Academic Vice President

"Rejoice With Them That Do Rejoice"

by John S. Tanner

I am grateful to be with you. I’m especially grateful that my wife, Susan, is here. She can’t usually come to mid-day events on campus. I am also grateful for those who conceived and prepared this celebration: David Whetten and Jenith Larsen, among others. The colorful decorations, the great food, the festive atmosphere all seem just right to celebrate faculty who have recently received promotion and CFS.

I almost prepared precisely the wrong talk for today. This is a new tradition. The Faculty Center hasn’t sponsored such an event before. But it has held a lunch for mid career faculty who felt stalled at the associate level. I was invited to speak to these faculty at a lunch a couple years ago. So when this event showed up on my calendar as talk to “mid career faculty,” I assumed I was to speak to faculty similarly situated. I told my secretary to have David Whetten send you my previous talk, thinking we could discuss it together. That talk deals with the angst of not being advanced, of feeling stuck. David wrote back somewhat puzzled about how that talk would work for this occasion.

It is important for speakers to know the occasion and their audience. I am reminded what happened to my sister in high school. Our local Oddfellows Club each year gave a scholarship to the top graduating male and female senior. My sister and the senior boy who received the scholarship were invited to speak to the Oddfellows after a lunch in connection with the award. My sister, well trained in the LDS art of Sunday School and Sacrament talks, and imbued with a missionary zeal to give the community a talk that reflected her LDS values, decided to give a talk about the importance of example. She illustrated this by parents who smoke. She began her remarks dramatically, addressing a smoke-filled room: “Do your children smoke? Do YOU smoke?” And then she lectured the group on the importance of example.

After she sat down, the boy who received the other scholarship stood up and graciously gave brief expression of appreciation for the scholarship and sat down.

As I say, it’s important to know your audience and the occasion. The occasion that brings us together today is celebration. It’s a time for rejoicing in your accomplishments, with feasting and song. And I do so with heartfelt praise for all of you.

However, like my sister I can’t resist the temptation to also give some advice and indulge in some reflection about principles. Invite a Mormon as your after dinner speaker and you should not be surprised to get a sermon.

I. In Praise of Praising

So today I also want to talk with you, at this significant point in your career, in praise of praising. I believe in the great value of “rejoicing with them that do rejoice,” as Paul puts it. Learning to rejoice with those that do rejoice is vital for our emotional and spiritual welfare–both as individuals and as communities. We need holidays, birthdays, award banquets, and the like. These make it socially possible to receive and express gratitude, love, praise.

It is not only children who need to be praised. Adults need praise too. And we need to give praise. Praising is good for both the giver and receiver. Like the “quality of mercy” as Shakespeare’s Portia describes it, praise is “twice blessed; / It blesses him that gives and him that takes” (MV 4.184-85). The ability to praise is a sign of spiritual health. As C. S. Lewis: “praise is inner health made audible” (Reflections on the Psalms, 80).

Over the last few weeks, I have felt strong spiritual impressions that I need to express appreciation and praise for the faculty more frequently. One reason that I am particularly happy to be here today in this setting is that it offers me a vehicle to fulfill this prompting.

II. Rejoicing With Others as a Gospel Imperative

As I suggested in my allusion to Paul, rejoicing is a gospel imperative. The full verse reads as follows: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” (Rom 12:15). In general, I believe that we are better in the Church at weeping with those who weep than rejoicing with those that do rejoice. We talk a lot about the former, often quoting the baptismal covenant language in Mosiah 18: 9 about being willing to mourn with those that mourn. Likewise we often remind ourselves of our duty to visit the afflicted, offering comfort and casseroles. But we speak less about the need to rejoice with those who rejoice.

