the harvard ichthus » Last Things

Façades

J. Joseph Porter — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 05:12:55 +0000

We are all — every last one of us — obsessed with giving good impressions. We like to be thought of as smart, attractive, funny, virtuous, and strong; we want everyone to believe that we have it “all together.” The staff of The Ichthus is certainly no exception. It is our secret hope that you will be enamored with our thoughts, our ideas, our layout, with the firstfruits of our labor — in short, that you will be enamored with us. If this is not our desire (and how could it not be?), it is at least our temptation.

I know, at any rate, that it is my desire. Were I left to my own devices, I surely would never rise above this pathetic ostentation and vainglory, the idolatry of self that is the sin of modern man. I wish I could tell you that I am a good and kindhearted person. But the truth is that I am a sinful wretch: proud, conceited, and judgmental, prone to anger and to deceit. I am a slave to the flesh, a poor wayfaring stranger.

The bad news is that, if anything even remotely resembling Christianity is true, you are, too — “for all fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Even our righteous acts are as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). And it is obvious that we know this; the gulf between our public and private personae give us away. And so we are comedians playing to an audience too afraid to laugh — adulterous brides who have spurned our grooms and reveled in our infidelity. We are a contradiction, a fusion of the divine and the demonic, at constant war with ourselves. We are a race of Fyodor Karamazovs, blithering clowns hiding behind masks because we are terrified, absolutely terrified that someone might see the truth beneath the disguise.

The good news is that God’s grace is for adulteresses and clowns — in short, for the world. God has forgiven us and intertwined His Spirit with the Sodom in our hearts. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God — and we can be redeemed. Try as we may, we can never vanquish Beauty, only wound it; despite all our transgressions, we still can sing, write, dance, and laugh.

The Ichthus, then, like any publication, is a journal devoted to the victories — the stories, essays, and ideas — of its staff. But it also is a journal devoted to the weaknesses of its staff, a journal created in recognition of the fact that we Christians are nothing without Christ. We acknowledge that we need to be saved — and we acknowledge that we have been saved.

We need no façade. Rather, we boast in our weaknesses: God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). We rejoice in our mortality: Death has been swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:54). And we remember that our triumphs come not from our brilliance or wisdom, but from the goodness, grace, and majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ.

J. Joseph Porter ‘12, a Philosophy concentrator living in Quincy House, is the Features Editor of The Ichthus.

Against Death Itself

Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:00:59 +0000

The Body of Christ is at war. We are at war. Easter is war.

In the winter, when ice descends on Harvard and the birds fall silent, we are quick to forget the promise of new life. We succumb to the slow relentless friction of our academic existence, propelled dumbly forward by fear of failure and appetite for success, heedless of both cross and empty tomb. Purpose is pressed from us by the weight of repetitious days, and a vacant resolve to keep trudging forever forward creeps in to take its place. Spurred by remembrances of authentic living, we look occasionally to God for fulfillment — we go to church, perhaps we read a chapter of the Bible — but we soon turn away again to consider papers and problem sets. Our lives begin to mirror in deadness the anemic grass and skeleton trees. We become lost in our busyness, sprinting Alice-like only to find when we collapse with exhaustion that we have gotten nowhere. In the winter, death comes easily.

I was dead once. The sickness of it sits in you like a stone.

As we Christians live in this little world where everyone is clawing for success, and as we grow in understanding of the culture of spiritual sterility that surrounds us, how can we help but see increasingly clearly the power of the Gospel that has been entrusted to us? This news we bear is the single most powerful cure for all the existential cancers that surround us. Even in the dark heart of winter at Harvard, we are filled with the promise and burgeoning reality of eternal abundant life in Jesus Christ our Lord! The surpassing brightness of this fact — that we have been created to know and love God and each other forever — is the light shining in our eyes when the world squats in six months of night.

But it is easy to forget. If we are not wary, the outer darkness will rapidly quench the inner light. A certain militant vigilance is required. We must strive always to live God’s radical lifestyle in defiance of the things around us. We must struggle with soldiers’ dedication to bring life to those who remain dead in sin. From our several small lights, we must build up a bonfire and cast the darkness away. The Resurrection inspires us to live lives of outrageous, countercultural purpose and immoderate love. Real living is infectious; we are Christ’s redeemed vectors in an epidemic of hope.

