Читать книгу Navigating the Zeitgeist - Helena Sheehan - Страница 11
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Bridge over Troubled Water
The day that I left the convent was another one of those days when the sharpest line was drawn between one way of life and another. Unlike the day I entered, when my mind was more on what was beginning than on what was ending, this day I was overwhelmed by what was ending and had no idea of what was beginning. As my mother drove us away, I could not talk to her about how I felt, but confined conversation to practical matters. We stopped and got an application for a learner’s permit, so I could drive, and an application to summer school, so I could continue to work toward a degree. We talked about jobs. I was considering VISTA, a domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. I liked working in the inner city. I arrived home, a place I had thought I would never see again. It was still a hectic and difficult household and I once again felt trapped in it. Sometimes I heard my mother talking on the phone about why I left. She would say I didn’t have a vocation after all, or that I decided it wasn’t for me. Once I shouted at her that I had decided it wasn’t right for anybody. My parents had been proud of their daughter who was a nun and assumed their problems with me were over. Little did they know that worse was ahead. I got all sorts of reactions from others: What a shame. What a waste. Aren’t you glad it’s all over? Do you regret it? Come on and tell me all the gory details. Did I regret it? This was a question I asked myself. As I caught up with events and trends in the world, I did regret that I missed the early days of SDS, that I had not been marching for civil rights down south, that I was not further along toward a university degree. However, I knew things had to play out in the way they did, given who I was and the world into which I was born. Moreover, there was a sense in which I felt that I turned negative to positive. I had survived a years-long, near-total assault on my intellectual, emotional, moral, and bodily integrity, and was stronger for it. Not that I knew yet how to bring such strength to bear upon my life. All I knew was that I wanted to continue my education and be socially and politically involved.
The year 1965 was the most difficult year of my life. I turned twenty-one in turbulence. I struggled not to drown in the tides threatening to engulf me and to find a bridge across troubled water. On so many levels, I felt like a misfit in the world to which I returned. It was not just the Rip van Winkle effect of discovering how things had changed while I was gone. It was a feeling of being neither here nor there, of being thoroughly out of joint with my surroundings, of belonging to no clear place. Even on the most superficial level, life was strange. I struggled to adapt to wearing ordinary clothes again. I kept feeling the lack of the long flowing veil and the swish of the long heavy skirts. I was a frightful sight. I had less than a half an inch of hair on my head, having been shaved so recently. My mother bought me a wig just the right shade of red as to look like my own hair. When I went down the shore one weekend with some of my classmates from high school, I was miserable. I had found them irritating and frivolous in high school, but I had even less in common with them now. On a deeper level, I plunged into darkness. The questioning that had unsettled the foundations of convent life for me was now unleashed full force, tearing relentlessly through my whole Catholic worldview. I grew obsessed with the question of the existence of God. I went over and over all the answers in the apologetics textbooks. I struggled with logic. I prayed for faith. I managed to continue to believe, but only by a thread and through the new theology. I responded most fully to the work of Teilhard de Chardin. I loved his passionate affirmation of matter, his respect for science and reason, his world-historical and teleological grandeur.
I got a summer job in Operation Discovery, a project of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” intended to offer enriching experiences for inner-city kids. I was teamed up with a handsome seminarian with whom I got on well, and we took the students, all of them black, on excursions all over the city and state. We went to concerts, museums, and art galleries. The banter with co-workers and kids was so freewheeling, so easy, without all the rules and regulations and stress that stifled my interactions with pupils, parishioners, and sisters at Corpus Christi. My new freedom was heady. I could decide how to spend my time, what to read, whom to see, what to wear. I delighted in things that others took for granted.
I started summer school. I had enough college credits from my three years at Chestnut Hill to count for one year at St. Joe’s. I was, unsurprisingly, exempt from all theology requirements. To qualify for any degree in a Jesuit university at that time, students were to take courses on theology and even more in philosophy. A total of twenty-four credits in philosophy was required, which suited me just fine. I started as required with logic and then proceeded to epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. I also registered for classes in biology, psychology, sociology, and literature.
My first philosophy teacher was the witty and clever David Marshall, who used the classroom as a platform to talk about whatever was on his mind. As well as entertaining us with his views on everything under the sun, he managed to make logic seem fun and fascinating, and I mastered the principles and procedures of both syllogistic and symbolic logic. I also had him for philosophy of science, ethics and aesthetics. In all these courses, he ranged through the whole history of philosophy in sweeping strokes. My next philosophy teacher was John Caputo, an ex–Christian Brother and still a postgraduate himself, who taught epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of man, and philosophy of religion with far more rigor, demanding tighter analysis of the arguments of each thinker and less of the broad sweep. With exacting clarity, he guided me through the prime texts of modern philosophy, a fateful experience for me. He later became an academic star and advocate of postmodernist theology, a position that held no appeal for me, but he was an excellent teacher for me at this stage of my development. My literature teacher was John Mullen, well-organized, sardonic, and demanding a high level of critical reasoning and clear writing. He believed that philosophical questions were often dealt with more meaningfully in literature. He also thought that some works of science or philosophy were themselves fine literature. He introduced me to the work of physical anthropologist Loren Eiseley, through his book The Immense Journey. It formed my sense that factual writing could and should be as creative and as literary as fiction. Outside class, I read Maslow, Frankl, and Fromm for an alternative view to that offered by Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner in my psychology classes. The former thinkers’ emphasis on the whole person, on the flow of lived experience and the search for meaning, were urgently important to me as my life world was undergoing a total transformation.
