Alan Stimpson
A Chapel Talk
to the
10, January, 2008
NOTE: The quotations in this chapel talk, unless
otherwise noted, are from Kurt Vonnegut’s memoir A Man Without a Country. Some of them have been slightly
edited and modified for content and language.
I am terrified by public speaking. Much as some of you
are terrified by declamations, or spiders, or
rattlesnakes. I expect you to listen for the same reasons that you listen to
declaimers, which are that an idea might find its way into your mind and that
is next to impossible to do anything disruptive while you are listening. I
don’t want any disruptions.
I’m going to read four excerpts from one of my
favorite author’s many books. Each excerpt contains a central idea, and the
ideas are more or less related to each other.
I’m not trying to tell you what’s right or how to
think or what you should think. I have a physical and very negative reaction to
attempts at indoctrination. What I do want to do is share some simple thoughts
that may make you pause to consider what you do think. I want you to think for
yourselves and be prepared to defend your ideas.
As an introduction, I would like to offer the words of
Joe Simpson, a middle aged man, reflecting on his own youth. This might serve
as a warning to us all.
“It never occurred to me that these early certainties
would themselves be eroded by time; that self doubts and too many questions
would make a mockery of what I once was and had set out to be; that time would
change me, would betray everything I once believed in. If I could succeed in
avoiding regret, I failed to realize that I would look back and sneer at what I
once had been.”
The first idea: kindness.
“I turned eighty-two on
When you get to be my age, if you get to be my age,
and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children,
who are themselves middle-aged, “What is life all about?”
I have seven kids, three of them orphaned nephews.
I put my big question to my son the pediatrician, he
said to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get
through this thing, whatever it is.”
I stood up in chapel and said back in the fall that
community service to me meant trying to improve someone else’s life, to make
his or her life better. “What is life all about?” or what is the point of being
alive? “We are here to help each other get through this thing” or we are here to
make each others’ lives better, to show kindness to one another.
The second idea is community. I think this follows
intuitively from the idea of kindness, but that connection may only be clear in
my own mind.
“Do you know what a humanist is? My parents and
grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. We humanists
try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without
expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister
didn’t think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn’t think there was
one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the
only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, our community.”
Now, I hated to bring religion into this, so in a way
I am avoiding it. The idea is that regardless of faith or lack of faith in an
afterlife there is a common ground of “try[ing] to behave as decently, as
fairly, and as honorably as we can” and trying to “serve…our community…as best
we can.” The best way to serve a community is by acting with kindness. I might
argue that it is impossible to have a community without kindness and that with
kindness a sense of community will inevitably follow.
This may seem overly simplified, and yes, maybe you’re
right. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t, though. Have we tried just showing more
patience, compassion, and generosity towards each other?
The third idea, and this will
probably give away who I’m quoting to those of you who are thinking about it or
paying attention: make something. Make anything.
“If you really want to hurt your parents the least you
can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a
living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an
art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s
sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a
friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you
possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created
something.”
I put this in here because this is the one of the four
ideas that really is just my personal agenda. I’m a proponent of learning how
to do for oneself. It enriches enjoyment and appreciation of things we already
enjoy and take for granted. Creating anything requires learning about a
process, requires practice, requires dedication. It
will make you humble and patient if you stick with it. “Do
it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have
created something.”
The fourth idea: recognize your own happiness.
“I had a good uncle, my late uncle Alex. He was my
father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life
insurance salesman in
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids.
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or
think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
The point being to step back from your life
occasionally to acknowledge the good moments. It’s easy to be bogged down by grades, papers, petty
grievances with friends, family and peers and miss out on being happy when you
can.
So I encourage us to embrace kindness for its own
inherent value and for the sake of our community. I encourage us to create
something, anything, and if we do these three things, we will probably have
many more moments in which to remark, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what
is.”
Alan Stimpson
Excerpts taken from This Game of Ghosts by Joe
Simpson and A Man Without a Country by Kurt
Vonnegut.