Notre Dame High School | Keynote: Words Hold Power

I had the honor of giving the keynote address for the TASC Justice Teach-In at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, California, on April 18th. As the oldest all-girls high school in the western United States, Notre Dame has an established history of providing education that cultivates women of impact. TASC Justice is a student-led group that educates and advocates for social justice issues while promoting service, activism, and equitable leadership within the school. It was a privilege to meet the students and to witness their compassion, dedication, and vision for a kinder and more just world. I learned a great deal from them.

My prepared remarks are below.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Barbara Chung, and I’m honored to be here today with you. The theme of today’s Teach-In, “Words Hold Power,” is an essential truth that I’ve been exploring throughout my life, and I’m so happy to explore it with you today.

First, a little bit about me: I’m a student at Santa Clara University School of Law, graduating in May. Most law students go to law school soon after they finish college, but I’ve taken a more unconventional path. I majored in English at Harvard, then earned my master’s degree in business administration at UCLA and worked as a business strategist and leader for about 15 years before I decided to go to law school.

When I tell people I’m in law school, the first question I usually get is, “Why? Why would you decide, in the midst of your business career, to pursue law?”

In short, my answer is that I believe words hold power. I believe this so deeply that I left a rewarding career to learn how to better use my words for good. Alongside my business career, I’m a poet and a gardener. Over the last six years, I published three poetry collections and turned my garden into a certified wildlife habitat. But I knew I could do more, especially with my words. And lawyers advocate with their words above all else. In the law, as in poetry, every word matters.

When I began to consider what to say to you today, of course I thought of all the ways we can use our words to change the world for the better: speak up when you see injustice; stand up for your beliefs; call your legislators; read banned books. Just to name a few.

But amidst all these ideas, one simple verse from the Sermon on the Mount lingered with me: “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” (Matt. 12:34.) In this sermon, Jesus expands on this idea, saying, “The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.” (Matt. 12:35.)

Today, you are going to learn ways in which to use your words for good. Seeing the topics you’ll be discussing here—censorship, abuse of government power, accountability and transparency, effectively using your own voices—I am confident that you will leave with new skills and a deeper understanding of the power of your own words. I am also confident that every one of you has the passion and the conviction to make your words count. You have chosen to be here on a Saturday morning to learn how to make the world a better place, and your choice speaks volumes about who you are and how much you care.

So, this morning, the one message I want you to take away from me is to care for your own heart, to fill it with good treasure. Out of the overflow of your heart, your mouth will speak, and your words will change the world for good.

How do you fill your heart with good treasure? You make good choices. You choose your treasure well, you choose integrity, and you choose people who love you for who you are and for your best self.

Let’s talk about these three choices more.

First, choose what you will treasure—and choose it well.

Choose what you will love. Everyone treasures something. But if you’re not intentional about what you choose to treasure, someone else will choose it for you. Plenty of people have a self-interest in making this choice for you. Don’t let them—make your own choice.

And choose well. High school and college are critical times for making these choices. You will experience so many new things in the next decade of your life. The world will open to you in ways you can’t imagine right now: new places, new people, new experiences, new ways of moving through the world.

But amidst all these changes—which can be both exciting and scary—you will always have your ability to choose beauty, kindness, love. Choices build on each other, and this is the time to lay a good foundation for your character.

One way to do this is to store up good words. I have here a notebook that I’ve had since high school. It’s not a journal, but instead a place where I would write quotes from books I read or speeches I heard. It’s not at all organized—it’s just one quote after another, a jumble of Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Juliana of Norwich and more. If it made my heart ache or sing, if it made me think deeply about life, I would write it here.

Looking at this three decades later, I realize now how profoundly these words shaped me. I didn’t look at this notebook much after high school. But reading it now, I see that the simple act of writing the words here wrote them into my soul and shaped the life choices I’ve made since.

And to be clear, many kinds of treasure can be good. Here are some ideas I wrote down when I was your age, in this quote from Emerson:

Page 4 of my high school notebook.

To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded.

Just make sure to treasure what is worthy of your love. And one way to discern what is worthy is to choose integrity.

Choose integrity, even when it is hard.

Merriam-Webster offers three definitions for the word “integrity”: first, “firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values”; second, “an unimpaired condition”; and third, “the quality or state of being complete or undivided.”

In other words, choosing integrity means being faithful to your values and doing what is right even when it’s hard. It means doing what is right in the small things as well as the big things. In fact, there isn’t much difference between the small things and the big ones. As Mother Theresa said (and as I wrote in my high school notebook), “We can do no great things—only small things with great love.”

I’d like to take a few minutes and ask each of you to think of a time when you decided to do something good even when it was hard. Perhaps you took the time to comfort a friend on a day when you felt like you had no time to spare, or you shared your lunch with someone who was hungry even though you were hungry too, or you spoke up for someone who was being bullied.

Then share it with someone sitting next to you. Once you’ve done that, I’ll ask for volunteers to share their stories with us all.

. . . [student discussion and sharing] . . .

Thank you all for sharing your examples of integrity. Every one of these makes the world a better place.

The historian Timothy Snyder tells us in his book On Tyranny that the first lesson of fighting authoritarianism is this: “Do not obey in advance.” He goes on to say, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

But if you have integrity, you won’t give yourself away. You’ll have practiced doing the right thing and holding onto your values. And, as the journalist Joanne Lipman recently wrote in the New York Times, “When women mobilize, countries are more likely to be egalitarian democracies. That’s why authoritarians fear women.”

So keep practicing integrity in the daily details of your life, remembering that when you can be trusted with small things, you can be trusted with great things.

Still, choosing integrity can be hard, and it’s even harder if you’re trying to do it alone.

So choose people who love you for who you are and who lift you up to be your best self.

And love others in the same way. To have good friends, you need to be a good friend.

I’d like to tell you about my friend David, who is my best friend from college and an accomplished attorney. I told you I took an unconventional path to law school, but what I haven’t told you yet is that I wouldn’t have taken it at all if not for David.

We were catching up one day about five years ago, and I was telling him that I wanted to figure out how to help people more effectively with my skills. He told me, “You should go to law school.” He added that even before we’d talked, he’d been thinking to himself lately, “Barbara should go to law school. She’d love being a lawyer.”

Honestly, I couldn’t absorb what he was saying at the time, and my first thought was, “I’m too old to do that.” But David dreamed bigger for me than I dreamed for myself, and in doing so he opened my mind to begin the most rewarding phase of my life yet.

Those people in your life who dream bigger for you than you dream for yourself? When you find them, choose them.

Once again: “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” Words hold power. You know this—this is why you’re here today. So fill your heart by choosing your treasure well, by choosing integrity, and by choosing people who love you and lift you up. Then the words you speak, the words you write, the words you amplify will change the world for the better. Your words will heal the broken places where you walk and the broken people whom you encounter.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today. I’m deeply honored to be here and grateful for every one of you.

The sunflower is a symbol for St. Julie Billiart, the foundress of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who said: "Be like the sunflower that follows every movement of the sun, and keep your eyes always turned towards our good God." Sunflowers also heal the soil in which they are planted, drawing heavy metals and other toxins out of contaminated soil into their stalks and leaves.