Best Commencement Speech Ever?

Let me start two consecutive posts with a question: Did you ever run across something that you read that was so along the lines of what you were thinking (but said so much better) that you realize it's what you were trying to think all along? In the recent James Watson post I added some comments at the end about worship/idolatry and science. And then today I got referred to a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace, who had this to say, even using some of the same terminology:

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: 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. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. 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. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing."


To quote Bob Dylan quoting someone else, "You gotta serve somebody." Foster's speech blows me away in its profundity, simplicity and humility. And for me, it leads to the question, what does it mean for a Christian to worship Jesus? The real Jesus, not a fake one set up by someone else. Because that's my way out from idolatry. Like I told Sam last night (after another one of his don't-make-me-go-to-sleep-yet theological questions), if Jesus made the universe, then following him, taking up our cross, is living the way we were made to live. Maybe a cliche, definitely true, and definitely convicting.

Read the text of Wallace's entire speech here (and thanks to Andy Whitman's blog for pointing this out, I am compelled to pass it along):
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html