Knowing the basics

Around this time of year I think about memorable commencement speeches I have heard. These addresses are where life gets boiled down to its essence, by cooks who have been in the kitchen longer than their tasseled addressees. The best ones share their experiences: what worked, what didn’t.

I still get chills from this anecdote shared by screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin when he addressed the class of 2012 at his alma mater, Syracuse University:

“When we were casting my first movie, A Few Good Men, we saw an actor just 10 months removed from the theater training program at UCLA. We liked him very much and we cast him in a small but featured role as an endearingly dimwitted Marine corporal. The actor had been working as a Domino’s Pizza delivery boy for 10 months, so the news that he’d just landed his first professional job and that it was in a new movie that Rob Reiner was directing, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, was met with happiness. But as is often the case in show business, success begets success before you’ve even done anything, and a week later the actor’s agent called. The actor had been offered the lead role in a new, as-yet-untitled Milos Forman film. He was beside himself. He felt loyalty to the first offer, but Forman, after all, was offering him the lead. We said we understood, no problem, good luck, we’ll go with the second choice. Which we did. And two weeks later, the Milos Forman film was scrapped. Our second choice, who was also making his professional debut, was an actor named Noah Wyle. Noah would go on to become one of the stars of the television series ER and hasn’t stopped working since. I don’t know what the first actor is doing, and I can’t remember his name. Sometimes, just when you think you have the ball safely in the end zone, you’re back to delivering pizzas for Dominos. Welcome to the NFL.”

It was very non-preachy, and Sorkin didn’t cast stones, but everyone within earshot at the ceremony got the point: The actor kid blew it because he welched on an agreement. The people he bailed out on had been gracious, his situation sympathetic, and his reasoning understandable, but hindsight proves he should have listened to a bit of wisdom penned 3,000 years ago—that the man is blessed who “swears to his own hurt and does not change” (Psalm 15:4, ESV).

The Sorkin advisory also helps me understand a hitherto baffling passage in James. Note the seeming non sequitur in last sentence:

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. … Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin” (James 4:13-17, ESV).

I get it now: We can’t know the future, but we all know the basics, and if we do them we will be OK. Those basics are things like trust in God, love of neighbor, loyalty, good faith, and letting your yes be yes and your no be no. There is nothing better, and safer in the end, than to simultaneously practice these and submit oneself to the providence of God. The chastened writer of Ecclesiastes draws all the strands of his mother-of-all-commencement speeches into this one advisory for youth setting out on the path:

“… Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13, ESV).