"What kind of life do you want to live?" This was the subject line that I sent to a group of 25 graduating seniors at Princeton University, where I serve as the associate dean of religious life and the chapel. As expected, Princeton students range from the smart to the very, very smart, and during their time at Princeton they become even more capable in whatever academic focus they may have. In many wonderful ways, Princeton is doing its job in training young men and women to be leaders in their fields and fulfilling the university's unofficial motto: In the Nation's Service and in the Service of all Nations.
But in addition to imparting knowledge and training, my hope is that those of us in education might also help young people to cultivate the wisdom required to determine what kind of life will be meaningful and good, for themselves and for others, and leave university equipped to make decisions that will lead to that life.
Why is this so important? Because wisdom about living life will ultimately be as least as important to the students as the information they have gathered in the classroom. And the ability to make well-considered decisions about how to live life will serve them longer. I know this because at the same time that I was asking these young people to reflect on this question, I was also talking to two middle-aged people close to me who are struggling as they consider what they are doing with their lives. These two individuals are by most accounts "successful," and yet they admit that they feel inadequate and ill-equipped to answer the question of what kind of life they want to live.
The group of students who assembled was wide-ranging in background and interests. They represented majors from Classics to Chemistry, Religion to Philosophy, and Public Policy to Comparative Literature. The individuals had been leaders in a range of religious communities as well as in the newspaper, student government and eating clubs, and they represented some of the most successful academic careers at Princeton. Although they had been in the same year, some of them were meeting one another for the first time. We started by going around the room with each student reading a passage from a book that they had read, either inside or outside the classroom, that had helped them with the question of what kind of life they want to live. (You can see some of the quotes from the books below.)
Not surprisingly for young people about to graduate, the conversation first veered towards choices around careers. At this stage of life, and perhaps for the first time, young people become aware that making a decision to do one thing also involves making a decision not to do another. For instance, if a student chooses to go to graduate school in public policy, it means that she may have to forfeit her desire to be a psychologist. The stakes can seem dauntingly high. And yet, as one of my aunts once taught me, you can have it all, just not all at once.
I often have had students say to me, "Well, this is the last time I will be able to take a month to travel," or "I may never be able to study painting again," and my response is always, "Says who?" While making a decision of where to go to graduate school or what job to take is important, it is also just part of long chain of choices we make in life. The practice of discernment will hopefully continue as we grow and learn more about who we are. Change is constant, as a Buddhist reading from one of the students informed us. Living life well requires a heart that remains open to the call of the Spirit to our unique Vocation. It requires occasional reassessment of our interests and skills, and taking risks as we embark on new directions that our life may take.
Because it is constantly being drilled into students at places like Princeton that they are being groomed for leadership, our students often look first at success in their work as being the most important element of designing the life they want to lead. And it is important. As one student remarked, being paid to do that which we are truly interested in is a great luxury. Yet even interesting and "successful" careers may not provide the kind of life they want to live.
An example of this was found in the biography of Henry Kissinger, which one student brought to the discussion. While controversial, Kissinger is undoubtedly counted as successful. However, the student brought in the biography as a negative example because of how the book revealed Kissinger's deeply petty and vindictive nature. While it might be attractive to be Secretary of State and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Kissinger failed at living a life that these students would choose to emulate.
For one extremely capable Muslim woman in the group the entire conversation about careers was still only tangentially related to the kind of life she wanted to live. Coming out of her religious tradition of fasting, she expressed the view that living life well is as much about restraint as it is about action. In other words, just because we can doesn't mean we should. She warned against the constant focus on striving; and how tempting concepts such as "success' and "happiness" only offer ever-receding horizons. She and others emphasized that family, friends, everyday small actions, and self-awareness are much more important than career. She wants to live a life where the question is not what we do but rather who we are.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, was Princeton's Baccalaureate speaker this year. Bezos relayed the story of being a clever little boy, sitting in the back seat of a car driven by his grandparents, and figuring out how many years his grandmother was going to take off her life through smoking. When the young Bezos proudly announced the figure to his grandmother, she burst into tears. On that day, his grandfather explained to him that there was a difference between cleverness and kindness. Cleverness is something that people like Bezos, who was an undergrad at Princeton, are simply born with; it is a gift. Kindness, on the other hand, is a choice. We have the choice to be compassionate, kind, and thoughtful. While we hope that students will use their gifts to the fullest, even more we hope that they will exercise choices that will guide their lives in the direction of kindness, compassion and service.
