“To Do or To Be?” 
Montreat College Opening Convocation Address
19 August 2008
Dan Struble, Ph.D.
President, Montreat College
© 2008 Dan Struble
Welcome to a new academic year at Montreat College! I pray that this year will be a time of tremendous growth for each of you. You will be presented with many enriching opportunities for intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and physical growth, each of which can move you closer to becoming the mature adult God created you to be. I say “can move you closer” because growth and maturity are not inevitable. There are many immature adults out there and, unfortunately, our culture seems bent on perpetuating adolescence. College is a time to grow into maturity, but you must choose to take advantage of the many opportunities it offers.
College is also a tremendous privilege. Today in our country, one-third of Americans your age have not completed high school; about half of those who have finished high school are unable to go to college; and about half of those who will make it to college will not graduate within six years. You have an opportunity to develop and enrich your life in ways beyond number. I encourage you to make the most of your time here at Montreat College.
If this is your first semester here, choose to begin well by applying yourself in and out of class. You should actively engage inside the classroom and plan to spend two hours out of class (studying and working on papers and projects) for every hour in class. That’s right—your studies are a full-time job. However, just as life ought not to be all about work, college should not be all about studies. Some of your most enriching opportunities here will come in the form of chapels, plays, musical performances, hikes in the mountains, athletic events, and those times with your friends when you talk about life and meaning and truly connect. Come to know your fellow students and participate with them in as many of these activities as time will allow. Set aside television, Facebook, and long talks on your cell phone with those far away (yes, even your mom!) to make the time to pour yourselves into each other and into the many activities here.
If you are a returning student and you failed to do these things before (and I know some of you fall into this category!), take heart: every semester is a new beginning, and new beginnings provide new chances to make the right choices. Don’t find yourself, years from now, wishing you hadn’t frittered away your time at Montreat College.
You expect the president, I am sure, to exhort you to choose a major and study hard—and I do expect you to do these things. Perhaps you are a little surprised to hear the president encourage you to spend less time talking with Mom to make the time to build close friendships here. You might be even more surprised to hear me say that college is not about preparing for a job or even for a career.
What’s that you say?! Don’t most good jobs require a college degree? Well, yes. Don’t many majors lead to specific career choices? That is also true. But if we reduce a college education to career preparation—to learn how to do something—we will be but slaves to doing. Surely we must eat and provide for ourselves clothing and shelter, but having these things frees us only from hunger and exposure. A great education, while it often does lead to a career that makes this limited freedom possible, should also provide freedom from our current cultural context. A great education provides the kind of freedom that comes from truly understanding the difference between doing and being and, especially, being those whom God has created us to be.
Let me illustrate, beginning with Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. You may remember, from the book or the movie, how Alice comes to a fork in the road and, pausing to consider which path to take, spies the cat looking down at her from a tree. Glad for this potential guide, Alice asks the cat which way she should go. Wisely, the cat asks Alice where she is going. Since Alice has no idea of her destination, the cat responds, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk.”
Do you have a destination in mind? Or are you like Alice, drifting along in life, as if in a dream? This sounds like a simple dichotomy, an either-or, but it is actually possible to do both. We may think we are goal-directed, making choices that guide our lives, yet oftentimes we have accepted our current culture so unreflectively that we are each more like a runner on a treadmill, “choosing” to put one foot in front of the other. The choice to keep going does keep us from being spit off the back end of the treadmill, but we may feel trapped as the treadmill turns faster and faster, and we find that we are not really going anywhere or taking much joy in the journey.
Consider, for example, the question we so commonly ask young people: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I expect that we have all been asked that question at some point in our lives, but the question itself is flawed. The question is really two questions combined into one: Who do you want to be, and What do you want to do? If we are to become fully human beings, not human “doings,” we should strive first to “be,” and we should let what we do flow from who we are.
Stephen Covey, in his classic book The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, encourages us to consider these questions separately. He makes the not-too-subtle statement, “No one on their death bed ever wished they had spent more time at the office.” He tells us to “begin with the end in mind,” and he would have us consider not which jobs we will fill (whether as teachers, lawyers, pastors, or business people), but what sort of people we will be in the lives of others.
Now I’ll ask you to use your imagination a little, so feel free to close your eyes and ponder deeply. I want you to picture your golden wedding anniversary, or your own funeral, or if those events seem too distant to imagine, your 30th, 40th, or 50th birthday. Who is there? What do you suppose they would say about you? How are they relating to one another? Is the fruit of your life apparent in the lives of those present?
