've got to prioritize putting our marriage or vocation second in the children.
God willing, if they come from that marriage, we've got to begin serving others on mission. I wish I could tell you that all of a sudden our wife got busy and all those things fell into place. And as you prepare to go out into the world that everything's going to just go great from all the foundations you got from the Summit Academy.
But it's not. It's actually going to be really hard, but it's going to be very rewarding for us. We faced failure after failure, setback after setback. Our busy wife. It was hard to begin to work in the time for God. We got pulled by school, we got pulled by work, we got pulled by other commitments. We lost jobs in the process as we were trying to rearrange our lives and employers who wanted more of us than we were able to give to being maintain that balance in the other areas of our life.
We had to work on our marriage. We had to deal with the heartbreak of infertility and figure out a way to address that. And even as we were trying to pursue another mission that we thought maybe this is what we're supposed to do to serve others an abortion for somebody opened in our town, we got thrust into the controversy of the pro-life movement.
But it wasn't just all those external challenges. The biggest ones that I had to face, some of which you will have to face. It's what happens in here. It's what happens in here. It's overcoming the fear, the self-doubt, the times when we have a lack of trust, the times when we feel powerless, the worries, what are other people going to think?
But for me, as I dealt with some of those internal challenges, as we dealt with some of those external challenges, we realized that the key to all of this was to seek first God's kingdom and His righteousness and all these things would be added on to us. We began with our relationship with God. We began to go to Mass more often than just on Sundays.
We began to pray more and pray more fervently. We began to make a regular practice of adoration. We began to, as the Baltimore Catechism tells us, grow in our knowledge, love and service of God in this life so we can spend eternity with them. In the next we next begin to work on our marriage. We started dating each other again.
We took our vocation or sacrament seriously. We began to communicate better. We began to pray together. We began to listen and understand one another and realizing that we felt that God was calling us to have children. We addressed our challenges of infertility by going to the Pope Hall, the six Institute in Omaha, Nebraska, at great expense, great pain, great struggles over many, many months.
But by the grace of God and with the help of Dr. Thomas soldiers, we were able to have our two children, our daughter Claire, and our son Patrick, a graduate of Summit Academy. And our mission because we were seeking first God's Kingdom, because we were trying to understand his will and to follow that and to know him and to have him to serve him.
We realized when that abortion facility opened that we were being called into pro-life service. We began to volunteer with. And then I quit my job to work at a local pro-life group there. And we began to involve other people, other churches in our community and pro-life efforts. And ultimately, it was there that we led the first 40 Days for Life campaign and then by the grace of God, we watched that grow and spread to hundreds of cities all around the world.
Over a million volunteers with more than 20,000 lives that have been saved. And Margaret and I and her family, we've traveled on mission as a family around the world, and we've met Save children in countries where we don't even speak the language. It's such a gift to be able to walk with God. It's such a gift to seek him first and grow in your trust and love of him.
And he will use you in such a profound and beautiful way. Let me rewind back to 1995. We had a conviction. We knew what we were supposed to share in that talk. And the next night we gave that presentation to those young couples and we were very vulnerable. We were very wrong. We said, Well, we've just figured this out ourselves and we're just beginning on this mission and we invite you to go with us.
And we could look in the mirror and say we gave a true, honest account to those couples and they gave great feedback. They were really encouraging. And even years later, some of those couples told us that began a journey for them of reprioritizing their life around their values. But for us, most importantly, we had been whipped up with a new sense of purpose and meaning and direction that would point towards impact.
We learned a life lesson that here, 28 years later, I'm sharing with you at your graduation and we still are trying to live out. Today is our life perfect 28 years of living this lesson out? Nope. But is it richer and more rewarding and more meaningful than I could have ever imagined? It is. We have a better relationship with Jesus than ever before.
And after wrestling with God for 28 years of going to Mass with my Catholic wife and Catholic children in 2017, I heard the call and entered our CIA. And at the 2018 Easter vigil five years ago, I was received in a performance of the Roman Catholic Church. And the graces and blessings have been so bountiful. And her family today receives our award and the Eucharist together.
