English Major Department Chapel Talk

As I close one season of my life, namely my training at Wheaton College, and transition into another, I got the opportunity to put in some good thinking about it all, trying to put the disparate pieces together into a whole. I was asked by the faculty of the English Department to be one of four seniors who spoke in our Department Chapel, reflecting on the English major and my time at Wheaton. Below is the transcript of my talk. I reproduce it here in full because I've had several students ask me for a copy of it, saying that it was very helpful to them in many ways. I think it's a good way to start this blog, in which I hope to be connecting all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge to Christ, in whom they are truly hidden, even if we do not always perceive it. I hope you enjoy it, and find it helpful in connecting the dots between Christ and the pursuits of a scholar or learner, even if you are no English major, nor ever were.

Though I risk cliché in saying it, my four years as an English major at Wheaton have led me on a journey of reading. And where has this reading-journey taken me? From epic to romance to sonnet to novel to short story, in a dazzling blaze (or blur) of text after text, all loaded with metaphor and metonymy and masterful polysyndeton, inclusio and ekphrasis and the archetypal archetype. But what is it that I have actually taken away from the study of literature? If indeed, “Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, / And many goodly states and kingdoms seen”, how then am I the better? Do I bear anything of the gold I found there with me on my way? Or do I but as a poor traveler, with empty pockets, now continue on my way with nothing but the rags in which I walked? A pressing question, I think, esp. to some of you who are still just embarking on your journey, but also to those of you who have long since embarked but are perhaps beginning to doubt whether the ledgers of trade would have served you better than this liberally artistic journey to “many goodly states and kingdoms”. Since this is my final semester here, I have, like those before me, begun to think about my journey and what I’m taking with me. I’d like to share with you that souvenir, and I want to present it to you in the guise of an old iron clamped ring of keys. A variety of keys is on the ring some old and worn and dulled on the edges, some new and crisp brightly shining like silver. A ring of keys: that is my souvenir.

And now I will confusingly mix my metaphors in telling you that this set of keys that I have gained are actually keys to a variety of doors that lead to innumerable rooms and halls in a grand medieval castle, and that my journey has really been one of exploration through the rooms of this beautifully ornate and wondrously mysterious castle of literature. The hours of reading have been my fascinated exploration of the rooms of this castle. In each class that I have taken the professor has acted as my tour guide, and I have received through these tours many of the keys to these rooms, so that I can now search them, to a certain extent, for myself. And going on in my journey does not consist in leaving this castle, but in further exploration, albeit of a different kind.

I might get frustrated if I thought that the goal of reading was to remember everything I read. But this metaphor of the ring of keys is helpful to me in realizing that this is not so. What we want is the keys to the rooms, and to know which keys open which doors, so that we may explore further. The keys are interpretive clues, they are the little tidbits of genre or literary device, concept or context, archetype or stereotype, which open up for us works of literature. When reading has been hard for me, I’ve found that most of the time it was because I was really on the outside of the door without the right key to open that particular work. Or it has been when I have gotten temporarily stuck outside the door, ruffling through my ring trying to find the right key in my lot of them. But this is where our tour guides come in so helpfully. How many doors would be still be shut to me, had not a guide handed me the key and pointed to one of the doors it worked on! Praise God for the tour guides, in such a marvelously grand castle, be grateful for them! Keys may indeed be found hidden in the rooms themselves, that is the works of literature do hold keys for the finding, but how pleasant to have them handed to you, by one who has frequented these rooms oft before.

In saying all this I certainly do not mean to imply that the handing over of the keys is always just that simple, nor would I wish to express that all of us find the same rooms as equally valuable, nor even that there are no rooms that, by the look of their exteriors and the texture of their doors, might not be worthwhile for us to find the key to enter at all. God knows we have only so long to search this castle before the King himself returns to clean up house, and since we will stand before him with our keys in hand to give an account of what treasures we have found or what trifles we have wasted our time on, there is cause for reflection. But to our Master alone we servants stand or fall, so we need not be too quick to judge or censure another’s explorations.

