Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

The following essay is taken from a so-called “last lecture” delivered by Fr. Himes on November 18, 2008, before an audience of roughly a thousand students, faculty, and staff, in the Yawkey Center’s Murray Room. It marks the first in an anticipated series named for the talk given by Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch in September 2007, after Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, from which he died in July 2008. (Speaking in Devlin 008 on April 6 at 8:00 p.m. will be BC historian Paul Breines.) The format encourages the speaker to discuss, in Himes’s words, “the issues that matter most and have been truest in life.”

A favorite poet of mine, W.H. Auden, wrote that “the first criterion of success in any human activity, the necessary preliminary, whether to scientific discovery or artistic vision, is intensity of attention, or, less pompously, love.” In other words, the necessary first step to understanding anything, knowing anyone or anything, is to love that person or thing. I don’t mean that you must have warm emotions or deep sentimental affection. I am referring to an activity. In order to really know anything, you have to give it your time and your energy. And what do you do when you begin to see a glimpse of the truth? The only thing you can do with it is to give it away. You have to teach. All of us are engaged in teaching. I’m involved in a very particular and wonderful form. But we are all teachers.

The teaching of theology, my chosen career, is first and foremost a matter of examining experience. It is not a matter of laying out doctrine—here it is, you accept it. For me, the teaching of theology involves relating what people for almost 20 centuries have found to be insightful and illuminating in the Christian tradition and asking students whether that history matches up with their experience. Do the ways in which people have lived and prayed, the ways they’ve entered into friendships, the way they’ve raised their children and shaped their society—do these experiences help you to understand your life? Teaching theology involves allowing experience to give new insight into the tradition and allowing the tradition to give coherence and intelligibility to our experiences.

My teaching assistants sometimes ask me what it takes to become a really good teacher. The answer has nothing to do with planning the lectures or setting the syllabus. You’ve got to fall in love with those whom you teach and with what you teach. At its heart, teaching is a conversation. I have always felt that my lectures—and my sermons—were experiences of conversation. You might argue it couldn’t be a conversation, as I did all the talking. In fact, I only did all the verbalizing. You contribute a great deal to the conversation—by your mere presence, your body language, the expression on your face, those little nods when you agree with something, or those puzzled I-don’t-think-so looks. In that process we both learn. Many times, I’ve heard myself giving a lecture and been astonished at what I found myself saying because I hadn’t expected to say that. Yet in the process of passing an idea on, I discover what I really think and believe. Teaching is a shared discovery.

If to learn anything you must give it away, how do you go about it? The first way you give to others what you learn is by allowing it to shape you. I’ve come to think that if there is one single virtue, it’s integrity. By integrity, I don’t simply mean honesty. I mean the word literally. It’s the quality of being an integer, an entity. It’s what happens at your wake when your spouse talks with your pastor, who talks with your business partner, who speaks with your next-door neighbor, who talks with your children, who speak with your doctor, and they all know that they knew the same person. You weren’t a series of masks worn for different relationships. You were complete.

It is in this process of giving yourself away—of teaching—that you will exist most fully and joyfully. Plato famously maintains that Socrates said the unreflective life is not worth living. William James remarked that, yes, that was perfectly true, but it was also true that the unlived life wasn’t worth reflecting on. One has to enter into commitments and relationships in order to have anything worth reflection. You must live as if by giving yourself to others, you will not be able to run out of existence. I cannot prove any of this, but I am convinced that if you do so, you will discover an existence far richer and fuller than you ever dreamed.

Fr. Michael Himes is a professor of theology at Boston College.