The Examined Life
Some mistakes are so easy to make that it is hard to see they are mistakes. I thought it was easier to know where I had been than where I was going. Shouldn’t that have been obvious?
After all, we have been in the past and we haven’t been in the future. The future seems like a great mystery, while the past seems stale. Day-old bread is cheap and so is a day-old experience for most of us. The key to living, we often think, is to know what is about to happen before anyone else.
I carried this idea over into my church life.
If there was a meeting on “how to find God’s will for your life,” I was there. Nothing would have made me happier than if a prophet had arrived to tell me God’s calling on me.
Or so I thought. Careful study of a great book, Phaedrus, reminded me of something I should have known from the Bible.
Plato begins his dialogue Phaedrus with an encounter between Socrates and a good-looking young man, sensibly enough named “Phaedrus.” Socrates starts the discussion with two questions: “Where are you going?” and, “From where are you coming?”
In two words: “Whither and whence?”
Over the course of the discussion, Socrates demonstrates that Phaedrus cannot really know the future, as it does not exist yet, but he can know the past. The trouble is that Phaedrus, like most of us, has no real idea where he has been. In our hurry to go “some place,” we often fail to notice where we have been.
Our memories are often contrived and changed to comfort particular desires. I have kept papers from tenth grade partly to remind myself of how little I knew and how much I have changed. Otherwise, there is a temptation to project the forty-seven year old me into a tenth grade me’s head.
What did I think then? What had I learned? What did my parents teach me? These are vital questions that will do more to control tomorrow than we would like to think. Choices I made in tenth grade had the power to change, and did change, my life today, but no choice I make now can change my sixteen-year-old self.
What I have been controls where I am going.
This makes what I am doing now so much more important than hypothetical ideas about what I might do. Right now I am typing this essay, but you will be reading it, if anyone ever reads it, in the future. Even when I am dead, Google will make sure this essay will continue . . . a thought that terrifies me. There is no way to know all the people who will, or will not, read this piece and so I can only write from what I have known. The future is not under my control.
Sadly, too much of my life was spent getting ready to know while failing to learn in the moment. Instead of reflecting on the wisdom and ideas I had been given, I rushed out to collect new ones. Phaedrus does this with speeches and many of us do it with ideas.
“Say something new!” we demand of our teachers long before we have actually mastered what they have said. Entertainment is at war with full comprehension. Great scholars are always reminding us of the importance of rereading a few great books until they become part of us, but our culture of consumption tempts us to rush to the next book, film, or movement.
We often lack mentors, because once we “get Yoda,” we don’t stick around to master what he could really teach us.
By now my grandmother would have said, “Well, of course, John Mark. Isn’t that what Jesus said?” He pointed out to his followers that if they had known God, they would know Him. If they had understood Moses and the prophets, they would have understood Him.
They missed Moses, so they weren’t ready for Jesus.
We often miss the wisdom in our childhood by rushing off to adulthood and so don’t see Jesus when He comes. We are looking for someone else. Sometimes I think that if we haven’t really seen Winnie-the-Pooh, there is no chance we will see Socrates. I know that if we have not seen Jesus as a child, we will never see Him as adults, even if we come to Him in adulthood. An adult who comes to Jesus as an adult must first become a child—and grow through Him to a new adulthood.
My grandmother would interject here, I think, that all this is fine, but that love is the essential reason this matters—and she would be right. You cannot really love a person if you do not know from whence they come. People can hide this by projecting “where they are going,” but to know them you must know their roots. That is why wicked masters would strip their slaves of their heritage. To lose my roots is to lose the one thing I might be able to know about myself.
I might be able to survive without knowing myself, I am not so important after all, but that would also mean I could not love my beloved—and that would be unacceptable. For from whence does this love come? What is the back-story of my beloved? We cannot know where ourselves or others are going if we don’t know whence we came.
More important still, a failure to reflect on the past will cost us a sight of the Image of God that is the foundation of existence and of all love. Love itself comes from someplace? Whence? To know where it should go, it is essential to know from whence it came.
The only real good in me comes from my creation in His Image and my recreation by being “born again” and having Jesus in my heart. Seeing what that moment meant will create a future that can only be described as paradise.
What I am going to do in the real future, Eternity, will be determined by where I am in that future. Just like this life, where I will be will be determined by where I have been. Those of us in Christ will go on being in Christ forever.
Those of us without Christ will be without love forever. Why? Not out of cruelty, but because we have cut ourselves off from the spring of love and so have an insufficient supply for Eternity. Our little measure of love will grow stagnant and diseased over the millennia without the constant renewal that comes from Christ.
Love itself is from God and leads us to God. If we knew the origin of love, we would know beyond a doubt where love should go. The divine origin of our passions would constrain us from polluting love with our own desires. Love, if it is to remain love, must flow in a course natural to it.
Socrates and Phaedrus stop their journey and sit together under a tree and talk. They take the time to see where they have been and where they are going. We must do the same. We may not have Socrates, but (better!) we have Jesus within, and a Wheatstone community that is in no hurry to move onto the next question.
Let’s take the time to ask “Whence and whither?” this New Year.
