By way of a brief personal update, I just thought I would let any readers who do not regularly email me know that on January 5, I got engaged to my beautiful, caring girlfriend, Jackie. I am obviously, ecstatic.
Additionally, if you like the writing here, stay tuned. It looks like I am going to have my first book published in January of 2009, and I may have news about other writing coming shortly. As soon as more details are available, I will post them here.
My first real crush was in eighth grade. There was a girl in my homeroom – we’ll call her Lisa – who demanded all my attention. I was the new boy in school, and she was the popular (gasp!) cheerleader. I thought she was a picture of adolescent perfection. Her voice was like spring, and her smile was a crisp Sunday morning. She spoke with a Georgia belle’s drawl, and she always managed to dazzle in a zip-up Gap sweatshirt and blue jeans. I didn’t have a chance with her, and I knew it. But it didn’t matter. Every word from Lisa lifted my spirit. Every look from Lisa set my heart pounding. I didn’t have a lot of friends or romantic prospects, but I had hope that one day Lisa would like me.
Time wore on. My crush persisted three years of high school, more than one battle with acne, and what seemed like an endless cycle of teenage angst. I grew taller and thinner, joined the basketball team, made a few friends, and settled into harassing teachers and causing my parents endless heartburn. At times I chased other girls, but Lisa was always there – a shadow in the corner of my heart – and one summer, after my sophomore year, we went on our first date.
It would be heartwarming to report that Lisa and I are still together. We’re not. Our tumultuous teenage relationship was scattered, overly dramatic, and remarkably uneventful. We went out a few times, dating off-and-on for more than a year; but within months the veneer of my infatuation had worn thin revealing Lisa to be a pretty, but ultimately ordinary teenage girl. She wasn’t the angel I’d hoped for. She was instead, a confused, curious, and emotional kid just like me; and by my senior year we had both moved on to other people and other things.
But to this day thoughts of Lisa and eighth grade bring me a smile. Strange, isn’t it? I haven’t thought about dating Lisa in years, but, forever, that memory of my first adolescent crush will bring with it thoughts of limitless, foolish, brilliant hope
How do you capture a feeling like that? Emily Dickinson tried, writing:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
William Shakespeare lauded hope writing, “True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings; Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.” The New Testament ranks it as one of the three primary virtues, and at some point in our lives we have all known its beauty. We’ve all heard the little bird’s song and chased it carelessly into unknown places and outlandish dreams. It invariably carried us through college art classes and fourth grade piano recitals. It lifted us over family illnesses and shined light on neglected childhoods. But it is, in too many cases, an increasingly rare phenomenon. It crops up time-to-time – watching the sunrise over a clear blue sea, gazing out over a new country, or looking tearfully into a newborn son’s or daughter’s wrinkly, unburdened eyes. Beyond these moments, however, it rarely sustains us. Hope isn’t something we practice. It feels unguarded or cliché.
What keeps us “meaner creatures” from simply adopting this virtue that could make us kings? What makes us afraid to grant that little bird a perch in our souls?
Right now, it’s half past midnight. I’m sitting in a room in one of the most brilliant cities in one of the freest and most beautiful countries in the world. I am surrounded by love, drowning in happiness, and now, more than ever, hopeful about the future. Not because hope just sprouted up, short-lived and unexpected. Not because good fortune has fallen in my lap or life has grown easy and meek. But because I’ve decided I can’t live without hope, I don’t want to live without it; and it is only through that most wistful of virtues – foolish, unguarded, fought for hope – that I can find persistent joy.
Sometimes I don’t think it matters at all what we hope for. What matters instead is simply that our hope is good and true and pure. What matters is that we have chosen to look forward optimistically, to imagine life in colors more vivid than our dreams, and to charge forward, smiling, into all of this world’s uncertainties.
My first commencement speech, as valedictorian of a small high school in Columbus, Georgia, was a catastrophic failure. As almost every first-time commencement speaker, I was convinced the opportunity to address my classmates and their families and friends represented my chance to change the world. In a written draft I waxed elegant about our generation’s “unique” opportunities and advantages, and I carefully crafted passages to make the audience laugh and cry.
Then a funny thing happened. Our salutatorian gave an almost identical speech and in the middle of the ceremony, and I began to question the validity of my own statements. My mind racing as she parsed through her carefully prepared remarks, I worked out a plan to change my speech on the spot. When I stood up to talk, I began by reading from my prepared draft, then, in the midst of speaking, I crumpled my draft at the podium, stopped talking, and tossed the paper containing my “eloquent” musings somewhere into a potted plant behind me and to the left.
I don’t have to tell you, the impromptu speech that followed was not a monumental success. Faced with several hundred expectant faces and the bright lights of the stage, the only topic I could think of was “fear”; and ten minutes later, there wasn’t a person in the audience who hadn’t experienced the fear that another student speaker was waiting in the wings.
In spite of that failure, however, I count my commencement speech, at least partially, a success. I failed that night because I took a chance at the last moment, and that failure did more to teach me about my future adventures in public speaking than any widely applauded address I’ve given. It wasn’t the first or last time I failed at something, and sometime around my sophomore year of college I realized that all those failures were and are a good thing. Failure itself is not the catastrophe you and I often envision. Rather it is a virtue, a choice, and an opportunity.
Everybody fails. As a boy, Thomas Edison’s teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. As a soldier, former president Abraham Lincoln entered the Blackhawk War a Captain, and came out a private. Ben Affleck made Gigli. F. Scott Fitzgerald flunked college, Steven Spielberg was a high school drop-out, and Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. “Never give up, never surrender”…and never show the prime minister a complex fraction or he whimpers like a baby.
Yet these men (and many women like them) were not destroyed by their failures but instead defined by the fact that they recovered from those failures well and were brave enough to fail in the first place. As NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin commented in a commencement address at MIT, “Not experiencing any failure in your life isn’t a sign of perfection; rather it is a sign that your goals aren’t bold enough.” Failure, in its purest form, represents an unsuccessful attempt to push the boundaries of your current level of knowledge or accomplishment, and it is in failure that you learn, live, and grow. No one fails at sitting at home watching Oprah or lounging in Starbucks sipping Café Latte! No one fails jeering Kobe Bryant or gawking at Britney Spears. People fail when they take chances that might be beyond their reach.
Almost a decade ago, Michael Jordan had a commercial in which he addressed his failures. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,” the Air Apparent declared. “I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life—and that is why I succeed.” His mentality is spot-on. You’re going to fail. We all fail. Do it, move on, and succeed.
Too often in life we are heralded for our accomplishments and maligned for our failures. The very prospect of failing often deters us from taking chances, and we end up living stagnant, predictable lives mired in the belief that only those things that are easy or sure are worth doing. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Failure is a virtue. It represents in every person an attempt to push boundaries and take risks – and it is often on a road littered with failure that we find our path to success.
Note: This post is adapted from a slightly more successful commencement address I delivered at Berry College in 2004.
Cal Ripken was, to use a cliché phrase, baseball’s perennial “Iron Man”. A soft-spoken shortstop and third baseman from Havre de Grace, Maryland, Ripken played 2,632 consecutive games for the Baltimore Orioles between 1982 and 1998. He was a stellar player. Over the course of his career he hit 431 home runs on 3184 hits with a batting average of .271. He was a 19-time all-star; and, though he was no Babe Ruth or Roger Clemens, his achievements on the field would have placed him among the baseball elite even if he had missed one or two games a year. But instead, Ripken never missed a game. He always showed up. He always played hard. And MLB fans voted Ripken’s record-breaking 2131st consecutive game Major League Baseball’s “Most Memorable Moment” because it represented a heroic achievement in what Ripken is truly known for: dependability.
In college, I had one motto: work hard and show up on time. I didn’t always live that motto, and I still don’t. Somewhere short of Ripken-like consistency, I slept through a few classes and turned in the occasionally late paper. Now I show up late for dates and sometimes give less than my best effort in my writing endeavors (as you may have gathered from the frequency of my blog posts). But I generally give opportunities my best shot and make deadlines because I know that even if I’m not the smartest or most talented guy in the room, being a dependable person will open additional opportunities to me that even raw ability might not.
