Hebrew Scripture Reading: Exodus 7: 1-7
This past week The New York Times published an article entitled “The Best Mind of His Generation.” It was an article about David Wallace Foster—a fiction and nonfiction writer of whom I had never previously heard. Not wanting to be one of the few people in the universe out of the loop about this eminently, intelligent person, I read the article. Ultimately, I ended up reading a few more articles, including a Wikipedia entry and a graduation speech by Foster delivered at Kenyon College a few years ago. The New York Times article had initially encouraged my budding interest in Foster by mentioning that he was raised in Champaign, Illinois. I later discovered that the author was in fact snubbing Foster’s real home town: Urbana, Illinois, the lesser known twin city next to Champaign, and the place where I myself was raised. Much to my delight I learned from Wikipedia that Foster and I are both alumni of Yankee Ridge Elementary School. Ah, my hometown pride was burning bright…
Foster’s graduation speech at Kenyon was printed in full in the Wall Street Journal last week. The speech is a delightful read. Foster begins his speech by telling the story of “two young fish swimming along.” They pass by an older fish, who nods and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The two younger fish nod and continue on their way, but eventually “one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’” Foster proceeds to talk about the different ways in which we can view reality and how easily we can take for granted the fact that we have options in what we choose to pay attention to in life. He argues that when it comes to how humans view the world we have a “natural default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.” It is a view that sees oneself as standing at the center of the universe. “Think about it,” says Foster, “There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you…Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.”
Thankfully, as humans, we also have the ability to adjust our default setting. To illustrate this, Foster describes the same reality from two different perspectives: our self-absorbed default-setting and “a more socially conscious,” adjusted version of this setting. He first envisions a rather normal workday. One spends nine to ten hours at work and then goes home, eats supper, and unwinds before sleeping and having to do it all over again the next day. However, Foster throws a wrench into this normal routine. After work, he has to go to the supermarket because there is no more food at home. In great detail, he depicts how this seemingly simple trip to the store can become an exercise in frustration and annoyance. First, there is the rush hour traffic. Then, there is the hectic and exacerbating grocery store full of everyone else trying “to squeeze in some grocery shopping” after work. Everyone is simply in Foster’s way, keeping him from obtaining after-work happiness at home. Silently, his anger becomes directed at the driver who cuts him off and all the space cadet shoppers and hyperactive kids running wild in the grocery store.
Foster next describes the same situation, but this time he takes a more sympathetic view of the people he encounters. When the Hummer cuts him off on the freeway, he imagines that possibly it is “being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him” as “he’s trying to rush to hospital.” It occurs to Foster that perhaps “it is actually I who am in his way” rather than the reverse. At the supermarket, Foster then considers “the likelihood that everyone else in the…checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as” he is, and “that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives” than his own.
With these contrasting examples given, Foster contends that if we realize that we have options for how we view the world then “it will actually be within [our] power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love,” or whatever one chooses to believe. Foster further talks about how we can choose what to worship. He talks about how many in our society worship a lot of things that ultimately eat us alive: money, power, and beauty. However, it is in religion that we can find subjects that command our worship and give us life rather than death. Foster concludes his speech by saying that what he is getting at in his speech is “the capital-T Truth about life,” “about simple awareness—awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: ‘This is water, this is water.’”
As I was reading Foster’s speech, I was particularly struck by Foster’s use of the word “options.” I had heard this word this past week on a radio show. Someone who worked at a suicide hotline had talked about how she helped people to see their options: the options they have besides killing themselves. The sad truth about David Wallace Foster was that he forgot his options. A little over a week ago Foster committed suicide.
It occurred to me that a common reaction to Foster’s suicide might be to feel upset or angry with him. How could he preach about the importance of seeing options, how could he see in such a crystal clear manner the human tendency toward self-absorption, how could he be so aware of the death dealing aspects of our culture, how could he see the grand value of religion that makes life so rich and meaningful, how could he see all this, and yet still commit suicide? Foster had gone against exactly what it was that he had preached about with such passion and insight.
