Happy to Report
A week ago today, I walked a path again in a new way. It took me an entire year of hard work to prepare to do it. I am happy to report about it to you here.
Last Thursday morning, I woke up in a little room in an old former Jesuit seminary in the town of Leuven, Belgium. From my fifth story window lay a few foggy fields in Flanders and suburban homes surrounded by modest gardens, ensconced in the usual din and hum of daily life. It was the beginning of the fourth day of my school's annual doctoral colloquium, a week-long event where faculty and doctoral students gather to do the work of an academic institution -- presenting papers, giving lectures, and participating in discussions, both formal and informal.
As the day dawned, I donned the sensible black dress and gray suit coat that I had purchased a year before. It was an outfit I had selected to wear for my oral examination last year but, in my anxious haste to the airport, had left on a hook on the back of a door. It was a marvel and a mercy that I was receiving the gift of being able to put it on, again, but also for the first time and, as I said, in a new way.
Beyond remembering to pack that dress and coat, I knew that I had things to practice, dispositions to deny and others to don. I had personal goals on which to keep my mind fixed. On this fourth day of the colloquium, I was scheduled to present on my research as were a few other students. Just like last year, I would face an audience of professors and students that would ask me critical questions. Of course, I was nervous.
Each doctoral student comes to the colloquium to practice this process. We poke and prod at one another, engaging, pondering, and testing our capacities and limits. There's art and science to it, and there are virtues to practice and vices to be wary of. For students, it's an important way to prepare for the program's final proving ground of the public defense. (We witnessed two of them last week.)
Faculty also participate, both as guides and teachers in the tasks of theological inquiry and discourse. Some participate like fellow pilgrims in the work, submitting to the same process of laying out their thoughts and research, and respectfully receiving and at times enduring comments and questions. There is method to the madness: it is a way for each participant, in our various stations, to keep toned and accountable in the work of knowing and discerning.
My experience at last year's colloquium was a difficult one, as I have mentioned many times in these occasional lettered reflections. To be more precise, if not entirely concrete, I found the week painful, disorienting, and rending. It unearthed things within me, questions about how I have gone about living and knowing my life. Coping mechanisms that had once served me to some degree -- as coping mechanisms do, up to a point -- completely shattered. Thus, despite having "passed" my oral examination during this colloquium last year, I departed home from Belgium in immense inner pain, in no way triumphant.
With that pain came a real feeling of personal humiliation. I feared the pain meant that I had made some terrible, horrible, manifestly obvious mistake, and that this whole experiment of advanced study was simply one long, self-indulgent extended adolescent fantasy project. I didn't know how to hold what I was feeling; I didn't know how to know it. I didn't know how to think about what to do about what I felt.
The pain proved to be a lever in my life. Rather than avoiding it, I turned to face it and methodically moved towards it. Each step forward was a humbling one. I asked a few priests for lists of therapists they recommended. I called around and finally selected a therapist and began meeting with her regularly. With her, I turned over stones in my life. I said fearful things out loud, vulnerably, to other wise and loving people. I gathered a small "clearness committee," and asked them for more questions. To use a biblical expression, I was practicing "scorning shame" and inviting people in to help me do it. None of these people and their efforts produced magical clarity to the questions unearthed in my life, but they did help me to keep asking them and scorning shame.
Beyond this inner work, I did a lot of remedial study on theological method, one of the chief criticisms that I received at last year's doctoral colloquium. Theological method is a particularly thorny and yet important subject: how one goes about knowing one's knowing. It matters for faith, for faith seeks understanding and is itself a knowing that is not easily measured by the usual methods. (Our world tends to dismiss faith as irrationality; it is not.) The subject of theological method is still not natural to me, and I'll have to keep practicing it, like learning a new language. Going to that "young" learning place as a middle-aged person is humbling. It's a good thing to do as a middle-aged person because it's easy to forget how hard it can be to learn and grow.
But I'm happy to report that I have learned and I have grown, which doesn't mean I've arrived somewhere but rather that I have not quit the pilgrim path. Practicing turning towards pain with curiosity, conviction, compassion, and courage, rather than instinctively trying to run from it, can do something good within us. The apostle Paul says that this kind of suffering produces perseverance, which cultivates character, which cultivates hope (see Romans 5:3-5).
I've mentioned before how a nun, recently, shared a piece of her writing with me about "the ordeal of hope." Hope takes work! Hope isn't optimism! Sometimes it's quite arduous! The pathway of hope rarely winds along paths of rainbows, unicorns, and cotton candy but rather emerges out of valleys of darkness, doubt, and fear. Hope is more likely found in communities where there is immense pain, loss, and bewilderment, and its fruit is quietly generative, building, and sustaining. (False hope, on the other hand, is reliably deceptive, destructive, and disintegrating. It is "vicious," in the way that all vices are.)
I hope you can hear in this happy report just how accompanied I have been in the last year. Shame is isolating, and so turning it out with discretion into the light of others' presence, knowledge, compassion, wisdom, and care is an important part of the therapy. I have practiced that as an athlete rehabilitates an injured muscle. My inner pain made it necessary, and while the therapy hasn't been painless, it has been joy-filled to not be so alone in it.
Last week tested that year's worth of inner work and study. The work had to be tested; it's a requirement of my program. But I also had to go back to find out who I was now. And I'm happy to report that the work held. From start to finish -- in my preparations for the week (no anxious forgetfulness this time!), how I set my personal goals (aim for "good enough," and nothing more), and in how I navigated the inner turbulence that is simply what being human feels like ("maybe this mood has more to do with fatigue than anything else, so let's not indulge it, Laura."). I found that I had new ground on which to stand, new strength within, and that my sense of self in that testing place was both beautifully recalibrated (smaller!) and also much less fragile. I was less lost in the intellectual exchanges! I asked a few questions that I think may have made some sense! I was able to appreciate the nature of the sparring that took place, and the gifts that were available to me within it. In other words, I felt both good and good enough at the end of the week. Not victorious, not triumphant, but also not at all humiliated and shattered.
The ordeal of hope that the pain of my shame had invited me into was worth taking up. I am still free to quit, but I am less inclined to, even if I still do not always have a clear sense of what the future holds and what this last year's worth of work will mean in my life or for my family or the world. This is enough for now, I am happy to report.
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