Almost all of us have observed this concept at work. Think of the respected people you know – whether they are construction workers or corporate lawyers. Are they late to meetings? Do you have to check in with them to make sure they are working hard? Do they ever stand up friends or shirk assignments? Almost invariably, the answer to all of these questions is no, because in all of their personal and professional relations, they have respect. They respect the time and resources of the people around them and the obligation their abilities and opportunities place on them to fulfill their own potential.
That is an aggressive series of statements, but I believe it’s true. When we are consistently late to meetings, dinner dates, or dentist appointments we are disrespecting those with whom we are supposed to meet. We are, in a sense, saying that our time is more important their time, and that they should operate not on the preordained deadlines on which we collectively agreed but on the capriciousness of our own personal schedules. This not only wastes their time, it creates a vicious cycle. Deadlines become permanently flexible, and all parties begin to ignore them. The efficiency of scheduling is lost because no one knows when someone else will waste his or her time, and each person begins to operate with disregard for other members of the group. Punctuality is how business people and friends get things done in a world of limited time, and perpetual lateness is an affront to that effort, apart from having negative implications for our honesty in agreeing to a meeting time in the first place.
Similarly, hard work is fundamentally an issue of respect. Just as punctuality is respectful of other people’s time, hard work is respectful of their resources. When someone offers me a paid job or the capital to start a business, they are, in a sense trusting me to make the best use of that job or capital and to take that responsibility seriously. They do not expect me to exceed my own abilities, but they do expect me to perform in accordance with my abilities by working hard. And by working hard and respecting the resources they have devoted to me I earn their trust – a trust that can lead me to additional responsibility and opportunity.
Also, hard work is respectful of one’s self. In this world, we’ve all been given talents, a social position, the benefits of family or some other endowment that confers on us opportunity. We earn that opportunity, by fully utilizing those endowments – by making the most of them – and that can only be done through hard work. That doesn’t mean we have to work all the time, vacations are evil, or leisure time is anathema. It just means that out of respect for ourselves and the opportunities we’ve been given, we should make the most of those opportunities within reasonable limits in justice to the fact that they have been given to us in the first place.
Cal Ripken was a good baseball player because of his unbelievable athletic talent, but he was great because unlike 99.9% of the human population he cared enough to make the most of his abilities. When the Orioles needed him, he was always there. In practice and on the field he seized each opportunity; and while he didn’t have the hand-eye coordination of Tony Gwynn or the raw power of Barry Bonds, he became legend because unlike anyone before or sense he extracted every ounce of good from his talents and did so in a way that respected, inspired, and assured his fans, coaches, and teammates. One day, I’d like to be known for that kind of dependability; but it will take a lot to get there.
By way of a brief life update...
For those who do not already know, I have made the decision to attend the Harvard Business School this fall, and will be moving to Boston in late August. I will be there for 2-3 years pending a few other decisions. I am taking the summer off (leaving my current employer in late May) to write, relax, and prepare for my upcoming academic excursion.
If you have the overwhelming urge to commission me to write a book, essay, or article in that time, just let me know! I have comitted to a few additional writing assignments already, and I will post links here as anything is published.
With the release of the film Amazing Grace, people around the world are once again waking up to the legacy of songwriter and reformed slave trader John Newton. A man hardened by the soullessness of trafficking in souls, Newton eventually turned on the “peculiar institution” in a moment of clarity inspired by grace. Redirecting his energies to Christian service and the creative life, Newton inspired generations with his story, and with his legendary song, “Amazing Grace”:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.
In a very real sense, Newton had lived in darkness – blind to the humanity of the people he once enslaved – but then, in grace, he found clarity.
Have you ever had one of those “aha” moments? You’re confused. The fog descends, you are lost – then the blinders slip away. A truth you once rationalized becomes impossible to ignore, and suddenly, you have purpose, a calling, and conviction. In a moment you find clarity and the world falls into place.
But immediately, that clarity is tested, and you are tempted to fall out of the light. Your former certainty suddenly feels like a silly moment of exuberance or false hope. Either time wears on and you forget the reasoning that once seemed so convincing, or new information rises to test your faith. Forgetfulness, ambiguity, or wedges itself into your imagination and clarity falls away.
Those moments are tragic because they destroy the one thing that can inspire us to noble action. I have written about courage – action in defense of virtue; but there can be no courage without clarity. Before we can act on virtue, we must have clarity. From this clarity, we derive conviction, from conviction, the courage to act.
But how does one find clarity? We live in an age of moral obfuscation and rationalization (counterbalanced, I some places, by dangerous fundamentalism). There are alternative explanations for almost everything. It is easy to get lost, and question the correctness of one’s own conclusions. Certainly, there is room for self-doubt. We are fallible creatures with misleading emotions and hopelessly flawed capacities for reason and logic. But at the same time, we are thinking, moral creatures, and at some point we must drop anchor, stand for something, and make a leap of faith.
That’s the best I can come up with. Take virtue seriously, think about it hard, and find a place to make your stand.
And that leads me to what I believe to be the second component of clarity (after careful consideration and the will to take a stand): memory.
It is easy to forget the things that matter to us, and easier still to forget parts of those things – allowing what was truth to be twisted into lies or rationalized until our previous moral conviction inspires nothing but a flaccid apathy. And so, memory of our moments of clarity is essential to the sustainability of that clarity. That is why thoughtful people journal and religious devotees memorize holy texts. The written word, unlike memory is unchangeable. It confronts us with our own inconsistencies and rationalizations by holding firm to its original form. And memorization – word-for-word, perfect and without paraphrase – is a constant reminder that there is knowledge outside and beyond our changeable thoughts, and an aid when our ability to reason and decide fails. When in our moments of doubt we are confronted not by a vague recollection of our principles but by the written word or sound memory, our clarity persists, our conviction remains, and our courage is fortified.
Skepticism is my natural inclination. I see every side of an argument, and as a result, I fail to take any side with conviction. I find time for everything but recording my thoughts on paper and committing my principles to memory; but if I want to be a man of courage, I must first be a man of clarity; and perhaps, by grace, I’ll learn to see.
Val Kilmer’s performance in the movie Tombstone is legendary. As the gunfighter Doc Holliday, Kilmer perfected an easy attitude of dangerous indifference. Holliday was a holy terror with a razor sharp wit. He frightened others because his disinterested façade concealed a violent interior ruthless, quick to act, and (due to fatal illness) with little to lose. To hear him speak, most of his life had been a purely self interested thing; but in Tombstone, he was a model of courage. That’s because in Tombstone he finally found something selfless to fight for: friendship. Wyatt Earp was his friend (one of his only friends), and Holliday proved willing to face anything, even death, to guard that friendship. In the face of overwhelming odds, utter hopelessness, and excruciating pain, Holliday found moral conviction in the defense of his friend.
That is courage, I think: a willingness to act in defense of virtue. In a sense, it is the enabler of all other virtues. It is the conviction that virtue matters on something more than an intellectual level, and that some principles are worth living and dying for. It is, perhaps, the most admired of virtues because it represents a conquest of fear, a denial of self that ultimately exalts self, and a completion of conviction – a period at the end of a passionate sentence. It inspires us because it is the portion of character that animates our better angels and forces us to recognize not those who preach principle, but those who practice it.
Think of our courageous heroes (a thoroughly redundant phrase). Their actions -- not thoughts – made them memorable and changed the world. Achilles taught the Greeks that glory, honor, friendship, and pride were more than talking points – they were beautiful, vitally important ideals. The Hebrew shepherd David, rising to face a giant, taught the Jews that faithfulness comes from trust, glory from trust to the point of action. Rosa Parks taught many Americans that it is not enough to talk about freedom – sometimes you have to stand. And movie heroes from Tombstone’s Doc Holliday to Daniel Kaffee in a Few Good Men have animated a generation trained to remember that understanding what is right and doing what is right are two totally different things.
