My Devotional Assembly

This is a rather long post, but it is the text of the devotional assembly I delivered to the junior high students at school on Friday. Devotional assemblies are the chance for faculty members to talk to the kids and essentially tell them about something important to the teacher, some lesson they want the students to reflect upon. Think of it as a half-step more informal than a sermon. This one went over pretty well, I think . The teachers liked it at least.

On September 12th, one of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace died. The newspapers and literary websites and journals all commented on what a loss it was for American literature. His novel, Infinite Jest, was listed in Time Magazine as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, which I would agree. In my opinion, it might the greatest novel of the 1990s, but I am biased since I wrote my master’s thesis on it.

After learning of his death, I turned not to his fictions, or his essays, but to his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. In this speech, Wallace discusses the old chestnut that education’s main goal is to teach us how to think. But Wallace discussed how the truth to that statement does not necessarily apply to only academics. He said in the speech:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

To Wallace, only by learning how to control how you think and what you think about do you truly have an open mind and the freedom to control your life completely and truly. He discusses how most people when they aren’t thinking get upset and angry at the thousands of petty irritations and annoyances we experience, but that by choosing how we think, by trying to be empathetic, we might be able to see the world differently and change our lives.

He uses the example being stuck in traffic. Most people get angry that they are stuck in traffic. “How dare you cut me off! Get off the road, you drunk driver! Do you have to be completely stupid to have a driver’s license in this city!” And that’s just me driving to school in the morning! But seriously, Wallace points out that the person who just cut you off could be a father taking their child to the emergency room, or that slow car could be a woman driving slowly because she’s been up all night working the night shift because she lost her prior job and can only support her family this way.

But I could change Wallace’s examples to ways that apply to your life in junior high. Like waiting in line at lunch. You can, like Wallace says, choose to think about how you respond to being stuck in the infamous breakfast for lunch line, and realize that everyone else feels the same way you do, but some of them are probably having a worse day than you: they might have flunked a test, or they’re brother or sister fought with them this morning, or even worse, their parents are getting divorced. And now they, like you, have to wait in line. Suddenly, your life isn’t too bad.
Just like Wallace’s point, if we choose how we think and react, and act to the world around us, we really have gained freedom. We aren’t mindless slaves with no ability to decide how we think and act. As Wallace says,

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, [uninteresting] ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

This applies everywhere in our lives: we must think about what we are doing and thinking because it is just too easy to do what society and culture is telling us to do. Do we really care what celebrities are doing with their lives, what Paris Hilton is buying at the store or what car Will Farrell drives? Is that what we want to spend our time caring about? Do we even want to spend our time caring about these things?

The world is bent upon making you mindless consumers, whether it is the clothes you buy or the shows you watch, or the ideas you swallow from radio or television. And when you become a mindless swallower of culture, you begin to worship the things that popular culture tells you to, that popular culture thinks are important. And Wallace says the danger is that if you do this, you will never be happy. He says

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship beauty and looks, [the unreal body images society forces on us,] and you will always feel ugly. . . . The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings [of daily life].

Only if you do the hard work about thinking for yourself, you’ll realize that you don’t want to be mindless in your thoughts and actions. We can apply the same ideas to the classroom not only in the everyday events of our lives, as I said earlier, but also in matters of honor. Hard to believe this, but all of us teachers remember (recently like me, or years ago like some of your other teachers) how scary it was as a student to admit to a teacher that you didn’t do your work, you didn’t remember to get a test signed. And out of fear, it is tempting to avoid problems and avoid disappointing or angering a teacher by lying to them. But to do so is, as Wallace says, to lose something valuable.

In this case it is your honor.

So far this year, as honor council sponsor with Ms. Thomas, we have had several such incidents of lost honor. We often think because these are not made public, that they don’t happen, but they do. So far, without naming names, we’ve had 7 lying offenses, 4 cheating offenses, 2 forged signatures, and nearly dozen other hearsays or questionable cases that we didn’t pursue. I bring these up not to embarrass anyone, but to encourage you to become active thinkers, to have the freedom to control your thoughts and actions, and by doing so, do the right thing, keeping your honor and the trust of your classmates and teachers by not cheating.

In the coming weeks, as finals loom and projects get turned in, the temptation to betray our best selves can be overwhelming. In fact, already in the last week, our honor council activities have nearly doubled from the rest of the semester. In the weeks ahead, I encourage all of us to think about how we act and think for ourselves. How can we be the best people we can be, how can we control our thoughts and actions honorably?

The baptism service in the Episcopal church has a wonderful prayer that fits so beautifully with what I’ve been talking about with you. In welcoming a person or baby into a life with Jesus Christ, the priest prays in a way that could serve as a reminder for all of us, regardless of our religion. The priest asks God to give the newly baptized “an inquiring mind and discerning heart, and the courage to will and to persevere” in life; it seems the authors of the baptismal service recognize that to have an inquiring mind and discerning heart is important right from the start, but that it also takes will and perseverance to do it right in big ways (like keeping your honor) or little (like waiting in the line for ice cream when we have it).

Please pray with me.

Dear God please grant us “inquiring minds and discerning hearts, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. May we be thankful for the things we have and the people we are blessed with, and may we seek always and everywhere to be our best selves in our thoughts and our actions.

Amen.