But what of tragedy? While much of the conversation with these students focused on the decisions that were theirs to make, others wanted to talk about that which we can not control. Death, suffering, and human frailty must be reckoned with when reflecting on the life we wish to live. One student brought to the discussion a passage from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time: "Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."
Several of the students in our discussion had experienced the trauma of the death of a loved one during their time at college, and others had suffered through a variety of difficult times of personal and academic hardship. Part of life is learning that you do not have control over tragedy such as the death and other kinds of losses, and that in relinquishing control and acknowledging our frailties, we are paradoxically made more aware of the power we do possess. I know several Princeton students who, like so many college students and 10 percent of our nation, are without jobs or prospects of further study. Living the life we want to live means that in those moments of apparent failure, loss, and setback, we see in even more detail the beauty and possibility of those things that are within our means to influence and enhance. It means that we never feel totally unable to better our situation or our world. As Baldwin goes on to write, "It seems to me that we ought to rejoice in the fact of death -- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return."
The conversation on what kind of life these graduating Princeton students want to live was wide-ranging and it ended without anyone developing a resolution or a plan. But my prayer is that our time together may have encouraged these marvelous young people to remain aware of the task. When the hour-and-a-half were finished, I admitted to the students that I did not think we had arrived at any firm closure, to which one student replied that the day when we close the book on these questions is the day that we die -- "The unexamined life is not worth living," as Socrates said. Long may this great Princeton class of 2010 live.
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Here are a few of the passages selected by the Princeton seniors as instructive in living the life they want to live.
From The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin:
Behind what we think of as the Russian menace lies what we do not wish to face, and what white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro: reality -- the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that we ought to rejoice in the fact of death -- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us...It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant -- birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so -- and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths -- change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not -- safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope -- the entire possibility -- of freedom disappears.
From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin:
She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. -- Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.
"How despicably have I acted!'' she cried. -- "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! -- I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust. -- How humiliating is this discovery! -- Yet, how just a humiliation! -- Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. -- Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.''
From "This Is Water" by David Foster Wallace:
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, everyday. This is real freedom.
From Marcus Aurelius' Meditations:
The Pythagoreans say this: at dawn, behold the starry heavens, so that we may continue to remind ourselves of those beings that are always in accord with each other and always performing their function; and also that we may remember their order, purity, and nakedness, for a star needs no veil.
"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda:
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.
The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.
From Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagan:
Everything in our experience -- our bodies, our minds, our thoughts, our wants and needs, our relationships -- is fleeting. Changing. Subject to death. We die in each moment and again, in each moment, we are born. The process of birth and death goes on endlessly, moment after moment, right before our eyes. Everything we look at, including ourselves and every aspect of our lives, is nothing but change. Vitality consists of this very birth and death. This impermanence, this constant arising and fading away, are the very things that make our lives vibrant, wonderful, and alive. Yet we usually want to keep things from changing. We want to preserve things, to hold onto them. This desire to hold on, to somehow stop change in its tracks, is the greatest source of woe and horror and trouble in our lives.
Paul Raushenbush: Finding Your Religion at College: 3 Questions to Guide You
It is so important to consider what kind of "adult" we want to be, but those thoughts are abstract if you consider that the roads post-graduation don't fork in the way they did in the past. There is no option A-Z anymore.
Religions having thousands of different gospels, and not the true gospel of the one handed to them by Jesus. We are told not to argue over the word. For it is futile for anyone who does such.
Instead, only ambition to manage and control some element of power attracts our graduates. Economic, political, or military power give the illusion of self-reliance. That is a measure of our immaturity and a harbinger of our helplessness.
When will Americans get over this idea that these private ivory league schools for the rich are helping America?
Then we have the lawyers from these schools running this country. How is that working out for Americans? A Supreme Court, congress, and white house and media bought and paid for by corp America run by MBA’s from what ivory league universities.
Yale hires graduates from Harvard as professors and Harvard hires graduates from Yale as professors and Princeton hires from both schools well you get the picture.
