The only way to escape the hounding darkness of self-loathing is to accept our inability….This death can only be avoided by walking through it, by dying to ourselves and living to Christ. This is the way out of the watery labyrinth of our world and into the Kingdom of God….“This is water.” But only Christ can show us how to walk on it. 

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech that shook the world; then he killed himself. It was hailed as wisdom for living, yet he could not live by it. The address was “met with universal acclaim.” The New Yorker, Huffington Post, and The New York Times all covered it. Time Magazine listed it in the top place in its list of Top Ten Commencement Speeches. You may have heard of it. In the speech, he gave the analogy of two fish passing by a third who asks them, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” To which, after a moment of silence, the two fish turn to each other and say, “What the hell is water?” Like these fish, Wallace said, we live in a world that surrounds us with the imperative to do in order to be, and when we don’t realize this, the results are disastrous.

Wallace put it this way: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” If we worship the things that the world tells us to—money, success, fame, even happiness—we will be consumed by things that ultimately will not make us happy.

Wallace understood this more than anyone, and the secular world quickly foisted him upon their shoulders as they seemed to chant, “Show us the way!” Yet, three years later, his adoring wife found him hanging in their home in Claremont, California. Wallace was eaten alive by the world.

Like Jesus said to the scribe in Mark 12, Wallace was “not far from the Kingdom of God.” But it is only the entrance to that Kingdom that can truly set us free from water worship. Wallace’s prescription for avoiding these soul-consuming effects was to be compassionate, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them … That is real freedom.” But Wallace was not ultimately free. This tortured man soon found out that even caring about other people was not enough.

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