Happy spring holiday of your choice! Here at the LHH we are celebrating Easter, but some of you are getting ready for Passover*, you're in Ramadan, or maybe you’ve just celebrated Opening Day of the Baseball season. Whatever it is that makes spring special for you, I hope you have a happy one!
Thinking about spring rituals got me thinking about David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, This is Water. He asserts, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” I think that’s deeply true. We are worshipful animals. Here’s the passage where he says that:
[H]ere’s something else that’s weird but 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 worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–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 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 grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Read the whole transcript here: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
Watch him give the speech here:
Anthropologists sometimes refer to the modern gods such as Jesus and Allah as “Big Gods”. Big Gods have an interest in society as a whole, and demand pro-social behavior, including behavior directed towards strangers. This is in opposition to local gods that were often the spirits of ancestors whose interests were generally only over the behavior of the immediate family and were relatively indifferent to the well-being of anyone beyond the family, and certainly indifferent toward strangers.
Rather than thinking of who or what I worship, I like to think of who or what I serve. I think a worthy life is one in which you put yourself into service for something greater than yourself. If you genuinely worship one of the Big Gods, you will tend toward serving humanity. (Let’s not talk about how worship of the Big Gods has been abused and corrupted by politicians over the millennia. I mean by genuine worship.) But I don’t think you have to worship the Big Gods to be drawn to service, though I think it does help. All truly good things flow from an other-centric orientation.
The great, late-Middle Ages philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas described love as being other-centric: "I answer that, As the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 4), "to love is to wish good to someone." (St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, First Part of the Second Part, Question 26, Article 4)
“The Philosopher” he was referencing was the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who may or may not have believed in any Big Gods. But what Aristotle said was:
Let loving, then, be defined as wishing for anyone the things which we believe to be good, for his sake but not for our own, and procuring them for him as far as lies in our power. (Rhet. ii, 4)
My particular Big God, Jesus, says:
A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35)
I always found that command difficult because I thought of love as an emotional response. But if you think of love in the way that St. Thomas defines it (by way of his pagan teacher Aristotle), I think you can see that this kind of love is a choice, not an emotional response. It is in this way that you can love your enemies as well as your family, friends, and neighbors. You can choose to will them well. That does not mean that you have to wish that their goals are met, especially if their goals are bad. It means that you hope that they find their way to doing and being good. In fact, when you start with the cognitive choice to will someone well, the emotional response follows. I think if you dig into the other, modern, Big God theologies, you will find something like this.
I think David Foster Wallace hit on something profound in his speech when he asserts we all worship, and our lives are defined by what we choose to worship. If you worship the self, it will eat you alive. Worshiping a Big God gives you a system to follow that, if done correctly and truly, will tend to help you become other-oriented. It will help you put more love out into the world. I think he is also right that your worship doesn’t have to be a Big God, so long as you can find a system that helps you orient outward, rather than on the self. As those long-haired philosophers of the 1960’s once sang,
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
The End, The Beatles
I’m not sure it’s actually an equality. In fact, I think it is an inequality. I think what comes back exceeds what goes out:
Love taken > love made
Perhaps more importantly, putting more love out into the world protects the self, even as it brings more love back.
As usual, willing good for all of you. Happy Easter, happy spring!
* Correction to the email version - I had the dates of Passover wrong.