Heaven

What follows is (mostly) hyperbole, and was inspired by a genius bit of writing from a kid in my German class in college. He once published an essay claiming to be smarter than Socrates.  He also pointed out that all math is basically long division.

Before I gave this speech three years ago, I had my sister and my future wife play a few tunes to open up chapel.  They sounded a bit like this.

The first reading is actually a poem I use quite often in class. It’s by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I was reminded of it by a young woman who used it in her end-of-year essay.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

Our second reading today comes from the 34^th Psalm, beginning in verse eight.

Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
Fear the LORD, you his saints,
for those who fear him lack nothing.
The lions may grow weak and hungry,
but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.
Come, my children, listen to me;
I will teach you the fear of the LORD.
Whoever of you loves life
and desires to see many good days,
keep your tongue from evil
and your lips from speaking lies.
Turn from evil and do good;
seek peace and pursue it.

Hello, everyone, I hope you’re doing well. It’s nice to speak to you at the beginning of this new semester. Seniors, how does it feel? No more finals. Freshmen, there’s still a long way to go, but you’ve survived the first round, and as the Juniors and Sophomores will tell you, doing well on these things gets easier. I remember my calculus teacher telling me that while I was in High School… as a student gets older, he gets better grades and he gets them more easily. Plus I’ve always found that heavy burdens are somehow strengthening when I actually finish carrying them and can find the proper place to lay them down.

I actually used to love this time of year, not because of the impending Super Bowl or because the college basketball season is in full swing. I actually used to like finals. It put a spring in my step and a twinkle in my eye. Part of this is that I was raised by a marine, and I think that things that are hard are good for me, but there’s also another reason. See there’s a basic assumption with which I live my life, and though I may incite riots of jealousy and outrage by admitting it, I may have to endure weeks of ridicule from both students and faculty. I think the time has finally come to confess: I’m pretty sure I’m the smartest person I know. I’m pretty sure I’m the smartest person in this room, and I don’t think there’s anyone here smart enough to demonstrate that I’m wrong. I was a decent, serviceable athlete in high school, and I certainly wasn’t either good-looking or popular, but I was smart, and I was proud of it, and today, wherever I go, I think I’m the smartest person in the room, and I’ve yet to be proven incorrect.

Now I can’t exactly go around with a list of names putting checks in the “dumber than me” category, and certainly the beatings I received as a middle-schooler taught me to stop introducing myself as “Boy Genius,” but make no mistake, whenever I meet someone (whether a parent, pastor, or policeman), lurking in the back of my mind is this question: am I smarter than this person? I’ve had some close calls, but so far I’ve never answered no.  It’s not really a conscious effort I’m making to determine just how dumb the rest of the world is: it’s more in my attitude in how I treat people. Whenever there’s confusion in a conversation, I assume I’m the one who understands what’s going on. Any time a student disagrees with me about a film or a CD, I have an inner unspoken confidence that I actually understand the subtle nuances of artistic expression better than the person sitting across from me. Of course, there’s lots of hard evidence to prove me wrong. Four years ago a kid taught himself Old Norse in the back of my class while getting a 98% in the class. Each year my school churns out students whose SAT scores could be mistaken for the altitudes of European mountains. And obviously, if I really do think the hardest math in the world is long division, there’s no way I could teach a Calculus course, right? I must know that I’m not the smartest person here.  But this is precisely why I used to love finals: they’re proof. Twice a year the teachers would try to find the limits of my understanding, and twice a year they would fail. That whole week, my fellow students walked around in a haze, shoulders pinched forward and faces heavy with too many facts for their paltry minds to contain, furrowing their brows like Ralph Wiggum in a vain attempt to comprehend the situation. But I was in my element.

In college I would make a ritual out of it. Like Rocky before fighting the Russian, like Lancelot with his hair shirt, for the weeks leading up to finals, I would stop shaving and would wear almost continually this old sweater that used to be my father’s. I would have drunk raw eggs too, but I’m a wimp. Then on the day of my first finals, I would shave, put on a tie and go take on the world.

I liked finals because they helped me believe in the things that I wanted to be true. I wanted to believe that I was unusually intelligent, and I wanted proof that could offset any evidence to the contrary. We’re all like this. We surround ourselves with the things that help support our most basic assumptions. It’s completely natural. We can’t be friends with everyone in the world, and so we surround ourselves with people who help us maintain the self-image we want. Hot-shot athletes have best friends who are also athletic, but they’re never friends with someone who’s good enough to challenge them on the field. If you’re into Lord of the Rings and Orson Scott Card books, you don’t hang out with people who think Science Fiction is for losers. Indie rock nerds,  hang out with other people who know about Sufjan, Spoon, and Aesop Rock.

