Jesus is often
portrayed as turning things upside down, a complete spiritual revolutionary. In this morning’s gospel, Jesus criticizes
the religious officials of his day for dressing in flowing robes and generally being
pretentious. I love it, and look at our flowing robes today—some might say we’re
doing the same thing, here in St.
Joseph’s. Jesus
condemns the religious hypocrisy of his day.
Then he contrasts this with the widow who gives everything that she has
to the temple treasury. This is the real
example of God’s servant, one who gives everything right back to God.
Jesus isn’t
actually turning things upside down. But
rather, things are turning, round, right side up. In the way God imagines we can be. The widow is right on. What would it look like to turn things the
correct way? In your life. How would you know when you got things just right?
The first question
I have is about where we’re going. You
know, this whole prep school thing, where does it really start and when does it
end? Why are you in such a hurry to be
out of high school? Or college? When exactly is this golden time that we all seem
to be expecting, just around the next corner?
At our formal dinners, we often hear how many days there are left for
seniors. If we lived our lives
correctly, I think the seniors would be sad, and the third form would be
overjoyed to hear about the plentiful days until their graduation. Why is it so hard to live in the moment? Oh wait, there’s it’s gone, the moment. Did you live it fully? I didn’t.
There is a
wonderful book about the power and potential that is in the moment called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. This short passage is about the mystery of
our being that can be found when we stop rushing past our lives.
“Being is
the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are
subject to birth and death. However,
Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost
invisible and indestructible essence.
This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self,
your true nature. But don’t seek to
grasp it with your mind. Don’t try to
understand it. You can only know it when
your mind is still. When you are
present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be
felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
To regain awareness of Being and to abide in the state of
‘feeling-realization’ is enlightenment.”
Six years ago, I
was giving the opening prayer, the benediction, at a dinner for my high school
class in Turlock, California.
The Turlock Bulldogs, a big old fashioned public school in a small town
with football as the crowning glory (and excellent water polo); it was a
lifetime ago. The occasion for the
dinner was our twenty-fifth year since our graduation. Looking around the room, I reflected on how
we were all in a hurry to grow up. Why
were we like that? Just like you. Most of us would give quite a lot, maybe
everything, to go backward in time; to simply be in the moment, a couple weeks
before Thanksgiving break, in the splendor of our youth. Like you are—just now. Maybe, just maybe, I said, we could slow down
tonight—and be completely present in the moment. If we did that, if we could find a way, we
would be more than young again. We would
find it, the source of everything. Somehow I think that’s what God is all about,
though I don’t think that’s the word we would use: to describe the wonder of just being.
What does it mean
to just be? With no agenda. Do we even know?
In 2010, a
documentary about education came out called The
Race to Nowhere, directed by Vicki Abeles.
She came up with the idea for the documentary as she watched her high achieving
daughter actually become physically sick from academic pressure. It’s that real. This movie is about highly motivated kids who
are deeply unhappy, even when they get the results, like the right college
admission, that they’re looking for.
These are not the slackers. The
documentary explores the lives and values of teenagers who want to be the very
best, but the psychological cost of their striving is presented in this
thoughtful and compassionate movie.
Whether you are a high honors student or not, you are all responding to
pressure, be it academic, athletic, social, or extracurricular. And the toxic cocktail of all of these things
is the idea that your college admissions, or rejections, are your measurement
of worth as a human being. Why are we
racing off to nowhere? Human beings are
crazy, totally insane. Animals actually
don’t have neuroses. Unless they live with people. Then they start to get a little crazy. Just look at Richie.
I have compassion
for all of you racing off to nowhere: because I was once an insane little
hamster on the crazy wheel myself. I
wasn’t always the Zen master of meditative basketball and sacred hoops, and now
vision quest soccer with the lads from thirds.
