I had a very intriguing article that came across my desk
at work. One co-worker was looking at
commencement speeches a couple of months ago and saw this one from a Wall
Street Journal article from 2008. He
then gave a print out to another co-worker.
I saw it lying on his desk and gave it a look. What I found was a man who understood his
failures under the law, but he had no answers to fix it or heal it. He had no hope. The speaker was a well-known liberal author
and columnist named David Foster Wallace.
He made this speech in 2005 to Kenyon University. As you read some outtakes from it, keep in
mind that Mr. Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself three years later.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they
happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
“Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and
then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is
water?”
This was the beginning of his speech to the college
graduates. The illustration paints the
picture of a set of young naïve fish.
This will be tied up better at the end of his speech.
…The fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult
existence, banal platitudes can have
life-or death importance. (Yes I had
to look banal platitudes up. It means: a
trite remark or mundane occurrences.)
…Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that
I am the absolute center of the universe…We rarely talk about this sort of
natural, basic self-centeredness, because it is so socially repulsive, but it’s
pretty much the same for all of us, deep down.
It is our default setting,
hard-wired into our boards at birth.
…if you want to operate on your default-setting—then you,
like me, will not consider the possibilities that aren’t pointless and
annoying, but if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then
you will know you have other options. It
will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow,
consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with
the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of
all things….You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what
doesn’t. You get to decide what to
worship….
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is
actually no such thing as atheism. There
is no such thing as not worshipping.
Everybody worships. The only
choice we get is what we worship. And an
outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual thing to worship
is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are
where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual
allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you
will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is that
they are unconscious. They are
default-settings. They’re the kind of
worship you just gradually slip into, day after day,
This is a
huge realization for this guy. He is
touching on what Christians know is true because of Sin that started in the
Garden of Eden. The lie that Satan
brought is that we can be our own god.
The next
section I am going to share shows Mr. Wallace trying to figure out what needs
to be done to alter this Default Setting or find freedom from it.
It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow
altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to
be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything
through this lens of SELF.
…It is extremely
difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the
constant monologue inside your own head…a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to Think” really means learning
how to exercise some control over how and what you think…It is not the least
bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always
shoot themselves in the head…(we are) supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your
comfortable, prosperous, respectable, adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to
your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely,
imperially alone, day in and day out…(It is really important to find freedom
from it)…The really important kind of
freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and
being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and
over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
I think
that everything this man is saying is true.
He, by God’s Just and Holy sovereignty, never found the answer. He never got the Gospel. The Gospel of God’s grace in Jesus is the
only way to find Freedom from this natural default sinful setting in us. Knowing that the Holy One loves you and gave
Himself up for you when you were still a sinner, let’s you know that you have
everything you need from Him who is the true “center of the universe.” Looking through life from the lens of the
gospel instead of the lens of self will allow you that freedom that Mr. Wallace
yearned for, so that you can truly care about others and sacrifice for
them. You’ve been given ALL that you
need by grace, so you can now give everything for others, to His glory. This is so radical from our natural state
that we have to preach it to ourselves all the time and every day. Mr. Wallace talked about this being something
you can find from within to alter the setting or you can choose to do the work
to free yourself from it. This is a
self-salvation project that will fail in the end. You cannot find an “inner Christ”. It has to come from outside of you. We find it, by grace, at the foot of the
Cross of Jesus. Our little idols we
create in our hearts are little ways to find comfort from the sin inside of
us. We look elsewhere even after we
become Christians. This is why it is so
important to be in the Word and hearing God speak through scripture. Mr. Wallace also talks about “learning how to
think”. This also makes sense to
me. The gospel gives us a renewed mind,
a new way of looking at our life and a compassion for other fellow sinners in
need of grace.
I think
that this article caught my eye first because the title was David Foster
Wallace on Life and Work. These are
questions that the gospel answers. Then
when digging deeper, I see the “default-setting” statement. That is a phrase I have seen in Christian
written articles like this one by Tullian Tchividjian:
We've all become pretty adept at establishing these rules
and standards that we find personally achievable. Legalism therefore provides
us with a way to avoid acknowledging our deficiencies and our inabilities.
That's enough right there to make it attractive to us. But it's also appealing
to us in how it puffs us up, giving us the illusion … that we can do it—we can
generate our own meaning, our own purpose, our own security, and all our other
inmost needs. It's what Michael Horton
pinpoints as "the default setting of the human heart: the religion of
self-salvation."
It's all so attractive because it's all about us.
Legalism feeds our natural pride. While abiding by our self-established
standards and rules, we think pretty highly of ourselves …. And what's especially
fine about being in charge of our situation (though we wouldn't admit it) is
that it's a way to avoid Jesus.
Don’t
avoid Jesus. He is there. He is our Lord. He is the answer to what is making us ache,
worry, be angry, and fight against. Go
to Him, take His yoke that is easy, and find freedom.
This is my pitch for the
day!
NY Yankees closer, Mariano Rivera, delivers a cutter in 2013, his final MLB season.
