Keep Looking Up

I date myself with this first illustration. One panel in the cartoon strip Peanuts, first published in 1947, shows Snoopy the dog and his bird sidekick Woodstock atop the dog house with their faces turned toward the sky. They might be admiring the clouds. They might be looking at a plane overhead. But the dialogue box revealing Snoopy’s thoughts reads, “Keep looking up … that’s the secret to life.”

In the years I have stood in this awkward speaking position in the center of the refectory, surrounded by parents—half a league, half a league, half league there, and half a league there, cannons to the right of me, cannons … well, I’ll stop there. In the years I have stood here, I have tried to share a little wisdom about being a parent. Tonight I say again, “Keep looking up … that’s the secret.”

I’ve spent forty-four years in education. I began teaching two weeks after I turned twenty-four. To put this in sad perspective, for any person in this room born after 1956, I could have taught you. What if tonight I told stories about what it was like to teach you as a teenager? About how you had fun? About what you hid from your parents? So, I say, keep looking up, keep to the long game far off and up in the sky, for if the confused and clueless and emotional mess you were as an adolescent can evolve to the accomplished, compassionate, loving person you are now, then no matter how much your son frustrates you, irritates you, disappoints you, disobeys you, he’s going to be fine. More than fine. You know what? He’s going to grow up.

My second point: I’m sick of “the Happiness Industry.” It depresses me. In the fourth century, St. Augustine called the equivalent “cruel optimism.” Daily we are inundated with advice about how to be happy—Ted Talks, new apps, self-help books, indexes and data maps on the happiest countries, photos of gurus atop mountains, yoga and YouTube videos, diets, and all manner and make of stuff to put an eternal and daily smile on our faces and money in someone else’s pocket. The Happiness Industry has stolen one cartoon character—a dog named Snoopy—to claim as its own. “Keep looking up … so that you will be happy” is the message; happiness is the secret of life. As is typical, especially today, context is neglected. I remind you that the dog the Happiness Industry cites is one character, and only one character, in an ongoing story full of depressed, obsessed, mean, deceiving, romantic, and deeply disappointed children—in other words, people like us. And who’s happy? Not the kids, but the dog.

Then why do I say, keep looking up?

To search. To search for what? To search for something uplifting, for a cause larger than ourselves—for purpose, for meaning, and even for transcendence. That search should continue all your life.

Nothing motivates a child more than the desire to join in, and nothing excites a child more than being swept up into something. As adults let us model that pursuit of activities that sweep us up to causes larger than ourselves, and let us share that with our children.

Let me move these generalities toward specifics:

Parents, do your homework. Not your child’s, but your own. Read voraciously. If you’re looking for a book, Mr. Brooks Hundley recommends Rabbi Harold Kushner’s Living a Life that Matters, Dr. Kerry O’Brien suggests I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, and Ms. Anne Continetti proposes Hissing Cousins: The Lifelong Rivalry of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Speak of your own learning, and engage your children in the questions you wrestle with in the books. Show them education is not about the grade in junior-year American history but about a lifelong inspiration to learn something new. What on earth could make us happier or more fulfilled?

Tell stories. Families are a collection of stories. My children could never get enough of a family story about Uncle Stoessel, a mountain man in western North Carolina at the turn of the century. Uncle Stoessel married my mother’s aunt, Aunt Cora Mae, who lived in a house on the edge of the woods outside Murphy, North Carolina. She lived in the house, and he lived in the woods. Every night, Aunt Cora Mae would leave food on the back porch. Your families have their Stoessels. Find them, and get your children connected to their inspiring, befuddling, crazy family stories. They will remember them forever the same way you remember the tales you learned from your parents.

Be active. I don’t have to admonish this crowd. Walk, run, lift, sweat, eat right, and model that mental health is most delighted by exertion. But I caution you not to make body beautiful a religion: need I remind you, gyms are lined with mirrors. Mirrors look back at you, not out and up.

Parents, live in the face-to-face world and not in screens. When you come home, check your phone at the door and spend time with your children, preferably at dinner. After dinner, when your children begin to work, put all the screens in your house, including yours, in a common area, and as you all work make sure you can see the screens of your children. Don’t send your child to his room with a phone or other screen. Period.

Parents, be firm about the values of your family, and don’t give in. Give it the Churchillian “never never never.” Say to your children this is right and what we believe, and we don’t care what all your friends’ parents are doing, and we are not going to give in.

Walk in someone else’s shoes. The Gospel admonishes us to take care of the sick, visit the infirm, feed the poor, and when you do these things, take your child with you.

Parents, worship. Sing praises of what is greater than you. Get down on your knees and lift your arms and give thanks, right there in front of your child, that you are alive and that we have been given the gift of this life and for a time the gift of our children.

In the second Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah prepares to die. As much as he says to the prophet Elisha to leave him to die alone, Elisha, who viewed Elijah as a father, will not. He demands a double portion of his prophet father’s spirit. As Elijah responds to the request, Elisha is witness to the miracle of a chariot of Israel with horses of fire taking Elijah up in a whirlwind to heaven. But before Elijah departs, he tosses his mantle to the ground, and Elisha tears his own clothes into two pieces and takes up Elijah’s mantle. And when Elisha crosses a river to meet fifty people waiting for the two of them to return, the crowd sees Elisha wearing his mentor’s mantle, and they say, “The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.”

May the spirit of you, fathers and mothers, rest upon your children.
Parents, let us keep looking up. It’s a long game. Thanks be to God.
And my thanks to you. This work has been my life.