We are the soldiers of Easter. We sink our trenches against death itself. May the explosion of blossoms and leaves that surrounds us each spring be a symbol of our coming victory. May the darkness that inevitably follows the light remind us of the many battles still unfought. Above all, may our entire focus both now and forever be the One who leads us in our struggle to nourish the seeds of His kingdom in this inhospitable Cambridge soil. Let us go — much is yet to be done.

Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini ‘11, an Organismic and Evolutionary Biology concentrator living in Dunster House, is the Managing Editor of The Ichthus.

The Power of Prayer

Jordan D. Teti — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:00:45 +0000

Any Christian who faces a crisis over which he has no control will turn to prayer. If man cannot improve, fix, or change the situation, then it very well must be God’s responsibility. At first glance, there is nothing wrong with yielding to God’s will or allowing the grace of the Holy Spirit to guide one’s path—indeed, these are essential aspects of our Christian existence. Still, prayer is not just a backup plan. If we direct our heart and mind to God in the good times, it allows us to feel the strength of the Holy Spirit when we are faced with the greatest challenges. This past November, I found myself in the middle of a natural catastrophe as wildfires consumed large portions of my hometown of Santa Barbara, California. When I realized the power of prayer in the worst of times, I considered what a change it would be if more people made such petitions a consistent part of everyday life.

Within an hour of the start of the fire, a sheet of flames lit the night sky on a ridge beside us. We scrambled through our home, gathering whatever we could not replace. This kind of wildfire intensifies anyone’s gratefulness for the little things. The hummingbirds that frequented the fl owers outside our kitchen; the familiar, welcoming smell of our house; the sound of dogs barking down the path by the rose garden—these were distinct features of our home that al disappeared. Such a fire also makes one grateful for the most important things in life: When we finally evacuated, our family was happy to be safe together; that was all that was important.

As we waited for the fire to abate, I received text messages from friends whose homes were more threatened than mine, and they asked me to pray that the winds would die down. I included them in my petitions to Saint Barbara and Saint Florian as I sought the intercession of the saints and unstinting grace of the Holy Spirit. As the blaze spread, I contacted a few friends to ask for their prayers, too. It seemed that only a miracle could save our home. My family received some two dozen offers of help and prayer. That night, we could have moved our entire home into storage if we had accepted half of those generous and genuine signs of compassion.

Unlike any other time in Santa Barbara, I felt a part of a real community. Neighbors were helping neighbors: They opened spare bedrooms for evacuees, they trucked boxes of other people’s valuables across town, and above all they prayed for each other. First, I wondered why it took a tragedy like the Tea Fire to send people into this mode. Why are we usually so indifferent to the daily trials of those around us? But after thinking it over, I realized that most people could have easily retreated to their own safe homes, smugly satisfi ed that they lived far away from the high-risk fire zones. That the community responded the way it did revealed our capacity to care for each other. I should note that this was not a sort of “common usefulness” devised by a bureaucrat, but a sense that one ought to yearn for the good of the community and not merely what is efficient or utilitarian. At the heart of such sentiments — as their crown and ultimate manifestation — was prayer, a distinctly immaterial activity of the mind and soul.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church prefaces its discussion of prayer with a striking and encompassing quotation from Saint Therese of Lisieux. She writes: “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and love, embracing both trial and joy.” Prayer embraces the good and the bad. When a fire rages towards our homes, we do not turn our heart to God in bitter rejection of His will. Such dissatisfaction with God is more the heart looking inward for a world according to its own will. As I prayed, I certainly hoped for the best for everyone involved in the fire, but I also acknowledged with humility that in some way I had to affirm what was going on—I had to embrace this trial however difficult it may prove to be. Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper makes much of an “absolutely universal affirmation extending to the world as a whole” in his classic essay, What is a Feast? Pieper goes on to say that this affirmation “has [little] to do with shallow optimism” since we cannot shut our eyes to the world’s horrors and pretend everything is alright. Instead, it is an assent to what is, even the worst circumstances. Therefore, the greatest of tragedies, such as Christ’s crucifixion, are “meaningful in spite of everything.” This is not an easy leap to make in an era of materialistic rationalism, but it opens windows to a life of true joy and love. With no resentment or anger, Santa Barbarans whose homes were destroyed went about praying for their neighbors whose homes were eventually saved. I have never witnessed a greater show of real Christian prayer.