But then, I thought some more about Foster’s writings. In his published works and even in his graduation speech, Foster made reference to suicide. In his speech, he suggested that the grand truth about which he spoke so eloquently was indeed the antidote to killing oneself. It then occurred to me that Foster was not simply preaching a message that he could not live up to. He was preaching a message that was born out of his own wrestling with the demons of depression and suicide. That realization made me further recognize that to be upset and angry with Foster is perhaps for some of us to engage him out of our own default-setting. From the default-setting perspective, the central matter is how the suicide affects me. His suicide makes it harder for me to have hope and make meaning out of life. It affects my happiness. All of that is a valid response, and may be true for many of us. And, then one cannot forget that Foster’s actions did have a horrendous and terrible impact on others, especially his family.
While it is important to be aware of all these effects and responses, I think there is also good reason to adjust our default-setting to include a focus on Foster’s own predicament, his own crisis, his own suffering. Then, we might realize that the people who commit suicide are the ones who are really the first victims of the tragedy, they are the ones who are suffering from a devastating mental illness, they are the ones who become a casualty in what is actually a larger public health crisis affecting our society as a whole in growing numbers.
Foster was not out to mislead us or fill us with disillusionment. Perhaps, he was facing his illness as best he could. In fact, while many of us were off moaning about the wilderness of life and cursing God, Foster was breaking open rocks so that the rest of us could drink. The real tragedy, perhaps, was that we could not figure out how to return the favor. When the final days approached, we could not figure out how to give Foster the water he so desperately needed in order to survive.
So where does that leave us? Where are we at now? Back in the desert, the wilderness. The Israelites were there for forty years, so we can’t be surprised. In fact, as one rabbi notes about the Exodus story, “The bulk of the biblical text deals neither with slavery nor the Promised Land but rather with the trek through the wilderness.” Figuring out how to survive the wilderness isn’t easy, and it is perhaps inevitable that among the travelers there might be murmuring of discontent, some complaints, some cussing at fate and one another, if not, God. Be that as it may, there are still stories of hope that come out of the desert.
This past week it just so happened that I read another account of a trip to the grocery store by someone in desperate straights. Writer Anne Lamott writes of her forty-ninth birthday. It was on this day that she had initially decided “that all of life was hopeless.” She described herself as living amid “desert days.” She notes that she actually has friends who are enthusiasts for deserts and their spiritual virtues of quietude and rough beauty, but that is not the case for her. She only likes deserts “for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up and the doors locked.” She prefers “beach resorts with room service.”
So it was that Lamott described an unhappy stretch of her life as desert days. At the time, she was feeling blue about the state of our country and the war in Iraq, in particular. In response to this situation, she had decided to eat herself into oblivion, but alas there was no food in the house. After praying to God for help in dealing with her sense of hopelessness, she went to the grocery store. To cheer herself up, she “flirted with everyone in the store, especially the old people.” When she finally got to the check out line, the clerk printed her receipt and cried out, “Hey! You’ve won a ham!”
Lamott felt “blindsided by the news.” She “had asked for help, not ham.” She thought, “What on earth was I going to do with ten pounds of salty pink eraser? I rarely eat it. It makes you bloat.” Still, she feigned excitement over the prize. A bagger went to retrieve the ham from the back of the store. As she waited, she thought that it would be “crazy not to receive” a gift from God, even if she didn’t like ham. She pondered, “Maybe it [is] the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”
Salvation was not swift, however. She had to wait ten minutes for the ham. After it arrived, she exited the store only to run her cart into a rusty car. She soon discovered that the car was driven by a friend who was out with her children. The friend happened to be down on her luck and had no money for gas or food. After giving her friend some cash, Lamott asked, “Hey, do you and your kids like ham?” Her friend replied, “We love it. We love it for every meal.” She took the ham.
Later, as Lamott thought about her friend, she wrote, “I remembered the seasonal showers in the desert, how potholes in the rocks fill up with rain. When you look later, there are already frogs in the water, and brine shrimp reproducing, like commas doing the macarena; and it seems, but only seems, that you went from parched to overflow in the blink of an eye.” When our own desert days come, may we hang in there, may we remember those who love us and encourage us on our way, may we remember the stories of those who have also been through the wilderness and made it out the other side, and may we find in them the courage, the water of life, that we so desperately need to survive. Amen.