"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there
is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not
worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And
the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type
thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess,
or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that
pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. 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 your body and
beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age
start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you."
-David Foster Wallace
"Ecce, homo!" ("Behold, the Man!") John 19:5
We are all lovers. We are all purpose driven. The question is what do we love? At what purpose are we aimed? David Foster Wallace hit it right on the mark only a few months before his tragic death. Whatever we worship, whatever we hold in awe, it will completely consume us. It will consume our passions, our time, our money, our all. No matter who you are, or what you pretend to believe (or not believe), there is some goal you are aimed at, there is some idea of "the good life" you are pursuing. If you don't believe me, just watch 3 commercials. They will all paint for you a picture of the good life, the "blessed man". Michelob Ultra will tell you that, "Blessed is the man who drinks a light beer, for he shall keep off the calories he has burned during his workout." Lexus confesses, "Blessed is he whose sports car is perfect, for so shall he be perfect." And finally, Taco Bell preaches, "Cursed is the one who eats the food of the old, for he shall not inherit the hip-ness of the waffle taco."
These are silly examples, but one of the most important things to realize as members of Western society, is that the world all around us is built to shape the way we view "the good life". The happy man is the man whose wife (or girlfriend) is attractive, wears the right clothes, with the right high heels, and isn't too much of a nag, especially when the guys are over. The happy woman is she who is able to go out with her girlfriends, who is the thinnest out of those girlfriends, and for whom men buy drinks. Underneath all of these miniature myths of "happiness" is the myth of money.
The myth of money (and its related "myth of the job") is what enables us to buy the cars, beer, clothes, workout machines/gym memberships, bikes, houses, (need I go on?) that we need to be happy. The myth of money is what holds up all of the other sub myths. Money is Zeus, and everything else springs from its head. It is to the myth of money that every presidential candidate and mayor must pay homage, "I will boost jobs and reduce unemployment"; it is to the myth of money that even universities now must submit, "96% of our graduates find job placement within a year."
However, as people and as society, we are learning that money (and the stuff and "prestige" that come with it) does not satisfy. Chuck Palahniuk put it this way,
"We are an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy (stuff) we don't need... Our Great War's a spiritual war... We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact."
He is right. The myth of money is old and dead. It perhaps hasn't been realized all the way through, but our level of decadence and depression with the myth of money is coming to its end. With what will we replace it? Or, perhaps more to the point of this blog, what will our schools aim at, if not "good college placement so that our students can get good jobs"?
What I suggested in my last post is that we need a different aim as a school. As St. Augustine rightly observed in his Confessions, "We are all restless until we find our rest in Christ." As a school, our aim is to make our students more Human by aiming them at Christ. We want them to fall in love with Jesus. Our aim is to have kids walk out of our doors more Christlike than they walked in. Our aim then, in a word, is "discipleship" (from the Latin word disco-"I learn"). It is "training" or "discipline" that they need (also from disco) in the ways of true Love, as their loves and desires are horribly disordered. They need to be trained up in the ways of true Humanity, and here is where Christ figures so centrally.
From ancient times education focused the eyes of the student on ideals. Think of Pythagoras's pondering of triangles or the Golden Mean's hold on architecture. The reason that art and mathematics (particularly geometry) developed to such an extent in the Greco-Roman world, and then again in the Renaissance, is that those who were studying and thinking were absolutely transfixed by the world of the ideal, by the image of perfection (remember the famous, "Is there such a thing as a 'perfect circle'?" debate).
The scholars especially would talk about what the blessed or happy or just man looks like in deed. What kind of life should you crave? What kind of person should you want your child to be? (See Juvenal's Satire X) When we see Michelangelo's David, Michaelangelo is answering this question of the ideal as it pertains to beauty. "What does the ideal man look like?" This same question is answered by the Greeks with statues of Apollo and Hercules. We might answer with a David of our own, Mr. David Beckham. The question of beauty for women is answered in statues of Venus and in paintings of Bathsheba and Judith, Biblical characters described as especially beautiful to the eyes. We answer with models on runways and cheerleaders on the sidelines of sporting events.
The concept of the ideal man/woman was called by the ancients the "tyrannical image". It was literally an image/statue you couldn't hope to live up to. It was an image that was terrible to look upon because it called you up to something higher and better than yourself, even while telling you that you could never reach that level of beauty or moral excellence. It was both infinitely encouraging and infinitely discouraging.
I want to suggest (following David Hicks) that Christ is that image for us and for our students. He is the "tyrannical image" of MAN. He is the second Adam. He is what we were and are supposed to be. In Christ we see all that man's blessedness and happiness look like. Humanity looks like living out the teachings of the Beatitudes (from beatus, which means "happy").
Before I have to sign off for this post, I want to add two rays of light to what Christ might look like as the tyrannical image.
"We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." (Ephesians 2:10)
"Both the one who makes people holy (Christ) and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters." (Hebrews 2:11)
These passages contain 2 basic elements that will shed light upon our future reflections on training our students up for following Christ: 1. God is the one who has made and is making us holy. It is through the sacrificial death of Jesus that we are made perfect. It is not our doing. 2. God very closely identifies with us ("brothers and sisters") and takes part in our working, not only with our salvation, but with what follows afterwards. This working, as the author of Hebrews makes clear later in his letter, includes both great times of success and discouraging times of failure.
Jesus as the tyrannical image of perfect Man dares to call us to to join him in his blessedness; he does not simply speak of our failure to measure up to his greatness. He calls us to join him in true Humanity as family. The "tyranny" of the image is diminished significantly when we realize that we are his heirs and family. He died so that we too could be revealed as the glorious sons and heirs of his Kingdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment