The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  The conventional wisdom is that we are all possessed of robust egos, of self-images that will not quit, and that the human sins with which we are most concerned are those of pride and arrogance. Ask the average American what comes to mind when Harvard is mentioned, and you usually get something like “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.” Ask the average non-American what he or she thinks of Americans and usually you will hear some variation on the theme of arrogance: The “ugly” American, as we recall, has nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with attitude.

  The conventional wisdom in this as in so many other things is not entirely to be relied upon, however, and my experience of Harvard students, and of Americans as well, is not that they suffer from a surfeit of self-confidence but rather that we all experience, almost to the level of a mania, what the psychologists call “the imposter syndrome.” Image building, that activity that engages us from our earliest years onward, is designed not so much to impress others as it is to protect ourselves from the discovery on the part of others that we are not all that we appear to be. The games of the boardroom are the same as those of the athletic field and the battlefield, designed to conceal our weaknesses from an enemy all too eager to seize upon them and destroy us. Thus, in cultivating the art of defensive living we cultivate a good offense. Catch them before they catch us. This does not mean that we believe ourselves to be less fraudulent than we really are, but that we must be inventive and persistent in preventing the fraud from being exposed to our disadvantage. From our earliest days we develop strategies to achieve this, from the way we dress, to our body language, to our speech, and to the acquiring of credentials meant not to certify but to intimidate.

  We live in constant fear of exposure. We live all our lives fearing that we are going to be found out, and in a way we are all little Wizards of Oz. We do it all behind the green curtain with smoke and mirrors, terrified that somebody will discover that that big big voice and that clever clever mind, and all that power, are really just a little tape going round and round and round and round.

  Well, there is good news, and that is why they call it the gospel. The news is not that we are worse than we think, it is that we are better than we think, and better than we deserve to be. Why? Because at the very bottom of the whole enterprise is the indisputable fact that we are created, made, formed, invented, patented in the image of goodness itself. That is what it means, that is how one translates being created in the image of God: It means to be created in the image of goodness itself. We are cast from a perfect die and the imprint is on us, and it cannot be evaded or avoided. God made us, male and female, in the image of goodness, and goodness itself is who and what we are, and God pronounced it good, and hence it is good, because, as the kid in the ghetto said, “God don’t make no junk.” What God makes is good.

  Self-worth, self-esteem, self-value, these are not essays in mere ego, these are essays in divinity. These are essays in goodness, the stuff of goodness and godliness itself, and it is that image that provides security and serenity in the world. People may take everything away from you, they may deprive you of everything you have and value, but they cannot take away from you the fact that you are a child of God and bear the impression of God in your very soul. You cannot be destroyed, and that cannot be denied.

  To be in the image of goodness, then, involves the act of imaging, a technique I learned while talking to a very large football player at a House dinner. Sitting next to him, I decided to try to make easy conversation, one of the things I’m very good at, at least that’s my image of myself, and so I said to him, “Young man, what do you do?” He said that he worked in sports theory. Well, that’s an intriguing answer, as I’ve heard of people who are theoretical types, and I know people who work in sports, but I thought that sports was anything but theoretical—either you knocked them down or you didn’t—and I thought that that was a very simple sort of thing. So I said, “What is sports theory about?” and he explained it in terms that even I could understand. He said that it was the process of imaging, of getting the brain to play through all of the right plays over and over and over again, to anticipate and to respond in the brain so that the plays and the actions are patterned, and that by the time you actually do a play, on that one time the brain doesn’t know that you haven’t done it dozens and dozens of times before, and so has perfected your ability to perform. It isn’t practice, this kid said to me, it’s imaging. “Imaging,” I said, “does that mean imagining?” “Yeah, something like that,” he answered. “The imagination has everything to do with how you perform. If you imagine yourself going through all of this patterning in the brain, anticipating and responding, then when it comes time for you to actually have to do it you have done it, and you are much better off doing it because you’re done it here before you have to do it out there on the field.”

  I was absolutely astounded by this, and to show how diverse college is, opposite us sat a piano player. She said, “Yeah, that’s what I do. When I practice the piano and I’m not at the piano, I practice at my desk, or I practice in my room, or I practice in the library. I first have the music out and I image what I am going to do with it, and then I don’t even need the music, and I don’t need a piano. I can image it in my head, I know how it is supposed to come out. I know what my fingers are supposed to do, and when it comes time for my fingers actually to do it they are much better able to do it because I have imaged it, I have done it, I have experienced the thing before actually having to do it.”

