To Choose Hell
“A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence... Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea...
Here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
From "This is Water," David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College, 2005
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Dear Alex,
Age matters.
Some say "30 is the new 20". More of our critical life decisions are increasingly being delayed to our 30-something selves: starting a family, a career, truly living.
Then we hear the contrary. “30 is not the new 20.” Our 20-something selves are a “developmental sweetspot” in life, vital in building and paving our future years. Being 20 is not a time to be wasted but explored and transformed.
I am not sure where I would fit in here. I (re)started college, career and home life at least a decade in lag. What if 40+ is my new 20? How do we know when to revel in our sweetspot until it’s over?
In my 30s I returned to school at ground zero in Seattle when many, if not most, of my peers had completed, achieved and secured their sweetspots. In my first semester, the Autumn rain was unrelenting. Cold, wet, I trudged through hallways and classes to make one solitary point: I was going to be a torrent of success in my view, my world. The sweetspots missed would be pursued to no end.
The following semesters in "day-to-day trenches" for me loomed into a tsunami of ambitious efforts, merits and scholarship. The school ranked me rationally high. Irrationally the center of my universe would be centered on a uni-verse - irascibly low and unhappy.
In my journey now towards 50, I begin to peep into the universes of others and one in N.T. Wright’s “Simply Christian”:
You may not have recalled but some time ago you introduced me to this passage in Wallace’s commencement address. Since then I could not stop thinking about his words.“Worship means, literally, acknowledging the worth of something or someone… You become like what you worship… Those who worship power become more and more ruthless…Because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow…Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being… When you worship an idol - you may well feel a brief ‘high.’ But, like a hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost: when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That is the price of idolatry.”
So “totally wrong and deluded” in my deluge of inanity to have come this far to choose hell and now veering off-centered from my focal reference point to stop making a point pointless for worship.
Yours, Kate
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Everybody should read Wallace's full speech at least once top to bottom. It has a sustained narrative trajectory that needs to be taken in in one breath.
Today's excerpt is one that I have referred to again and again, talking to people and mumbling to myself. I usually don't like doing this, but today I am going to respond to it like I am writing a sermon outline, to "say it like it is"--as if ever possible.
First I want to ask: how do we know what we are truly worshiping？ This seems to be an easy enough question. The usual suspects like money and power and health should easily be captured...and just as easily released. If we stay unspecific and thus impersonal then we're really just sermonizing to ourselves.
So imagine I am losing my job: it is one thing if I am being treated unfairly but an entirely different beast if I have done something wrong and disgraced myself. What if it is both, as it often is when something like this happens in real life? What if I'm 20% in the wrong vs 80%? What if such simple mathematics does not exist? What if a lawyer can spin the number, an accountant can cook the books? What if I can't afford a lawyer? What if I myself am the most powerful lawyer, or know the best number chef in town?
All these different conditions and variables make a different worshiper of me.
Part of being honest is being very specific in our self assessment. If whatever I said above doesn't really hit home then let me put it another way; let me tell you about me. If I am to lose my job today I will likely go on living more or less the same, disgraced or not. Because I have no money worry.
You could say I have no money worry because I don't need much to live a good life, which may well be true. You could further suppose that I don't need much to live a good life because I have found my place in God's story, which is in fact a deep aspiration of mine.
What I don't tell you is I will use these good conditions in my life to talk myself up and talk my opponents down when bad things happen, maybe when losing a job, or maybe when losing a limb. (I might not love my job but I love my walks.) I will never tell the world how spiteful I can be when I think there is a reason for being so. In fact I don't even know the depth of my own spite until I fall into a well.
Who am I, really? A simple-life champion? A faithful, religious man? Or a contemptuous financially secure middle-class bigot? What am I truly worshiping? You tell me. If not now, one day you will see, when I am down the bottom of a well.
This sermon is getting long, so let me wrap it up hopefully quickly with my second point. We know what we are truly worshiping if we find ourselves inconsolable when losing it. You don't know how I feel, we say. No one ever will but Me, Myself and Yours Truly. We become reachable by nothing and no one. We say it is a matter of principle, that it has to do with justice we must remain angry and bitter, that it is in the name of God we must stay way up on our cross, for the world to see the bloody mess they have made of us.
"My concept of hell, I suppose, is being stuck with myself for ever and with no way out," Rowan Williams once defined hell this way. Being alone forever. All bridges burned. In exile for all eternity.
"If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." Exaggeration Jesus was using, of course, black comedy. Still there must be a reason important enough, people he cares about enough, a human reality true enough, for him to exaggerate, a comedy burned black enough to smell like hell.
Yours, Alex
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