Americans these schools are the very foundation for capitalism to flourish where the rich get richer on the backs of middle class Americans that are soon to be third world status as this nation succumbs to the evils of capitalism.
America’s style of capitalism is creating suffering all over the world and if these graduates are anything like those in the past that suffering will continue around the world. Take your next vacation to Iraq and see how America’s imperialism for oil has caused profound suffering in that country.
A Pastor with GUTS!
Thought you might enjoy this interesting prayer given in Kansas at the opening session of their Senate. It seems prayer still upsets some people. When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard:
Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance.
We know Your Word says, 'Woe to those who call evil good,' but that is exactly what we have done.
We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem.
We have abused power and called it politics.
We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.
Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.
Amen!
The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest. In 6 short weeks, Central Christian Church, where Rev. Wright is pastor, logged more than 5,000 phone calls with only 47 of those calls responding negatively. The church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India, Africa and Korea.
Commentator Paul Harvey aired this prayer on his radio program, 'The Rest of the Story,'and received a larger response to this program than any other he has ever aired.
With the Lord's help, may this prayer sweep over our nation and wholeheartedly become our desire so that we again can be called 'one nation under God.
I very much agree with the ultimate sentiment of this article.
It reminds me of something my mother said to me.
"You know the expression 'actions speak louder than words'? Well, I think actions DO speak. I like to think of my actions every day - the way that I live my life - as my conversation with God. And it is my goal to have the best conversation with God that I possibly can."
Class prejudice is an 800 pound gorilla in the living room of America. Weaned on the Rust Belt. Camoflaged in the Reagan years. Ignored by Clinton and his WTO corporate apologists. Beaten savagely by the Bushies.
Reality check: 24% of boomers have BAs, 26% of genY. The implication: educated advantage within families. So much for the cliche of education being a way out of disadvantage.
An economic system that benefits maybe 20%. The rest subjected to the financial econopaths and the economics of trickle-up.
What kind of life do you want to live? How about one supporting that traditional Americanism, the common good. One that answers "Yes!" to the Biblical question: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
One aware that we working people were once personnel. Now we're "human resources," bodies like the dead coal miners and oil rig workers to be used up in the extraction of what's left of the earth's resources by callous, irresponsible corporations.
Certainly we as a species, especially those of us with spiritual beliefs, can come up with a better reason for existence than mindless consumption, depleted humans, and ecological destruction. Welcome to our world.
So I read through a few pages of ale's other comments. Defenses of the S.C. flag. Quotes from Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin. Wanting Cheney as President. And lots of one-liner attacks on President Obama. Before I found a reference about going to church. So I can guess what's most important.
How are any of the problems I've raised-- human and ecological destruction by means of an out of control economic system-- cured by intoning the name "Jesus?"
Christian belief is not enough. Nor is privatized charity, a word that in the original Greek is clearly love. Though the exact term "social or economic justice" is not biblical, the concept is obvious in the OT prophets and the NT gospels like Matthew.
Read Acts 4:34-35. "There was not a needy person among them, for as many as had land and houses sold them. They brought the proceeds and laid them at the feet of the apostles, who distributed to each as any had need."
If we Christians demonstrated the reality of that, unfair and exploitive economic structures would never have been able to subsume the political system. And there would be no need even to speak about government intervention.
I was born into a dirt-poor family on an Indian reservation in the southwest. My father, aware of the hopelessness of reservation life, sent me off to live with a family in Phoenix where I lived, in effect, as an indentured servant. But I had the very good fortune to come to the attention of a public school teacher who took me under her wing and encouraged me to take advantage of my aptitude for math.
Eventually I moved in with my "mentor" and her husband, was graduated from HS and received a scholarship which enabled me to pursue a degree in engineering. While at the university, I married a young Army officer. A year later he was killed in Vietnam and I was six months pregnant.
Long story short. I used the proceeds of my husband's life insurance policy to start a business that eventually became extremely successful. And later I remarried, turned the operation of my business over to my sister and went to live the life of a rancher's wife in the southern Rockies.
And each morning I still look forward to what surprises the day might bring.
I never went to Princeton, but life is nonetheless perfect.
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Geez. You had me until making that huge faux pas. Yikes. Talk about the blind leading the blind.