Standing At A Distance

 

Scripture: Luke 17:11-19

 

A sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church

August 9, 2020

 

 

 

       When Facebook first came on the scene, I didn’t know what to make of it. My trendy friends assured me that I needed to join. They promised that it would help me connect with other human beings; but I didn’t feel particularly disconnected. They said that I’d see pictures of other peoples’ vacations and lunches; but I wasn’t sure I had any interest in doing so. They described all the funny pet videos I’d be able to watch; but I couldn’t imagine a greater waste of time.

 

       Still, I was most put off by the rather casual use of the term “friend” in connection with the online associations that Facebook facilitates. In the early days of the social media site, a family member enthusiastically gushed to me: “I’ve only just joined and I already have five-hundred friends!” With my characteristic tact, I responded: “No, you don’t.” He said “Yes! I do!” and pointed at the number in his online profile. I said: “Do this. Ask all of those five-hundred people for money and see who sends it. Those are your friends.”

 

       Well, a pulpit is perhaps an awkward forum for confessions, but I will admit that over time I’ve become an enthusiastic Facebook convert. I know that opinions differ about Facebook and I have no interest in evangelizing anyone on its behalf. If you’re not into Facebook, I get it. But—speaking only for myself—Facebook has enabled me to stay in much closer touch with family, friends, and professional contacts who are dispersed around the globe. Also, I like posting pictures of our travels and our lunches and funny videos of our dog.

 

       What surprised me most about Facebook, though, is that it turned out to be a way to establish new connections that have somehow mysteriously transformed into friendships—despite the fact that I’ve never met these individuals in person. They include an Episcopal clergyman in Kansas. A rabbi in Maryland. A Jesuit priest in Washington, D.C. It sounds like a joke where all my new Facebook friends walk into a bar.

 

Speaking of which, my new friends include someone who’s written a book on the favorite cocktail recipes of Ernest Hemingway. A law professor in Indiana. A couple of newspaper columnists. A fair housing advocate. The list goes on and on. Would they all loan me money? Maybe, although following Jesus’s example in the wilderness, I won’t tempt them to disappoint me by asking.

 

For all of its other shortcomings, which are abundant, Facebook has reminded me of something about which I seem to need constant reminding, especially these days: We can maintain deep personal connections with people even when we’re not in their physical presence. Indeed, we can even establish those connections out of nothing more than words, images, and the electronic projection of the human spirit. Physical contact plays such an outsized role in our lives that we can forget about the facility and effectiveness of other kinds of communion.

 

The healing stories of Jesus convey the same message, but in cosmic, mind-bending, soul-changing terms and dimensions. Of course, many of those healing stories involve physical contact. Perhaps the most famous comes in the fourth chapter of Luke, in these stunningly simple words: “At sunset, the people brought to Jesus all who had various kinds of sickness, and laying his hands on each one, he healed them.”

 

In some of the stories, Jesus has very minor physical contact with those he heals. In the eighth chapter of Luke, we encounter a woman who touches the hem of Jesus’s cloak and is instantly cured of her condition. We often remember this story as one about the unimaginable power of physical contact with Jesus. But it’s worth noting that Jesus describes things differently. He says to her: “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

 

A number of years ago, I helped institute at a church that I attended a regular “healing service.” We met once a week in the evening, listened to each other’s struggles, and prayed. I think everyone agreed that the most important moment came at the end, when we gathered in a circle, our arms around each other, imagining a healing force moving through us like a steady electric current. If sometime I had announced that we were having a no-contact healing service that week, I think everyone would have stayed home.

 

But that would have been a mistake. Jesus knew that we can be in a place of healing intimacy with each other even when we’re not in close physical proximity. He conveys this to us over and over again, including in the gospel’s healing stories.

