What Are You Actually Worshiping? (You Already Know)

In 2005, David Foster Wallace stood in front of a graduating class at Kenyon College and said something that had no business landing the way it did in a room full of twenty-two-year-olds about to go make money.

“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship… Worship your body and beauty and you will always feel ugly. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid. Worship your intellect, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

That speech has been read at weddings, quoted in TED talks, and passed around in entirely secular corners of the internet for two decades now. Almost nobody who shares it seems to notice that it’s making a religious claim. Wallace wasn’t being poetic. He was describing a mechanism: whatever occupies the center of your attention will eventually demand your peace as payment. Lose it, and you lose yourself.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you when they share that quote: a Russian parish priest said the same thing more than a hundred years before Wallace did, and he didn’t stop where Wallace stopped.

The diagnosis you already believe

St. John of Kronstadt spent most of his life as an ordinary parish priest in 19th-century Russia — not a monk on a mountain, not a philosopher, just a man who heard confessions and wrote down what he noticed. What he noticed was this: the danger was never that people loved bad things. It was that they loved fine things in the wrong order.

“Money, comfort, admiration, food, reputation, pleasure, even our own opinions can gradually become centers around which the heart revolves. Then our peace depends upon keeping them. Our fear comes from losing them.”

Read that again next to the Wallace quote. It’s the identical structural claim, right down to the mechanism — peace hostage to possession, fear as the toll. The only difference is which decade said it out loud.

You already run this diagnosis on other people constantly. The coworker who can’t handle a single piece of feedback because their whole identity is stapled to being the smart one in the room. The friend whose mood is a direct readout of their follower count. The relative who cannot enjoy a holiday because it isn’t going exactly the way it’s supposed to. You don’t need a theology degree to recognize misplaced worship. You clock it in other people every week. The harder question — the one both Wallace and Kronstadt are actually asking — is whether you can clock it in yourself.

The quiz nobody wants to take

Kronstadt’s answer to that question isn’t a lecture. It’s a short list of questions, and they work whether or not you believe in anything at all:

What occupies your mind the moment you wake up? What does your heart run to when it’s afraid? What do you believe you cannot live without? What can disturb you so deeply that everything else disappears?

Try answering honestly. Not the answer you’d give at a dinner party — the actual one. For a lot of people it’s a job title, or how a body looks in a mirror, or what a phone says when they check it, or being right in an argument nobody remembers three days later. None of those things are evil. That’s exactly the point Kronstadt is making and the one modern self-help culture keeps rediscovering: the object doesn’t have to be sinister to own you. It just has to be sitting in the wrong seat.

There’s an older version of this same question, from someone whose credibility on the subject doesn’t need footnoting: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Not should be. Will be. It’s presented as a law, not a suggestion — wherever you put the treasure, the heart follows automatically, whether you consented to the move or not.

Where the secular version runs out of road

Here’s what’s actually interesting about Wallace’s speech, if you go back and read the whole thing rather than the quotable parts: he gets the diagnosis exactly right and then visibly stalls on the prescription. His actual advice is to worship “some sort of God or spiritual-type thing,” and he says it almost apologetically, like a man who knows he’s just described a locked door and has nothing better to offer than “try not to look at it.”

That’s not a failure of nerve on Wallace’s part. It’s the actual ceiling of what secular wisdom can do here. Buddhism, stoicism, therapy-speak about “attachment” — they can all get you to the same diagnosis Kronstadt reached: stop clinging, the object you’re gripping will not hold your weight. What none of them can do is tell you what to do with the hunger once you’ve let go of the thing you were using to numb it. Detachment without a destination just leaves you circling.

Kronstadt doesn’t stop at detachment. He names the destination:

“The problem of our life is union with God.”

Not proximity to. Not belief in. Union with — the specific claim that the hunger driving all that misplaced worship was never irrational, never a design flaw to be managed into submission. It was accurate the entire time. It was just aimed short.

The part that sounds like a stretch until you check the footnote

This is usually where a religious writer starts asking for faith you don’t have yet, so it’s worth being precise about what’s actually being claimed. St. Paul, writing to a church in a Greek port city that knew a great deal about misplaced worship, put it this way: “he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:17). That’s not a metaphor about feeling close to God on a good day. It’s a claim about actual union — the same kind of language you’d use for the closest human bond available, applied to something Paul is saying is real and available, not aspirational.

You don’t have to accept that claim to notice something true underneath it: the hunger Wallace named, that Kronstadt named, that you’ve probably named in yourself at 2 a.m. more than once — “as the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God” (Psalm 42:1) — was never going to be satisfied by anything smaller than what it was actually built for. Every stand-in eventually shows its size. That’s not pessimism. It’s just what happens when you finally weigh the substitute against the thing it was standing in for.

What to do with this on a Tuesday

Kronstadt wasn’t writing for people trying to become monks. He was writing for parishioners with jobs and debts and difficult marriages, which is most of the reason his questions still work outside a church building.

So here’s the actual homework, not the churchy version: run the list today. What did you reach for first this morning — and was it a person, a thing, or a feed? What’s the one loss that would make your whole day collapse if it happened right now? Whatever you found — that’s not a confession you need to feel bad about. It’s just data. It tells you where the seat is currently occupied.

The move Kronstadt is proposing isn’t white-knuckle detachment from everything you’ve been holding onto. It’s a redirection — noticing, honestly and without theater, what’s currently sitting where something larger belongs, and turning the wanting itself back toward its actual object instead of trying to kill the wanting altogether. You were built with an appetite this large. The problem was never the size of the hunger. It was the size of everything you’d been feeding it.