In case you’re not familiar, David Foster Wallace was an acclaimed novelist (whom I’ve never read), and student of the human condition. And society. And mass media.
Shortly before he took his own life, he gave a commencement speech, “This is Water,” at Kenyon College (click here for audio):
The choice bit:
“Everybody worships.
The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god…. is that pretty much everything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real money in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth.
Worship your own body 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.
,,,,,Worship power, and 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.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They’re 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 measure value.”
Of course, Christians have heard some version of this “everybody worships” spiel. It’s almost pastor 101.
But what drew me to this particular passage (from a Tim Keller book) is the phrase “eats you alive.”
Now one caveat: Depression and anxiety and other mental health conditions (particularly OCD) can all eat you alive, and that’s NOT a matter of worship but health.
So if you feel eaten alive and have one of these health conditions, it’s not because you’re worshipping the wrong thing.
Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking a bit about this.
What eats me alive? (beyond my mental health conditions).
Well, fear for my family, for one. I worry about what will happen to them all the time, and not just your run-of-the-mill, “I’ll buy life insurance” kind of worry.
It’s so intense that it eats me alive, sometimes.
Of course, my OCD, my anxiety disorder may be contributing to that, but I have to ask myself whether, in some form, I am worshipping my family. Is it my disorder or my worship?
These are hard things, particularly for people with mental health conditions, to know but it’s worthwhile to stop think for a second (without overthinking).
- What is eating me alive?
- Is my mental health condition contributing to it?
If you can honestly say “no” to the second, then maybe you and I are worshipping, at some level, something we shouldn’t.
Again, I want to be very clear: Your mental health can cause anything — literally anything — to eat you alive, and just being depressed, for no reason, eats you alive, as well.
But think also about how tied you are to the things of the world, what you might be worshipping, what might be eating you alive that doesn’t have to, that shouldn’t.
In his book on midlife crises, Dark Night of the Shed, Nick Page wrote:
“It is a disturbing thing, that dark night moment when you realize that the gods to whom you have given your life have let you down.
And the reason that it occurs in middle age more than at any other time is, I think, because in the first half of life we can still hold out the hope that they will deliver on their promises.
There is still plenty of time for our worship to be rewarded.
But by middle age, as we’ve seen, our illusions have gone. We have seen the best that these gods can do, and found it wanting.”
……The wrong gods will always fail us. For some men this leads to anger and frustration.
For others it is expressed in fear and anxiety.
We lie awake at night worrying about money, about where the next job is coming from, about what will happen to use in the future. We feel helpless, isolated, trapped.
The German term for ‘mid-life crisis’ is Torschlusspanik, literally ‘door-shut-panic’, fear of being on the wrong side of a closing date.”
The answer, of course, is the ones I’ll always give on this blog.
First and foremost, Jesus.
Even if you feel he’s forsaken you in this life, I promise he hasn’t because he was forsaken for you.
In Romans, Paul writes, “And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how deeply God loves us.”
Notice there’s an assumption of disappointment there — that you might feel disappointed by God. I don’t think any Christian hasn’t. But because God loves us deeply, one day — and it might only be when we die — that hope you’re banking on won’t let you down.
By definition, at death, everything else you trusted will have let you down. But not Jesus.
“Today you will be with me in paradise,” he told the thief.
And the second answer I’ll always give on this blog — if you’re struggling with feeling eaten alive, please please please also run to your doctor. Consult a psychiatrist, a therapist.
Depression doesn’t have to devour you, anxiety doesn’t have to consume you, OCD doesn’t have to… oh, OCD. How I hate you.
So look above to Jesus for salvation and to Psychology Today for finding a psychiatrist or therapist who can help with your mental health.
Oh, and here’s that speech.
[Photo: By Bjorne of Danmark]