But even with these examples, we still fail because we are short-sighted in the face of fear – we consider every cost of an action but the cost to our character and the cost to our memory. How many times, for instance, have you known what is right, and been too timid to act on that knowledge? How many times have you seen truth in jeopardy and sheepishly turned away? We constantly scare ourselves into behaving in a cowardly or calculating way rather than acting with courage in spite of the fact that we know our timidity can never lead to a fulfilling life. We know that when we look back at those we admire they were not the ones who lived long, safe, prosperous lives, but those who lived as if principle mattered, who lived diligently and defiantly in the face of fear.
What would happen if we learned from that example and from Achilles, Holliday, and Parks? What if in searching for truth we made our actions available to the defense of truth? How much would our times change? We still live in a world of injustice – broken homes, human trafficking, hungry kids, and pointless war – which courageous actions are we now willing to take?
At the end of the movie Tombstone, Doc Holliday is not rewarded for his courage, he fades into a painful death with only the friendships he fought for and the valor he gained to sustain him. But the lesson of Tombstone is that Holliday’s notoriety couldn’t be measured in its impact on his physical life, but in its impact on the quality of his existence, his legacy, and the lives that legacy changed.
This Friday I am embarking on a 2-3 month trip to the Middle East – The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in particular. I am very excited. I’ve never had the opportunity to make extensive travels abroad, and I have had little exposure to Middle Eastern culture. While I will be based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (along the Red Sea near Mecca), I have plans to visit Egypt and the United Arab Emirates; and I may have the opportunity to make weekend excursions into other neighboring locales as well.
This has two implications. First, if we’re friends, it will be slightly harder to contact me. I am still available via email, and I will be checking all my current voicemail numbers, etc. I’ll also be getting a Dubai number while I’m in the area.
Second, in order to keep this site devoted to virtue (and other soon or not soon-to-be-named topics), I am creating a new page on this blog entitled (creatively), Travel ex nihilo where I will post ruminations on my travels throughout the Middle East and elsewhere and occasional pictures. These posts will be updated with the same (in)frequency as the main page, and will be more personal in nature. Additionally, I may post quasi-travel related thoughts here on the main page.
That’s all for now. Wish me luck (I am still awaiting approval for my visa); and check back at Travel ex nihilo for my Middle Eastern updates.
In his extensive writing career, 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard used pseudonyms like he was Mick Jagger on world tour. Employing, at various times, nom de plumes as inauspicious as “Judge William” and as ostentatious as “Anti-Climacus”, the so-called father of existentialism masked even his greatest works (Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death) in the names of his fictitious personas. But when it came to his weighty deliberation on love, Works of Love, Kierkegaard removed the mask of anonymity. Penning that great work in his own name, the philosophical pride of Denmark seemed to acknowledge the deeply personal nature of his subject, creating one of history’s greatest explorations of the cardinal virtue. And it is in the Second Series of that treatise that Kierkegaard pens a brief definition of that ambiguous concept that I imagine to be another stepping stone on the path to perfect love – selflessness.
In the essay, “Love Does Not Seek Its Own”, Kierkegaard writes:
Love does not seek its own, for there are no mine and yours in love….
Justice is identified by its giving each his own, just as it also in turn claims its own. This means that justice pleads the cause of its own, divides and assigns, determines what each can lawfully call his own, judges and punishes if anyone refuses to make any distinction between mine and yours….—But sometimes a change intrudes, a revolution, a war, an earthquake, or some such terrible misfortune, and everything is confused. Justice tries in vain to secure for each person his own; it cannot maintain the distinction between mine and yours; in the confusion it cannot keep the balance and therefore throws away the scales – it despairs!
Terrible spectacle! Yet does not love in a certain sense, even if in the most blissful way, produce the same confusion?...Love is a revolution, the most profound of all, but the most blessed! So, then, with love, there is confusion; in this blissful confusion there is for the lovers no distinction between mine and yours. Wonderful! There are a you and an I, and there is no mine and yours! For without a you and an I, there is no love, and with mine and yours, there is no love; but “mine” and “yours” (these possessive pronouns) are, of course, formed from a “you” and an “I” and as a consequence, seem obliged to be present wherever there are a you and an I. This is indeed the case everywhere, but not in love, which is a revolution from the ground up. The more profound the revolution, the more completely the distinction “mine and yours” disappears, the more perfect is the love. Its perfection essentially depends upon its not becoming apparent that hidden at the bottom there has lain and still lies a distinction between mine and yours; therefore it depends essentially on the degree of the revolution. The more profound the revolution, the more justice shudders; the more profound the revolution, the more perfect is the love.
“The more profound the revolution, the more justice shudders; the more profound the revolution, the more perfect is the love.”
This is both counter-intuitive and powerful. As Westerners, we live in a society obsessed with justice. Our other premier philosophers – like Plato and Rawls – dedicated their greatest works to the concept of justice, to the perfection of justice. But in a simple turn of phrase, Kierkegaard flips the philosophical scales. Rather than exalting justice to the detriment of our deeper yearnings, he exalts that which defies and confuses justice with a power greater than justice. He shows us a deeper justice. He paints for us a picture of the pathway of love.
This is the other half of the parable, “The Prodigal Son”. When reading that story, I am always struck first by the patience and forgiveness of the father. His love is timeless and it is undaunted by the disrespect of the son. But when I look deeper, it always occurs to me that at the heart of the story is a deeper revolution than simple patience; and that at the heart of the father’s forgiveness, there is a blindness greater than forgiveness – there is a love rooted in selflessness, an utter disregard for the distinction between yours and mine.
If this isn’t apparent in his actions toward the prodigal son (e.g., relinquishing his property, sacrificing his best upon the son’s return); it is clear and bold in his statements to his elder son – the son who stayed home. That son became angered when the father accepted the prodigal son and welcomed him home with a party. That son had stayed with the father all along. He had worked steadfastly and respected his family. In every way he had obeyed, and when the younger son returns to accolades he fumes (Luke 15: 29-30):
Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf.
He is mad. He feels betrayed. He has obeyed but his brother, who should be outcast, receives honor.
In a way, we agree with the eldest son. Our sense of justice is violated. We empathize with the elder son’s plight. And then the father’s reply shows us where our own understanding of love falls short. In the very next verse, he says to the elder son:
My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours (emphasis mine). But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.
The elder son sees injustice, the father sees sons who are more important than justice. The elder son sees the waste of his father’s property, the father sees property that is nothing without sons. The elder son sees a mine and a yours –the waste of his by the antics of his brother – but the father sees no such distinction, for he knows that his love means a willingness to cede everything, even life itself, to these sons.
As Kierkegaard said, “…the more profound the revolution, the more perfect the love.”
Where, in our lives, does love make justice shudder? Where in our lives, is there a selflessness so great that the very idea of self – the basis of democracy! the calling card of the modern age! – simply melts away? I know in my life I remember snapshots of such love. I remember college nights at the Waffle House – a best friend who studied with me until the early hours of the mornings – and an unspoken agreement that neither one of us noticed or remembered who paid the bill. I remember gifts I’ve been given – paintings, shoulders to cry on, long days of wiffle ball, hour-long storybook sessions from a tired mom, and one Nintendo (when we didn’t have the money but I was a very sick little kid!) – that came from nowhere but the heart, and took everything the giver had. I remember the few times when my own sense of self melted – even if for a moment – into that blissful state where I really considered someone else better than myself. And I also remember how hard such a self-sacrificing state of mind is to maintain.
I’m slowly realizing that almost all virtues drive to agape love because agape love isn’t simply a virtue. It is the perfection and proper ordering of all other virtues. And I’m slowly realizing that just because love isn’t initially perfect, that doesn’t mean it’s not fighting to get there. We are put here on this earth to walk one path, to perfect one thing, to realize one quality that illuminates all the others. We have been given a capacity, an understanding, a virtue that – in its perfection – could confuse all the troubles of this world and eliminate the need for all other virtues because it is the very reason for virtue.
What a revolution if one day, we could find ourselves drawing nearer to such a thing.
One of the eighteenth century’s most impactful painters was the Italian master Pompeo Girolamo Batoni. Famous for his portraits of contemporary celebrities and for his artistic renditions of Christian imagery, Batoni was eventually awarded Austrian nobility. He has many famous paintings including The Ecstasy of St. Catherine of Siena and The Fall of Simon Magus, but almost no work in his portfolio is as visually stunning as his 1773 masterpiece The Return of the Prodigal Son. 
