TALKING
Reflections on what happened long ago, what's happening now, and what is yet to come.
Saturday, August 30, 2025
A Teacher Forever
Friday, May 31, 2024
Honor
Convocation 1997
I appreciate this opportunity to address you,
honored students, on what l think, upon reflection, much of the teaching I've
done at Calvin boils down to.
It gives me particular pleasure that my
youngest daughter is also among the honored and that I may share this final
lesson with her too.
|
|
VOICES
I have read and taught
literature most of my life. And literature, as you must have discovered too,
speaks to us through many voices. It's those voices that compelled my attention
already when I was but a child. It's those voices that have fascinated me always,
even as they enlightened, entertained, angered, moved, and nourished me. I want
to tell you about two of them, for they contain nearly all the others. One I
shall call the Voice of Earth, and the other the Voice of Heaven.
They're the voices of
my teachers. Listen, for they're your teachers too.
“There once was a wise
Teacher who imparted knowledge to the people.
He pondered and
searched to find just the right words, so that what he said would be right and
true.
And this is what he
said:
I wanted to see what
was worthwhile for us to do under heaven during the few days of our lives.
I undertook great
projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and
parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I owned more herds and
flocks than anyone else. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the
treasures of kings and far-away places. I acquired the delights of many women
and became greater than all others around me.
I denied myself
nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.
But when I surveyed
all that my hands had done, and what I had toiled to achieve, I found that
everything was meaningless, a chasing after wind.
So I hated life. I
hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, all the things into which
I had poured my effort and skill. What do we get for all our toil and anxious
striving with which we labor under the sun? Aren't all our days of work touched
by pain and grief? Even at night our minds do not rest. This too is
meaningless.
For death ends all of
it. Neither the foolish nor the wise will long be remembered.
I looked and saw all
the oppression that was taking place under the sun. I saw the tears of the
oppressed--and they have no comforter; power was on the side of the oppressors.
Better not to be born
than to see the evil that is done under the sun.
I looked and saw the
righteous get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked get what the righteous
deserve.
All this, I say, is
meaningless, a chasing after wind.
I saw wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner.
The sleep of a simple laborer is sweeter than that of a rich man whose
abundance permits him no sleep.
Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.
As goods increase, so does consumption. And of what benefit is
it to the owner except to feast his eyes.
For as we come, so we depart. We can take nothing from our labor
that we can carry in our hand. All come from dust, and to dust all return.”
(Ecclesiastes)
When the Teacher had spoken, the people pondered its
meaning--the meaninglessness of life.
Have you pondered it too? Have you wondered, "what if it's
true?"
The voice is familiar to you: you encounter it in your
classrooms and in your dorm rooms, the voice that emerges from ancient
scriptures as well as the contemporary novel and film and the latest rock
lyric.
Listen to the voice of Goethe's Faust sum up the meaninglessness
of his education:
Faust: I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology
All through and through with ardor keen!
Here now I stand, poor fool, and see
I'm just as wise as formerly.
Am called a Master, even Doctor too,
And now I've nearly ten years
through
Pulled my students by their
noses to and fro
And up and down, across,
about,
And see there's nothing we
can know!
That all but burns my heart right out. (Goethe,
Faust, 1, 354)
Listen to the voice in TS Eliot's Wasteland lament about this
"world of broken images,...where there's fear in a handful of dust--where
many are born to idleness, to frittered lives and empty bottles and squalid
deaths."
Listen to Macbeth exclaim over the ruins of his once-noble life:
...all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle. Life is but a walking shadow,
A poor player that struts and
frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing!"
Listen to "Dust in the
Wind" by Kansas:
All my dreams pass before my eyes a curiosity
Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind, ...just a
drop of water in an endless sea
All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see
Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind
Have you pondered it? The meaninglessness?
I think you have!
All of us are painfully aware that Brian DeWall is not among us
tonight. That Matt Remein and Lorie Powell are not here.
(Brian was killed in a car
accident and the others were seriously injured.)