 

Consider the story of the centurion’s servant, told in the eighth chapter of Matthew and the seventh chapter of Luke. You remember how it goes: a centurion comes to Jesus and asks him to heal his servant, who is gravely ill at home. Jesus offers to go to him, but the centurion dismisses it as unnecessary. In essence, the centurion says: “I have a lot of authority and people do what I tell them to do; but your authority is even greater; so I know that if you just ‘speak the word’ he will be healed.”

 

As with the woman who touched his garment, Jesus celebrates the man’s faith: “I have not found so great a faith, no, not in Israel,” he says. Jesus calls for the servant’s healing. And within the hour, the man recovers.

 

Then we have the story of the Canaanite woman’s daughter, told in the fifteenth chapter of Matthew and the seventh chapter of Mark. Here, a Canaanite woman comes to Jesus and pleads for him to cast a demon out of her daughter, who has become possessed. Jesus simply says that her request has been granted and sends her on her way. No laying on of hands, no hugs or high-fives or garment-touching. It’s as if the woman’s faith alone did all that was needed.  

 

But my personal favorite among these stories comes in the seventeenth chapter of Luke. Here’s what happens. Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, stops in a village. He is visited there by ten men, all lepers, who because of their illness “stood at a distance.” That was essentially the command of the public health departments of the time: no one should come into physical contact with a leper.

 

They ask Jesus to have mercy on them, he tells them to show themselves to the priests, and as they depart they are healed. Now, I want you to notice that all these men showed tremendous faith. When Jesus sent them to the priests, they didn’t balk, or wait to see if the healing worked, or otherwise test the power of Jesus’s command. They turned, and left, and were healed.

 

Still, only one of the men—a Samaritan, and so a social outcast for an additional reason—shows gratitude. He comes back to Jesus, falls at his feet, and thanks him. Jesus says (we can imagine, almost with a smirk): “and where are the other nine I healed?” Then he commands the Samaritan: “Arise, go your way. Your faith has made you well.”

 

It’s funny how experience changes your perspective on biblical texts. I used to think of the nine who did not return to express their thanks as ungrateful oafs. But now, in my COVID-saturated sensibility, I suspect they just wanted to run off and throw their arms around all the family members and friends who they’d had to look at from afar for so long. You know, it’s almost as if someone somewhere had told me to be careful about judging people.

 

These healing stories all reinforce the notion that we do not need physical contact to be in spiritual contact. We can love each other, connect with each other, heal each other, even when we stand at a distance. All we need, every one of these stories tells us, is the faith that this is so.

 

Of course, we do not find this message only in the healing stories. After all, ours is a religion built around the experience of absence as presence. God is elsewhere, and yet with us every day and even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Jesus ascended to heaven, and yet the gospel of Matthew concludes with his promise: “And surely I am with you, even to the very end of the age.” At the center of our belief system lies the conviction that when his followers went looking for Jesus in a tomb, he wasn’t there, he was gone—and yet he walks with us and he talks with us and he tells us we are his own.

 

These days, we all need to make do with less physical contact. But that doesn’t mean we’ve had to make do with less loving connection. To the contrary, in some paradoxical ways COVID-19 has pushed us to places of broader connection, deeper empathy, and a more considered compassion.

 

In that bracing passage in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells us that when we serve the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned it is just as if we are serving him. Those misfortunes may or may not have been part of our personal experience before COVID-19. But, now, all of us are sharing more intimately in these sources of existential instability and anxiety.

 

All of a sudden, we have to worry about how we will get food—and we stand in closer communion with the hungry. All of a sudden, we have to worry about our health and the health of every person around us—and we stand in closer communion with the sick. All of a sudden, we have to worry about where we will be welcomed and admitted—and we stand in closer communion with the stranger. All of a sudden, we have to worry about whether and when we can leave our homes—and we stand in closer communion with the imprisoned.   

 

And, all of a sudden, things we took for granted have become precious to us. A hug. A kiss. A big, sloppy gathering of friends or family. The ordinary has taken on an extraordinary significance. Counting our losses turns out to be a compelling way to count our blessings.

