Devotional

This is adapted from a lecture given as a part of the “Last Lecture” series at Boston College, this talk was given by Fr. Michael Himes, S.J. on November 18, 2008. The premise of the lecture is basically: what would you say if this was the last lecture you could ever give. Fr. Himes is a professor of Theology at Boston College and one of my own favorite professors. This lecture was attended by over a thousand students, speaking to the great wisdom of this amazing man.

Thinking of this as the last time I have to speak on what matters most has wonderfully concentrated my mind. I’ve thought long and hard about it, particularly in relation to a statement from Soren Kierkegaard, the great 19^th century Danish philosopher of religion. Kierkegaard in his journals writes this; he did not ever think of this being read by anyone else, it was in his personal journals published long after his death; “there is something quite definite I have to say, and I have it so much upon my conscience that as I feel that I dare not die without having said it, for the moment I die and leave this world as I understand it… at frightful speed the question will be put to me ‘have you uttered the definite message quite definitely?’” Well of course that’s a good question as I come to think about a last lecture, have I uttered the ‘definite message quite definitely’.

What is the definite message that has to be said? Well, I think it’s this; it’s a statement I’ve spoken about many times, preached about many times, prayed about many more times than that, a statement that appears repeatedly in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; it’s the statement of Jesus that if you hold on to you life you lose it, but if you give your life away it becomes everlasting.

For a very long time, I think I misunderstood that statement, because for a very long time when I spoke about it, when I prayed about it, when I preached about it I thought of it as a commandment. As if Jesus is saying, now that’s what you ought to do, that’s how you ought to live. Only after a long time did it occur to me that it’s not a commandment at all, it’s a description. That Jesus is not saying that’s how you ought to live, he’s saying that’s how things are. You want to know what existence is like? It’s like this: if you hold on to it, you won’t have it; but if you give it away, you can’t run out of it—you will see it become everlasting. Being and giving away one’s self turn out to be exactly the same thing.

There’s a way this is said very famously, very powerfully in the first letter of John. The author of the first letter to John’s way of saying it is “God is love.” My way of saying it, at least for this evening, is that the foundation of existence; the reason that there’s something rather than nothing, the reason anything exists at all; is self gift—is love, the gift of the self to another. That’s really an extraordinary claim.

I think, as I look back on my own life, my experience is that it is precisely correct. It is the central thing that needs to be said. That if we’re going to exist, we need to give ourselves away

A favorite poet of mine, W.H. Auden, wrote that “the first criterion of success in any human activity, the necessary preliminary, whether to scientific discovery or artistic vision, is intensity of attention, or, less pompously, love.” In other words, the necessary first step to understanding anything, knowing anyone or anything, is to love that person or thing. I don’t mean that you must have warm emotions or deep sentimental affection. I am referring to an activity. In order to really know anything, you have to give it your time and your energy. And what do you do when you begin to see a glimpse of the truth? The only thing you can do with it is to give it away.