If you don’t know the story of "The Prodigal Son", here’s the background. Apart from “The Good Samaritan”, “The Prodigal Son” is perhaps the most famous parable of Jesus Christ. Recounted in the New Testament by Luke, it is the story of a boy, who, fed up with the day-to-day banality of family life, seeks to strike out in the city on his own. With stunning disrespect, the young son asks his father if he can have his share of the inheritance early (essentially telling his Dad: “You are dead to me.”) so that he can abandon his family and seek pleasure elsewhere. Inexplicably, his father says yes.
The son, laden with his father’s hard-won fortune travels to the city and hosts enormous parties. He lives a lavish life drinking and sleeping with prostitutes. He shames his family and himself; and, when a famine strikes the land, he finds himself friendless and impoverished. He takes odd jobs around the town. He eventually ends up working with and eating with pigs, and when everything has gotten as bad as it can, in desperation, he turns home.
If you don’t see the irony and terror of his position, picture yourself in it. His family loved him, and he told them he was better off with them dead. He shamed them. He disrespected them. He squandered their money on women and wine; and when he fell to eating with pigs, he returned to them hat in hand. For all his presumptuousness, even this son knew he was in trouble. In fact, he planned on returning not as a son, but as a servant – someone seeking work rather than love from his father. He knew it was going to be bad. But then, in a stunning twist, the father welcomes him home. Luke reads:
So he got up and went back to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. His son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.' But his father ordered his servants, 'Quickly bring the finest robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.' (20-24)
“…this son of mine was dead, but has come back to life again.” That is passion. That is patience. That is agape love.
Batoni’s painting marks this moment beautifully. The son is beaten down, afraid, and ashamed. All his arrogance and pride has given way to fear. He knows he’s returning home unwanted and unloved; but in that moment – the moment where the father could have turned him away in a fit of righteous anger – he instead raises his garment, tucks the frightened boy inside, and says simply, “I love you. Thank God you are alive.”
How many times have you been the prodigal son, wife, husband, daughter or friend? How many times have you hurt those who loved you most and tossed the affection of your closest allies away with disdain? How many times have we all looked at mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters and screamed actions of hate even when the other person’s heart held nothing but love? And how many times, when things have gotten worse than we could have imagined, when the life we longed for has locked us in a prison cell of pain, has that very beaten and betrayed person taken us back?
If agape love is, in its simplicity and depth almost impossible to describe, it is at least partially composed of patience. Not the patience of a hunter stalking his prey or a scientist laboring endlessly in a lab, but the patience of the father in Batoni’s painting – unaffected, silent, constant, and true. Motivated not by self-interest, but by the everlasting bonds of a love we sometimes feel and almost never understand. Bound up in the feeling that some things are more important than pride and respect, and that among all virtues love – steady, unfailing, unconditional love – is the most beautiful and rare virtue of all.
In my life, I have pushed away those I love a thousand times. I have acted ashamed and wandered from respectability. But these people have always waited for me to return. And as I remember my mom and dad, friends and brothers forgiving every slander and sin, I wonder when I’ll learn the lesson of the father, and stop behaving like the son.
Where are you today? Are you waiting for a departed loved one or sleeping with the pigs of your past too fearful of the consequences to stumble home. Are you embracing a son birthed in the newness of forgiveness or feeling the warmth of a patience that simply refuses to die? Wherever you are, take a look at Batoni’s painting sometime and take hope. Our lives can be ugly, wretched and filled with hate. Our actions are often dark and disgusting. But for every year of solitude, there is a moment of return that washes all those sins away. That is the beauty of patience. That is the beauty of agape love.
G.K. Chesterton would have loved Martin Luther King, Jr. It was Chesterton, after all – a rotund British optimist brimming with merriment and fantasy – who noted the central necessity of The Dream to human existence, saying:
The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
But it was King who pulled the American Dream red hot from the fires of racism, hatred, and inequality, and poured on it justice that “roll[ed] down like a water”, a sense of righteousness that swept through a rejuvenated America “like a mighty stream.” The forces of weakness in his country imprisoned, beat, ridiculed, and ultimately murdered King for the audacity of his hope, but King – visionary, saint, hero – never faltered or failed. In 1964, from the steps of the Lincoln memorial he shouted:
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
And speech by speech, struggle by struggle, King’s dream swept up a populace mired in the shame of its original sin. He retook our dream – freedom, equality, brotherhood – from the clutches of the national nightmare that had held it hostage for two hundred years. In his life and death, he transformed the United States, and mobilized the entire world for a half century assault on those ideologies from Memphis to Johannesburg that would deny people their basic human rights.
That is vision. Big. Powerful. Ecstatic. Overwhelming. Passionate. Persistent. Firm.
Vision is revolutionary. It is the driving force behind our greatest movements and speeches – Churchill before British Parliament in 1940, Faulkner speaking up for the immutability of the human heart at the height of the atomic scare, Bobby Kennedy grieving with a country on announcing the death of the U.S.’s greatest dreamer. It is, when we see it in others, the very passion that gives us hope and inspires us to loyalty; but too often, obscured by the daily struggles of dentist appointments, office deadlines, and faltering romantic relationships, vision is lacking from our adult lives. Why is that?
At one time, we all had dreams. As kids, we turned wagons into chariots and family dogs into noble steeds. We battled dragons and pictured ourselves in legends and storybooks, living and breathing courage and clarity, and charging headlong into adventure, if only to fight for what our tiny brains knew was right. We loved other people around us thoughtlessly – innocent of the lines of race, religion, and creed that so often divide us as adults – and we thought in terms of stories. “For what do I want to be remembered?” “What would a hero look like here?” “What, in this situation, kingdom, or fairytale, is right?”
As kids, I think, we are blessed with an innocence of irony – we have no concept of the absurd and we have an acute awareness of proper ranking: heroism is more important that temporary physical discomfort, courage is more important than the possibility of failure, getting one big thing right is more important than the day-to-day possibility of error. But as adults, we learn failure after failure, struggle after minor struggle, and detail after detail, to subjugate the dream to reality. We forfeit real vision – expansive, daring, and dangerous – for smaller goals and accomplishments that are safer and easier to see.
But what would this world look like without vision, without those proponents of vision, visionaries? What would your life look like – what would my life look like – if great people tempted by a little temporary comfort had given up on their wild and seemingly impossible dreams? It is hard to imagine that world because here, at the height of the new millennia, we stand on the shoulders of giants; but really think of the stories wouldn’t have without our visionaries.
There would be no United States and no democracy. The founding fathers and their intellectual contemporaries in England and France were not mere subjects of the crown, but dreamers who saw in the New World a new possibility – a society without class or inborn limits, a culture of liberty, hope and choice – and were so inspired by their vision that they sacrificed wealth, comfort, and even life to birth into the world a new idea: that “all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” and that governments should not be empowered to take those rights away. We wouldn’t have a free and peaceful South Africa. Without the daring of Mandela and Tutu, the evils of apartheid might still envelop that beautiful country, and without their equally preposterous vision – that mercy, progressivism, and hope should dominate a post-apartheid world – we might have an embattled South Africa to this day.
Without the vision of Watson and Crick, we may never have attacked those building blocks we call DNA and opened a world of hopeful possibility. Without a cigar-smoking, overweight historian named Winston Churchill, we may never have found the moral courage to fight the 20th century’s most evil and dangerous ideology, bringing from the ashes of World War II a rejuvenated West basking in the glory of its “finest hour”. And without the leadership of other visionaries – Hayek, von Mises, Thatcher, Solzhenitsyn, and John Paul II – we may never have come to the point in the 20th century, where, staring at the physical boundary between a belief in ideology and a faith in the creative power of man, our own Great Communicator was empowered to proclaim:
After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor….