 

But a critical part of the Good News of Jesus Christ is that all of this upending of our normal lives has made us more connected, not less. It has brought us closer together, not pushed us apart. It has expanded our spirits, not shriveled them up. It has magnified the Lord and his place in our lives, not marginalized him.

 

When those ten lepers came to Jesus, the Bible tells us, he found them standing at a distance. But the healing stories demonstrate that physical remoteness is no obstacle to the God who, after all, created space itself. Their faith closed the gap—in an instant. Just as it did for the centurion and the Canaanite woman. They could do all things through Christ, who strengthened them. And we can do all things through Christ, who strengthens us.

 

The healing stories also provide some reassurance that this amazing grace does not depend upon us having arrived at a state of spiritual perfection. Jesus blessed the woman who grasped at his garment, despite her boldness; he blessed the Canaanite woman, despite her bluntness; he blessed the centurion, even though he represented the oppressive power of the Roman government, and the centurion’s servant, even though Jesus had never met him; he blessed the ten lepers, even though only one returned to express his thanks.

 

As the old hymn goes, Jesus blesses me “just as I am,” and you just as you are. He strengthens us and works through us even though we are messy and flawed human beings who are laboring to do better, to live faithfully, and to love unhesitatingly and inexhaustibly. Perhaps, in the Good News that he brings us, that is the best and most welcome news of all: that we are blessed, just as we are. The gravest mistake we could make would be not to hear it and take it to heart.

 

Right now, at this very moment, the most powerful and loving force of the universe is in your company, right beside you. God is no more “remote” than you are from your children, your grandchildren, your friends, your co-workers, your fellow church members, or any of the hungry, homeless, estranged, sick, or imprisoned people that have been placed in our care. Through the movement of our faith and the power of the Holy Spirit, no living soul stands at a distance from us. Not even one.

 

“With God,” Jesus said, “all things are possible.” Even a savior born into poverty. Even a Messiah riding on a donkey. Even an empty tomb, with the stone rolled away. Even human connection, over hundreds of miles. Even intimacy, when communication goes online. Even peace, in the midst of turmoil. Even grace and comfort, in the throes of an often ungracious and discomfiting time. Even love, in the absence of embrace. It’s kind of like magic—only infinitely better, and it’s for real.

 

*

 

Once upon a time, the story goes, there was a terrible sickness. Ten men thought that it meant they had to stand apart from God. But then they learned that their sense of distance was an illusion. And their faith that this was so brought them to a place of wholeness and healing.

 

And so will ours.

 

Praise God that it is so.

 

And the people said: Amen.

 

 

An Ocean of Need

A Sermon Shared Online

May 17, 2020

Scripture: Matthew 6:24-33

         Epictetus was one of the great Stoic philosophers of antiquity. A hard life would seem like good training for such a job, and Epictetus had one, at least during his early years in Rome.

Epictetus was born into slavery during the tumultuous reign of the emperor Nero. He was physically disabled, perhaps from birth but maybe because of a severe beating he received from his master—ancient sources disagree.

After the death of Nero, he secured his freedom, began to teach in Rome, and things were looking up. But he had to flee when the new emperor, Domitian, expressed his opinion of the local philosophers by banishing them.

        

Epictetus went to Greece, where he established a school and took on pupils. In fact, the writings we have that are attributed to Epictetus are actually the notes and transcriptions of one of his disciples, Arrian. We owe a great debt to Arrian, even if he just did all that work for extra credit.

 

As the reputation of Epictetus grew, he became a celebrity and eminent people sought him out. True to form, though, he did not allow all the attention to turn his head: he maintained a simple and humble life and had very few possessions.

After his passing, an admirer supposedly paid a handsome sum for his oil lamp, an irony that would have left Epictetus either quaking with laughter or shaking his head in dismay.

         Epictetus makes for excellent reading during hard times. He helps us keep in mind the difference between the things we can control and the things we cannot. He reminds us that we have no power over external events, but that we have almost limitless power over how we respond to them.