  In other words, to see or to image perfection is to strive for it and, indeed, to accomplish much of it. The imagination has more to do with virtue than virtue itself. What an extraordinary thing. A football player doesn’t need a field or a team with which to play football, and a piano player doesn’t need the music or even a piano to perform the great work. The only equipment we require to live out the image of goodness in the world is what we have, because God has given us by his very creation of us a capacity to image, to imagine what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful. Here the image is not the external result but just the reverse. An image is not fashion, it is the internal change that we call imagination, and if you cultivate a lively moral imagination, that is a considerable improvement over the maintenance of mere fashion and style.

  Think of it—the power to be rests within. It requires only what Professor Tillich once called the courage to be and to see things not as they are but as they ought to be, so that you can cope with things as they appear to be. To be created in the image of God means that we are in some sense a picture of God. There is that of God in us, there is that of God in the poor and destitute of the world; in them there is something of God. Sin is when that something, that image, is distorted or denied or deprived or twisted. When we deny that image in ourselves and, even worse, deny it in others, that is the point when we have committed the almost unforgivable sin, the point when we demean and demonize others so that we can abuse them and treat them badly.

  Slavery was only possible in this country when white Christians denied the humanity of their slaves and suppressed their own humanity in the process, for even they knew that human beings do not treat others in that way, since there is that of God in each and all of us. That is also what happens in racism, and in anti-Semitism. How could the Germans, for example, that most civilized of people, treat the Jews as they did without demeaning or taking away that of God in themselves? How could Americans treat the Native American in the same way, if they did not take that of God which was in them away from them? If the denial of the image of God is the problem, the affirmation of the image of God in self and in others is the solution.

  Perhaps the most radical thing for the modern pilgrim to say is “I am a child of God.” “I am a child of God” is the mantra of the free woman and the free man of Christ. I am a child of God. In the image of goodness I am created, and so is everyone else, and when we believe that, when we image that, we can act upon that image, we
can image that goodness as our mandate in life. We have the power to do this. We don’t have to read books, go to college, take a correspondence course. We have the power right now to do this, with everything we have this very instant.

  Jesus says in Mark 11, “What things whatsoever you desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them and ye shall have them.” Who are we, to do this? How can it be thought that we can do this? The Bible tells us who we are. I Peter says, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a dedicated nation of people claimed by God for his own,” and that is who we are. We are to proclaim the glorious deeds of him who has called us out of the darkness into his marvelous light. Peter said, “Once you were nobody, not anybody at all. But now you are God’s people. Once you were without mercy, but now you have mercy.” To work on our image is to realize that our image is the image of God, and that we are better than we are right now. The work on our image is nothing less than the work of God in our lives. In the image of God created he them, male and female he created them.” We are made with goodness, for good. Knowing that, and knowing that the Bible is about that, is a good start on the pilgrimage toward the good life. We affirm not ourselves but the God who made us, is in us, and who is with us.

  How Can I Face the Future?

  Over my years of dealing with students in their last year of college I have learned that what might appear to be an innocent question has hostile implications. I used to ask, “What are you going to do next year?,” and as more and more students seemed to know less and less about what the future held for them, I noticed that they were less than happy with the question. They often felt guilty if they could not provide a definitive answer, as if somehow the uncertainty was a moral fault and a defect in their character. Perhaps they were anxious about the question because it was the sort of question their parents had been putting to them with increased urgency, or perhaps they were upset because they had not yet got around to making the necessary plans. Perhaps the plans had fallen through, or perhaps they were feeling more like grasshoppers than ants, and psychic winter was coming on. Whatever the reason, my innocent and in some sense profoundly ignorant question caused more anxiety than it was worth in my young friends, and so I agreed with myself not to ask it in the last term. It seemed a fair question in September, a tender one in January, and downright rude in May. I consoled myself and my young friends with a piety of reassurance: “You have a future, we all have; you just don’t know what it is yet.”

  Anxiety about the future, I discover, is not confined to the college young. Many of my older colleagues, neighbors, and friends face their futures with a sense of apprehension, and of foreboding and dread. The prolonging of life, that miracle of modern science and technology, has turned out to be a mixed blessing for many. The long stretch of post-retirement years, the “sunset” or “golden” years, as the euphemists would have them, do not hold out the promise of blessed idleness with time to do all the things that work prevented, or a contemplative and serene old age in which one lives off the well-earned bounty of a well-lived life. Will I have enough money to live on? Will I have my health, in particular my mind? Will I be stuck in a nursing home, or with dutiful but unhappy relatives? Will I have a lingering decline, watching my parts fail in succession until I hope that I lose my mind before I lose everything else? What will happen when all who knew me in my prime are gone and there is no one left to love me, and I am surrounded only by those who are paid to maintain me? Anxiety about the future is not confined to the young.

