New Church Life July/August 2017 | Page 45

BRYN ATHYN COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT 2017 Always the Right Answer: Good and Truth Erin Glenn Busby B eing back in Bryn Athyn reminds me of my high school days, and I thought about a story that might be apocryphal. But I will tell it the way I remember it. One of my friends had not attended church schools before moving to Bryn Athyn at the beginning of high school. Part way through high school, someone asked her if religion classes were hard because she didn’t have the same background as the other students. She said, “Well, it was intimidating at first, but it got much easier once I realized that the answer was always good and truth!” I don’t know how well that strategy really worked for religion class. But I have become convinced that it is the right answer for life – good and truth really are always the answer. Pursuing both is never wasted, and combining the two is the route to happiness. I will mention that my friend’s statement that “it’s all good and truth” is not without support in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. In The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine, we read: “All things in the universe, which are according to Divine order, have relation to good and truth,” (11) and that truths without good have no life, but are like a body without a soul. (22) I have found that, if you pursue truth and good for their own sakes, you never know when you might use them. One example in my life is the book Middlemarch. I’ve always loved novels, and probably my favorite class in college that had nothing to do with my majors was a class on the Victorian novel. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one of the greatest of these novels. Among other things, it is foremost an exploration of how people find their use in life, and what they can do when they get that disastrously wrong. In fact, the main storyline of Middelmarch is a good example of what happens when you don’t combine good and truth: Dorothea Brooke is an idealistic young woman who marries a much older clergyman with the idea that she will help 315