I believe in the power of such prayer to help a community flourish, at the very least in goodwill. More people directing their minds and hearts to God, in an effort to genuinely wish the best for their neighbors as they plead for the grace of the Holy Spirit, would produce considerably more opportunities for us to experience a substantive social existence. Think about what it would do to bring us into a closer communion with God and the Church, and how it would transform us into the joyful, routinely loving beings that we are meant to be. We should not be content that the willingness to pray emerges only in crises. I end with a prayer, asking the flames to remain long after the threat of fire is gone: Ure igne Sancti Spiritus renes nostros et cor nostrum Domine; “Enkindle, O Lord, our hearts and minds with the fi re of the Holy Spirit.”

Jordan Teti ’08, a Kirkland House graduate in Government, is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Ichthus.

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus

Rev. Prof. Peter J. Gomes — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:00:47 +0000

For forty years, I have devoted myself to preaching from and teaching about the Bible, and in recent years I have written books on how to read and live with the Bible. I have been long aware of the Bible’s iconic status in American cultural life, and I realize that the various ‘battles for the Bible’ have to do with the right to interpret and claim it for one’s own point of view. Over all of this, however, I have become increasingly aware that the Bible is a means, and not an end in itself, and that what the Bible ‘says’ is not as important as that to which it points.

Jesus, for example, was not a Bible teacher but as a preacher of the good news, and the Bible, insofar as it is important to Jesus, is so because it points to the good news, the gospel, the world as it is meant to be. Jesus never seems satisfied with the status quo, nor does he waste a great deal of time on critical and textual matters as far as the Bible is concerned; thus, if we follow the example of Jesus and how he used the Bible, we will always be encouraged to look beyond it and toward that to which it points. People are misguided when they try to reconstruct a ‘biblical’ worldview, for in that construction most are inclined to look back rather than ahead. What is ‘scandalous’ about Jesus is his emphasis upon a new dispensation, a new and radical future, and his opposition to the status quo and things-as-they-are. What is exciting and demanding about the Christian faith, as we find it in the teachings of Jesus, is the emphasis on the ‘new’ that corresponds to God’s original intention for creation.

When, in his model prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…” he is inviting us into an imaginative construction of the world as God would have it, a place where love triumphs over hate, equity and peace are normative and not exceptional, and where those in power must remember that they cannot hold their power legitimately at the expense of the poor and the marginal.

Most Christians today, particularly Protestants, use the Bible to justify their own position in maintaining the status quo, while the preaching and teaching of Jesus, which was meant to introduce an age of radical risk-taking in which everyone takes the good news seriously, is often used to hold the line against any challenge to things as they are. Jesus always pointed beyond the text. Those who are obsessed with the text, and who fail to go beyond it to the ultimate challenge of the gospel, are wrong-headed and fail now as Jesus’s own critics failed in his time, to imagine and work for a world that is not yet. The Bible, and Jesus’s place in it and use of it, is not an exercise in history but a venture in prophecy that is – and should be – disturbing to those who like things, or simply accept things, as they are. It is far too easy to proclaim Jesus as a great man, a human and divine exemplar, and far more difficult and demanding to seek what Jesus sought and follow where he leads. Neither the abused term, ‘conservative,’ nor the term, ‘liberal,’ make much sense when we think seriously and conscientiously about the teachings of Jesus: the only appropriate word is one that frightens us all, and that is the word ‘radical.’ It means, as we all know, a return to the root of the matter, and that root is the good news, the gospel, which is at the heart of creation, God’s original work, and the preaching and teaching of Jesus.

If, then, we are to break out of our present malaise and mutual suspicions, we cannot simply ‘Go back to the Bible,’ as the old hymn put it, but must go to where the Bible and Jesus point, which is toward the gospel. Let us remember that Jesus came to proclaim the good news, the gospel, to which we must turn; and we must be prepared to go beyond the Bible to the gospel, and to the force and direction of scripture if we are to be faithful to the preaching and teaching of Jesus.

