Turning the Page

With a freshly printed diploma hanging on the wall, I find myself at a new job in a new city. Everything is original, unknown, exciting. But as much as these novel sights and sounds draw my mind to the present and to the future, I am also reminded of the past. A new chapter begins as another ends, and turning that page requires some reflection.

I’ve been thinking in particular about what it was I actually learned in college. It certainly wasn’t dates or facts. Ask me about the details of almost any historical event and I feel my pointer finger click instinctively for Wikipedia.

Instead, I think one of the most valuable lessons I learned in college was the integration of my academic career with my personal life. It didn’t take long for me to realize that what I believed in the classroom mattered for what I believed at home and in church. Initially this was quite a scary revelation. If I encountered something new in the classroom, it could present a serious challenge to my faith. Or so I thought.

Thankfully I discovered Flannery O’Connor’s writings (incidentally, a popular subject today ) which sorted out the various conflicts I encountered in the classroom. Here’s an excerpt of a letter O’Connor wrote in 1962 to a young man named Alfred Corn, who was experiencing many of the same challenges I did as an undergraduate:

I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20th century. Peter said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames or reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don’t have faith just because you feel you can’t believe. About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do, and I think from your letter that you will not take the path of least resistance in this matter and simply decide that you have lost your faith and that there is nothing you can do about it.

One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life. This sounds like a paradox, but I have often found it to be true. Students get so bound up with difficulties such as reconciling the clashing of so many different faiths such as Buddhism, Mohammedanism, etc., that they cease to look for God in other ways. Bridges once wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and asked him to tell him how he, Bridges, could believe. He must have expected from Hopkins a long philosophical answer. Hopkins wrote back, “Give alms.” He was trying to say to Bridges that God is to be experienced in Charity (in the sense of love for the divine image in human beings). Don’t get so entangled with intellectual difficulties that you fail to look for God in this way.

The intellectual difficulties have to be met, however, and you will be meeting them for the rest of your life. When you get a reasonable hold on one, another will come to take its place. At one time, the clash of the different world religions was a difficulty for me. Where you have absolute solutions, however, you have no need of faith. Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge. The reason this clash doesn’t bother me any longer is because I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. I might suggest that you look into some of the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man et al.). He was a paleontologist—helped to discover Peking man—and also a man of God. I don’t suggest that you go to him for answers but for different questions, for that stretching of the imagination that you need to make you a sceptic in the face of much that you are learning, much of which is new and shocking but which when boiled down becomes less so and takes place in the general scheme of things. What kept me a sceptic in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read.

Continue to read. Thank you Ms. O’Connor. I believe I will.