Keep imagining, but now I’d like you to call to mind familiar images from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Remember how Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future? Scrooge is terrified most by the ghost of Christmas future. Scrooge looks on as he sees his business associates casually noting that he will be little missed; he sees his housekeeper laughing as she sells the shirt that she has pulled from his dead body; and he sees his cold dark grave.
Now imagine that Scrooge is sitting next to you—not the reformed Scrooge, awakened after his three visits, but the Scrooge who considered Marley’s ghost to be but an “undigested bit of beef.” How do you imagine he would see his own funeral? I suspect he would picture himself drawn to the funeral in a fine carriage, his body dressed in rich, respectable attire, and the funeral attended by his business associates, who would carry on about Scrooge’s shrewd business practices and the resulting massive estate he compiled.
It is hard to see ourselves as others see us. The social mirror in which we see our own reflection can be terribly distorted. In fact, we are drowning in a sea of messages that tell us that we are defined by what we do for a living, by where we live, by what we drive, by what we wear, by our achievements, and by how we look. We are told that purchasing some product or another, or reaching some level of professional or financial achievement will surely satisfy. So often we strive and strive to prove ourselves worthy, to climb the ladder of success, thinking that is what we are supposed to do, or that doing so will make us happy and loved, only to find emptiness at the top of the ladder, as we have discarded what really matters along the way.
There are many reasons our culture sends messages that distort our vision and influence us to make decisions that impoverish, rather than satisfying our true needs. At one level, overabundance of goods leads advertisers to suggest that their products will meet needs unrelated to their function. When there are hundreds of makes and models of cars to choose from, for example, transportation is not a defining feature. Instead we are told that the new Cadillac will “turn us on,” the Mercedes will signal that we’ve made it, the Chevy truck will convey what rugged Americans we are, the Volvo will show how much we love our families, and the Prius will show how much we care for the environment.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who visited the United States in the early 1800s—and perhaps the most astute observer of American culture ever—noted that democratic institutions, in making everyone equal, also create a condition where no one knows who they are in relation to time, place, or others. Here is a telling quote from his book Democracy in America:
. . . democracy make[s] every man forget his ancestors . . . it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
Democracy, de Tocqueville warns us, creates social conditions in which each of us feels we must define who we are. We are no longer identified in relation to our family and community, as was Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph; instead, we are individuals striving to demonstrate that we have a place. Alain de Botton, a more recent European observer, wrote a whole book entitled Status Anxiety, to describe our current state and ways to alleviate it.
Perhaps the most fundamental reason our social mirror is so distorted, however, is that most of those who shape our culture believe that Nietzsche was right, and the rest of us simply go along. Nietzsche was the nineteenth-century philosopher who proclaimed that “God is dead.” We Christians have allowed the naturalists, the materialists, and the nihilists to define our culture. If we are all just accidents in a meaningless universe, we must construct our own meaning—hence, the drive to be (or at least to appear to be) someone worthy of acclaim. If this world is all there is, we can proclaim with Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “What is man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.” We then should strive to eat well and sleep in comfort. If there is no meaning, then we should constantly distract ourselves with entertainment to avoid the despair that inevitably accompanies meaninglessness.
Let us now return to Ebenezer Scrooge during his time with the Ghost of Christmas Present. Watching Tiny Tim exclaim (though clearly sick and weak), “God bless us every one,” Scrooge has what I’ll call a Purpose-Driven Life moment—Scrooge realizes, to paraphrase the first line of Rick Warren’s book, “It’s not about [me].” “’Spirit,’ said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, ‘tell me if Tiny Tim will live.’” Scrooge later asks the Ghost of Christmas Future, “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they the shadows of what May be only?” Armed with the understanding that life is not about him, about what he does for a living, or about how much he accumulates in his life, Scrooge awakens committed to making a difference in the lives of others.
You have a tremendous opportunity at Montreat College. Here you can come to understand history, art, music, business, psychology, and many other things. You can become a reflective critic of our culture, and a student of human behavior. You can learn how to learn and synthesize and create and communicate, so that you need never be a slave to what is. Most importantly, you can do all of these things in the context of learning to be a disciple, because without God, our freedom is empty. Without God, there is no meaning, no ultimate purpose, no end. Choosing to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind will take you out of the center of your universe; and loving your neighbor as yourself will make you significant in ways no car, no job, no amount of money ever could.
May God bless your time here at Montreat College. I pray that you will spend it well.
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