All of us know something of
the shock of hearing what we cannot bear to hear: someone we know, someone we
love has died; someone is critically injured; someone has been violated; some
unspeakable human atrocity has been inflicted on the innocent. When such news
reaches us, the rational mind shuts down before that blank wall of
incomprehension, and the heart goes numb under the icy grip of death and
disaster.
Yes, you have pondered it, we all have, when the voice under the
sun said: meaningless!
Who can look back on this 20th century and not feel anguish at
the sickeningly twisted and broken figures that have littered the path of our
human journey. Who does not feel " the void of unfulfilled lives that have
been tossed forth from the womb only to fail."
Who has not felt the poison of meaninglessness seep into one's
own heart at times, even and maybe especially at age 20.
Of course you have.
And yet, we cannot accept ourselves as mere dice thrown out of a
cup. Like the Ancient Teacher, we think we ought to be more than a handful of
dust.
A voice that is easily lost in the din of Earth voices says we
are. It's the voice of another Teacher, with a Word from Heaven.
“This Teacher from the beginning was himself the Word, and the
Word was God.
He lived for a while among us, full of grace and truth.
Those who believed His Word received the right to become
children of God.”
And this is what He said:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. The truth will set you
free. Come, follow me.
Whoever follows me
will have the light of life. You are the light of the world; see to it that the
light within you is not darkness.
You cannot serve both God and Money. Be on your guard against
all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his
possessions. For where your treasure is, there is your heart also.
If anyone wants to be first, he must be the servant of all.
Love the Lord God with all your heart, with all your mind, and
with all your strength. Love one another. Love your enemies.
My mother and brothers are those who hear God's Word and put it
into practice.
Those who believe have everlasting life.”
The Teacher spoke, and his words had authority, for he came from
God.
Many pondered the meaning of his words--the meaning of life and
death.
Have you pondered it too? Have you wondered, "what if it's
true?"
Some of those who believed, like Stephen, a man full of God's
grace and power, did great wonders among the people. Or like Barnabas, who,
full of the Holy Spirit and faith, brought a great number of people to the
Lord.
And some who heard the Teacher's words, like Peter and Paul,
began to talk to others. They talked about the love of God; they said:
“The Father of compassion and the God of all comfort comforts us
in all our troubles, so that we can comfort others with God's comfort.
Nothing will be able to separate us from God's love.”
And they talked about the need to love each other. They said: “If
we love each other, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. The
only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. So let us love
one another deeply, from the heart; not with words or tongue but with actions
and in truth.”
They said, “we are created in Christ Jesus to do good works. For
the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power. We must live as
peacemakers who raise a harvest of righteousness. We must share with God's
people who are in need. If our enemy is hungry we must feed him; if he is thirsty,
we must give him something to drink. We must overcome evil with good.”
The Teacher's words echoed through the centuries. Echoed in
novels and sermons and drama and hymns and oratorios. Echoed in actions, as
some began to feed the hungry, began to comfort the oppressed, tried to make
straight what was crooked, built churches and hospitals and schools.
Built Calvin College.
We're here tonight at Calvin College to celebrate God's gift of
good minds and to honor you for using that gift with distinction. Now, there
are voices under the sun that encourage you to excel because it's in your own
best self-interest--it will lead to enhanced personal status and security. And
there are other Earth voices that would have you abandon your pursuit of
excellence for self-indulgence, or even for despair in the face of ultimate
meaninglessness.
The Word from heaven is different.
It tells us that this is our
Father's world, and that all of what we are and what is under the sun belongs
to him. And if you believe that, you get up each morning to use your gifts
we're celebrating, because they're God's gifts, gifts for learning to create
beautiful music and stirring poetry and compelling art; gifts for preparing to
distinguish yourself in science and theology and education and business; gifts
for preparing to build magnificent structures and rockets that go beyond the
moon; gifts for preparing to join all those who want to take good care of this
fragile earth.
In every Calvin classroom you are challenged to use and develop
your gifts in ways that honor the Giver and that bless his creation.
