By Sarah Dugal
It’s official: Spring is in full bloom in New Canaan! The daffodils at Irwin park are stunning, Allegra is on everyone’s nightstand, Galas-galore are taking place around town, and the seniors are wearing goggles 24/7. With college decision day (May 1st) in the rear-view, and graduations just around the corner, I’ve found myself thinking about one of my favorite commencement speeches, delivered back in 2005 by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College.
I first became familiar with Wallace through his 1996 novel, “The Infinite Jest,” which I read as a second-year at the University of Virginia – and found to be depressing, beautiful, fascinating and dripping with religiosity. His rather-unorthodox speech, “This is Water,” I found to be much the same.
In it, Wallace challenged his audience with a statement that still resonates deeply, 20 years later: “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.”
This observation stuck with me for years: the observation that we all seem to revolve our lives around something. That we are all religious, placing our confidence in one thing or another to produce meaning, value, identity and belonging, whether it be our academic or athletic achievements, jobs, relationships, wealth, etc. That – whether we’ve been to service recently or not in years – we spent yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that worshipping. Our schedules, commitments, and finances typically point to, as Wallace puts it, “how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”
I wonder if this time of year puts that reality on display more prominently than others, both in my own life and the life of our community – through the lacrosse games, the AP tests, the benefit luncheons & the exchange of Summer plans. We are busy assigning value.
The tricky thing, Wallace identifies, about these forms of worship “is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious… They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day.” I may feel as though I’m exercising personal freedom, building my life, and yet, I’m tethered to my image, status, and accolades. The more I have, the more I want. We are free, as Wallace puts it, “to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.”
It’s here that Wallace arrives at an unlikely suggestion – as an unreligious intellectual – that, “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.”
Why? There is something life-giving to the conscious effort of diverting our gaze intentionally to something bigger than ourselves – especially that which grows our empathy and compassion for others. In the counter-cultural orientation toward love, fellowship & unity, we experience a different kind of freedom – a freedom from ourselves.
“But of course there are all different kinds of freedom,” Wallace reminds his audience. “And the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”
I wonder if it’s this freedom that the Apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” (Galatians 5:1).
Sarah Dugal serves as the Area Director for Young Life in New Canaan. Young Life is a global, ecumenical non-profit that exists to reinforce that adolescents matter through relational youth ministry, create approachable spaces for students to explore faith, and model servant leadership in local communities. To learn more, visit NewCanaanYoungLife.Org.