Thirty-one years ago, I was the valedictorian in my class, out of some
five hundred plus students. Being the
valedictorian was something I decided to be; it didn’t just happen. I didn’t have the same problem with pressure
in athletics because I never played, or rarely played, when the game was
already decided. Those coaches are all going to hell, by the way. I’d be sent in with eighteen seconds left to
play, so I tried to shoot as many times as possible before the horn
sounded. Run the offense? I don’t think so. Sometimes I tried to collect random
fouls. But, every night, I studied like
a demon, with an agenda. I had two
objectives: one was to be the very best, to be #1, first in my class. The second was my holy grail, my golden
dream: to go to West Point.
Then a terrible
thing happened: I got everything I ever
wanted. Watch out when this happens
to you. I won the race to nowhere. Yay.
Now: West Point is
a wonderful place if you like military perfection, people screaming at you,
marching all the time, firing automatic weapons with hints of much larger ones
to come, and the possibility of live combat some day (whether or not you agree
with American foreign policy). You on a
conveyor belt to violence, and you don’t even know it. Aside from being unable to take orders,
smirking when people yelled at me, and hating regimentation, I loved it at West Point. The
uniforms were fantastic, and great with the ladies. But I also had a very important and terrible
realization. I wasn’t there for me; I
was there for my father. I was living
his dream, not mine, and I wasn’t going to get any closer to him by doing
it. I was living in an upside down
world, and I wasn’t going to get the love I wanted by following his dream. So I did something that was very painful—is
painful to this very day, though it’s a deep and good pain because it came with
self discovery. My great decision: I
dropped out of West Point, and the race to
nowhere. I went in search of my
authentic self. I quit something really
big, and it hurt. It hurt others; it
hurt my father. Oh, and by the way,
nobody at the twenty-five year reunion seemed to remember, or care, that I was
the valedictorian, or that I dropped out of West Point. I felt exactly the same way.
When my dream of
being a West Point graduate and an army
officer died, a new dream was born—almost instantaneously. It is often when you fail that you find the
true terms of your success. That new
dream, a new story, would lead me to divinity school and the priesthood; and eventually to you, my home at Kent on the other side of the country from California, and not very far from old West
Point, the proud citadel of my lost childhood.
In my first year
of divinity school, the dean of my seminary told us something strange and
mysterious. He said we should make all
of our study into a form of prayer. To make all of our study into a prayer. This idea was the exact opposite of my
pre-West Point self. Everything then was
an insane competition where a bad grade (like an A-) was an indication of my
worth as a human being.
Make your study
into a form of prayer.
How can you do
this?
Well, here’s a
place to start in your thinking. During my
first year at Kent,
a young man named Jon Geller was diagnosed with bone cancer. He played center for Coach Marble on a team
that eventually won the New England Championship. But football was over for Jon in preseason;
when his cancer was discovered after he broke his shoulder during
practice. Jon had to leave Kent to take a medical leave for chemotherapy
treatments at home in Montreal. Jon wasn’t facing college admissions stress
anymore, or the nose guard across the line.
He was facing the ultimate test that we will all face. And the gritty, determined young man fought
his cancer, with every fiber of his being.
This is a happy story because Jon went into remission. He returned to Kent; not to be a football player,
but to be a student. To be a human
being. To just be. In the spring of
his senior year, before graduation, Jon spoke in chapel about his journey, back
to life as we know it. You could have
heard a pin drop in this chapel. At the
end of his chapel talk, he gave two Thanksgivings to God. The first will surprise you. Jon said he was grateful for being able to do
homework again. To read, to write, to
think, to do math problems, to draw, to understand the world around him. Jon had learned how to make studying into a
form of prayer. His second Thanksgiving
was for friendship. You never know how
important your friends are until your life is on the line. Being a friend is one of the most important
human vocations. Be kind to each
other.
Make your life
into a prayer of gratitude, completely in the moment. People will notice something different about
you, almost instantly, a change in the air, a wonderful disturbance in the
force. This is called peace of mind, the
change that comes over you when your authentic self is born. It is God
incarnate, but you probably won’t even need to use that word. Being
will be enough.
Beyond even
approaching your studies with a new heart, make your entire life into a form of
prayer. We were made for so much more
than the life we’re living.
Let’s give the new
a chance to live. To just be, in each of
us.
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