Guidance for how to make a life, not just a living

Peter Gomes teaches courses with names like "The Christian Bible and Its Interpretation" and "Introduction to Public Preaching." But what he strives for in every class he teaches at Harvard University is to challenge his students to explore what it means to live a good life.

"They're all related to the notion of trying to be good in a fallen world," says Dr. Gomes. That notion is a "great heroic Christian theme" - one that he says is growing in appeal among today's young people.

For 32 years, Gomes has been the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals. He's also a Baptist minister at the postcard-perfect Memorial Church set in Harvard Yard, the heart of the Cambridge, Mass., campus. In the lecture hall, in the pulpit, or over dinner, he always aims to respond to what he calls a "moral curiosity" inherent in young people. Excerpts from his recent conversation with the Monitor follow.

On the desire to be good:

This interest in goodness has been around a long time; it's been growing in intensity in the last dozen years.

Sept. 11 didn't cause anything. It simply sharpened the focus of something that has been evolving. My students are not indifferent, but Sept. 11 is so manipulatable, that they're appropriately wary of it.

On the need for role models:

What was most important for me, as a boy from 18 to 22, was to see adults modeling the life of the mind. I wanted to see how ... thinking, bright intellectuals conducted their affairs. How did they carry on their lives? What did they have that I could learn from? I see my job here as not simply imparting information or technique, but, in some sense, to show people how to live - or at least how I live.

We divide our [lecture] classes into sections of 10 or 12 people, and I always teach one or two of those. It's in the section where I actually do get to know people rather closely.

Then, I give a dinner for all the students of my course at the end of every year. We divide them into groups of 15 and have as many of those dinners as it would take to cover the whole class. For those who want that kind of contact, my teaching assistants and I work very hard to make it happen.

On learning to make a life:

The object of an education is to make a life and not a living. What troubles me more and more about great research universities is that we are far more interested in teaching how to make a living.

Those who have grown up on affluence really have not yet learned how to deal with the things that money cannot secure or buy. The test of a good life is not how you live in good times, but how you manage in bad times. It's the business of college to help prepare you to do just that.

I have seen people beginning to take that notion seriously for themselves. They don't want to be what their parents want from them, which is usually something better than what Mom and Dad had for themselves. One of our duties is to try to suggest what that job might be. One looks for it in history, in the lives of great men and women, the recovery of the sense of heroism and noble purpose.

On the search for heroes:

We've spent so much time muckraking and exposing, but most of us have a great hunger for the opposite, for people who move and inspire us and can transform us.

The vacuum of the heroic was filled so quickly by the firemen on Sept. 11. But they were doing what they've been paid to do, trained to do, agreed to do.

Page: 1 | 2