Whenever I preach and teach about the Bible, or invoke the name and authority of Jesus, I ask, “What has this to do with the good news? What does this say about the kingdom for which we pray, the world as God meant it to be?” This is admittedly risky business, as Jesus himself soon discovered, and while its implications may prove disturbing to the ‘churchy’ among us, this notion of the gospel beyond the Bible may prove encouraging to the faithful, which, after all, is the point of the gospel – genuine good news for those who are tired of things as they are. As is so often said in the much-abused Book of Revelation: “Let those who have ears listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” We all may be in for a few great surprises, and that is what makes both the Bible and the gospel so exciting.

Rev. Prof. Peter J. Gomes is the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University and the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church. He is the faculty advisor to the Harvard Ichthus. Rev. Prof. Gomes has most recently published The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?, Harper, 2007.

The Religion of Love

Allison A. Frost — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:00:51 +0000

It’s embarrassing to admit that I spent the better part of my freshman year falling in love. My plunge was total, unexpected, effortless, instant. He and I came together so forcefully, so naturally, that my only way of explaining it to bewildered friends back home was the transformation of a two-dimensional world into a three-dimensional one. Seemingly overnight I became a new creation.

I would love to dismiss that period of my life and the mistakes I made during it as the deluded sentimentality of a two-star movie plot. I would love to claim it was all a product of my naiveté and the proximity of my particular object of affection. I would love to laugh lightly, smile ruefully, even issue a little sigh at the memory and disregard it as an exaggeration. The reality is that I can’t. Try as I might to deny it, the feelings I had were not petty and they were not fleeting. In truth, what I felt for him was, for a long time, as real to me as the existence of God.

C.S. Lewis affirms that all this is not mere illusion: romantic love, eros, displays a godlike grandeur that we ought not to ignore. “[Eros’] total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness, his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal world,” Lewis wrote, “this love is really and truly like Love Himself.”1

The problem, Lewis wrote, is in the promise. Love’s power—a very real power—goads us to make vows of eternal happiness we have every intention but no power to fulfill. It asks us to surrender all and we do so blissfully, forgetting that eros is rooted in feelings whose intensity is only matched by their volatility. “And all the time the grim joke is that Eros whose voice seems to speak from the eternal realm is not necessarily even permanent,” Lewis wrote. “To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity…[but] Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.”2

What I remember best about the beginning of that time is, strangely, the elevator. It was the site of my first late-night phone call home about him and it was where, a few days later, our relationship officially began. The strength of our feelings made placing any boundaries on them appear foolish, and we used to laugh about the irrelevance of time as we talked late into the night, told every story, every secret, uncovered every hidden part of ourselves. The time he and I spent together was like that self-contained metal box: suspended in air, insulated from all other reality.

Without realizing it, I soon made the relationship an idol for myself by assuming that nothing love goaded me to could be wrong. In myriad small ways I started to choose him over God and everything else. Yet even at the deepest moments of intimacy in the relationship, I had the persistent feeling that something—or Someone—was missing. I found myself praying at the most unorthodox times, trying to invoke God by calling on His name even as I ignored His Word. Couldn’t I, by the force of my love, win God’s sanction for us?

Even after time uncovered our many flaws, our devotion to each other did not flag. What did it matter that he sometimes spoke maliciously, that I was stubborn and demanding? Love meant a complete surrender. I stood at the top of Widener steps and through my tears forgave him for throwing away the people most precious to me. We comforted each other as we struggled under the terrible burden of trying to be each other’s fulfillment. We summoned broken smiles and rode the elevator home. We were the best—indeed the only—thing we had.

Soon I found myself walled off from the people around me and, in my despair, walled myself off further from God. Out of fear that He would confirm to me that I was wrong, leaving me with nothing, I stopped my ears and slowly plunged into depression. By the time the relationship ended—a process that took months to finish—both he and I had lost our footing completely. Even then, the cables holding us suspended did not snap. We had to slowly, painfully cut them ourselves. After the ecstasy of the initial connection with this boy, God gave me a terrifying vision of what love looks like when separated from Him.