But like the Ancient Teacher, we hear the voice of Earth, and we
too are so easily tempted. Our hearts are so easily fooled. We like personal
success and all its perks too. We like to build empires for ourselves. We so
easily become mere moneymaking machines for the acquisition of more status
symbols. We listen to the voice of Donald Trump a week ago as he asked 300
fifth graders in the Bronx:
“You know what you have to do to live in a big beautiful
mansion?
You have to work hard, get through school. You have to go out
and get a great job, make a lot of money, and live the American Dream.
And you're going to have fun doing it. It's a lot of fun.”
We like to live what everyone else seems to live for.
"We like to turn," as T.S. Eliot put it,
“To the grandeur of our mind and the glory of our action,
To arts and inventions and
daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness ...”
But then we remember the Ancient Teacher whose chasing after
wind left him a hollow man who had eaten the bread that did not satisfy and
drank the water that did not quench. For the deepest need of our human heart,
the voice from Heaven tells us, is to live for ultimate meaning, and for the
joy that comes not from getting, but from giving.
The voices of Earth, in literature and life, have much to teach
us. They are part of our Father's world.
That's why at Calvin College we try to understand Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer and Hemingway. We note the oppression that is taking place under
the sun. We are challenged by the track "Little Sister" sung by
JEWEL:
“..we gotta start feeding our souls/not our addictions and
afflictions of pain/ we gotta start feeding our souls/I wish I could save them
from all their delusions/all the confusion/of a nation that starves for
salvation/God only knows that drugs/are all we know of love/”
We are profoundly touched by Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf who
wanted music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, passion instead of
foolery, but found no home in this trivial world of ours, and who over
"the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance,
while suffering its seeming meaninglessness and living its seeming madness, and
who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation
and God's presence. "
We ignore nothing in this fallen world. For nothing is
meaningless under the sun.
Not beauty or goodness or grace or love. Nor evil. Brian's life
was not meaningless; neither is his death. Pain is not meaningless--especially
the pain so deep that faith can't get around it; it has to go through it and
discover that even in the deepest, blackest pit, the God who is acquainted with
grief will be there. And it is good to weep when God weeps with us.
If you have heard the Word from heaven and believe it, there is
much to do under the sun that is meaningful. There are classes to attend, term
papers to write, portfolios to prepare, books to read, friendships to develop,
fun to enjoy, beauty to savor (Gushee, Mr. CT).
And there's a world out there, where too many “cry like infants
in the night,” (as Tennyson put it) “cry like infants for the light, and with
no language but a cry." Or as E.A. Robinson put it, “there's a world out
there that's a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered
infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks”; where too many think of
Nike as a more powerful symbol than the cross.
Calvin College was built to prepare you for your place and your
mission in that world, The mission of claiming all that's under the sun for
Christ and for doing his work in this world which he loved and for which he
died.
Seeking to transform a culture that practices its
entertainment--sex without love and violence without conscience--to transform
this culture into communities that value honor and respect for another.
To transform the American Dream of material consumption into
MLK's dream of equality and dignity and brotherhood.
To transform power brokers into peacemakers.
To transform the voices of disdain for this life into a
rip-roaring celebration of all the beauty and joy and goodness that by God's
grace still find their way into both the light and the dark places of this
scarred and broken world.
That's our calling, because
this is our Father's world, and we are his children. That calling will require
the most gifted minds and most committed hearts you can offer -(to paraphrase
T. S. Eliot)-to bring all your gifts/ to bring all your powers for life, for
dignity, grace, and order to His service.
Honor students at Calvin College, listen to the voice that has
the words of ultimate significance. Discover the ways in which to love and
serve your God and this world with all the gifts of your mind and of your
heart.
Friday, November 8, 2019
Worlds of Wanwood
The piece that follows is an excerpt of a column I wrote during the fall season back some thirty years ago. The falling leaves during the last week reminded me of it.
It focuses on the Bible teacher, John Vroom, whose teaching at Omni Christian High has not gone well, especially on this particular morning. Tom Graham, a brilliant student, again made him feel uncomfortably inadequate and even defeated. He found himself empty of authority.
Outside, the early winter sun reflected brightly off nature’s overnight dusting of snow.