  Polls tell us that most people in a land thought to be mindlessly optimistic are worried about the future. We often hear these anxieties expressed in economic and material terms, and for the first time there is the perception in America that children will not necessarily have a higher standard of living than their parents. The American Dream, upon which so many politicians trade, once thought to be the pursuit of happiness and the blessing of liberty, is seen more and more as more and more and more and more at risk. The dream of upward mobility became first an expectation and then an entitlement, and is now a disappointment, and that disappointment has fueled what can be called the politics of disappointment and bile. Taxes that mortgage the dreams of the middle class to subsidize those perceived as undeserving are more and more resented. Institutions such as colleges, industry, even the government, all once thought to be essential to the solutions of our problems, are now, in this climate of anxiety and recrimination, seen to be the problem.

  Anxiety about the future, however, is not obsessed merely with the material and the economic. We know that there is a profound spiritual anxiety about the future. At the height of the Cold War, Robert Jay Lifton and other observers of our social condition thought that the anxiety had to do with the fear of nuclear annihilation and the destruction of life on this planet as we know it. For years we were dominated by doomsday scenarios and the climate of moral angst that they created. I well remember the national frenzy created by the made-for-television movie The Day After, a bit of docu-fiction of the early 1980s about the day after a nuclear attack, which was meant to be a nuclear-age version of Orson Welles’s famous radio program, The War of the Worlds. It was nowhere near as good a piece of writing, but it brought to the national hearth of television the fears and forebodings that attended a culture of soulless science, rampant militarism, and arrogant technologies.

  When the Cold War came to an end the anxiety about the future did not vanish and we could see that the Cold War and the nuclear age were not the causes of our fears but merely present-day expressions of them. In some sense these clear and outward manifestations of terror served us well by focusing our energy and deflecting our consciousness from the sickness within. This could lead to despair, to a kind of existentialist nihilism, a mechanistic celebration of the hedonistic, the absurd, and the material, and for many these were the facts of life in the 1980s. That period could be captured in the classic exchange between the optimist who argued that this was the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist who agreed.

  Hope is a slippery word and particularly so when it is used in connection with the future and as an antidote to anxiety and fear, but it is just hope that people require in facing their futures; and hope’s greatest power is that it enables the present by embracing the future. The essence of the good life for which this age seeks is that hope is worthwhile, worth living for, worth waiting and working for. Hope does not deny the circumstances of the present, and hope doesn’t help us get out of our difficulties. Hope doesn’t get us out, but it does get us through. Contrary to the street smarts of the age, hope is not the enterprise of last resort, it is the quality that transcends both failure and success, for it substitutes the ultimate for the temporary. Hope is not stoical endurance, although it does help us to endure, but whereas endurance has a certain almost fatalistic quality to it, hope itself goes beyond that which must be endured. Hope allows us to transcend definition by mere circumstances and appearances.

  Job is often cited as an example of unconquerable hope, and if we remember his story we will recall that he did not use his hope to deny the reality of his present pains and circumstances. The hope that was his was of the same essence as confidence, and that confidence was not in himself or in anything that he did, or could do, or was. Hope thus always points away from the one who claims it to the one who is its source. Thus hope is not solipsistic and self-centered, but directed invariably to that which is worthy of confidence. This is what Job 11:18–19 makes clear, thus enabling Job to look beyond himself and his circumstances:

  And you will have confidence because there is

  hope; you will be protected and take your rest

  in safety. You will lie down and none will make you afraid.

  This is also the direction of hope in Psalm 27:13–14:

  I believe that I shall see the goodness of the

  Lord in the land of the living! Wait for the

  Lord; be strong, and let your heart take

  courage; yea, wait
for the Lord.

  And again in Psalm 43:5, we read:

  Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why

  are you disquieted within me? Hope in God;

  for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

  Hope therefore is what connects the present to the future; it is the mother of courage, confidence, and endurance. The good life is not that for which one hopes; hope is that which makes the good life possible, and thus the good life is not an objective but a consequence. When we are able to see that, and to adopt that reality as our own, we are free from the tyranny of an unredeemed past, a remorseless present, and an unknown future. We are free to become, in the glorious phrase of Zechariah 9:12, “prisoners of hope.”

  The Bible is the record of God’s action of creation, redemption, and sustenance. The hope of those who trust in God is the result, the consequence of these divine demonstrations. Biblical hope is thus not wishful thinking, an extrapolation into the future based upon little more than pious expectations. Hope is certified in the experience of people’s relationship to God, to which all scripture gives testimonial: Because of what God has done, the people have hope in what God will do and is in fact doing. Hebrews 6:19 calls this “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,” and I Peter 1:3–4 thanks God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for the fact that by his mercy “we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.”