Wonderful Quotation from David Foster Wallace

Hi. This is the quotation Father Hugh read in his homily Sunday evening August 23, 2009. Lots of people were interested in getting a copy of it.

David Foster Wallace, Except from Commencement Speech at Kenyon
College, 2005 (He committed suicide in mid-August, 2009).


“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. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type 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. Never
feel you 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. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up- front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

“Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to
be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside
world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

Welcome to another school year.

Chuck

Is “organized religion” the cause of wars, hatred, and other evils?

In his book Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis traces his journey from his early atheism to the Christian faith. One of the phenomena that influenced his thinking is the fact that all over the world, in every age, people have sought to make their behaviors consistent with some external measure of what is good, just, and true. Sometimes that means changing our actions to fit a higher standard. All to often that means seeking ways to amend or reinterpret the standard so our current actions can be justified. But Lewis reflected that in every place in every time, the need to be "right" with something transcendent is a core aspect of what it means to be human.

Lewis is not the only person to recognize this basic aspect of humanity. In fact, I have read reports of recent psychological research seeking to define and quantify this human quality.
In the context of this understanding of human nature, religious expressions of all sorts are seen to flow from the human need to be closer to and more in tune with God, however that concept is understood. Properly expressed by healthy people who are blessed with good leadership, this wonderful element of our humanity emerges in people like Mother Theresa, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, and Saint Francis of Assisi and in movements like Habitat for Humanity and Oxfam. It shows up in good families, good friendships, and healthy churches. But like other powerful drives such as sex and the need for safety, the urge to faith can drive us in terrible directions. One sees "Christian" white supremacists and "Muslim" jihadists violating the most basic standards of human decency because they have let their urge to faith be turned in truly bizarre directions.

So to condemn "organized religion" misses the point entirely. There is a powerful drive within each human being to do what is right and to be right with God. When we allow this drive to become deformed, misdirected, and perverted we see terrible outcomes. The answer to the problem is not to ignore or suppress this aspect of our humanity – witness the result of trying to do that with our sexuality – but to understand and appreciate it in a way that allows it to blossom into the truth, holiness, and beauty that it calls us to.

Chuck