Inside, Vroom remained oblivious to the scene and the sounds just outside the room window.
But there, under the large oak tree that in summer shaded Omni’s faculty room, Lucy DenDenker and her English class had gathered.
The students crowded around Lucy, some holding up a wet handful of fallen leaves whose flaming orange and bright yellows had long ago turned into muted browns and blacks.
A few students pulled themselves up onto the lower branches, a thin layer of snow cascading down as they climbed higher.
The class grew quiet as Lucy’s clear voice began to recite:
When yellow leaves. or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie…
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Over Omni’s oak unleaving?
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, not spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Lucy DenDenker, surrounded by her students, stopped him.
The students’ faces, solemn and attentive, stopped him. He followed the upward gaze of some, and then he too saw where the voice was coming from.
Tom Graham, perched halfway up the oak, face serious and intent, delivered the next lines of his version of Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
It is Margaret, Kenneth, Janet, Robert that you mourn for.
Quietly, Lucy’s class gathered and began to move back toward their classroom.
Quietly, John Vroom stood by the window and waited for the light to reach his darkened soul.
Monday, July 29, 2019
THE HOUSE WE LIVE IN: a literary exploration
And there are. Each one with a different voice. The voices are talking about the house, about everyone in it, about everything that has happened, that is happening, that might happen, that should happen. Some voices are vulgar and profane; some whine; some are angry and hateful; some are shocking. And some voices are many of these things at once. |
You’re spell-bound. You begin to visit these rooms often now. Gradually you realize that many people in the house do the same. You talk together about your visits to these rooms. You discover that some go there to escape the confines of their life in the house; some to be informed; some to be inspired; some to be provoked to critical thought and gain understanding; some to be delighted and to enjoy; some to glory in the sordid and sensational; some to glory in the right, the true, the just.
Like the voice of an old woman, 90, suffering from inoperable cancer, facing the end of her life. But she’s terrified of death. Nothing in her life has made her ready to accept its end. She thinks back on the story of that long life: the story of a young girl who had to grow up without a mother; whose father was cold and dictatorial and proud; her defiance of this father by marrying the town’s reject; the unhappy years with a man whose body she desired but whose mind and manners she despised; the decision to leave her husband with her youngest son, whom she loved deeply in her heart but never expressed with her mouth; later, the son’s return to his father, to tend him as he lay dying; then the accidental death of that son for which she felt personal guilt, but for which she was unable to shed tears and which she was unable to accept.
A sad story of broken relationships, of alienation, of unrepentant pride. A story without warmth or tenderness for there had always been that overpowering fear of weakness. Now darkness is closing in, and with it the terror from never having lived in the light.
She tries to run away from it all and finds shelter in an abandoned house. There, exhausted in body and spirit, she faces her self-inflicted blindness and makes her confession to another wandering soul: “I had a son, and he died. The night he died, I was transformed to stone and never wept at all. I’d had so many things to say to him, so many things to put to rights.” She begins to cry, her first tears. Still she insists: “I don’t accept it. It angers me, and will until I die.”
But then her prideful spirit breaks down completely, and she is able to admit that she treated her son wrongly. Suddenly the sense of his forgiveness floods her soul with peace. She’s changed when she’s found and hospitalized. When the minister stops for a visit, she asks him to sing, “All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with joyful voice. Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell; Come ye before him and rejoice.” When he finishes, a veil lifts from her eyes, blinded too long. She’s choked with the incommunicable years, everything that happened and was spoken or not spoken. The knowledge comes upon her so forcefully, so shatteringly—the knowledge that she must always, always have wanted simply to rejoice.
Her voice, profoundly penitent, speaks to you: “How is it I never could? Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine of even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some brake of proper appearance—oh, proper to whom? When did I ever speak the heart’s truth? Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.”
At the end of her wilderness now, the old woman is thirsty. She takes the glass offered her, and drinks the water, and dies. *
And you—you return to your own life, sobered, and you pray God to save you from walking in darkness, eyes blinded to the truths within you and around you.
