Ex Nihilo

Hope

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.

The virtue of failure

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.

The dependable virtues: Hard work and punctuality

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.

The virtue of certainty: Memory, clarity, courage

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.

The Enabler Virtue: Courage

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.

When Justice Shudders: Agape Love Part III

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.

Agape Love Part II: Patience

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.

The Dreamer’s Virtue: Vision

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.

The companion virtue: Friendship

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.

A virtue without the fat: Brevity

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.