Several years ago, the school where I work instituted an ‘advisement’ period twice a week, in which teachers could conference individually with students about their progress in school, distribute information from the counselors, and so on.  I started with a group of freshmen, about half of whom were failing at least one class (many of them multiple classes) by the end of first quarter.  When I asked each of them why they were failing a class, I was astonished by how many of them answered, “I don’t like it.”  It wasn’t that they found the class too difficult or that they were scared to ask the teacher for help.  They simply didn’t like the class, and therefore they didn’t do any of the work.  Their decision-making was based entirely on whether something gratified them in the moment.  If it didn’t, then it was not worth their time or effort, regardless of the consequences.  In fact, it took quite a bit of persuasion throughout the year to make some of them see that a reluctance to run a mile in P.E. was a pretty dumb reason not to graduate from high school.

As surprised as I was by my students’ perspective, it actually makes sense that they would function this way given our culture at large, which creates celebrities out of people with no discernible talent or virtue (often the exact opposite of that–we seem to reward the most debased and dysfunctional members of society with our attention); in which people applaud themselves for having found the easiest and shortest way to attaining something, regardless of the lack of ethics or the harm it’s done; in which we have so many options for gratification that experiences have become disposable.  Hard work is for chumps.

Even those of us who recognize how problematic that worldview is struggle.  Some of the things I love most and recognize as the most meaningful are the hardest for me to sit down and actually do on a regular basis.  They are not instant gratification pursuits.  They are hard, and I have to fight myself constantly to engage in them instead of checking my e-mail one more time or going on Facebook or watching TV or rooting around in my refrigerator for something to snack on even though I’m not hungry.  But there is something good about having some drudgery, or at least drudgery with a purpose.  There is something good about the Me being humbled by the work of something that’s bigger and more important, that takes time and discipline and thus quiets the Me’s demands.  I resist it, but I know I need it.  Which is why I’m thankful for reminders like this:

Last week I read this article about how today’s college students think more highly of themselves than ever, but don’t actually perform as well as they think they do.  Aside from confirming the doom-and-gloom comments about “students today” that I hear from fellow teachers (and, I’ll admit, pronounce myself when I’ve had a bad day), it made me reflect on my own college experience, which was the exact opposite of what’s cited in this latest study.

As the youngest child in my family, I grew up with three older siblings who were (and still are, for the most part) highly intelligent and highly accomplished.  As in, they won pretty much every academic award/recognition/prize in every subject at every grade level it was possible to win.  My two oldest siblings also are gifted pianists, which my middle brother could have also been had he not quit piano to excel at sports instead.  Oh, and win a few writing contests on the side when he wasn’t creating short stop-action animation films.  Needless to say, I knew early on that I was way behind, and struggling mightily in subjects like math and physics and scoring significantly lower than my siblings on the SAT (even with the help of that prep class my mother sent me to), not to mention AP tests, only confirmed this early conclusion.  I saw myself as just an ok student with ok abilities.  I won some awards too, but they didn’t really count stacked up against the family legacy.  To be clear, my family was always supportive of me and I can’t remember a single time my parents ever said I should be more like someone else in the family.  But somehow I still became convinced that I did not measure up.

This only became magnified when I went to college.  At Wellesley, I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of students who were just like my siblings: impressively intelligent, accomplished, and talented in all sorts of ways.  On the one hand, this was a wonderful and extremely positive experience.  In addition to learning from my professors, I got to be around all kinds of amazing people my own age, including the friends I made at MIT, where my middle brother was studying.  I got to experience and be enriched by their thinking and creativity and talents.  I loved being in college, but at the same time, I was haunted by the feeling that I was constantly on the verge of failure and/or of being revealed as a fraud who did not belong in this company and/or being asked by the college authorities to pack up my things and go.  And this made me work harder than I ever had before in my life.  It also made me very quiet in class.  I had more than a couple professors ask me why I never spoke in class.  I usually responded with an ambiguous shrug, but the answer is quite simple–I thought I would sound dumb compared to everyone else.

About five days before graduation, we received a printout of our final transcripts.  I remember seeing my grades all listed in a row and thinking, “Hey, these aren’t bad!”  Then I saw the words “magna cum laude” at the top right.  I didn’t know what that meant, so I asked a friend down the hall.  I was utterly shocked when she told me.  I was also utterly disoriented.  It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that I was actually a good student.

In the years following graduation, I found myself deeply regretting the level of fear and anxiety I had throughout my college years.  Not only had it caused me a tremendous amount of stress, but because I had felt so inferior, I missed out on the opportunity to really engage in class discussions, talk to professors, and explore certain options (like internships and graduate school) I had automatically dismissed because I didn’t think I would qualify.  Boo, fear!!

At the same time, I’ve come to realize that this fear and insecurity is also a big part of why I excelled, and it’s a pattern that has repeated, to a certain extent, in many other areas of my life.  I think on some level, I am always looking at people who do something better than I do and feeling an urge to try to improve.  I know I’m not alone in this either.  Since my own revelatory moment that last week of college, I’ve made a point of asking friends who are highly accomplished how they perceive themselves, and the large majority of them share a similar story.  These friends have mostly been women, so this also makes me wonder if this is particular to women or if accomplished men have a similar disjunct between their perceived and actual abilities.  I’ll have to conduct a study on that in some other life.

In the meantime, it makes me wonder about this connection between fear and accomplishment.  On the surface of things, fear seems to work very effectively at making at least some people very successful.  But what is the point of excelling if you never get to enjoy or actually feel that you are doing well?  Oddly enough, I don’t want to lose all of my fear–I think I need a little edge of unease to keep me sharp, to keep me questioning.  But I wouldn’t mind meeting some of today’s over-confident college youth somewhere in the middle.