And he offers us countless quotable maxims: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” “There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things that are beyond the power of our will.” “First say to yourself what you would be, then do what you have to do.”

         When James Stockdale was a student at Stanford University, he became an enthusiastic reader of Epictetus. Stockdale went on to serve as a pilot in the United States Navy in Vietnam. He carried what he’d learned from Epictetus with him.

When Stockdale’s plane was shot down and he ejected over enemy territory, he realized that he would be taken prisoner of war and held under the worst imaginable conditions. The story goes that as Stockdale descended toward the ground in his parachute, he thought to himself: “Epictetus, here I come.”

         It turned out that Stockdale needed every lesson that Epictetus offered him. He remained imprisoned for more than seven years. He spent four of them in solitary confinement. He was brutally tortured, leaving him with physical difficulties and severe pain for the rest of his life.

Years later, as a vice-admiral and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Stockdale would acknowledge the critical role that Epictetus played in his mental and physical survival.

*

         In recent months, many of us have felt things fall away from us that had become integral parts of our sense of well-being, our identity, our very existence. We have felt ourselves slowly drifting down into unknown and evidently hostile territory. We have worried about what comes next.

Take the modest pleasure of joining friends for dinner on a Friday night. We have woken up into a world where leaving home poses material risks, where we have to remain distant from people we love, where the local restaurant has closed—perhaps permanently, where our resources are limited, and where we may struggle to distinguish Friday from all the other days of the week, given their dull sameness.

In time, this situation will pass. But we know we will have lost some things that matter to us, if we haven’t already. It doesn’t help that we don’t know with anything like certainty what they will be. Anxiety and uncertainty just love working together.

And those are the losses of the privileged. For the poor and disadvantaged, staying safe, sheltered, and fed posed almost insurmountable obstacles even before the pandemic. The arrival of the virus has brought into plain view the rampant poverty that infects our country, the brittle fragility of so much of our population, and the legions of people who subsist on the fractured and crumbling edges of survival. We all have to get by with less; but some of us started with nothing. What will become of them?

Such times invite us into a closer and deeper kinship with certain ideas, including many that are central to the teachings of Jesus. One of those comes in a familiar passage in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. With all due respect to the grandeur of the King James version, permit me to render it in everyday parlance.

“Look,” Jesus says, “you have a choice. You have to decide who and what you’re going to serve. You can serve God, or you can serve material things, but you can’t serve both. It’s up to you.”

He goes on: “But let me tell you this. You cannot make yourself happy by serving material things. A life defined by all that stuff cannot give you freedom, peace, or fulfillment. To the contrary, having shiny objects at the center of your life just breeds anxiety, because you’ll constantly worry about losing them—and you will.”

He continues: “Freedom and contentment lie in not worrying about tomorrow and what you will lose. It lies in living fully today. It lies in committing your heart to things that cannot be lost.”

“Nature tells us as much. Look at how the birds don’t fret about food—but get fed anyway. Look at how the lilies of the field don’t worry about clothing—but are beautiful anyway. In fact, they’re more glorious than Solomon in his fanciest jewels and robes.”

He concludes: “It’s this simple: I love you. And, because I love you, I need you to know that the more you invest your soul in material things, the more you will worry. The more you worry, the less happy you will be. All that worry won’t get you anything—and it certainly won’t get you anything that matters. It will not add a single hour to your life.”

“So here’s the deal. Life is a series of choices. Every single time, choose first the Kingdom of God instead of all that other stuff. Then everything you really need will come to you.”

Now, in order to tease out what this passage means, and especially what it might mean for us, I need to tell you the stories of three rich young men. The first of them comes to us later in the Gospel of Matthew, in the nineteenth chapter. You know the story.