The danger of love, Lewis warned, is in being deceived by eros’ godlike qualities into believing that eros can take the place of God. “Eros, of himself, will never be enough—will indeed survive only in so far as he is continually chastened and corroborated by higher principles,” Lewis argued. Like us, love is at its best when it surrenders its own strength to seek God’s grace. Even more, “Eros, honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon.”3 God is love, but love—eros—is not God. Without God at its center, love demands sacrifices for covenants we cannot or should not keep.

With time God showed me that every transcendent feeling I had glimpsed in that relationship was real, but only lasting in Him. In truth, love requires Christ as a mutual foothold in order to stand: “We love because He first loved us.”4 It was God’s love, not his or mine, that was “the most excellent way” I’d been searching for all along.5

I am no enemy of eros. Still, having tasted the best that worldly love has to offer, I gladly turn my eyes first to God. I hope that others will be wiser than I was. In the end, it is by leaning into Christ that we draw closer to each other. Only when He becomes the beginning and the end of all our love can we escape Eros’ endless rise and fall and, at long last, arrive.

1. Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, 1988. 107-109.
2. Ibid. 113-114.
3. Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, 1988. 110.
4. 1 John 4:19
5. 1 Corinthians 12:31

Allison A. Frost ‘08, Managing Editor, is an English and Religion Concentrator in Winthrop House.

What now?

Ann Chao — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 04:00:22 +0000

I saw the face of Jesus in a little orphan girl.
She was standing in the corner on the other side of the world.
And I heard the voice of Jesus gently whisper to my heart,
“Didn’t you say you wanted to find me?
Well here I am, here you are.
So what now?

-”What Now,” Steven Curtis Chapman

I spent this past summer as a volunteer teacher at Bethel Foster Home for blind and disabled children in China. It was an amazing and humbling experience. I arrived there in July expecting to learn much more than I would teach, and by the beginning of September, that expectation had proven true.

There are 31 children at Bethel Foster Home, and almost all of them are blind; some have additional disabilities such as infantile autism or attention deficit problems. Others have mental and emotional issues from many years spent in poor, often abusive conditions in other orphanages. Bethel is truly a haven for them. Founded only a few years ago by a young French couple, the foster home is a loving and nurturing environment as close to a family as many of these abandoned children can have. In just two or three years of living at Bethel, many children’s lives have been completely transformed. Many have transitioned from violent habits and distrust to love and openness.

It is amazing what love can do. It can take a life and turn it completely around. Isn’t this the core of the Gospel: that love is the greatest transforming power, able to heal, to forgive, and to save? If such a powerful force is the mission, message, and very person of Jesus Christ, why does Christianity today seem to be lacking in true transformative power and spirit? According to the news we read every day, Christianity is certainly not disengaged from political involvement in this country or a wide range of scandals. People wonder what being Christian is actually about. Is it more than just going to church on Sundays, wearing a cross, and telling people to repent and believe in Jesus?

I believe in the basic salvation message: that Jesus Christ came to this Earth to die for our sins and offer us eternal life. But I also believe that that wasn’t the only reason He came. He came to show us how to live. His years of public ministry as recorded in the Gospels are vivid pictures of compassion, giving, healing, standing up for what is right, and selfless love. To the very end, He was indiscriminate and radical in His love for others and death approached, Jesus gave a clear message to his followers about how one who truly follows God should live. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me,” (Matthew 25:35-36). “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me,” (Matthew 25:40).

Each person is created in the image of God, with the ability to love, to feel, to be hurt, to rejoice, to want love from others. And in each of the 31 children at Bethel, I saw His face, the question of “what now?” gently painted in innocence and expectation. The question “what now?” is more prominent, more insistent, as I think of the millions of children in China who are not so fortunate, still living in the sad conditions many of Bethel’s children had experienced for most of their lives. And when one considers the enormity of suffering across the entire world, places where human beings are still bought and sold as slaves, where children are forced into prostitution, where hundreds of thousands of people are brutally killed in Darfur… the question “what now?” is blatantly obvious and unavoidable.