Even schools do this. My Dad went to the Naval Academy, and my Mom went to St. Johns. They are completely different schools, with completely different student bodies, but both schools tell students the exact same thing, when they arrive “You’ve been accepted because you’re the best and the brightest of your generation and you’re going to change the world.” Think about every movie star, rapper, or basketball player, or politician you’ve ever seen with an entourage. What are those people there to do, to challenge the star? Tell him when he says something rude or unintelligent? I don’t think so, they’re only included as long as they keep telling Iverson or Marky Mark that he’s the greatest thing in the whole world. If they stop, they’re gone.

There are a lot of assumptions with which I live my life: one is my brilliance, but there are a few others.

• I don’t think I’m tall. Seriously, I’m 6′ 3″ but I think I’m normal and that 98% of the world is short. Every year when a class comes in for the first time, I worry about the fact that they all seem so malnourished, like they were fed coffee in the bottle. I pass the basketball team in the hallway, and my thought is “Nice to see some normal people around here.”
• In spite of nearly 30 years without a championship in the city, I still believe that Philadelphia sports teams are the best in the world. [glad to say my Phillies removed this curse three years after I gave this speech]
• I think Baseball is interesting. I know it’s not true. I know it’s coma-inducingly dull, but some part of me really enjoys the long pauses, the strange mountains of stats and the fact that people can play it in long pants and still call themselves athletes.
• I still think that if I were to quit this job today, run off to a shao-lin monastery somewhere and devote myself to my studies, I could become the world’s greatest warrior.
• I think Grammar is fun. What’s more, I think it’s good for you.

Technically I know all these things aren’t really true, but I don’t ever admit it. Still, by being aware of these dumb thoughts in my head, I can counteract them. I can stop myself when I start discussing baseball strategies at the dinner table. I can be careful not to treat other people rudely: maybe they do know something I don’t. Being aware of my assumptions gives me power over them. Plus, I can identify the assumptions I’ve made that are correct.

Sometimes, I think my natural leanings are accurate. I believe

• Being kind is better than being cruel.
• Sometimes a man has to fight for what he believes in.
• Jesus Christ was the Son of God.
• Hard work is often more important than skill.
• If my students don’t understand, I haven’t said it right.

I live my life as if these things were true. And by testing them, I can become more certain of their veracity. I gain power over my assumptions by questioning them, and by living by the things I prove to be true, I gain power of the world around me.

In the end, the thing I thought would solidify forever my claim to brilliance was the college I chose, and I actually chose it because I expected it to attack my most firmly held beliefs.  Somewhere deep down I felt that all my smarts were really invalid unless they had been brought to the breaking point and still survived. If a man has never been tested, how does he know he’s really any good? I went to Swarthmore College, a small school, just outside of Philadelphia, hard to get into and harder to finish.  That’s the amphitheater, where we had graduation every year. My freshman year, I saw a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream there. It was put on at night, and the whole glen was lit by torches.

Swarthmore has a certain reputation to it, one that goes along with my attitude of superiority. This is how smart Swatties are: we have the only sundial in the world that adjusts for daylight savings time. Not only do people there know how to use sundials, they worry about misreading the sundial and being late for class. I once sat down at dinner and discovered over the course of the meal that 4 of the 8 people sitting there had gotten perfect scores on the SATs. Kids walked around with t-shirts that said “We’re not snobs, we’re just better than you.” and “Anywhere else, it would have been an A.” I was convinced I was going to go there and still get A’s.

So I was really happy when I heard the dean of students on the first day of school tell us, that “we’d been chosen because we were the best and brightest of our generation and we were going to change the world.” Finally a place where my brilliance would be universally recognized. Then the dean continued: 80% of you were valedictorians. The dean pointed out this means that most of you will have a much different experience here than you did in High School. “Question your assumptions about who you are and what you believe,” he told us, and over the next four years, struggling to dig C’s and B’s out of the walls of libraries, I really had to do that.

The first person I ever met at Swarthmore while visiting there before deciding to come was a girl named Jess, and we spent the night there talking about Medieval British Literature and Modern British Music. When we matriculated, she wound up on my hall, and we became friends. We used to spend late nights drawing, talking, and drinking tea, and it was through her that I became aware of some of the great assumptions people have about the religion I hold dear and the person I worship.  Jess was an avowed atheist and she used to tell me that while she didn’t really have a problem with my faith, it had certainly helped a lot of people through their struggles, she didn’t need the support, the crutch that other people did.

Her argument is an old one: Karl Marx said that Religion was the opiate of the masses. What both he and Jess meant is that when people can’t cope with the horrible nothingness of their lives, when they’re not brave enough to confront the truth that their life is meaningless, such cowards turn to Christ for help. Jess and Karl are made of sterner stuff than  I. Jess said she liked the fact that my beliefs made me a nice person, but she didn’t need help, she was fine on her own.