Jesus encounters a rich young man who isn’t actually a bad guy—although he gets a lot of unfavorable air time in sermons. He has tried to live honorably. He has kept the commandments. Indeed, if we could find any fault in him it’s that he seems a bit too proud of those accomplishments.

Perhaps consistent with that theme of pride, the young man wants something more: he wants to be perfect. He asks Jesus how to do it. He probably thought that was a smart and safe thing to do.

But Jesus gives him an answer that he does not like and that might even have struck him as foolish and dangerous. Jesus says: “Well, if you want to be perfect, then go sell all that stuff of yours, give the money to the poor, and follow me.”

You see what Jesus did there: he placed before the young man the same decision that he was talking about back in chapter six. In essence, he declares: “You have a choice. God or material stuff. One will give you freedom and peace and fulfillment, the other won’t. Your call.”

The young man can’t bring himself to give up all the nice accessories of wealth—the robes, the rubies, the Rolexes, the Rolls Royces—so he leaves. Importantly, however, the text tells us that he does so in a state of sorrow.

Think about that for a moment: the instant the young man made the wrong choice a  deep sadness overcame him. So knew immediately that Jesus was right. The magnetic pull of all those sparkly ornaments proved so great that he walked off anyway.

This brings me to our second young man, also rich, but who made a very different choice. Siddhartha Gautama was born into a royal family near the border of Nepal and India about 2,600 years ago. Siddhartha’s parents had extraordinarily high expectations for their child, anticipating that he would someday become a great and powerful leader.

In a well-intentioned but wildly misguided effort to help him fulfill his destiny, they spoiled Siddhartha dreadfully and sheltered him from the problems of the world. As a result, he became thoroughly acquainted with life’s pleasures but remained a stranger to its hardships.

Their plan failed, however, when Siddhartha left the palace and came face to face with human suffering, sickness, and death. Having seen them, he could not un-see them.

These events left Siddhartha with a difficult decision to make—one that should by now sound familiar. He could continue to chase after the material rewards of this world, or he could seek to understand the causes of human suffering and help alleviate them.

He chose the latter course, shed the elaborate trappings of privilege, reduced life to its essentials, and set out on a quest for answers. The answers he found prompted people to follow him in great numbers and, as you know, to call him Buddha.

Buddhism consists of a complex and multidimensional collection of philosophies, beliefs, and texts and resists a quick and tidy summary—indeed, trying to describe it at all runs against some of its foundational insights. But it is fair to say that at the core of Buddhism lies an idea stunningly similar to the one suggested by Jesus in the passages I just discussed.

Buddhism recognizes that our suffering comes from our desires. Our forward-looking striving deprives us of the joys of the here and now, and drives us to commit our thoughts and energies to the finally fruitless task of accumulating things we cannot keep—objects and accolades, prizes and praise, status and stuff.

To be clear, Siddhartha’s search for enlightenment was not some inwardly-focused Olympic-level self-improvement project. The whole point of his undertaking was that he had seen suffering, had empathized with it, and had dedicated himself to addressing it. This fulfills the very definition of  “compassion,” a word that comes from roots meaning “to suffer with”—to understand the struggle of someone else and to exist inside of it with them.

In one of his poems, the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh gets at these ideas and their interconnectedness in the simplest of language. He writes:

I vow to offer joy to one person in the morning

And to help relieve the grief of one person in the afternoon.

I vow to live simply and sanely,

Content with just a few possessions,

And to keep my body healthy.

I vow to let go of all worry and anxiety in order to be light and free.

Or as the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn puts it, throw away your self-absorbed mind and “only keep the question: ‘What is the best way of helping other people?’”

Compassion lies at the heart of Buddhism, just as it does at the heart of Christianity—at least when we do it right. Indeed, if it does not, then we have made a different kind of choice than the one to which the founder of our faith calls us. In that case, we have not left the palace; we have just traded one turreted fortress for another.

