What We Choose to Believe

Spirituality Column #100
October 7, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Curren! in Westfield (IN) newspaper

What We Choose to Believe
By Bob Walters

Acclaimed postmodern writer David Foster Wallace, the recently deceased author of Infinite Jest, once said, “The only thing that is capital T True is that you get to decide … what you worship.”

This particular truth coming from a postmodernist – someone who shuns the ideas of absolute truth or of a God who is the final arbiter of right and wrong – is astonishing.

It was part of his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.

In adult life, Wallace said, “there is 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 an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Wallace lists money, things, our own body, beauty, intellect and sexual allure – our self-centered default settings – among that which we will unconsciously learn to worship in the absence of a conscious spiritual focus.

Wallace eloquently describes how our automatic, hard-wired human self-centeredness traps us and spiritually kills us, i.e., eats us alive: we will fear the loss of money, the loss of beauty, power and allure, the inadequacy of not knowing everything.

Wallace is saying that my conscious faith in Christ or your conscious faith in something else pulls our human passions away from, and hence gives us freedom from, our self-centeredness – our utter focus on self, and on self as God – that was Satan’s leverage in the Garden with Adam and Eve.

Wallace went on to say, “the really important kind of freedom involves … [our individual] … discipline … to care about other people and sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

Unwitting as it may have been, that is an excellent description – a capital T Truth – of what Christians are supposed to be.

Wallace suffered from long-term depression and committed suicide Sept. 12 (2008). I doubt he would have read so much Christian theology into his address, given that he couldn’t bring himself to spell out “Jesus Christ” (J.C.). But Jesus was unmistakably in that piece of writing.

We choose what we believe. True. Choose wisely.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) found this address in the Sept. 19, 2008, Wall Street Journal. It makes Bill Mahar’s new “Religulous” movie about the irrationality of faith seem awfully small.