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Because, you see, we live in a world created on the dreams of history’s greatest men and women. We live an existence predicated on the fact that some people, undeterred by circumstance and probability are willing to sacrifice everything for hope. In our individual lives we see this in smaller ways as parents fight to give us better lives, and stick with us even as we forsake them. We see this in friends who have the vision to see through our addictions, moral failures, and weaknesses to the light on the other side of our futures; and we see this in our kids, who look at us with a love and hope we have lost in ourselves because they, in their innocence, see not who we are, but who we could be.
What is your vision today? What is your dream? What big, unconquerable hope do you hold to even in the face of failure and despair; and what story or passion do you see as bigger than your present circumstance, big enough, even, to warrant faith.
Many people see vision as a talent. I see it as a virtue, a choice. We can either wake up today in faithlessness ready to encounter only the concerns of daily life, or we can see over these hills to something bigger and more beautiful, a place that until it becomes reality, seems suited only for dreams.
"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love..."
It's early December, and the North Georgia wind is growing colder. Snow fell in the mountains last week, fires are being stoked, and families are finally coming together again for the holidays.
Me - I went home for Thanksgiving. I will go home again for Christmas. I will see my mother and father and my two little brothers whom I love dearly. I will spend the holidays with aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins; and this year, as every year, I will likely forget how lucky I am.
Statisticians say that Christmas is one of the happiest and lousiest times of the year. While many of us are surrounded by family and friends, others cry out. Suicide and depression increase. Everyday loneliness is intensified against a backdrop of other people's warmth. On the anniversary of a Savior's birth, so many languish in suffering and solitude.
I know. Three weeks ago I spent the night at a shelter in Atlanta with a group of homeless men who, by recommendation, are housed in a church for the duration of the winter. They come in around 7 p.m. and leave around 5:30 a.m.
Like clockwork they have shelter, food and community - maybe not family, but community - even as hundreds of others like them (and like me) freeze nightly on the streets.
It is hard to take. Talk to them, and most remember better days - mothers, brothers, wives, warmth and joy. But often those days can seem far away.
Don't we all feel this way sometimes? Homeless, cold, lost and afraid, we search and rarely find.
Even the wealthiest, the prettiest, the happiest among us desperately need something good, something dear, a care without consequence.
This is Christmas - faith that can move mountains, hope that never fades, love without end.
It is a time to remember and a time to forget. It is the time when our otherworldliness and homelessness draw nearest, bringing with them the greatest sorrow and the greatest joy - amplifying what it means to be human for a few short weeks, and testing our resolve as we struggle in a world that is decidedly not our home.
Hug someone a little tighter this Christmas. Linger after your family dinner, write someone an unexpected card and pray an extra moment or two on Christmas Eve.
It is important to remember as finals approach, and, for some, the real world draws only a few months away, that there are things more important than this school, than your problems, than the next test or even the next day.
First Corinthians tells us to remember three things. This December, will you remember?
*This article first appeared in the Berry College Campus Carrier in 2002
In the decade before his death of AIDS, Allan Bloom found a kindred spirit in novelist Saul Bellow. Bellow, a Nobel laureate in literature, taught classes with Bloom at Chicago late in the last century. In popular culture, he is known as the storied Jewish author of The Adventures of Augie March. At Chicago, he was a beloved teacher and sensitive colleague. Bloom, a political philosopher and student of Leo Strauss, was the author of the groundbreaking book, The Closing of the American Mind, and a seminal interpretation of Plato’s Republic. Both men had a marked impact on history. Both were Jewish. Both were atheists (or agnostics). And both were plagued by the same questions: Jerusalem or Athens? The City of God, or the City of Man?
Forging their friendship with a strange mix of shared cultural heritage, intellectual curiosity, and mere proximity, these men, late in life, became such close friends that on Bloom’s death, Bellow wrote a fictional account of Bloom’s last days. More than a treatise on the intellectual currents of fanned by Bloom at the close of the American century, it is the gentle tome of a friend remembering a friend. The book, Ravelstein, is deeply personal and disarmingly philosophic; and by combining the two, it illuminates the nature of Bellow’s and Bloom’s friendship: two men, bound by time and circumstance, both wondering after the same questions. It is a picture of friends sitting at the edge of an abyss, afraid, mesmerized, and intrigued – comforted at least partially by the fact that they sit and stare together.
Have you ever had a friend like that? Most of us, even those with lower aspirations than Bloom and Bellow, have. As a high school student, you had a group of two or three people who shared your love of basketball or sci-fi, philosophy or fantasy, and who would stick with you through thick or thin. You had a college roommate who always knew when to tape a crucial football game, and a best friend – a companion – who was always there with the right words when time was tight and tempers were short. In my time at Berry College, I grew to know several people for whom I developed what the Greeks refer to as phileo love, and with whom I experienced the deepest of shared passions. To this day they stay with me, if not in person, in heart.
But as often as we experience this depth of love, this intimacy, early in life, we seem to neglect it as we age. Sure, we remember eros. We fight to find agape. We even understand the protective, parental nature of storge love. But friendship, phileo love, is taken for granted. It is neglected or relegated to second class status in a world of whirlwind romance and international causes. It is forgotten, and as the cares of life close in on our ability to wonder, to dream, and to wander, many of us leave deep friendships behind.
Why do we demote the importance of this friendship love? After all, to the Greeks it was everything. Sometimes tinged with eros, phileo love bound groups of men and women with shared visions, ignited wars, and launched philosophic traditions that revolutionized the West. What would the academy have been without Plato’s love of Socrates, or Aristotle’s love of Plato? What would the Illiad be without the passionate companionship of Patroclus and Achilles? Friendship was the foundation of literature, philosophy, mathematics, and democracy in the Greek world, and its importance, for two thousand years, was transmitted to the successors of the Greeks in the modern world.
Friendship was a primary mover of various movements throughout the modern era. Poetry was revolutionaized by the friendships that ignited transcendentalism in New England and the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The very concept of political freedom was turned on its head by a rebel group of “founding brothers” running headstrong towards the enlightenment in a radical “new world”. And fantasy and apologetics were forever changed by the fireside chats of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. It could well be said (and has been said in Lewis’ The Four Loves) that friendship, more than eros or storge love, has inspired some of the world’s strongest movements and finest moments; but it receives little airtime in modern culture. Movies neglect it. Pop-songs dumb it down to thuggish loyalty or candy-coated girl-talk cliché. Regular people, you and me, forget our friends. We remember marriage. We remember parenthood. We sometimes remember God; and we sometimes remember to develop a sense of friendship love in coordination with the agape, eros, and storge loves in our life (and surely, this is a positive thing). But we forget to tie ourselves to those people who merely share our passions. We forget the necessity of friendship love as a sufficient phenomenon when the other loves in our life grow important. If there are four loves, we act as if juggling the fourth alone is more trouble than its worth, and let our pure friendships, our phileo love, slip away unnoticed and untended.
But aren’t we lucky to have such fellow travelers in a mysterious and uncertain world? Not those willing to love us romantically. Not those who only care for us and protect us. Not those with the unconditional love of saints. But those rare people who are willing to refocus us on shared goals when we fall by the roadside or allow ourselves to be lead astray. Those people who are not jealous of our love, simply appreciative of it. Those people who see it enhanced when we share it, and feel it cool when we tuck it away.
Everyday this love, friendship, surrounds us, waiting for us to notice. Let us never forget that love takes various forms, and to neglect a study of friendship, of the bond of shared passions and quiet loyalty, is to neglect the part of our souls that longs not to stare into the eyes of another, but to sit at the edge of the abyss together and stare forward into the mystery, confident, for we are not alone.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote:
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Some of history's finest writers and orators realized that the brief is often superior to the lengthy. Nietzsche, Franklin, Twain, Lincoln, and Confucius were all made famous by the concision with which they communicated grand ideas.
Brevity gives wisdom impact by making it memorable. Know when to be concise.
If you are new to the site and would like a permanent link to all the virtue posts in this series, they are archived under "The Virtue Project". Please stop and look around.
A few days ago I was making my way to a professor's house along a rural back road outside of Rome, Georgia, when on a hill to the left of the highway I noticed a huge piece of painted white ply board pinned firmly to a rickety old telephone post. On the ply board was the simple phrase “Love You Lynn” painted in huge, black letters. It wasn’t professional. It wasn’t paid for or properly zoned. It was just there—an impulse of love displayed in the most public and dorkalicious way.