I do believe love is more powerful than suffering. But it is also a great challenge to love, and perhaps this is why it seems so impossible to fix all the world’s problems. There were many times I became frustrated with teaching children who rebelled and didn’t listen, or got tired of spending so many hours a day with preteens desperate for attention. Still, time and time again I found myself face to face with the truth of who these children were: living testaments to the transforming power of love. Once, I asked the students to finish a sentence beginning with, “I am grateful because…” One girl said, “I am grateful because many people love me.” This and many other moments struck me powerfully, reminding me that despite all that is wrong with the world, God is here and He is not letting go. His wish is not only for us to know and love Him, but also to love and serve others. It is easy to say, “I love God,” but what validates or falsifies that statement is whether one follows the command to love others and serve the “least of these.”

Today, Jesus still presents this question as both an invitation and a challenge.

…I know I may not look like what you expected,
but if you remember,
this is right where I said I would be.
You’ve found me.
What now?

Ann Chao ’08, Books & Arts Editor, is a Social Studies and East Asian Studies concentrator in Currier House.

The Important Tests

Chiduzie Madubata — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 04:00:53 +0000

I remember it like it was yesterday. I had just gotten my first exam back from Chem 5, and I was terrified to look at the grade. I knew I had not done well; following my high school habit, I had only prepared for the exam the day before. That turned out to be a huge mistake. I looked at my score in dismay: 46%. I tried to keep myself composed but inside, I was dying. It was the lowest grade that I had ever received in my life, and I felt like my dreams of being a doctor were over—even though it was the first exam of my Harvard career. What would I tell my parents? How could I continue on as a Harvard student with this blemish on my “permanent” record? I went to visit a friend who also took the course and broke down in front of him, absolutely riddled with fear about the future. My friend, who happened to be a Christian, looked me in the eye and spoke the words that still impact me today: “Don’t despair. God’s got it under control.”

Before that day I felt I was ultimately in control of my academic future. My immediate thoughts after receiving the grade focused on me: How was I going to get out of this? What impact was this going to have on my life? Will I be a doctor? The idea that all this might have to do with something bigger than me never entered the picture until my friend reminded me that God was in control of the situation. As a Christian, I was called to love the Lord with all my heart, my soul, my mind and my strength (Mark 12:30), which meant that everything about me needed to be engaged by Him. It was then that it hit me as hard as the 46% did— I could not ultimately control everything.

But how could I bring a love of God into my experience as a pre-med? The answer lay in understanding that God is omnipresent; He is everything and in everything that we do. And so, we must glorify God in whatever we do (1 Corinthians 10:31); my studies could in no way be exempt. In thinking this way, I integrated God into my academic life by realizing that academics were not everything. They were not a measure of my whole self and my eternal soul—they could not define my value.

God gave me the passion to become a doctor, but I needed to honor Him by how I studied—with Him in mind. An unexpected result of integrating God into all of my life was that I began to try to truly love all my neighbors as myself (Mark 12:31). That had to include the guy sitting next to me in my chemistry class whom I was directly competing against.

At first, it was difficult to love my pre-med classmates. During my pre-med experience, I had felt either competitive or isolated, causing me to have animosity or apathy toward others. Yet as I started to pursue a deeper relationship with God through my studies, I overcame my isolationist mentality and acknowledged my classmates’ existence. With God’s help, I began to treat them with His compassionate love. I also began to set aside time for them—time that could have been used to complete problem sets and study for exams. Changing my attitude toward my classmates and the way I spent my time was not easy. It involved sacrificing both the isolation I had built up and time that might have been spent in pursuit of higher grades. But showing compassion to other pre-meds became more important to me than academic success because I felt that compassion was better for healing past wounds than mere scholastics.

In order to love other pre-meds completely, I had to enter into their pain. Through this, I learned that they struggled with the same things that I did, such as uncertainty about the future and constant self-doubt. I saw their brokenness along with mine and could finally identify with them. I began to understand that they, like I, were created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which meant that they were worthy of the same love and respect as me. I no longer had to be overly competitive or indifferent towards their presence. Instead, I saw other pre-meds in the way that God saw them: people with value and purpose.

