00:00Lord, in the mercies I see, Lord, honor me.
00:11Please welcome to the stage, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:30Charlie's overarching passion was his Christianity and his devotion to his God.
00:39He believed what St. Francis taught us almost a thousand years ago, that we should strive
00:47to live our lives in perfect imitation of Christ.
00:54We should turn every day and every moment and every interaction into a prayer.
01:01And Charlie understood the great paradox that it's only by surrender to God that God's power
01:07can flow into our lives and make us effective human beings.
01:13Charlie Christ died at 33 years old, but he changed the trajectory of history.
01:22Charlie died at 31 years old.
01:25Because he had surrendered, he also now has changed the trajectory of history.
01:38Charlie's other passion was free speech.
01:43He understood that the free flow of information was the soil, the water, the sunlight for democracy.
01:51He understood democracy's great advantage was that our policies were formed by ideas that
01:59had triumphed in a marketplace of debate and conversation.
02:05He thought that conversation was the only way to heal our country.
02:11And this was important, particularly important during a technological age, when we are all hooked
02:17into social rhythms, social algorithms that are hacked into the reptilian cores of our brain,
02:27and amplify our impulses for tribalism and for division.
02:32He felt that the only way to overcome that biological impulse was with a spiritual fire and with developing
02:40community.
02:41And the only way to develop community was through conversation.
02:46And so he always gave the biggest microphone to the people who were most passionately aligned
02:52against him.
02:54Because he believed that we need to talk to each other.
02:57And that we needed to be able to say what we mean without saying it mean.
03:01A few years ago, my brother David died.
03:07And I asked my mother, does the hole that they leave in you, when they die, does it ever get
03:15any smaller?
03:17And she said to me, it never gets any smaller.
03:20Our job is to grow ourselves bigger around the hole.
03:24And we do that by taking the best qualities, the best, most admirable character traits of
03:30the person that died, and integrate them with restraint, with discipline, with practice,
03:37into our own character.
03:38And in doing that, we make ourselves larger, and the hole gets proportionally smaller.
03:45We also give a kind of immortality to the person who left us.
03:50Because their work continues through us.
03:53A couple of days ago, my niece, or my granddaughter, left for college in Europe.
04:01Her mother noticed that she packed a Bible.
04:03When her mother asked her why she made that choice, she said, I want to live more like Charlie.
04:10And one of my first conversations with Charlie in July of 2021, we were talking about the
04:25risks that all of us take when we challenge entrenched interests, the physical risk.
04:30And he asked me if I was scared of dying.
04:33And I said to him, there's a lot worse things than death.
04:37And one of those things is if we lost our constitutional rights in this country and that our children
04:44were raised as slaves.
04:46And I said to Charlie, I said, sometimes the best consolation we can hope for is that we
05:01get to die with our boots on.
05:03Well, Charlie died with his boots on.
05:06And he died to make sure that we didn't have to undergo those fates that are worse than
05:14death.
05:15Oh, let's remember, Charlie, he was, for those of us who were friends with Charlie, we don't
05:24need any more evidence of the love of God, because the evidence of friendship is the best evidence
05:33that God loves us all.
05:34Thank you, and God bless you.
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