This brings us to our third rich young man. Giovani di Pietro di Bernadone was born in Assisi in the late part of the twelfth century. His mother gave him that trippingly poetic name while dad was away on business. Upon returning, his father—a prosperous silk merchant and a practical man—nicknamed his son Francesco. We know him as Francis.

As a young man, Francis enjoyed a carefree and indulgent existence. He loved fine clothes, reveled in the songs of troubadours, spent money lavishly, and otherwise more or less constantly threw himself a big party. But, as with the Buddha, the realities of suffering interrupted this perpetual celebration and its attendant fantasies.

Also as with the Buddha, history and tradition have left us with stories of various events that worked to change Francis’s heart. On one occasion, the legend goes, Francis was busily and successfully selling his father’s fine cloth in the marketplace. As he took in handfuls of money and doled out armfuls of beautiful wares, a beggar approached him. Francis looked into his eyes, and saw his despair.

Francis knew that he had to live differently. Against the strident resistance of his family and friends, he cast off his inheritance, took a vow of poverty, and dedicated his life to caring for the poor. After a year, with only eleven followers surrounding him, Francis led the tiny group to Rome and asked Pope Innocent III to recognize the fledgling group as a new religious order devoted to a life of simplicity and service.

St. Francis has had a profound influence not just on individual lives and the history of the church, but on all of Western culture. Oscar Wilde declared that one of the sad facts of history was that no one since Christ himself had been a true Christian. We hear an echo of the same idea in G. K. Chesterton’s quip that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

But Wilde added: “I make one exception: St. Francis of Assisi.” Wilde said of St. Francis: “He understood Christ, and so became like him.”

The poet Vachel Lindsay, another enthusiast for St. Francis, urged us to go forth and do likewise. He wrote:

Would I might wake St. Francis in you all,

Brother of birds and trees, God’s Troubadour,

Blinded with weeping for the sad and poor …

God make each soul the lonely leper’s slave;

God make us saints, and brave.

One could do worse, I suppose, than by beginning every morning by reciting that last line aloud, and then proceeding to try to live it.

         The French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, an atheist, saw a deep connection between his own view of how to find value in life and that of St. Francis. In one of his journal entries, he wrote:

September 15

In the cloister of San Francesco in Fiesole there is a little courtyard with an arcade along each side, full of red flowers, sun, and yellow and black bees. In one corner,  there is a green water sprinkler, and everywhere the humming of bees. A gentle steam seems to rise from the garden as it bakes in the heat. Sitting on the ground I think about the Franciscans whose cells I have just visited and whose sources of inspiration I can now see. I feel clearly that if they are right then it is in the same way that I am. I know that behind the wall on which I am leaning there is a hill sloping down toward the town, and the offering of the whole of Florence with all its cypress trees.

But the splendor of the world seems to justify these men. I put all my pride in a belief that it also justifies me, and all members of the human race, who know there is an extreme point at which poverty always rejoins the luxury and richness of the world. If they cast everything off, it is for a greater and not for another life. This is the only meaning that I can accept of a term like “stripping oneself bare.” Such terms have always had associations of physical liberty, of harmony between the hand and the flower it touches, of a loving understanding between the earth and those of us who have been freed from human things.

Ah, I should become a convert to this, if it were not already my religion.

Albert Camus spent much of his life thinking about, and seeking after, freedom. He found it one day, sitting in a monastery courtyard, reflecting on those who have dedicated themselves to lives of simplicity and service, pondering the bees and the flowers—more beautiful even than Solomon in all of his glory.

         The current circumstances have given most of us an unexpected and unwelcome crash course in this way of thinking about and experiencing the world.

We have had to cast off non-essentials. We have had to manage our grinding anxieties. We have had to learn to live in the present moment—the radical impermanence of the future leaving us with greater puzzles than we can penetrate or, perhaps, even ponder.

We have had to find freedom, and peace, and compassion in a situation that is constraining, and disorienting, and plays to all of our worst impulses of greed and self-interest.

We do not remember signing up for any of this.

