The following was a short talk I gave at one of the weekly “Tuesdays in the Chapel” services hosted by Bob Randolph, MIT’s Chaplain to the Institute. The prompt for this years talks is “A book or event that changed my life.”
-The first lines of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me…
Our topic is a book that changed your life. The Great Gatsby is not the book that changed my life, though I like it very much. I included the first few lines of Gatsby though because I think they warmed me up for the the thing that would change my life.
It’s kinda funny, because the narrator of the Great Gatsby, Nick, says the advice from his father stuck with him and he was continually turning it over. Well, these lines have stuck with me since I first read them in high school. These ideas of not judging others and that some of us have advantages for which we can’t take credit stuck with me, even if they were latent for a long time
As a Christian chaplain, I would feel sheepishly cliche saying that the Bible is the book that changed my life. So I thought it would feel like less of a cop-out to talk about one particular snippet of the Bible. So I chose a very small section of text that sparked one of my first experiences of being very impacted by the Bible.
Let me set the stage a bit for where I was at this point in my life. I had recently graduated from MIT and was overall feeling very discouraged about life in general. I was in that post-college malaise that I see many recent grads experiencing these days. I felt disoriented by this sense that, after my expensive and arduous education, I knew less than when I started. And I was certainly more confused about what I wanted out of life and how to pursue it.
I was also feeling like pretty profound screw up. I had wanted to go to grad school for a PhD, but my application was pretty weak and that didn’t work out. So then I thought I would enter the high-powered and glamorous world of consulting. But I didn’t get offers from any of the really glamorous firms and took a job with a quirky, struggling boutique consulting firm in suburban Boston. It wasn’t a good fit for me and I was pretty unfulfilled in that job. And the icing on the cake was a sudden and unexpected break up in a four-year relationship that I thought was heading towards marriage.
I always thought of myself as a “problem solver”. That’s a big part of what attracted me to MIT and what I think got me into MIT. And MIT was supposed to make me really good at it, but here I was facing a host of problems that I didn’t know how to solve.
So it was a perfect storm of disappointment and disillusionment for me. And it really felt like the ship was sinking.
Bible reading was not a normal thing for me at that time, but my despondent state was beginning to put me in a more spiritually receptive posture so one day when I came across the Bible that my parents had sent me off to college with, I decided to open it.
At this point I was faced with the same dilemma that all novice Bible readers face: “Where the heck do I start in this intimidatingly thick and complex book?” Not knowing a good way to answer that question, I did what any rational, scientifically-trained person would do: open to a random spot, read a couple of lines with utter disregard for context, secretly hoping that the spot where my finger lands will hold deep wisdom that speaks directly to my situation.
These days as I’m helping students to navigate their first experiences with the Bible, I have much better strategies to recommend, but at the time, it was the best I could come up with. And in that instance it worked pretty well–well enough that I’m standing up here and saying that the couple of sentences I landed on changed my life. And so here they are:
Who says you are better than others? What do you have that was not given to you? And if it was given to you, why do you brag as if you did not receive it as a gift?
Which turns out to be from the New Testament letter of 1 Corinthians written by the apostle Paul. So in that moment when I happened upon this verse, I was kind of dumbstruck. I could not wrap my mind around this.
Truth be told, I did think I was better than others, at least in certain respects. But I think what really got to me was this question “what do you have that was not given to you?”
My immediate response was “well, lots, I have lots that wasn’t given to me.” So I thought about things like my MIT diploma, they weren’t just handing those things out for nothing. I would have readily acknowledged that getting that diploma involved things I couldn’t take credit for. I didn’t get to choose the supportive family environment I was born into or the good public schools that I attended. I was just fortunate.
And I knew I could not take credit for any natural talents that got me through MIT anymore than I could take credit for my disarmingly understated good looks. I had always enjoyed math and science and solving puzzles. But I was certainly not one of those students who float through MIT on raw intellectual talent. Most of my classes felt significantly over my head. To my mind, I got through MIT because I worked very very hard. And I was pretty sure that was something I could take credit for. So there Paul.
But I found myself engaged in this internal dialog where my assumptions started to crumble.
You did work hard, but where did you get that capacity to work so hard?
Well, I suppose anyone has the capacity to work hard at least some, but I was dogged about it. I kept at it, I had to persevere and persist to make it through.
But where did your ability to persevere and your temperament for persistence come from?
What?! They came from me having big goals wanting those goals badly enough.
But where did your tendency for high aspirations and the ability to channel such desires come from?
Well, you get the idea, this deconstruction drilled down through all the layers that I could think of. I had been able to make good choices academically but how could I take credit for that given the other areas of my life where I was unable to consistently make good choices, even when I knew what good choices were.
It would be pretty hard to overstate the impact all this had on me. It was way more than “hey, I should be less arrogant and more humble” (though that was a helpful takeaway). It was much deeper than that. It was a wrecking ball to my identity. So much of my self-image and self-worth was built on what I perceived as my achievements and my skills. And suddenly that was a house of cards knocked over by a single breeze.
It left me with three questions:
- What did it mean that everything I had was a gift?
- What would fill the vacuum for my identity and self-worth?
- Holy cow, what else was in this stupefyingly insightful book I was holding?!
I have only partial answers to each of these three questions today and the past dozen years has been a journey of searching them out. I continue to stretch myself to see all of life as a gift. I’m still asking the question “who am I?” And I feel I am still scratching the surface of the animated wisdom of the Bible. One surprising thing has been that, wrestling with each question has provided exponential insight to the other two.
So technically, I guess it would be incorrect to say that these verses changed my life. They are changing my life. And sometimes I think I’m just getting started.