Variations on a theme: The Original Speech

This, then, is the original speech I wrote for graduation. Looking back on it, I'm glad I gave the other speech, but I certainly feel this has its place. I would appreciate any attention given to it, any thoughts voiced, but I feel a bit repetitive posting so many similar ideas. Nonetheless, I hope this does something for you.



Several weeks ago, as I was formulating my very first ideas for what to say, it was suggested to me by one of my wise professors that I avoid the common theme of “advice for the young graduate.” I agreed with her - there will be plenty of other people to provide that, and, being no further down the road myself, I would probably tell you something terrible, like “It’s cheaper to move back in with your parents.”

I would like to speak, then, not of where we are all going, a subject of which I am entirely clueless, but of where we have been. I hope to trace for you a narrative of faith from Point A, the day on which we first stepped onto campus, goofy and awkward, to Point B, today, sitting here again goofy and awkward in our funny-looking traditional garb. I should disclaim at this moment that the story I tell may not apply to each individual here today, but it is a story that I believe, if it does not directly apply today, very likely will apply in the future.

If our memories have been kind to us, when we think back to freshman year, we remember the incredible retreats, the sudden and perhaps surprising camaraderie which sprung up in our stairwells or in our classes, or maybe the delight in finding that there was a club, a ministry, or a discipleship group seemingly tailored to our interests. It was a gleeful time. There were plenty of uncomfortable times that year, of course: I imagine nearly every one of us at some point walked into an apartment to find a new couple sitting quietly. They were only holding hands, of course, but they were very clearly, and very awkwardly, waiting for you to leave. Even if it was your own apartment.

May God forgive any of us who actually were one of those awkward couples.

But freshman year, for the most part, I would describe as a year of stunning, blinding, beautiful idealism. The opportunities were spread before us like a tree heavy with fruit – we had only to choose among them. And the truest beauty was this: we found ourselves in a friendly, close-knit community of other people who were as passionate for Christ as we were. What a novel idea it was! Those of us who came straight from public schools found we could suddenly openly discuss the nature of God in the middle of class – and with the professor! Not only that, but we could take entire courses on theology and on the Bible, regardless of our major. What could be more blissful than studying God?

I would like you for a moment to hold onto this image of a freshman I’ve described. When I was a freshman, that is exactly what I was thinking. I, like many around me, was desperate for more of God and more Christian community wherever I could find them – chapel, church, d-group – anywhere. I was full of hope, full of love, full of a supreme confidence that the God I knew, the God I had grown up with, would direct me down a path that would bring about deep, significant changes in the world. If I were to give this image I’ve painted a label at the bottom, it would read “Certainty.”

I don’t remember when the first changes began to occur, but we had to have known that the honeymoon could not continue forever. Perhaps it was toward the end of freshman year, after a few strong disagreements with a roommate and close friend. For many of us, it was in our first theology class, or in Old Testament. But there came a point for most of us when we looked around at our Christian community, at the people all around us in these classes, and we listened to them explain what they believed, and we came to a startling realization: everybody around us was wrong. Usually not on the largest points – we could all sign a similar statement of faith, but on all the little points that made our faith our personal faith, we found ourselves rather isolated. Somehow, it seemed, not everybody got the same memo. And sometimes we found that the disagreements were about the largest, most important aspects of our faith. It’s easy to write off somebody speaking from “outside” the faith. It is far more difficult to ignore the sharp differences within the faith. Could we find room for these people under the banner of Christ? Could we call these people with whom we so passionately disagreed brothers and sisters in Christ?

Around the same time, we began encountering wonderfully strange new situations for which we had not been as prepared as we imagined: mission trips and local ministries, among other things. Personally, I found myself confronted by my experiences with the group Fatboys, CCU’s homeless ministry. I had never thought about the homeless before; I had never needed to. And consequently, I had never thought about how God wanted me to interact with them, what God would have me think of them. There were the drug addicts, of course, and the drunks, and those so fresh from prison their tattoos were still bleeding. There were also those people down on their luck. There were former veterans, victims of mental disorders, victims of physical abuse, victims of economic strain. Oftentimes they stuck together in incredible bonds of friendship, taking turns guarding their few possessions while the others slept. I could never have imagined there were so many kinds of homeless people. I was surprised to find that nearly all of them knew the gospel, many of them expressed belief in it, and some could quote more scripture than I ever could. One night a homeless man who camped next to a bicycle path led me down to the Platte River, where he washed my feet in the cold, living water in a gesture of humble gratitude. If I had missed it before, I knew then that anything I had ever thought about homeless people in the past would need to be completely re-thought.

Before I knew it, I found that nearly everything had to be re-thought – I didn’t necessarily have to change everything I believed, but as I traced all the loose threads of my faith further back, I found more loose threads. And as if working these things out alone were not hard enough, those of us going through this process often found that our friends were also going through it, which meant that rather suddenly and all at the same time, none of us knew anything. If we raised questions in conversation, we got questions in return, and all those people we had previously disagreed with, those friends and roommates who called themselves Christians but whom we had previously doubted – well, they began to seem perfectly reasonable. Or, at least, no less reasonable than ourselves. Actually, among all of us Christian students, it began to become very difficult to tell just who was being reasonable, if any us were.

Parents in the room, friends of the graduates – I am quite sure you have heard us complain about our school work, about exams, about not getting enough sleep at night. These are the cries of the student that everybody hears, and everybody knows. But I wonder if you have heard the cries of the spirit, the cry of the young man or woman whose faith, whose very identity, seems to be unraveling on the floor. An upcoming mid-term may rob somebody of a good night’s rest, but this experience, this slow, torturous stretching, straining, snapping of long-cherished beliefs – this will rob the very soul of peace.