There is something brilliant about tacky love. It is unafraid and unashamed. It is loud and obnoxious. It manifests itself in the most public and imperfect ways. It is spray-painted on overhangs and water towers across the country. It is redneck, rough, and unrehearsed; and yet, in some ways it is more sincere and more beautiful than the most stunning recitation of Donne or brilliant rendition of Romeo and Juliet. It is tacky. It is brave.
As a teenager I knew all about tacky love. We all did. Cheap dates and senior proms are the breeding ground for such public displays. I remember a time when a Publix rose bouquets, cheap tuxes, and too-tight suits were the norm in my dating life; but, sadly, as I have grown in “sophistication,” my appreciation for such things has faded away. I constantly fret over public reaction to my unrestrained displays of affection. I worry what others might think poorly of me selling myself so completely on the concept of love or adoration. I feel stupid and vulnerable. I convince myself that tacky love is somehow beneath me—yet, thankfully, no matter how far I slip, there is always a “Love You Lynn” sign that reminds me of better days.
Thank God for signs like the one I saw Friday. And thank God I live in Georgia—a bastion of unabashed, homegrown tackiness. Our flags wave proudly from poles on our front porches. Yellow ribbons dot our mailboxes and door frames. Crosses anoint hillsides where sheep and cattle graze. Our families are loud and loyal; and if we fall in love with a beautiful Southern lady, heaven help us we are not afraid to paint a sign in our garage and staple gun it to a telephone pole or propose a life together in neon letters on the scoreboard at a Braves game.
I hope Lynn appreciates her tacky love—I did. After all, what do any of us need, if not an adoration so deep it discards beauty and dares to be tacky.
Note: I originally wrote this post as a column for the Berry College Campus Carrier. The sentiments in it now are as true to me as they ever were. And I most certainly think tacky love is a virtue.
Find this entire series archived under "The Virtue Project".
We coax her forth with simple words,
but in this pool of cells she hides –
a cherub cloaked in chemicals
obscured by nature’s guise.
Rise up our friend, our light, our hope!
Be good, neutrality defy!
Prove out this angel,
show her now,
repress her darker side.
I was a rough and rowdy kid. Open a Coleman family photo album and the twenty-year-old pictures of me reflect a brown-skinned, blonde-haired, imp of a little boy with eyes that flashed mischief and a smile that screamed trouble. Like all kids, I took my parents, providers, and protectors for granted. I broke bones, occasionally ran away (usually just down the street or to the playground right outside our apartment), cried out for attention (quite literally – watch our home movies), ruined valuable household possessions, and crashed through the world with the wild naivety of a human child unleashed into an existence that hadn’t yet battered him with the pessimism of time. I pitched tantrums and caused problems at every turn.
But my parents still loved me. My dad, a former rodeo cowboy turned financial adviser (go figure!) was a pillar of strength. He provided for us financially. He stood up for what was right and taught me to face every situation with courage and moral certitude. My mom was, quite simply, amazing. She dedicated herself to raising my brothers and me, and ended up raising all of our friends and, eventually, dozens of boys at a group home that she and my dad helped found. When I was young, I remember my mom playing whiffle ball with me under the fading Florida sun. I remember her reading to me as I drifted to sleep on lazy summer days and holding me when the worries of a five-year-old would get me down. I was a hassle, but my parents never faltered, never failed.
As I aged, they held firm. I remember moving to a new town after first grade and going with my father to inner city football games where he worked with young men who weren’t blessed with dads like mine. I remember him running for city council and playing hoops with me in our backyard when I decided to try out for the JV basketball team. I made the team, and then, inexplicably, I remember him and my mother, rain or shine, home or away attending nearly every JV and varsity game for the five years – screaming at refs, lobbying coaches to give me playing time, and high-fiving me when I would start or when the game would go our way. They were there with me as I won my first poetry contest in elementary school (a cash prize I used to buy sea monkeys) and much later when I graduated high school and botched my valedictorial address. My mom was crying the day I left for college. She was crying the day I graduated college. And, I have a feeling, she’ll be there (like she was for every play, scraped knee, and strings recital) crying when I finish graduate school, get married, and have a mischievous kid of my own.
Agape love is a hard thing to understand. It is the cardinal virtue, so deep, complex, and daunting to consider that it seems a logical impossibility at times; but in the real world, I have seen it. And the snapshots I have – my parents, aunts, uncles, mentors and friends – are the pictures of this perfect quality that I take with me, examples of a purity of heart that I may never fully possess, but that I’ll always pursue.
It is humbling to think back on these snapshots of my mom and dad, more humbling still to look forward to all the debts (of spirit, moral certainty, and mind) that I’ll incur, and absolutely devastating to think about the fact that these debts are not debts at all, but gifts, forgotten and forgiven as soon as they pass from my parents to me. And while I have no idea what it means to enjoy that kind of loyalty, dedication, passion, and strength myself; I know that I’ll figure it out one day, and that the examples I have from them will have gone further towards providing me with that capacity for truly charitable, universal, and unending love than any other experience in my life.
Our highest virtues are often clouded in the complexity of the human spirit, and sometimes we have to content ourselves to learn them in snapshots. The images are simple. They are illustrative. They are hard to understand. They are the parables piecing together the opus of life. But sometimes they are all we have, and more importantly, all we need.
Hold tight to these images when you receive them, and live every moment as if you’re creating them for others. You are, and thinking that way makes all the difference.
John Donne holds a special place in my heart. Like most American teenagers, my exposure to the Donne began with a reading of his (in)famous poem “The Flea” in high school literature class, and continued with Hugh Grant’s misquotation of his most famous utterance (“No man is an island…”) in About a Boy.
I admit, that is a relatively inauspicious introduction to a 400 year-old master poet; but somewhere along the way, I picked up his collected works, and beneath the pop-culture references and sexual innuendos, my appreciation for him deepened. He was man both serious of thought and avaricious for a cheap pun (much like William Shakespeare). He admired poetry almost as much as he lusted after women. He longed for love above all else (even as he was skeptical of its motivations); and he saw in love a need for both the physical and the metaphysical. Donne never worshipped either the concept of love or its human incarnation in the form of a specific person. Instead, his deepest longing was for the intersect of the two. And it was there, at the crossroads between the natural and the supernatural, that Donne found adoration:
TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
("Air and Angels", John Donne)
I’ve been there, have you?
Sure you have. You cruise down the road listening to John Mayer’s “Love Song for No One” and dream of the day that you will meet not love itself, but the human being who, for you, will be love. You make lists of the character qualities that will define your beloved then compromise those qualities for something better (and utterly unexpected) when he or she comes along. You hope, and dream, and wish for someone to give you that something that you see missing in your life. And you pray that when you find that person, you will forever adore them, and they will forever adore you.
Adoration. It is the only word that connotes that glorious intersect of honor, respect, and fervent love. It is the quality that enables both worship and its corollary, submission; and it is a type of love or honor that requires both the physical (a person or deity) and the metaphysical or supernatural (belief, hope, faith). You can love a concept (freedom!). You can feel passionately about an idea (equality!). But you can adore only another being (Mom!). Rather than a virtue, in its purity and naivety adoration seems, at times, nothing more than a youthful ideal. And by the time we are adults, it has often faded into just that, an ideal.
We all have our reasons. You adored a mentor (parent, teacher, grandparent), and they abandoned you when you needed them most. You loved a woman so much your heart ached every time you saw her – right up until the moment (or even beyond the moment) you saw her abandon your adoration and walk away. You had faith in a leader – political, religious, cultural – and then they lost your admiration in the heat of scandal. Regardless of the circumstance, something happened to your respect or love for that person that dampened and then extinguished your adoration for them; and with every lost object of adoration, your belief in the very concept of adoration slipped a little further into chasm of disappointment and doubt.