Every year we re-tell the story:  a baby born in a manger, shepherds in the field.  We sing songs.  We light candles.  We put figurines on the mantle.  It is such a familiar story that we forget how strange it really is.  How completely—at least on the surface of things—irrational.  How illogical.  The God of the universe, the God outside space and time as we know it, beginning the redemption of all creation in the most vulnerable and dependent of ways—as a baby.  And a baby born not in the middle of the day, but in the middle of the night.  God physically entered this world in the midst of darkness.  I find that detail significant.

Six months after my mother died of cancer, I stopped by my parents’ house to drop off some groceries for my father and found him lying on his bed, unresponsive.  He was breathing, just barely, but I could not rouse him.  And then I found the suicide note.  I called 911 and the paramedics came and an ambulance and the police to question me about the circumstances of his overdose.  At the hospital, I sat in the waiting room with everyone else until someone came out and summoned me through the double doors separating patients from their anxious families.  When I asked about my father, she wouldn’t answer.  She just said the doctor would come talk to me shortly and put me in an office the size of a closet and shut the door.

In that tiny office, the sounds of the ER were muffled to the point that I could hear a clock on the desk ticking slowly and steadily.  I was fairly certain the doctor was going to come tell me that my father was dead.  Why else would they sequester me like this?  And in that time of waiting, which seemed like an eternity, I both felt and literally was more acutely alone than I have ever been in my life.  My mother was gone, dead of a rare and excruciating form of cancer, and now either my father was also dead or, at the very least, ill in a manner he might never recover from.  I had called my siblings on the drive to the hospital and two were on their way, but they both lived on the east coast and wouldn’t be with me until late that night.  Whatever was happening in the moment, I was facing alone.  And yet, I wasn’t alone.  As I sat listening to that clock ticking, I was acutely aware of Jesus waiting with me.  That awareness was as vivid and intense as my feelings of aloneness.  Which makes no logical sense.  But truth isn’t always logical.

My awareness of God’s presence did not make me feel any better.  I didn’t experience any cocoon of warmth or protection from the anguish and horror of those moments.  But even in the midst of the awfulness, even though I felt so alone and so devastated, I knew with a certainty I could not even have begun to fabricate for myself that God was with me.  I wasn’t praying.  I was too traumatized to pray.  I was also too angry.  Not just angry, I was filled with a cold fury at God.  Hadn’t we been through enough?  How could this happen?  I wanted no part of God.  So I just sat, deadened, despairing, and fully aware of God sitting and waiting with me until the doctor finally opened the door and told me they had managed to stabilize my father for now and were moving him up to the ICU.

I’ve thought about my time in that little closet office on many occasions in the years since.  For some Christians, their testimony of and certainty in Christ involves personal encounters with him that involve dramatic and deeply felt transformations, either internally or externally or both.  And many, I think, are attracted to Christ in the hope that he will rescue them from pain and loss and fear.  There are times when he does offer that.  But on many occasions, Christ’s presence in our lives does not offer an escape from suffering, but a commitment from him to enter into the midst of that suffering with us.  To walk us through the valley of the shadow of death.  That has been my experience—not an absence of pain but the certainty that God will never be absent from my pain.  That he will never forsake me even when I feel utterly alone.  Even when I bitterly reject him.

We don’t need light during the day time.  We only have need of it in the dark.  And that is when Jesus came.  That is when he still comes.  That is the Christmas story.  Mary, Joseph, the animals, the shepherds, and the illogical and necessary truth that hope can be born in the deepest part of the night.

That title comes from a Jane Kenyon poem entitled “Twilight:  After Haying.”  In the penultimate stanza, she writes “the soul’s bliss / and suffering are bound together / like the grasses…”  This illustrates a conundrum many (myself included) have wrestled with throughout the ages–namely, our seeming inability to experience true beauty and connection without the dark contrast of loss.  Or, as the old cliché goes, we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone–or at least until there’s some kind of threat to it.  As Emily plaintively asks the Stage Manager towards the end of the play Our Town, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it–every, every minute?”  To which the Stage Manager answers, “No,” though he amends this to “The saints and poets.  Maybe they do some.”  This inability is, perhaps, an outcome of our fallen human condition.  We are constantly losing sight of what matters until some kind of suffering or loss gets us back on track.  That’s a bit depressing–except for the beauty and the radically deepened awareness that sorrow and loss can initiate.

Nature models this for us in the layers of rich hues painting the sky before the sun drops into darkness, the vivid flame of autumn leaves before they drop to the ground and crumble.  A friend of mine whose husband is battling prostate cancer wrote to me about all the tiny details she was noticing and relishing while sitting next to him in the hospital after he had surgery–the softness of the hairs on his arm, the smell of his neck, the blue of his eyes.  Another friend whose mother died this past summer played Bach trios (one of her mother’s favorite composers) with her brother and a friend for hours on that final day, filling the house with music; she told me through tears later that night how the beauty of that experience was something she could not even begin to put into words.  She was sobbing but she was also full of joy, a combination of emotions I was familiar with, having experienced my own taste of beauty in anguish in the last days of my mother’s life, when my family gathered around her bed, laid hands on her, and sang all her favorite hymns.  It’s the anguished joy of Mary, pouring fragrant oil on the feet of Jesus and washing them with her hair.

The reality is that all of our time with those we love is precious remaining time, but so often we don’t realize that until the loss becomes tangible, until it surrounds us.  So yes, it’s sad that beauty must so often be accompanied by sorrow and loss.  But what consolation that sorrow and loss are so entangled in beauty.