Both rejoicing and mourning necessitate our getting outside of ourselves; both require selflessness. But rejoicing for others entails a different and more difficult selflessness than mourning for them. To mourn requires that we awaken feelings of compassion and pity for the sufferer. To rejoice requires that we suppress feelings of jealousy and envy for the successful so that we can truly rejoice in their success. Rejoicing for others demands that we keep one of the most difficult and often violated 10 Commandments, the last: “Thou shalt not covet.” (Ex 20:17).

In a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel I read about a year ago called Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, the narrator, a preacher who married very late in life, confesses that he struggled all his life with the 10th Commandment as he watched others marry and have families:

The Tenth Commandment is unenforceable ... and it is violated constantly. I have been candid with you about my suffering a good deal at the spectacle of all the marriages, all the households overflowing with children ... not because I wanted them but because I wanted my own. I believe that the sin of covetise is that pang of resentment you may feel when even the people you love best have what you want and don’t have.... I have never really succeeded in obeying that Commandment, Thou shalt not covet.... “Rejoice with those who rejoice.” I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep. (134)

Covetousness, like its twins envy and jealousy, though it receives far less attention among us than sexual sin, is surely among the most destructive of temptations. Or I should say self-destructive. For unless it is acted out in other ways, our envy primarily injures ourselves. I often think of an early modern literary depiction of envy as a wolf eating its own stomach (Spenser, Fairie Queene 1.4.30-32), and of Iago’s remark: “Beware envy my lord / It is a green-eyed monster, born of itself, begotten of itself.” How small and petty we become when our souls respond to the good fortune or blessing of others with envy and jealousy. This becomes the inciting sin of Satan in Paradise Lost: he rebels because he can’t stand the fact that the Father has chosen the Son to become the Redeemer; he feels that this honor to another has somehow impaired to Satan’s own worth.

As I said, I think most of us are better at weeping than rejoicing for others. The temptation toward jealousy and envy (twin sisters of covetousness) is perhaps especially great in the academy. For we academicians are a driven lot–full of ambition and desire to excel. This is one of the positives and one of the perils of our profession.

Perhaps no word better describes the ideal to which every university ascribes than excellence. Excellence, however, as I have mentioned to the faculty before, derives from a Greek, which is to say pagan, ideal of wanting to be better than anyone else: arete. To be excellent is to strive for the victor’s wreath in Olympic sports or in the arts. Excellence is a deeply competitive idea at its root. There can be only one who wins the gold.

The same connotations traditionally were associated with the word “emulate.” To seek to emulate someone was to desire to outdo or excel him or her. Thus an “emulous” person is a jealous or covetous person, one who wants to be better than anyone else. (You can see why I am always a little uncomfortable when we talk about wanting to emulate the Savior, as if emulate were simply a fancy term for imitate, even though that this connotation has gradually disappeared.) Evidently, W. W. Phelps wanted to be excellent in an emulous sense of the word and for this reason the Lord rebuked “for he seeketh to excel, and he is not sufficiently meek before me” (D&C 58:41). Such selfishness was not conducive with the principles of Zion.

III. Rejoicing for Each Other in the Academy

Here, in what we sometimes too glibly refer to as a Zion university, we need to seek to excel without becoming emulous. This is not easy. I sometimes wonder if those who use the phrase Zion university understand the oxymoronic, paradoxical aspects of this ideal. The concept of Zion and University are in someways antithetical. The one expresses our hopes and ideals for a society that not only has no poor but no class distinctions, and where every gift is equally honored, valued, and celebrated. Zion is horizontally oriented.

By contrast, a university necessarily values some gifts over others, particularly gifts of the mind. Excellent janitors and secretaries tend to get fewer accolades and perks at universities than do faculty. Universities also idealizes excellence and competition for rankings and for ranks, such as those you have won as newly-minted associate and full professors. In many ways, universities are vertically oriented institutions.

BYU needs to be a place where we have standards of academic excellence and hold each other accountable for our performance vis a vis these standards. And at the same time, it ought to be a place where consecrated individuals are pulling for each other, valuing each other’s gifts, wanting each to succeed and rejoicing with them that do rejoice.

