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David
Foster Wallace, in his now-famous 2005 commencement address at
Kenyon College, made a striking observation: everyone
worships something. Wallace himself was not a person of faith, but he
argued — rightly, I think — that we are all meaning-seeking creatures.
The question is never whether we will give our lives
to something, but what we will give them to.
“Because
here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches
of adult life, there is actually 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 the compelling reason for maybe choosing
some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much
anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you
worship money and things… then you will never have enough.
Worship
your body and beauty 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, 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.
But the
insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil
or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings… to
be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all
creation.”
—David
Foster Wallace
His
diagnosis is honest and a little uncomfortable: the things we most naturally
reach for — money, beauty, power, status — don't just disappoint us.
They consume us. And the most dangerous part, Wallace notes, is that
this often happens without us even noticing.
Most of
us can look back and recognize seasons where we spent ourselves on
things that didn't ultimately satisfy. Life drifts. Attention scatters.
Years pass.
This is
precisely where Scripture enters — not as a rulebook or a moral
checklist, but as a picture. Eugene Peterson, who
spent a lifetime immersed in the biblical text, captures it well:
“While
on vacation, our family worked on a jigsaw puzzle. When those thousand
pieces were dumped onto the table, it seemed an impossible task to put
them together. The only thing that kept us from throwing the pile into
the fire was that there was a picture on the box of what they could
become.
That
picture made it possible to do something. Because of that picture, we
had the motivation and faith to go to work. Without it, the chaos would
have overwhelmed us, and we would have given up. That's precisely what
the Scripture does for us in relation to the chaotic world in which we
live. It gives us a picture. Christ is the one who gives coherence to
all the disconnected pieces of that puzzle. In him everything
interlocks...
That's
what Christ is doing with the chaos of the world. And that's what he's
doing with the chaos in the smaller world of our lives. Putting our
lives together. And making them whole.”
—Eugene
Peterson
What
Peterson describes is what the Bible actually offers: not an escape
from the chaos, but a coherent image of what the pieces are meant to
become. Christ at the center, making sense of what otherwise feels
scattered and purposeless.
Scripture
is trustworthy not because it makes life simple, but because it tells
the truth about what we were made for — and points us, again and again,
to the One in whom everything finds its place.
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