Grad speech

The cancer was unexpected, as it always is. He didn't see it coming, didn't guess it was there, had no idea it was lurking within him, threatening his life. So they fought it hard, he and his doctors. They expended the entire arsenal--radiation and chemo, blasted away in a wholesale fashion almost certain to create collateral damage. 

But that's what did it. It was the radiation got him, he said, being stuck in a awkward position where he couldn't move his head, could barely blink, where he felt pinned down like an insect, a total victim. He'd consented to the operation, of course; he'd followed their advice. But from the moment he entered the room that day and was laid out beneath the machine, he belonged to them, not to himself; he belonged to them and to God, he said. The nurses, the tech people, the specialists--they were in charge of his life, he said; and the only way to win was to give up everything he was. To beat cancer, he had to leave himself behind.

David Brooks says Paul Tillich used to say that suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

It was there, pinned down beneath the clamoring radiation that this good old friend of ours felt a proximity to the Almighty as undeniable as it was glorious. When his soul was emptied of self, it was filled with God. Horror turned to blessing.

In a wonderfully thoughtful NY Times op-ed, David Brooks says he wants to understand certain kinds of people he knows and loves:

ABOUT once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

Just what exactly makes such people glow? That's the question he's asked himself--and he attempts to answer in the essay. The list of virtues he enumerates comes as no surprise. After all, most of us already know "the last shall be first."  After all, "ask not what your country for do for you, ask what you can do for your country." After all, "greater love hath no man than. . ."  The most profound human wisdom isn't yet to be discovered; people have known it forever. 

Selflessness--true selflessness--is a gift not only to others but to your self, odd as that may sound. Being pinned down in radiation therapy did our friend double duty, he told us, not only slaying the cancer but something of his own human pride as well.

In a month or so I've got to deliver the commencement speech to my granddaughter's eighth grade class, a formidable task. I doubt that she and her classmates will hear anything the speaker says--few graduates ever do; but like every other commencement speaker, I want to say something of heft, of value. 

How can I tell them the most powerful events of their lives may be moments of profound suffering? How can I tell them the story of our old friend who claimed he saw more of God on that hospital gurney because there was so much less of himself in the way? How can I tell them the way to wealth is to do unto others as they would have others do unto them.

They're eighth graders, for heaven's sake, still kids. How can I tell them the vital blessings in their lives may arrive when the self they think they are, simply is no more?

My on-line class had all kinds of problems with the fifth act of Hamlet, when the Prince and his friend Horatio stumble into a cemetery and somehow find the skull of Yorick, the King's jester. There Hamlet stands, Yorick's skull in hands. You know the image. 

They didn't get it. What's the big deal?

How can I tell thirty eighth grade kids that, in all honesty, picking up a skull now and then may well offer the kind of deliverance men and women and even children all require. How can I tell them that in real life, it's not the first who shall be first, but the last?