We were learning lessons. We were experiencing life. But on the inside, a little lamp flickered, and at times, went out. The very nature of the struggle was that it removed the only true comfort we had. In the words of writer Franz Kafka, we felt “forsaken like children lost in the woods. When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of my sufferings and what do I know of yours? And if I fell at your feet and cried and told you, would you know any more about me than you know about hell when they say it is hot and sets one shivering?”

Some people find themselves at this point somewhere in the middle of college. Others stumble into it toward the end, and are perhaps at this stage right now, and others still will find that it hits them once they leave the warm, enveloping community of school life. It is a cold and lonely position to be in, especially when you seem to be surrounded by people whose faith is stronger than ever. The questions within you will not lie still, and it becomes clear that something must change, the questions must stop, if you are going to maintain any sort of life.

At this point, it often appears that there are only two options. The first of these is that young person I asked you to keep in your mind: the freshman, armed with certainty. Our old selves – they seem in retrospect so achingly beautiful. We believed beautiful things beautifully, and the memory of who we once were seems almost to haunt us. Our faith was so fresh, so alive. If you have not experienced this yet, I would warn you: there is a terrible temptation to return to what you once knew. But if you are to do so, you must go with greater passion than ever, and never let yourself rest. And you must disregard your experiences; you must forget your doubts. You must erase the person you’ve become.

I think very few of us would choose to simply “go back” – even if we had the choice. But the simple fact is that there is no going back to the way things were before – just as there is no putting new wine in old wineskins.

I tried something else. As I grew to understand my lack of understanding, as every temporary foundation shifted from beneath me while I tried to build my scaffolding upon it, I began to give up the hope and the faith that there was any solid ground into which I might sink my roots. I knew nothing, and I knew that I knew nothing, and I held up this knowledge as the one thing certain. I became proud of a foolishness, one that degenerated quickly to uncritical laziness, and from laziness to bitter apathy.

If we must escape our state of anguish, then, and we cannot go back to the past, there appears to be only one other option: give up. When the questions come, force them down until you cannot hear them. When somebody begins to pray, leave the room, because it is uncomfortable. Put the bible away, because it brings more agony than relief. I have seen many friends reach this point. And I have spent a great deal of time there myself. It can last for months; it can last for years.

Friends, graduates, families: if you find yourselves at this point, now or in the future – have hope. If your efforts to find the God you seem to have misplaced prove fruitless, have hope. But why should you?

Because God will never stop bothering you. I don’t mean the idea of God, and all the questions, although that is perhaps true as well – I mean God, and bother is exactly the word I mean, too. We have all heard the verse in Job which reads, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Seldom do we put it in its context, in which Job says to God, and I quote, “Let me alone; my days have no meaning. What is man that you make so much of him, that you give him so much attention, that you examine him every morning and test him every moment? Will you never look away from me, or let me alone even for an instant?”

The answer, of course, is no. If we ever think we have escaped God, and all of questions that we have, then we have fooled only ourselves. A 19th century poet named Francis Thompson wrote of this feeling in terms better than any others I have found. In his poem “The Hound of Heaven,” which I strongly recommend that all of you read, he describes God as a bloodhound, who literally follows him “down the nights and down the days…down the arches of the years…down the labyrinthine ways of [his] own mind, and in the midst of tears,” all while Thompson continues to run, continues to chase after a life free from God. At the end of the poem, however, he is finally caught like a cornered fox, and God, the hound of heaven, says to him:
“All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home :
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”

The writer Yann Martel, in his book Life of Pi, wrote that “zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.” To return to faith, to accept the extended hand and step out of the despondency that comes of having not been able to completely reconcile your faith with your experience, is not to re-enter a cage from which you have escaped – to return to faith is to release God from the cage you tried to build. Logic and reason are tools with which we understand the world – they are not the world itself, they are not God, and God does not fit within them. The desire to understand God should be pursued, but it is not the chief end of life. Greater minds than ours have tried and failed, and St. Augustine himself, one of Christianity’s most influential theologians, wrote that “If you think you have conceived of something – if you think you have finally understood something - then it is not God.” For anyone who grew up speaking Latin as their native language, that’s “Si comprehendis non est Deus.”

We came to the school with a very reasonable faith and a God we understood. I hope we can say that we leave it with a resurrected faith and a God we love. When God takes our hand, and lifts us out onto the other side of the bleak, trying time – and I must stress that there is another side to reach – we are able to look back with new eyes. The faith and the passion that we remember having from that beautiful, ideal time in our past – they are not gone. They are in the hands of God, who has allowed them to pass away that he might resurrect them anew, just as he allows us to experience – even leads us into – the dark night of the soul, that he might transform our very concept of God. Hopefully, we find ourselves feeling not trapped but released, not defensive and petty, but open, and passionately loving.

Very likely, this is not the last time it will happen to us. I have been speaking of us graduates, but the idea applies to everyone present. Life breaks boundaries. Life, experience, love, conversation, ideas – if we have trouble reconciling these things to our idea of God, it is to God’s credit that he is beyond our comprehension. We embrace God not because God makes perfect sense, or because God fits into a method of thought that we find comforting. We embrace God because, against all reason, God pursues us. When we have given up, even when we would ask God to leave us alone and let us be, God is there, forever and ever, amen.

Si comprehendis non est Deus.