Page 12 - ProvidenceChristianCollege_Magazine_Spring2018

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tHis is Living Water, continued froM Previous Page
ceremonies for that reason, never mind that they always seem to fall on warm days in May on my wife’s birthday, the academic garb weighs a ton, and I tend to perspire easily.
Yet, at the time, I was certain that my bias against ceremony amounted to a solid indictment against appearances
for the sake of appearances. An aspiring Shakespeare scholar, I could cite Henry V’s famous critique of ceremony before the Battle of Agincourt to give my position that much more intellectual heft:
“And what have kings, that privates have not too, Save ceremony,
save general ceremony? And what art thou,
thou idle ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more
Of mortal griefs than
do thy worshippers?” (Henry v, Act IV, Scene i)
Here, King Henry ponders fame the night before he famously leads an overmatched army of Englishmen into France to
do battle. What makes his speech so striking is that it is delivered by a man who had made an art form of employing appearances as a young prince to make his own life a spectacle, picturing himself as a sun that he would purposefully allow to be smothered by clouds, only so his radiant reappearance would bedazzle onlookers.
King Henry learnt only later in life that a life lived to gain recognition from others is an unhappy life, not worth the sleepless nights and restless days.
And therein is the rub. So much of what we do in this age of images tends to turn on gaining the recognition of others. I was right as a young man to notice this and to skeptically reject idle ceremony as a foolish idol.
But I applied this judgment improperly in the case of my college commencement as I assumed the impersonal setting (sitting in a crowd of over 10,000 people) of the celebration signified that the whole affair was impersonal. It wasn’t impersonal
to my father. And your ceremony is not impersonal to you and your friends and family this morning.
Yet, had I gone to my own ceremony, I would have had to sit through a number of speeches that I thought had nothing to do with me. And given that I was the most important person to me that day, and most other days for that matter, I didn’t want to attend an event where I was lost in the crowd, even if it meant upsetting those close to me.
Perhaps one of the hardest things to learn in life is to gain joy from another’s enjoyment, especially when you believe that this costs something to you, whether it’s lack of attention when it’s showered on the other person, sacrifices we make