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Where I’ve been lately…
I started a Masters in Theological Studies this fall. The first day of each of the three classes I’m taking were handled differently from each other.
My History of the Church course began with a classic participatory prayer, the kind where the prayer leader says some nice words and then asks if anyone would like to share prayers for anyone or anything that’s close to their heart. When I logged into my Systematic Theology course, I learned about the Divine Office, also called the Liturgy of the Hours or Opus dei. This was less jarring in that it was less participatory, but also jarring because when you have two classes of three beginning with prayers, the assurance you got from the admissions counselor that there are a few non-Christians in each cohort starts to feel hollow. Finally, logging into the class I was least excited about, Biblical Studies, I expected the worst without really knowing what that would be. Group confession? Five Hail Marys and an Our Father? Instead, we had no prayer, but we did have a survey to fill out so our professor could get to know us.
The survey included questions about our favorite music and our favorite books, but also asked if we had any religious trauma we wanted our professor to know about. We were encouraged to share any bad experiences with Christianity, the Bible, or anything else (there’s an awful lot of sexual violence in the Bible…) that would help her make the class meaningful and effective for us. She also assured us she would never expect anyone to pray in class, though she did make the option available shortly after to participate in Lectio divina which, for the unfamiliar, is a form of prayer on a given scripture or other written work.
I hadn’t done “Christian prayer” for many years before this. I think I would have previously said that praying was the part of Christianity or religion or spirituality that I was most connected with still, because it’s harmless and it’s meditative and it’s noncommittal. It doesn’t force you to align with anything but yourself and with whatever it is you think is divine. But when asked to do it live, to do it with others, to pray with a community like I theoretically have wanted for a while, it felt absurd.
Why am I getting a masters in theology at a Catholic university? This is the kind of question I have for myself after I’ve spent the day reading about the unnamed second wife in Judges. I read about her husband giving her to the town to be brutalized and killed before he chopped her up into twelve symbolic pieces. I write a reflection on this passage, wondering what it might have meant to the men who wrote it and wondering what someone is supposed to do with it today. I ask myself this question: Why am I getting a masters in theology at a Catholic university?
When I mention it to people, the silence after it comes out of my mouth feels endless. People are typically just expecting me to continue talking. I am capable of explaining it, but still, I stumble. I mumble a little joke (“Jump scare!”) and then I move the conversation along. I don’t know how to say I’m loving the program, I’m finding it bizarre and absurd, that I’m learning about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and realizing I’ve been really uneducated on those subjects before. I could say something about that, about how, for some reason I don’t really understand, I’m excited to do my readings and to finish my assignments and I haven’t really felt that way about school before. Why am I getting a masters in theology at a Catholic university?
After the first time I ran into this self-disclosure dilemma on a date, the first time I had to clunkily confess to a man that I was studying theology, I added a note to my dating profile: part time graduate student in theology, but not in a weird way I promise lol. No one has yet commented on it, but I also haven’t had time since August to go on a date. Too much reading to do, too many evenings taken up by classes. I’ve also spent a lot less time with friends since August. Why am I getting a masters in theology at a Catholic university?
“Why” is a difficult question, better asked in pieces. The first piece is something like: “How’d this happen?” The second piece is: “To what end?” What’s the point, what’s the utility, of studying the systems and theories of something so wildly imperfect and illogical as faith, especially when it is presented in such a sectarian way?
How’d this happen? To anyone who’s read this blog for long, it’s probably not that surprising. I love this shit, as you know.
I write around god and worship and spirit and even sometimes God. All of that. I did my zine earlier this year about Mary, the theotokos, the mother of god. What’s missing in that explanation is the other stuff, the stuff that I put into my personal statement for scholarships and such. It’s stuff about attempting a Masters in Public Policy so I could understand society and people and finding the classes boring, obvious, or shallow. I’m not getting on a soapbox against policy scholarship, but I’m starting to accept that I don’t care enough about that. I thought my questions belonged there when they simply didn’t. I was bored.
What I really am interested in is the soul. I always have been. I’ve tried directing that interest toward other more marketable applications, saying that I’m interested in “interpersonal dynamics” and “people management” and “organizational culture” and while those interests aren’t entirely untrue, they are, for me, the shallower manifestation of what is essentially an interest in the soul.
So I sought out an academic space where the soul is a real thing, where there are debates about the soul and about the limitations of our knowing, where the soul’s care is seen as an urgent and essential need. I could have done this in other ways, but I wanted to start where I was, from within my tradition. I decided to start in a Catholic context.
To what end? The simplest I can say it, I think, is that understanding transcendence feels like an urgent task. Whether or not that “transcendence” has outgrown the structures that we have historically used to engage with it is up for debate, but I think the necessity of the transcendent is less debatable. We need to be thinking bigger than ourselves and our immediate needs. One way to do that is to look in the direction of the transcendent.
I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I am excited to spend the next year or so learning about how conceptions of divinity and actions in support of justice intersect. I’m excited to start learning Greek and Hebrew and to try to understand the intellectual roots of the ideals that are still weaponized against the majority of people in the world. Something happened between the days when small communities of equals met together in house churches throughout the Roman Empire, shared the bread and wine, and envisaged Heaven on Earth and these days, days when Christianity has become the Roman Empire and the only Heaven to speak of comes after you die.
In the short term, I’m doing some early reading for a proposal on the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. As part of this, you can expect some of my upcoming emails to be oriented toward unpacking his beliefs around evolution, the Cosmic Christ, and how life gropes its way forward toward the Omega Point. If that sounds obnoxious and painfully liturgical, it’s worth noting that his philosophies are often really not all that different from those of Olamina’s GOD = CHANGE philosophy in The Parable of the Sower. Lots more to come on that.
I suppose I might have preferred to study in a context that is not so sectarian, though I’m not sure I know of a program that offers a truly interfaith and interreligious kind of theological education. I’m doing my best to fill in gaps where I can and to go for greater complication and nuance rather than simplification wherever possible. But I also am reminded of how I’ve learned traditional astrology, an approach that I learned from my friend Larry. There is value in meeting a tradition and learning it first on its own historically specific terms. You can always complicate it and expand it and bring it into your context eventually, but the benefits of deep study within the scope of the subject’s place in history are real. That familiarity is useful, a skill that you need if you want to be able to speak fluently with others in the tradition, however different their aims with the tradition might be.
Long term, I like to hope that this learning I’m doing will help me make a good mark on my world, that this deeper understanding of faith will support a movement toward transcendence. I like to hope that “religion” is not a human concept that’s too antiquated, too ossified to be useful any more. I like to hope lots of things and so far my studies have supported those hopes. That’s probably the best way to explain why I’m still in this program.
To end this ramble on some positive and optimistic notes: since the initial jarring experience of praying in class, I’ve been excited to see how much real theology in the Catholic church is rooted in love. Not “love the sinner, hate the sin” love, but a deep, unifying, primordial love. A love that animates the world. As much as this doesn’t track to the reality of American Christian politics, to the weird cultural ecosystem of popular Christianity, or to whatever it is that Ch*rlie K*rk’s organization does, the best Christian thinkers of recent and modern times are interested in and committed to a theology that values love, that values life, and that values what we experience here and now. In some way, I’d like to contribute to that project.
Like I said up top, this has taken me a while to get down, edited, and sent; I’ve paused all payments and am going to be figuring out what I can reasonably accomplish here going forward. I miss writing this blog and am not ready to put it in the desk drawer just yet. Thank you, as always, for reading.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
What a pleasant read! I really enjoyed this, and I hope that at the very least, this program offers a lot more answers than questions. Thanks for sharing and good luck with school!