But I hope this metaphor of keys is helpful to you, as it has become a comfort to me, for two reasons. First, it points to what I have found to be one of the most important concepts in education, the crucial idea of distinguishing tools from facts. Tools are worth memorizing because they do work for us, they open doors, they breathe life into literary works. And very often if I can just find why something is a tool, that it is a key to some door I know, then with almost no effort the key is on my ring.

The second reason it has become a comfort to me is because I’ve found that my mind works much more naturally in the conceptual realm, rather than the concrete (esp. the concrete in terms of personal reflection). My mind naturally gravitates to concepts and issues, rather than personal narrative. I’ve found this to be true in relating to my fiance, Ashley Johnson, whose mind is just amazingly filled with concrete images and story lines, who can tell the story of her day in such a vivid fashion, whereas when I try to look back at my four years at Wheaton, all I get is a fuzzy blur of a general impression. It’s only when connect my experience to the larger context of what we’re all doing that I feel like I’m getting anywhere. I very much realize that this of course makes me exactly the opposite of the stereotypical English major, because English majors live concrete highly vivid lives, bursting with dramatic appeal, but I’m also an Ancient Languages major, and we’re a pretty stuffy lot stereotypically, so perhaps that’s why I don’t fit the mold. But, you know, I heard recently from Dr. Jacobs that it’s actually sterotypical for the average English Major to think, “I’m not like the average English Major” and to feel a vivid sense of alienation and dramatic solitude over this fact. So maybe I am a stereotypical English major after all. But, friends, it’s not about the stereotypes. It’s not about the stereotypes. It’s about the archetypes.

Back to my metaphor of the keys: Keys link the concrete and the conceptual. And literature itself is in this way incarnational, clothing a concept, a message, an idea with the flesh and bones of story, form, rhetoric. The very human activities of writing or reading are themselves pictures of how God has written himself into the fabric of our lives. Everything written is a part of His grand narrative, and how we read as people who often define ourselves as readers should reflect a theology of God’s authorship. I was recently reminded of this in a new way last semester. I loaded onto my ipod the lectures of a D. Min. class on Christ-centered Preaching, taught by the late Dr. Edmund Clowney and Dr. Tim Keller, and listened to more than half of the lectures with time I did not have in my already packed schedule. One of the questions Tim Keller asked regarding how we read the Bible (and we all are readers of the Bible) was, “Is the Bible mainly about me, or mainly about Jesus, and only secondarily about me as I become identified with him?” In other words, do I mainly read any part of the Bible as simply a moral example telling me to try harder, or do I read it as being about what Jesus accomplished for me and now accomplishes in me by grace. What is the primary key that we use to unlock a passage of the Bible? Because we’re using some key; whatever we’re doing, we are using keys when we interpret.

This applies in a similar way to how we read other literature as well. Colossians says that “In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge”. That is an astonishing statement, and one that I all too often do not really believe. I think it’s saying that Christ is the master key that unlocks all the halls in the castle, Christ is the secret passageway to all the rooms that have something of lasting value, Christ is our ultimate tour guide, the great Key-Maker, the Landlord and King of the Castle himself. While I cannot explain how, I most want to express to you that I have come to know during my time here at Wheaton that I need Jesus as my Mediator, even between me and the authors I read. I think this is the goal of what we’re trying to do here at Wheaton, integrating our faith with our learning, but it is a goal that I think we can all too often become discouraged by or complacent towards. But we needn’t be. I commend to you to think Christocentrically about your study of literature, because after all, the castle is His: “Christ the power and the Wisdom of God”. And yet this great and majestic King has condescended to be also our very own traveling companion, journeying about as an exile, poor, needy and in rags alongside us. And so, while we all continue to explore the castle in our various ways, let’s endeavor together, by the power of the Word who became flesh for us, to do what we can to clean house.