Convocation Address: "What Do You Love?"

Sept. 8, 2022
 
Let me begin by acknowledging that it's typically at this moment when someone begins a public address that at least some in the crowd take a quick glance at their watches to mark the time. I have been known to do that. "Let's see how long he goes." My personal guardrails on public speaking are informed by a Faculty Retreat speaker of about a dozen years ago. This professor was a developmental molecular biologist. He was invited to help us to become even better teachers than we already were. He spoke about content, illustrations and the timing to insert them; cadence and the change of tempo; and the encouragement for students, or any of us, to take notes as we listened. This was all about how the brain comprehends and retains. Or doesn't. The speaker informed us that in just a little time after any speech is given, listeners will recall, at most, only about 10 percent of what they just heard. But as I stand here before you today, I have to confess that I failed to take notes and I zoned out about 10 minutes into his talk about talking. So what I've just shared is pretty much all I can remember from that day. Note to self: Make it snappy!
 
The music industry has been telling us about love forever, and they've done it through song titles. Captain and Tennille told us that, "Love will keep us Together." Huey Lewis believed in "The Power of Love." According to the Supremes, "You can't hurry love." One of my teenage favorite foods and singers, Meat Loaf, professed, "I'd do anything for love." The band Foreigner must have been confused because their lead singer belted out, "I want to know what love is." David Bowie was all about "Modern Love," which is not to be confused with Steve Winwood's quest for "Higher Love." And in a twist on what higher love really, truly means, country singer Hays Carl lamented how, "She Left Me for Jesus." 
 
And of course Scripture is chock full of descriptions about love and actions that demonstrate love, that tell us about what love is—that Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast, and it is not proud. Or that there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for a friend. 
 
Now, to the subject of my address today: It was about 8 or so years ago that Whitworth hosted James Smith, a professor of philosophy from Calvin University. He was superb. His topic that week, and what was a singular, framing statement, became the title of his next book: You are What You Love. 
 
Now, let me make some qualifiers here: There are so, so many aspects of our identities and who we each are. The title is reductionist about our identities with respect to what we love. Of course it is. The work is about one particular way of thinking about ourselves, and that is in light of what we love.
 
And so, if we are what we love, he asked, then what do we love? What do you love? What do I love? What does the evidence of my life demonstrate and suggest about my loves? Not what I say I love, but what my life really conveys about what I love.
 
Even though the statement and question are written in present-tense form, don't hear them as confined to the present tense. Our current loves have some sort of history, some evidence from the past; and our present-tense loves have some kind of formative and shaping effect that speak into what might become of our futures and how we live our lives. Our loves are informed by our pasts and they speak into our futures in big and small ways. 
 
As I have done inventories and audits of my life, of my heart, I have not been able to shake that statement, "You are what you love." And because of my role at Whitworth, I cannot help but dwell, and I mean really dwell, on the question of institutional loves, university loves; about how our current loves have been shaped by Whitworth faculty, staff, and students of the past, and how all of us, today, have a role in what those loves are now and how they will form the future of this place. This question about university loves is for another time.
 
John the Baptist makes an early appearance in John's Gospel, just six verses into the text. And you know John; he comes testifying about the Savior who is to come. When Jesus first appears, John points to him and says, "Look, the Lamb of God." And, then we are told, John and his two disciples, caught up in who Jesus appeared to be, begin to follow Him. Jesus notices the men, turns, and asks one of the 307 questions he poses in Scripture, and the very first one he asks in John. "What do you want?" Not yet, "Do you want to get well?" Not yet, "Who do you say that I am?" Not yet, "Do you love me." Those questions come later. Rather, "What do you want?" It's a question about wants and longings. It's a question about our loves. And just as it applied to those very first disciples, the question applies to us. What do you want?
 
And here Smith lays out some things for us to consider: The intentionality we have about our loves; the gravitational pulls of our loves; the habits of our lives that shape our loves and thereby form us; the rivals for our loves and the need for an ongoing audit to index them towards God's best for us. Students, what a perfect time in your lives to further discover and pursue your loves, and maybe, even set aside some existing ones that just aren't the best.
 
Let me briefly unpack those considerations, as the author would have us do.
 
He writes that we are all headed somewhere. You cannot not be headed somewhere. There's a place out there that we long for, a place where we hope to arrive—it might be in terms of vocation, relationships, faith, service, something. There's some ultimate out there, some sense of a good life to pursue, an idea about how the world ought to be. Because our wants and our longings inform where we are headed, it is worth being intentional about what we love. Those loves have the capacity to do things to us and in us.
 
Saint Augustine speaks to this, too. He wrote: "My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me." Our orienting loves are like gravity, pulling us towards them with a force outside ourselves.
 
And we should be mindful that there are rivals out there for our loves, drawing us towards those things that may not necessarily be the best things to love. We can be pulled to places that simply aren't the best places to be. 
 