Now whether she knew it or not, Jess was using the most ancient definition of nice. Nice comes from the Latin verb nescire which means to be unaware. What being nice means is being so dumb you’re harmless.  According to Jess, in order to be a Christian, one had to sort of cower in the unsubstantiated hope that all this pain was one day going to go away and we’re all going to go away to heaven. She would rather live her life than spend it cowering in a corner waiting for the next one. And I think she’s right, so would I.

It’s easy to see where people get this idea of Christ and what he offers us. Go into any Christian bookstore and you’ll see cute little angels with halos and pastel-colored clothing. We’ve forgotten what real heavenly looked like. Creatures that would cause grown men to fling themselves down in fear, Creatures so beautiful they were frightening. The first thing angels always say in the Bible is “Do not fear!” What would a person have to look like before his very visage would cause people to scream in terror? Today we’re used to pop-Christianity where if you try to be a good person, that’s enough. Just stay true to yourself… find out who you are, girlfriend… that will get you through. You have to be who you have to be. First, love yourself, then you’ll realize that Jesus loves you.  There are words for that kind of theology; you can say them in heaven, but not in church.

I think I know where we get this idea, we misinterpret a few passages of scripture.

Matthew 12: 28- 30 says:  Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

This leads to a few very easy misinterpretations of scripture, and they are misinterpretations that play very easily with what more and more people in modern America tell us is the goal in life: early retirement. Right? Isn’t this what we imagine as a perfect life? A solid gold house and a rocket car and no need to break our bones late into life. Think about all the advertisements for places to vacation, places to take a break and not have to think very deeply. Places where if you spend enough, everything will be done for you. Think about how our methods of entertainment have gone over the years. We can spend more and more time sitting down, spreading out, not learning or growing or achieving real life. Like the panther in Rilke’s poem it’s easy to convince ourselves that the bars which surround our lives are the only things which exist and there’s no bigger world outside it.

Jess’ words cut straight to the heart of our false assumptions: Christians too often assume that what’s easy must be good and what’s hard must be bad. Christians talk, give sermons, and pontificate without end on heaven, even though the Bible says very little about it. But we take this bit about Christ’s burden being easy and we turn it into an entire theology. Our idea of heaven is, as David Byrne said, “A place where nothing ever happens.” Seriously, who wants to spend the rest of eternity playing the harp and waiting for something to happen, knowing that it never will? No wonder Jess thought we were wimps. She wanted to listen to Nirvana, Led Zepellin, and Hendrix. She wanted to fight injustice, not sit on a cloud and dust her halo all day long.

The modern picture of the devil we get equally from pastors and heavy metal album covers is a little man in a red suit with a pitchfork and bifurcated tail who makes you work forever. If you slow down he pokes you in the rear, and makes you work harder.

But the truth is more frightening. In scripture hell is never described as a place of work. It’s a grave, a garbage dump. Hell is where you go to do nothing. My sister was right. The Devil don’t come up in no black robe. He’s got a face so beautiful it will bring you to your knees. Or maybe like a celebrity endorsing some new car or movie or tv show, he’ll bring you to your seat so you don’t ever attempt anything hard again.

These false images are the opposite of what we know to be true in real life. When a student does well in an English class, he doesn’t get an easier one next year, he gets a harder one. AP Calculus is not a punishment for people who are bad at math, it’s a reward for those who have succeeded. If a varsity athlete says he wishes he were on JV so he wouldn’t have to work as hard, we recognize this as a fault in that person. We don’t take the most incompetent people and promote them to punish them. Jobs and college and life after AACS are not penalties for passing high school. They’re more difficult because they are the reward. See the thing we’re losing both in Christianity and in our modern culture is the knowledge that the reward for success is a greater challenge.

The worst thing about this kind of Christianity is the falsehoods it spreads about Christ. We hear him say that he wants to help us to make our life easier, and we assume it means things it never did.

Jesus came to save us from Punishment. That’s what Heaven is to a lot of people: no punishment. Sorry, you and I will still die for our sins, but Christ died to save us from the ultimate punishment for our sins.

Jesus came to make us happy. Sorry, he came to give us life. Like Psalm 34 said though lions may grow weak, Christ will give us strength. Not our vacation, our strength.

Jesus came to take away our suffering. The truth is far more terrifying. He came to make our suffering more like his, effective.

Christ didn’t come to wrap us in a blanket and keep us from experiencing anything hard. He came to give us more life. He came so that we could learn to live life better. That’s why classes and finals are hard.  Otherwise you can’t grow. When the Calculus teacher offers to teach you the easy way to do a math problem, she’s not offering to make it painless, just to teach you how to do it better. She’s not trying to let you expend less effort, but to make your efforts more productive.  When coaches design offenses that will get “easy points” they really mean the points will be easy if you work as hard as you can.

That’s one of the things I look forward to at the beginning of every semester, even though final exams or senior practica wait at the end. The knowledge that fills me at this time of the year is that a new challenge is coming and that though it is difficult, by the end I will have more life than I did before it. I hope my students are looking forward to it as well.

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