But, to paraphrase James Stockdale: St. Francis, here we are.

What do we do now?

Well, most of us will probably feel like perfection is way out of reach. As an imprisoned felon in one of Father Gregory Boyle’s books says, “I shot perfection in the foot a long time ago.” And more than once, at that.

 Many of us likely see ourselves as closer to the young Siddhartha and the young Francis than to the spiritually mature, older versions. We see more of ourselves in the rich young man than in the Son of God. We know from experience that we all too often walk away from good choices, and sorrowfully, too.

At least this holds true for me. I’m quite sure that I would have been that guy who bought the lamp of Epictetus, probably at a fashionable silent charity auction, then leaving it out ostentatiously for houseguests to admire over appetizers. I’m more likely to sit under a tree for the shade than for enlightenment. And I’m not going to wait breathlessly for LinkedIn to send me an email saying that my next great career move is canonization.

We understand what Jesus and Epictetus and Buddha and St. Francis did, but we still have to ask: How does that apply to us? What can we do?

We can follow instructions, to the best of our ability.

We can focus on the present day and the instant moment within it. We may not be able to keep all of the worries and destructive thoughts out of our heads, but we can respectfully decline to feed them. As Shunryu Suzuki said, “Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”

We can keep asking ourselves: “What is the best way to help other people?” We may not sell all that we have, give the money the poor, and devote the rest of our lives to caring for the disadvantaged.

But we can choose to live toward simplicity. We can choose to live toward compassion. We can choose to live toward service. We all can do all of these things. Every. Last. One. Of. Us.

A story from the Zen Buddhist tradition tells of two masters who met atop a seaside cliff to demonstrate their skill at archery. The first master chose a small target tied to a distant tree, took aim, released the arrow, and hit dead center. The second master slowly and deliberately raised his bow—but then spun around, faced the other way, and let his arrow fly. It sailed elegantly through the air into the ocean. He lowered his bow, smiled at the first master, and said “bullseye.”

We do not need to set our sights on perfection to come closer to the life urged upon us by Jesus, Epictetus, the Buddha, and St. Francis. When we make choices toward simplicity, compassion, and service, we aim at a vast ocean of need. Every arrow we launch in that direction will hit its mark. It will be one bullseye after another.

If we can do these things, then we will be freer. We will be happier. We will be more at peace. We will be better servants of God and humankind.

We will, each in our own way, be saints and brave.

*

And, lo, Jesus said to them: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieve break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.”

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Amen.

And amen.

Actually, You "Commenced" A Long Time Ago

Remarks delivered for an informal commencement celebration

May 8, 2020

Len Niehoff

Professor from Practice

University of Michigan Law School

         When Kate invited me to offer a few words at this informal commencement celebration, she said that I could talk for as long as I wanted but only needed to do so for about five minutes. At that point, I realized the true brilliance of the University of Michigan Law School class of 2020. You figured out how to get what all graduates have always wanted but have never been able to achieve: a five minute commencement speech. And, to make matters better, you can openly drink while it’s going on.

         I may not hit the five minute goal, but I will try to keep my remarks brief because, in the grand tradition of commencement speeches, I have nothing to say that you do not already know. Still, maybe a few of you have lost track of the fact that you know it. And maybe a few others will find some small utility in a friendly reminder.

         Conventional wisdom holds that a traditional legal education via the Socratic method helps toughen students up in preparation for a profession where a thick skin comes in handy. I think this generally gets things right, based on the scar tissue I’ve acquired during my thirty-plus years as a practicing litigator. Still, I would be the first to admit that, on the toughening-up front, your third year of law school seriously overachieved.

         Acknowledging the immense challenges that the past few months have posed for you is my cue to give a speech you’ve heard a lot recently. I am now supposed to talk about all the good things you have gotten out of the experience of living through this existential version of a force majeure clause.