Just like a compass needs occasional recalibration, so too might you and I need some recalibration after having been captivated by rival notions that compete with what our better loves should be.
 
So, students, how does that translate at all to your Whitworth experience and the identification and pursuit of loves?
 
You are here at this wonderful, formative season in your lives. These are years to discover, develop, and pursue the loves that will form you in so many ways. How might your Whitworth experience be a time where your loves and longings are incubated, fertilized, and grown?
 
This is a shaping place, and it is a shaping time. You have been invited into classrooms and spaces that form and mold. Our deepest desire is that this experience leads to a wonderful story, where those loves emerge and stick, loves of character traits, personal interests, and convictions.
 
And who knows what they are or may become. The love of hospitality; science documentaries on a Friday night with a bowl of popcorn in your lap; the art of friendship; fellowship over meals; Bach's Cantata No. 21; teaching children to read and seeing the expression of joy and accomplishment when they realize for the first time they can do it; the wonders seen through a confocal microscope or through X-ray crystallography; rehabbing someone's shoulder; putting paint to canvas; being a minister of healing to someone in distress; getting lost in a novel; launching a business; sensing the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. And on and on in the loves that shape our hearts and minds and souls.
 
And this happens through the cadences of academic and residential life, through rhythms and routines and rituals played out over and over again, like muscles trained through repetition, like beginning piano practice by playing the scales. In other words, the habits that best shape your loves and your lives.
 
I'm thankful for my colleague, Stacey Smith, who alerted me to a recent blog from Phil Eaton. Phil has deep roots in the Whitworth community. In this blog, Phil was reflecting on photos he had taken over the years. Some were of family moments around a table. Others were of times in his professional life that stirred memories of events and achievements; and others were of places visited, vacations taken, meaningful experiences had. You probably have a mental catalog of images just like Phil, ones that speak to significant memories and moments in your lives.

It was the photos about travel that brought to mind for Phil a poem by the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, who wrote this about traveling: "We travel for something to bring back to show. You have been there: a lock of God's hair, stolen from him while he was asleep; a photograph of the garden of the spirit. As has been said, the point of traveling is not to arrive, but to return home laden with pollen you shall work up into the honey the mind feeds on." Laden with pollen you shall work up into the honey the mind feeds on.
Phil wrote about the travel pollen we collect on ourselves and that sticks to our skin. It's the stuff we then carry on us and with us. Like a bee on a flower, we extract and suck up the nectar of wonderful and blessed experiences, and we get pollen on our bodies that we then carry with us.

As I read that poem, I thought about you, students, and the honey-making experiences to be had in our classrooms, labs, studios, rehearsal spaces, fields, and gathering spaces.

That is the work of this place on you, the pollen you collect, the places you step into, the sweet nectar of classes and discussions, that mixes and stirs, that uncovers and develops loves you may have never seen coming. Or maybe they were there, but until here, until now, you just never knew how sweet that educational and relational honey could be. These are the kinds of things that shape and feed your loves in wonderful ways. Phil Eaton encourages us to work up that honey, stir it up, savor it.

In that mixture, in this university hive, the stuff gets deposited, stirred; loves are discovered and shaped; and the honey of our lives gets made.

But be patient. Don't fret if those loves take time. The study and experiences you have here may just be the foundation for loves to emerge in the years ahead. Those loves may emerge more along the lines of how the poet Ogden Nash writes about how ketchup comes out of a bottle: "First a little, and then a lottle." Your loves may begin in little ways before you realize that academic love has become a lottle. 
 
I'll close with these thoughts on our loves, which reads a lot like a benediction and a charge. It's informed by interactions with our newest grandchild, 4-month old Brooke, who is becoming more human every day. She is already smart and talented and very popular. Brooke is at that age that brings a parent, or grandparent, a joy that fills the heart. We look at her, coo at her, speak to her in loving tones, tell her that she is loved beyond anything she can yet understand. And when we speak to her, our faces wear nothing but smiles. She now responds to those smiles with ones of her own. Her smiles are reactions to the love first being shown to her. It's a responsive love, and it's one you might just have heard about before. Romans 5 tells us that God loved us before we even knew how to love.
 
In light of that ultimate love, may your intellectual and social and relational loves be ones that are responsive. May your loves bring about a Kingdom come, something the prophets spoke of as shalom. May you be attentive to those loves, shaped and supported here, which help you to become the one whom God is calling you to be. And, as the Psalmist wrote, may we all thirst for what the Lord would desire for our world and our communities, just as the deer pants for streams of water, may our souls pant for God.
 
So back to that question: What do you love?
 
May the hum of this place, where you make your steps, where experiences stick to your skin, help you to find your loves, or even just begin to discover them; ones that make for fulfillment and even more, contribute to a world that might not otherwise be.