Years after that fateful chemistry exam, I am preparing to graduate and enter medical school in the fall. I am blessed to say that I have no regrets about how my experience changed after the talk I had with my friend. As I gave my pre-med experience to God, He gave me His heart and ultimately His love for others. Knowing that I was at peace with my colleagues most of the time also helped me to do my best on my assignments. My desire was to honestly learn, instead of “learning” to compete with others. In turn, I was freed from anxiety.

I may not have straight ‘A’s or graduate summa cum laude, but thankfully those things did not prevent me from pursuing my passion for healing in medical school. People do not need to become obsessively competitive and self-absorbed in order to become doctors. Instead, I would argue that practicing self-sacrifice is the best preparation to care for future patients. With these insights comes a sense of peace. I know that I have done the best I can to honor God through loving others, and that, more than anything, is the truly important test.

Chiduzie C. Madubata ’06 is a Biology concentrator in Mather House. His first name means “God guide me” in Ibo. His last name means “Everyone is welcome.”

Coming Home

Kirsten Nyborg — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:00:24 +0000

If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” —John 7:37

I have always been depressed by the idea of being merely a “pretty good” person. Before I was a Christian, I identified myself only according to characteristics that I considered wholly good (and even noble) – the parts of me that appreciated things outside of myself that I thought were good, like nature or another person. That was the “real” me, but I had no way of reconciling this desire for goodness with poorer components in my character, such as selfishness. I was unwilling to exist as a compromise, to always be lacking or skewed compared with what I considered beautiful, and yet I could hardly voice my desire for a perfection in myself and my life that was higher than anything I had come close to achieving. I sought perfection in myself and for myself, because I was deeply vested in the belief that no one else could honor or benefit my interests as much as I could. I was constantly working to create an ideal that is God, and can only be created by God. Without knowing what it felt like to experience satisfaction, I couldn’t realize that I was unsatisfied with my progress, which, considering the height of my goal, was pathetic. It was like going through life wearing a backpack of bricks: I would of course be aware if it was one brick heavier one day – I would call that day extremely uncomfortable – and if it was five bricks lighter the next, I would call that day wonderfully light; but I would never realize the effects of the condition of heaviness until I had a different experience to compare it to. I needed to see God in order to recognize the impossible nature of some of my values, like the belief that I had to create perfection myself in order to have it in my life.

When I went to the Alpha course in my sophomore fall, I learned that the real God is very different from the vaguely judgmental picture I’d created. I had never understood that God knows my faults and loves me anyway, or that He promises to joyfully give me everything that I need for eternal life, but I recognized truth as I read it. In the Bible Jesus tells his disciples,

I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. (John 6:35-40)

It surprised me that God wasn’t totally alien. The good that I had been seeking really exists, and it is good – it just wasn’t in my power to reach it by attaining money or trying to make people love me. It is God. Everything good, in me or anywhere else, is from God, and is a dim shadow of the entirety of Him, or of the essence of goodness. The things that seemed the most good to me, beauty in nature or love from my parents, were only the most that I was able to see of God. That doesn’t make those things less wonderful, but shows how great God must be. Hearing about who God says He is changed my fear of trusting Him. It was only dangerous for me to put my hope in something outside of myself when I was the best and most trustworthy thing I knew. It was such a relief to discover that God is the giver and the source of that purity that I want to call my “real” self, and it meant that there was a good reason for hope.

While I was deciding whether or not to become a Christian, I remember being in awe of the weight of God’s existence. It was scary to consider that He is real and that he sent His son to die and provide for me despite my imperfections. What if that serious love were true? The life I had been blindly spending meant more than I had ever imagined. I was so afraid to change the way I had always been living and thinking, but the truth that God is really there – that Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection have already happened regardless of whether I choose to recognize them – made me so deeply aware of the danger of throwing away something real that I had to acknowledge Him. Responding to God, if you really see God, matters. It will change you. For me, the biggest difference is that I am never separated from God. I have a greater hope and higher joy than this world can offer because I have a constant relationship with the source of everything good. Finding God was like coming home to a greater peace than I could ever create myself. That is one of the blessings of His love.