When you go again, you hear the voice of a man who learned long ago that life for many is a battle for survival. As a youth he has to steal for food on the table at night. Often he gets caught and jailed. He watches his mother fall ill, grow weak, and fade away, for there is no money for medicine. When he marries, it is to a woman who has no capacity for affection. They manage to raise a sickly son on proper nutrition, which they are able to provide with money from stolen goods. Work Is scarce and pays but little. Often there is no work at all. Eventually the little family of three lands in a cabin by a lake, and the man learns how to catch fish for a living. It takes years before he is able to make it into a livelihood. But his hopes for his son keep him going. He wants his son to have a better life than he has had. His son grows up into a sturdy, independent young man. Then war breaks out. The fisherman tries to ignore it as much as he can. He wants nothing to do with any man or people or ideology that would curtail the freedom of others. And he gives shelter to anyone whose life and freedom is endangered by another. Thus his cabin on the lake becomes a hiding place.
One night the Germans raid his place. They find no one, but they take the fisherman in for interrogation. They tell him they have his son too, and that his son will die unless the Germans get the names of those who are involved in the underground. Nothing is more important to the fisherman than the life of his son. Yet he refuses to tell what he knows. When he discovers that his son is already dead, the will within him to live dies too. They try to beat the wanted information out of him, but he is silent. They torture him repeatedly to break this man who had not been broken by an absent mother and a cruel father, by poverty, exploitation, discrimination, humiliation, and a loveless marriage. But they cannot break him. Though life has trapped him again and again, his dignity and pride and self-respect as a human being have survived.
He gives the Nazis nothing. So they take his life. The voice of the fisherman is stilled. **
You stay and you listen because you hear more now than the offense of his language. You hear him being friendly to the friendless; being critical of messy people who have bad manners, who profane love by reducing it to sex, who humiliate the underdog, who slobber over sentimental movies while neglecting their kids right beside them, who are devoid of conscience or human decency. In this creature who is no longer a child and not yet an adult, you hear the voice of a moral critic. And you begin to look beyond his posturing and see his kindness and generosity in action, his respect for the humble, his love of good books, his need for clean, white things, his pursuit of purity.
You’re shamed by his capacity to care about others; here’s an adolescent who is supposed to be self-centered and egotistic, and what does he think of? About what will happen to the lowly ducks in Central Park when winter comes; about what will happen to the innocent girls when not-so innocent boys take them out; about what will happen to young children when they see the f-word scrawled on school walls. You hear an anxious frustration in the voice: “I thought how the little kids would see it….”
He rubs it out; then finds another. “I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on. It wouldn’t come off. It’s hopeless anyway. If you had a million years to do it, you couldn’t rub out even half of them.”
You’re shamed again. You’d been ready to write this kid off as a foul-mouthed jerk, emerging now as a would-be saint. You listen to his voice again, wistful and urgent at the same time: “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. … And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff. … That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. … that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.” ****
When you return to your part of the house, you realize that this lonely, lost voice has given you more to be Christian with than you had before. Again, you remember the story of Humpty Dumpty, and the words of another voice you’ve listened to: “When God had made the Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him down to nothing but sparks, but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb.” *****
You know that the bond between daughter and daddy has always been close and strong and special. You hear their voices now, and the listening room in this ramshackle house of yours is hallowed by them. Listen:
“ 'Lena, I had so much I wanted to tell you. All the things I thought we’d have time for later.’ He bit down on the pain with animal teeth, then his face drained back to calmness. ‘Couldn’t remember to live every day like it was the last one…. I want you to get Tater back to his folks.’ He held her as her body stiffened and broke into helpless tremors. No. Impossible. Her head slashed back and forth against him. ‘I won’t do it.’ ‘For my sake,’ he said patiently. ‘Don’t grieve now, Lena. This is wonderful, that we’re getting to say last things to each other. Most people don’t get to, or can’t. It’s what I held out for. So I could tell you how much I love you. And Claudie. And the babies. And thank you. For all you’ve given me.’ ”
For what are stories for if it is isn’t also to make you try to catch the Humpty Dumpty’s falling from the wall, if it isn’t also to touch the tumbling mud-balls and help them to show their shine a little and make them sing again?