You know the themes by now: this experience has given you a unique opportunity to build character; it has given you bragging rights in perpetuity over everyone who didn’t finish law school under these circumstances; it has given you a deep inventory of stories to tell your children, your grandchildren, and all of the other captive audiences that life will deliver to you along the way.

         You’ve been inundated with those messages for good reason—they’re true. And the workmanlike wisdom of these observations probably explains why they’ve become the fastest-growing clichés in the lives of graduating law students. But I worry that these experiential consolation prizes we have been bestowing upon you miss something very important. I don’t think they show sufficient respect for who you already were when you got here.

         Let’s consider the data. A little research tells me that you are, on average, 27 years old. Most of you were therefore born in or around 1993. So let’s take 1999 as the year when many of you would have really started to become meaningfully conscious of the world around you and the events happening there.

         Now, let’s think about how that world unfolded. It started with the shootings at Columbine in 1999. Then came the presidential election crisis of 2000. Then the attacks of 9/11 in 2001. Then the increasing awareness of global warming in the mid-2000s. Then the financial crisis of 2007-2008. And so on and so on and so on.

But you don’t need me to lay out this unsettled and unsettling history for you. You lived it. You had to navigate that relentless shitstorm—and as children and young adults, no less.

         And that’s my point. The traditional idea of “commencement” entails a quaint and nostalgic idea of innocence. It says: So far, you have moved through life as sheltered and isolated scholars, but now the real stuff, and the hard stuff, and the real hard stuff commences. As if.

         The poet John Berryman once wrote to the novelist James Dickey, “the trouble with this country is that [someone] can live [their] entire life without knowing whether [they are] a coward.” You have not had that luxury. The universe has been testing your courage, pretty much non-stop, since your earliest pangs of consciousness.

         Before you walked into your first law school class, you had already acquired this singular credential: you had grown brave. You may not have known it. Courage had become such an intrinsic and essential ingredient of life that you may have taken yours for granted, as if it were an involuntary reflex like breathing. But, make no mistake about it, you had developed the virtue of courage—and you had earned it.

That courage of yours saw you through law school and now opens up endless possibilities. I like how the poet Maya Angelou puts it: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” In short, you have had unimaginable challenges; they have endowed you with unimaginable promise.

I will confess that, at a personal level, I can’t help wishing that the universe had spared you all of that crap. Given my preferences, you’d have grown up—like I did—in a time where the scariest thing in your elementary school was your homeroom teacher, Mrs. Dill, who we could not resist calling Mrs. Pickle. But, then, nobody put me in charge of the great unfolding arc of history, and I’m sure that’s for the best, so here we are.

I will conclude by saying this. I love all of my students, every last one of them, even the ones who don’t love me back. I am inclined—perhaps as someone who earlier in life darkened the doors of two seminaries—to  think of law students as members of my flock who are in my care, to worry over them, to fear for them, and to lose sleep over them. And being in my flock is like staying at the Hotel California—you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

But, class of 2020, here’s the thing—and here’s the paradox. You have dealt with, and will for the foreseeable future continue to deal with, one of the most complex and daunting tasks ever set before a University of Michigan Law School class. And, more than any class I can remember, I think of you as being in my flock, maybe because we’ve shared the experience of having the same wolf circling us for several months now.

And yet … and yet … I just can’t bring myself to worry about you. I know what you have seen. I know what you have lived through. I know who you are. I know what you can do.

I can’t bring myself to fear for you. Indeed, the only fear I feel is for anyone foolish enough get in your way.

I can’t bring myself to lose sleep over you. I have too much confidence in the irresistible force of your dreams.

So, congratulations, class of 2020. Today is a seriously big day. Honor it. Celebrate it. Run the mental tape so you remember it. Add it to your already overflowing storehouse of signal and courageous moments.

Then, tomorrow, start putting that formidable energy of yours to work. Grab the world by the lapels. Shake it up. And change it. The world needs your dearly bought courage. The world needs you.

Go get ‘em.

Oh, and Go Blue.