I have a model for a colleague who combines these ideals of excellence and love for others. It is Jim McDonald. Jim is a first-rate scholar in econometrics at BYU. He is also one of the readiest persons I know to pass out heartfelt praise. For years Jim was in my home stake presidency. He never failed to drop a note or make a phone call when one of our children did something—anything—of good report or praiseworthy. Jim was at the door giving praise. He does the same within our BYU community. Praise and appreciation just overflow from his person. It is for this reason that I have often told my wife, “I want to be like Jim McDonald when I grow up.”

To be full of praise also awakens a spirit of gratitude and of good cheer. It’s hard to sincerely rejoice with others without feeling some of their joy lift our own souls. Likewise, for a spiritually healthy soul, it’s hard to feel joy without wanting to praise the source of our joy. For praising completes our joy.

C. S. Lewis writes insightfully about this in one of his lesser known books, Reflections on the Psalms. In it Lewis poses an intriguing and fundamental question: Why does the Lord constantly invite us, and even command us, to praise him? It cannot be because he is vain or needs our admiration to confirm his self worth. He does not have any ego-need for confirmation as most of us do. Hence, it must be that we need to praise, Lewis reasons. This discovery causes Lewis to realize that the whole world rings with praise, that the act of praising completes our joy, and that the readiness to praise is a mark of a generous soul. Let me quote:

I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise ... the world rings with praise - lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game - praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praise most, while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least.... Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.... I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: "Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?" The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about....

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch. (Lewis, p 80-81)

To praise aright—that is to praise what is truly praiseworthy—is to confirm the values that bind us together in healthy communities. Likewise, to praise amiss—in art, movies, literature, family—is to deepen social decay and degradation and hasten the spread of evil.

IV. An Injunction to Rejoice

So let us indulge in praise at BYU. We should be discriminating in our praise, to be sure. But let us also be generous, apt to praise. We need not be stingy is celebrating good works of our colleagues and co-workers. None need be penurious in praise.

I was reminded often in my home to rejoice with them that do rejoice. My dad used to say all the time to us: “Learn to rejoice in the successes of others.” This lesson was not just Sunday School nicety but a practical necessity for the daily well-being of a family of 13 children. In such a family, there was only a 1-in-15 chance that the birthday or the present under the tree or the compliment from a teacher would be for you. So we developed family rituals of hugging and hollering when a brother or sister opened a gift, and celebrating when a sibling has something good happen to him or her. In a family that was also instilled with ambition to succeed, the principle of learning to rejoice with and for others became a critical ballast and counterbalance to what could have been a family circle full of envy and covetousness.

I believe this ethic of learning to rejoice with them that do rejoice is critical in the BYU family as well. We celebrate your accomplishments today. Seek occasion to celebrate the accomplishments of others in their turn. You have been promoted. You now can and should help others to be promoted and, in the larger sense, promote good works in all your colleagues—no matter where they are in their careers. Be like Falstaff, who says “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men” (2 Henry IV, 1.2.8-9). You can and should be accomplished in your own right and seek to be the source of accomplishment in others

V. Conclusion

Enough preaching. In conclusion, let me indulge in a practice not much indulged in among Latter-day Saints. I want to propose a toast, albeit only with the juice or water that remains in your goblets. Latter-day Saints likely don’t toast much because we are teetotalers, not because there is anything inherently wrong in the practice itself. Indeed, it is a good practice—a way of formally expressing praise and benediction. So let me conclude this talk in praise of praising with a toast in celebration of you and your future careers at BYU:

May each of you continue to be successful in all you do. May you be extraordinary teachers who gladly teach and gladly learn, and who find great joy in seeing your students learn. May you be scholars who are blessed with the thrill of discovery and creativity, whose scholarly and creative work bring joy, honor, and acclaim to you and to BYU. And may you also find enduring happiness in being good colleagues and mentors to your fellow faculty, rejoicing in the success of colleagues and student alike.