But read “Air and Angels” once again. Beyond your disappointment, anger, sadness, and despair, isn’t there something in you that still longs for the hopeful feeling that adoration brings? Is life really worth it without the hope or possibility of adoration? Isn’t there something in you that still wants to find something, someone you truly consider better than yourself so that you can fight, lay down, submit, or worship again. You see, the more I think about my own life, the more I realize it is almost impossible to sing the praises of another unless you, at some level, adore them (an adoration rooted in selflessness!), and you can’t have adoration for someone else until you are willing to take a chance on someone else – even at the risk that they might not always adore you.
But adoration is a fragile thing, and I have also learned, the hard way, that it is a virtue that must be treated with care. You see, we live in a culture (as did Donne), where we throw our adoration around too easily in youth and lose it because we treat it with intemperance. Meanwhile, real adoration depends on finding an object that is truly worthy of our adoration and sticking to it. We are called to love (agape) everyone. But our adoration should be reserved for a select few so that it is preserved for the times when we finally find an outlet worthy of its honor. And we should assure that unlike some lesser virtue or vice like infatuation, our adoration is rooted in truth, and has the permanence and dedication such a sacred quality should enjoy. We should not take adoration lightly; and we must fight for its survival in our hearts even when the feelings that gave it birth have started to fade.
That is the life of John Donne. When he was younger, much of his writing revolved around his notorious love of women; but as he aged, his adoration shifted from the fairer sex to the God of his heart, and his poetry, ever beautiful, followed suit. In “Batter my heart, three person’d God” Donne writes:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
.
You see, like us, Donne experienced the disappointment of lost adoration; and over the course of his life, he learned not to abandon adoration, but to place it properly, to reserve it for the deepest of relationships, and to hold it only for those to whom he was willing to give his life. The object of his affection and respect may differ from ours, but it was important for him to find it and stick with it – because it enabled in him a tiny piece of that most important virtue, Love.
I am not yet sure where to place my adoration (though in some areas of my life, it grows clearer everyday). I have adored and been adored and seen those faces of adoration fade away in the harsh realities of time. But unless I hold on to a willingness to adore someone, some being “before [I know his/her] face or name” – I know that some part of what I have always loved about myself, and about life, will be lost. Adoration is a tough virtue to figure out. But it is worth the fight – even if, for a time, it is caught somewhere between air and angels, tangled in the lost refrains of a love song for no one. That, I think, is a cheesy motto even John Donne could appreciate.
Note: I once wrote a poem that seems appropriate. Find it here.
My first encounter with Steve Irwin was midway through high school. As I remember, a good friend, Will Wagner, came to basketball practice raving about a revolutionary new show he’d seen on the Discovery Channel called The Crocodile Hunter; and after his synopsis – a crazy Australian guy in khakis confronts giant man-eating reptiles with lawnmowers and smiles – I was compelled to watch. My dad and I camped out in front of the T.V. to catch Irwin’s act the following week, and The Crocodile Hunter soon became a staple of our weekday television diet.
That’s why (and this sounds stupid, I know), it was really sad for me to hear that earlier this week, Irwin was killed swimming with stingrays off the coast of Australia. To be honest, I hadn’t watched The Crocodile Hunter in years, but my memories of the show are incredibly happy – my dad, brothers, and I laughing together and longing for Irwin’s freedom, joy, and enthusiasm, sympathizing with his love of the outdoors. And my memories of Irwin were purely positive. He was a goofy guy who loved his life and everything around him. Apparently the same onscreen and off, he was a man of such unbridled passion that it simply spilled out into the world he cared for in a ridiculous, giggle-inspiring way; and we (people all over the world) grew to love him for it.
In Australia this week, thousands of mourners – many of them school children – left monuments to Steve ranging from crayon drawn notes to hangered khaki shirts. News outlets from CNN to the New York Times have been clogged with memories of Steve and the details of his death. And on the Discovery Channel website, forums to capture the mourning have experienced severe server delays, even as special funds to commemorate Steve’s life and work (find them here) overflow with donations. Viewers from Singapore to the UK have poured in to the site to share their sadness and disbelief. They call him a hero. They recommend a national holiday in honor of conservation to commemorate his life. They compare his death to the death of “superman”. And many, so many, of these people share the same sentiment: something beautiful and pure has passed from this world. In a time of division, paranoia, and pessimism, a particular monument to joy and simplicity – one of ours! – has passed away.
That is what passion, real passion, does to people. It convicts them. It inspires them. It moves them in unbelievable ways. Steve Irwin was a diesel mechanic from Australia who found his calling chasing animals and pushing a positive message of conservation to the world around him. He had almost nothing in common with the men and women we traditionally consider heroes – Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, or Joan of Arc – but he shared with them an unbridled zeal for his life’s purpose. And while his cause was not as heart-wrenching, urgent, or important as the civil rights movement or apartheid, his conviction, his passion, made it mean something, at least something, to us.
What if we all lived life in that way? Stupid. Unconerned with how we look to others. Totally dedicated to something outside of ourselves. Above the pain and detachment around us and able to stand strong against it because we have found joy – real joy – in something we love. Have you ever felt that way about a person, about God, about a cause? Have you ever wanted to totally let go of everything else to pursue them or chase it? Have you ever found a love so deep it sent chills through your body and tingled every nerve ending from your feet to your hands?
And feeling that love or conviction, have you ever pushed it away? Have you ever doubted it? Have you ever convinced yourself it wasn’t so pure or important, or worse yet, it was, but you were not pure or important enough to pursue it? Have you ever feared losing control so much that you were willing to sacrifice passion on the altar of fear and uncertainty; and, in doing so, have you sabotaged a relationship, a job, a purpose, or a calling because you lacked (or feared) the passion to pursue it? Have you allowed cowardice, faithlessness, and doubt to slay, perhaps, one of the only virtues that stands indirect opposition to their dominance in the human heart (love being the root virtue – for all good passion, true passion, arises first from love)?
I know I have. That is why I watched Steve Irwin, and a part of me connected with him. That is why, even as I go through my daily routines I read longingly the speeches of William Lloyd Garrison and Abraham Lincoln and cry like a baby at cheesy movies where the too-good hero struggles through some adversity with a narrow focus on some incontrovertibly good purpose. That is why I am captivated by the story of a God who must pursue (even through death) the creation that is the desire of His heart. And that is why it is often only in retrospect I can truly see or appreciate the things and people I have cared for most.
It is easy to be punctual, honest, and moderate. It is easy to be cleanly (as Ben Franklin would recommend); but passion is a virtue so all-consuming it frightens us. And it is so demanding (and freeing) that most of us only experience it in its truest form, through others or for brief moments in time. And that is why passion, to be sustained, must have a twin: perseverance.
When I was in middle school, we lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Columbus, Georgia; and, every day, my mom and I would drive by a small house at the corner of the neighborhood an old man lived. Apparently, the man had at some point suffered a stroke, because everyday, at a certain time of day, you could find him slowly walking up and down his driveway trying to keep his frail and beaten body moving and alive. He made progress over time. When he started, he had a walker. My last memories of him were standing free of the walker, inching along the concrete with dedication and purpose. And though I never knew his name, I remember that old man by what my mother called him every week for years with tears in her eyes, “My inspiration.”
Give me the strength to be like that. My mom’s “inspiration” could have given up when his body started going downhill. He was always alone in his driveway, so I don’t think he had anyone to care for. He knew he would never really recover; and he didn’t care. There was something he loved about this life so much, there was some passion in him that so stirred his soul that he decided to persist – to fight – through anything and everything. I assume he simply could not bear to abandon whatever it was he found beautiful in this world. And so, he hung onto it a little longer, and made it a slightly brighter and more hopeful place for a pudgy kid and middle-aged housewife (and how many others?) who passed by everyday and found some comfort in his strength.
Passion without persistence can be an emotion, a whim. But passion hardened by troubles and criticism and pock-marked by the wrinkles of time is one of the most beautiful human qualities I can imagine. And, like a virus, it spreads into the hearts and minds of those exposed to it even briefly, even at a distance.