I look at our marriage and Margaret and I've been married now for more than 30 years, and we are more in love than the day that we said I do. And we're in this new emptiness season. And it is so much fun and we are doing mission together. It's amazing. And we're so thankful for the children that God gave us that we didn't even know if we were going to even be able to have our daughter today is a national Dominican religious sister.
We were just out with her a few weeks ago in Nashville in August. She professed her first vows. And when we see her, she's just radiant with joy and happiness. And she loves Jesus and loves serving him through the religious life. Our son Patrick, who graduated from the summit, is a student now at George Mason University. He just finished his junior year.
He's the student campus minister helping to lead the campus ministry there. And he's been sponsoring and being a godparent and bringing other people into the church. It's beautiful to see this fall. He'll be studying abroad in Morocco. He is on fire for Jesus and wants to share his love with the whole world. And on mission we look back on not only what God did through the pro-life season, but even as we've worked with engaged and married couples, as we worked helping mentor and help other leaders in organizations, I will get all that God has done.
And I say, it's not because of us, it's because of him. It's because we sought him first and all these other things were added besides today. We were joyful. Today we were thankful. So why do I share this with you at your commencement? I share because it's the most important lesson that transformed my life. Our life. And if you wanted help for the rest of your life, you will not only change your life, it will change the world around you.
The Summit Academy has given you the right foundation. They've helped you to understand that God is first your relationship with Him, your Catholic faith is central to everything, but now you're going to have to go out and make that first and everything you do as you begin school, as you begin work, you're going to have to make the time.
You're going to have to continue on your journey of adoration and prayer and time and scripture and seeking to understand the truth and beauty and goodness of your faith. But I know you can do that. Keep him first in all things. Secondly, the beautiful process of inquiry that you've learned at somebody Academy asking questions, testing ideas, pursuing truth, apply that to discerning and discovering your vocation.
Maybe it's the priesthood, maybe it's religious life for many of you will probably be marriage and family, perhaps diaconate or single wife, but continue to ask the questions and ask God What is it you want me to do? How do you want me to love and serve you primarily and thrive in that vocation that will give you great meaning in your life?
And third, as you go forth, pursue the mission that God has prepared for you. And that mission will change. It will changes you be in the school, will change as you begin working with change, as you begin your vocation and family, but continue to be open and inquire where God is asking you to go because you have been and will continue to be equipped to serve.
You will continue to grow by keeping on this journey, this process of learning and growth that you've gotten at the Summit Academy. You've been prepared not to follow, but you have been prepared to lead to change their world so desperately needs today to bring the true, the good and the beautiful to everyone around you. And in so doing, you will have a profound impact.
Today, graduates, I'll share with you a little bit of my story, but that's not the most important story here today. The most important story is your story. Your story. Somebody, somewhere needs to hear your story. The story of your wife up to now, but more importantly, the story of where you're going to go from here. There are some projects that only you can start.
There are some ministries that only you can build. There are some wives that only you can touch. There are some great solutions to great challenges we face in the world that only you can develop. You may be the only Bible that somebody else ever reads. You may be the only Catholic church that somebody else ever experiences. Somebody, somewhere needs to hear your story.
So in conclusion, so we have Peter, Tess, Della, Diane and Tracy, Joe, Maria, Sophia and Mary. Put God first, seek him first in all things, know him, love him, and serve him. Secondly, live out your vocation as you discover it and allow it to illuminate the world for Christ in his church. And third, go out on mission and bring the good news of Jesus to everyone around you.
The message that you've been blessed to receive in your family and in the school. Take it out and share it and make disciples of all nations. In today's Gospel at Mass in John, Jesus said, Peace be with you as the Father has sent me. So I send you. Today is not about the Summit Academy sending you off. It's not about a commencement speaker sending you off today is about Jesus Christ, sending you forth to bring light into the darkness.
So go forth and change your world. Compassion.