Kirsten Nyborg ’06 is an English concentrator in Leverett House.

Receiving the Kingdom of God: Haiti Summer 2004

Anna Bingham — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:00:27 +0000

People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this he was indignant. He said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.” Mark 10:13-15

Without question what I remember best about Haiti is the children. It would be hard to forget them. Most Haitian families have at least six children, and one of the most common diagnoses that Albert, the nurse on our trip, made during the clinics he held was pregnancy. Many parents cannot afford to send their children to school since all schooling is private, so children are constantly visible, not hidden away in schoolrooms as they are in the US. As we neared the village of Desab, and as we turned off the main road and onto the dirt road that leads into town, the children began to come. Sister Eunice sat shotgun, and the rest of us lurched happily on top of our luggage in the back of the pickup. The children ran down from cement and mud huts tucked behind the bush and brush of the landscape. Their legs were thin enough and fast enough that they became a blur as they raced to be first to stick their hands into Sister Eunice’s window. “Peewilli, peewilli?” they cried, saying the Haitian word for lollipop.

Sister Eunice is not a sentimental woman; in her dealings with the village elders who led the cooperative, she never minced words. Only with the children did Sister Eunice’s hard edges begin to soften, and while she never handed out money, she could always be counted on for a tasty treat. She was fastidious with the care she took maintaining equity in all her actions. She once recounted with great indignation how a priest had accompanied her on a trip to Haiti; when they arrived in Desab, he without asking began handing out soccer balls and candy on a first-come first-serve basis, and before long, of the dozens of children who had swarmed down the mountains, half were “haves” and half were “have-nots.” The thought of creating more inequality in a country already infamous for it was intolerable to Sister Eunice, and she always managed to conserve her lollipops so that every child on the dirt road to Desab left the window of her truck with bulging cheeks or pockets.

In the US, where over-stimulation and access to too much of everything force many children to grow up too fast, to know too much and yet understand, and value, so little, it is difficult for us to properly appreciate Christ’s words to us in Mark. When I was a child, receiving something meant getting presents for my birthday or for Christmas, and I did not often receive them with proper thankfulness. Instead, I compared them to the bigger and better things I saw in storefronts and on billboards; knowing all that was out there made it very difficult for me to receive anything with true joy. The children of Desab, on the other hand, know of very little. Many have not been to school; Port Au Prince, the nearest city, is inaccessible; and I rarely saw children play with manufactured toys. Yet at the same time, their understanding of life is much deeper than that of the typical American child, simply because they’ve experienced firsthand hardships that I, even at twenty-one, had only heard of.

The children of Desab understand hunger. Subsistence in the mountains of Haiti is uncertain and, even in the best of times, insufficient. Despite the best efforts of the cooperative, many children still show signs of malnutrition: distended bellies, loss of pigment that turns hair from black to a yellowish orange, and rotting teeth from a lack of calcium.

The children of Desab understand the powerful grip of disease and the despair of seeing no relief in sight. I never saw one child cry despite the fact that as the nurse’s assistant, I waited on children who came to us with day-old machete gashes that had not been washed or bandaged, or with a case of scabies so severe that pus-filled lumps swelled up beneath the hair and down the back of the neck.

Even in the midst of all this suffering, the children of Desab are also the most joy-filled and trusting children I’ve ever met. I had always wondered what it meant to truly receive the kingdom of God like a child, and the children of Desab showed me the way. Rather than expecting us to earn their trust, they implicitly gave it, climbing onto our laps and vying to hold our hands within hours of meeting us. This, I thought, was how Jesus wants me to treat him—not for me to wait for him to win my faith, but to trust him unconditionally.

The children of Desab demanded our attention. They called out our names incessantly, insisting that we listen to them or look at a picture they had drawn. In turn they listened to us, and they struggled with utmost concentration to understand our strange English words. If God could be tired out, I thought, then surely he would want me to exhaust him by calling on his name, demanding his attention incessantly throughout the day. The children of Desab received us with a delight and joy that made me believe they desired nothing more; that they were fulfilled completely. I hope that I can receive the Kingdom of God the same way.

Anna Bingham ’06 is a History of Science concentrator in Leverett House.