Ten years from now, heck, ten days from now, I won’t often think of Steve Irwin, just like I rarely remember my neighbor treading his driveway as days slipped into night. But even when memories of people like these evade me, there is some indelible mark that all these passionate people – teachers, poets, parents, strangers, friends – have left on my soul. I can’t rid myself of it, even when I want to. Their passions infected me, and in some small way, I have learned from them.
Now how do I live my life so that someday, someone looks at me and says the same thing?
Update: The folks at InTouch magazine came across this article and asked to publish it with a few modifications. You can find it on their website now.
It is fitting that the greatest poet in ancient Greece was blind. Homer, the man who almost single handedly crafted the ethical precepts of our Athenian forebears with The Odyssey and The Iliad, never saw the faces of the human beings he touched. Though his words would reach a hundred generations and give us some of the mightiest and most human heroes in Western mythology, he never watched a sunrise or stared into the eyes of a girl. He never saw the wars he started, or those he prevented. He never gazed upon the adoration of his followers or the statues erected in honor of his creations, and he never saw a real hero lace his sandals to do battle for the very code of honor that he, Homer, had put into place. Though he read the human heart with skill, tenderness, and precision, it was not his lot to see the human face. And that may have had everything to do with his understanding.
Maybe blindness, viewed properly, is the overlooked virtue.
Most people would agree that there is nothing more important in this life than intimacy; there is nothing stronger, more moving, or more fulfilling in this world than the power of the human heart bound up with the hearts of others (or the heart of God) by the sheer force of hope and love. We have all experienced this: in marriage, in family, in relationships with our friends. And even if our lives have been ravaged by pain, indecision, and despair, we can usually think back to moments – gazes, conversations, dimly lit hours of physical contact and silence – that made all the challenges in our lives worthwhile. That is the power of human soul united with other souls. But too often, it is our vision chases the opportunity for these moments away.
We have a chance to connect with people, but for all the good in their hearts and the possibilities in their friendship, we cannot overlook their flaws, their history, or their past decisions. We are calculating in our relationships, and ruthless in our evaluations (and we hide this with an ambiguously beneficent word: “standards”). In a more striking and physical sense, we walk the streets of our cities every day and turn away from others because they are homeless or hurting or ugly. We maintain such a careful guard over our own physical appearances (our image) that we reject others who violate our taste; and we then let this tendency leak into our inner lives. We give up on spouses and significant others because we cannot learn to overlook their flaws. We write off our friends, or even our children, because we are disappointed in their actions or unable to forgive them for the things they have done. We are so acutely aware of the appearances of those around us, we are so attuned to they way they make us look, we are so impacted by the visual that we forget to use our other senses to draw close and see what our eyes simply cannot see. We let the visual preempt the intimate; and we never draw near enough to touch those around us.
We’ve all had the pleasure of interacting with the blind at some point in our lives; and many of us have had the same experience. Blind people, often, just don’t have the same sense of personal space that we have. On meeting, they’ll often touch you immediately. They will hold your hand. They will sometimes feel for your shoulder or face (what is it they see?). Because their eyes can’t see you, they have to draw near to you, and violating your personal boundaries become more intimately acquainted with you as a physical being. And the funny thing is this: it’s almost never uncomfortable. In a way, it’s freeing to have someone touch you without seeing you for who you are on the outside, because they are willing to draw near to you regardless of the way you look, regardless of what others see. They possess, in a physical sense, something even more perfect than forgiveness: blindness – an ignorance of the standard most people hold for you right away.
How much would it change our lives if in our everyday interactions we viewed blindness, an openness to intimacy, as a virtue? There are certainly times when we have to see others for who they are – flaws and beauties, virtues and failings – and turn away from them if (even though we forgive them), they are injurious to our lives. Sometimes to protect ourselves or those around us, it is necessary to reject physical and emotional closeness (ask the abused spouse, or the neglected child). But it seems that if relational prudence is also a virtue, it is a virtue that, in its extreme (superficiality, judgmentalism, dismissiveness, and fear) has become a vice.
Some scholars suggest that at some point in his life, Homer could see (his images of the landscapes of Greece are too vivid). But in a way, that would make his story all the more beautiful, because it wasn’t until he lost his sight, that he began to change this world with his heart. Blindness may not always be a virtue, (almost nothing, in the extreme, ever is). But in a world so attuned to the visual, to the first impression, to the distance bred by sight, it might be quality of ignorance that could allow us to draw near to those we would push away with our sight.
I have a theory about M. Night Shyamalan: Every other movie he makes is good. The Sixth Sense – good. Unbreakable – bad. Signs – good. The Village – bad. As a director, he has developed a consistent pattern of success and failure; so following on the heels of the aforementioned Amish horror film, The Village, I thought Shyamalan’s latest effort, The Lady in the Water was primed to be a barnburner.
I was only mildly disappointed. If you go into the film with an open mind, it is cute, interesting, fanciful, hopeful, and fun. It is most certainly a “bedtime story”, but it is a bedtime story as much for adults as for children; and its themes are the very kinds of childhood lessons we forget when we cross the Rubicon to adulthood. Hope, faith, and love all play prominent roles, and the idea that each individual has worth and purpose is laid out quite explicitly. But the thing that hit me hardest was Shyamalan’s focus on community. The premise of the film is that a group of very different people come together to save the life of a strange young woman, and in the process of saving her, they find self-worth and community. They are not perfect. They don’t share a lot of common interests. They have very different (sometimes very difficult backgrounds). But their willingness to open up to one another, to work together, and to hope in one another radically transforms their lives.
In the splinter factory of modern life, this lesson is too often lost. I know that in my own life, I am reluctant to form the kind of deep and lasting bonds that marked so many in past generations. My job keeps me on the road 4 days a week, and while I have always had large groups of acquaintances, I keep few close friends (people to whom I open up and give my trust). When I do open up to someone, I tend overdo my reliance on that one person (I put all my eggs in one basket, so-to-speak); and in everything, I attempt a spirit of individualism. I am an ardent fan of Emerson, Locke, and Louis L’Amour. I like self-reliance. But the more I see of life, the more I realize that while individualism is not a virtue (in every sense); community (fostered by openness, trust, and mutual reliance) almost always is.
Perhaps I should clarify. I am not a collectivist. I do not believe in forced communities, and I do think we should, at times, be self-reliant and independent minded. All of histories greatest leaders, at some point or another, had to stand against the tide; and independent thought is a priceless commodity. But in the broader context, I am coming to believe that it is community that brings us the greatest opportunities for hope, love, and true friendship. It is also community, or connection and mutual dependence, that fosters our very adherence to virtue.
In a recent sermon, pastor Andy Stanley noted that it takes three things to apply virtue to our lives: conviction, commitment, and connection. Conviction is that fundamental step where we arrive, personally, at the belief that something is important to us. And a commitment to living our convictions is necessary to keep the momentum of that initial choice in the face of apathy and temptation. But those two alone are insufficient for real adherence to virtue. To truly commit to our convictions, we need accountability and reinforcement. In other words, we need connectivity.
And this connectivity must be deep and broad-based. While some people grow only to rely on a spouse or a significant other, such reliance can be dangerous. That one person could fail you or leave you. And smothering them with all of your inner thoughts in the absence of other healthy outlets is the quickest way to stress your relationship with them. You are not perfect, and neither are they. You are not a sufficient support for them; and they are not a sufficient support for you. Real connection needs to be broad-based. You need more than one or two friends if you can find them. You need a group, or community; and you have to be willing to open up to them, to leave yourself vulnerable, and to trust them. You have to grant others access to your life, and really open yourself up to their correction, friendship, and kinship before you get the full impact of their presence in your life.
We are a self-reliant and selfish society. This has so many benefits – free thought, independence, and the presence of truly valid political and moral opposition – the very things that ignited our country’s lurch towards equality at the time of the civil rights movement and our revolution from Great Britain more than 200 years ago.
But these great moral events were also enabled by small (and in some cases, large) communities of individuals who opened up to one another, who relied on one another, and who trusted one another for correction, support, and friendship when times were tough. On a smaller scale, as we fight battles for our convictions today, we need more than just our own commitment. We need each other. And individual dedication to opening ourselves more and more to the involvement of others in our lives may be at the very heart of virtue.