A battle of ideas was raging in most Catholic universities at this time, as the relativizing effect of Vatican II was unraveling so many accepted principles. The divide was especially sharp in philosophy, where the hegemony of scholastic philosophy was cracking. The old guard, mostly priests, considered the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas to be the last word in the discipline, and all subsequent philosophy merely a series of approximations and errors. They used textbooks written by some priest who taught modern philosophy according to the formula “Descartes was wrong because …,” “Kant was wrong because …,” and so on. The new breed—mostly laymen, but including priests and ex-priests—sought to incorporate alternative philosophies. Existentialism and phenomenology were particularly strong currents in the philosophy departments of Catholic universities. For a time, this made St. Joe’s a congenial environment for my studies, and existentialist voices at first spoke most directly to my condition.
I studied philosophy with extraordinary intensity, which was a source of affectionate amusement to my teachers. When one of them heard I was heading for the beach for the weekend, he speculated that my beach towel was emblazoned with “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Such moments brought light relief from my fierce existential angst, which nevertheless continued to weigh heavily. Another teacher predicted a prolonged virginity for me, because: “After all, who wants to talk about Hegel at the breakfast table?” He must have felt it was safe to assume nobody had yet been subjected to such discomfort, since I had only recently left the convent and as yet had only got as far as turning into a secular equivalent, a Heideggerian variant of “being-toward-death” after taking off the veil. I reeked of Sturm und Drang. I brooded with neantization. I ached for authenticity. One of my teachers did not see it that way, and we bonded, to the point where I was on the verge of losing my virginity, but he stopped and decided it was a line we should not cross. My virginity was one thing, but my integrity was another. Another teacher offered to pay me to write a postgraduate paper for him. Desperate as I was financially and flattered that he thought an undergraduate able to do his postgraduate work, my integrity was really all I had left, and I had given up much already to keep it. He was not happy at having exposed himself without getting what he wanted. Though he believed I could ace an A for him on his postgraduate course, he gave me a B in my undergraduate class.
Philosophy preoccupied nearly my every waking moment. I pondered the great questions of the ages: between idealism and materialism, monism and pluralism, realism and conventionalism, structure and process. Above all, I weighed the arguments for and against the existence of God, as if deciding were a matter of life or death. Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways didn’t really work for me anymore. There was also the problem of evil. Where was God during the Holocaust? Where was he now, as some lived in luxury while others lived in rat-infested ghettos in Philadelphia or bomb-devastated hamlets in Vietnam? I struggled to believe. Much of what I read spoke of the eclipse of God, the absence of God, the death of God. I felt the full force of these phrases. I prayed for faith. I prayed to this hidden God, while asking myself how a hidden God was different from no God at all.
I turned every assignment into something meaningful and important for me to explore. I read texts that had enormous impact on me, such as Dostoevsky’s The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. I memorized the most arresting passages:
Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
Although I was still at a Catholic institution, many of these readings were on the Church’s index of forbidden books, which would have filled me with foreboding in high school. By then, we hardly noticed or cared which books were on the index. It was formally abolished by Paul VI in June 1966, which was just as well, because some of the titles were already required reading for my philosophy courses.
I met new people. I liked many of my classmates, but preferred the company of my teachers. The ones I liked best were as indulgent with me as the mentors of my teenage years. I wanted to be around people who pushed me, challenged me. We formed a philosophy club comprising both faculty and students. I saw a lot of Greg during this period. I went down to Baltimore, where he was stationed, as soon as I could. Another time we met in New York, walking the streets of Manhattan all night long. We talked and laughed and even danced. There was still no one to whom I could speak with such freedom and openness. I also saw Ken again. He had left the Dominican order and entered the psychiatric ward of Philadelphia General Hospital. The story was that he had a “nervous breakdown,” a term used widely and loosely then. To this day, I don’t know what happened to him. We were no longer on the same wavelength. The last time I saw him he had joined the Marines. I dated quite a lot, despite the Sturm und Drang. I “played the field.” I enjoyed male company after being so starved of it in my convent years. There was a high school teacher, a scientist, an ex-seminarian (who then became a priest after all), even a businessman. I didn’t fall in love with any of them. They didn’t touch me at my core. I did know what it meant to love someone, even if I had never expressed it sexually. I was seething with erotic desire, but my strongest attractions were to men who were unavailable in that way, even when we became quite close in other ways.
Through it all, I was still a Catholic. I went to mass. I attended joyfully the first masses of seminarians I knew. Around my own parish, I ran into my former classmates from primary school, whose Catholicism seemed untroubled and unchanged since eighth grade. Meanwhile, my doubts were multiplying and intensifying. In this aspect of my life, which was starting to swamp me, I felt utterly alone, no matter how many great people I had around me. I still did not know a single person who was not a religious believer. No one I knew was going through such a crisis of faith.
In the fall, I went to work as a sixth-grade teacher at Our Lady of Charity School in Brookhaven. I would have preferred to be in the city and not the suburbs, but this was what the archdiocese offered. At that time, it was unheard of for an ex-nun to continue to teach in the same school system. I won that battle, against the wishes of the order I had left, and got a job teaching in a different school staffed by a different order. I also fought for and won my appointment to teach religion as a layperson, arguing that if I had been qualified to teach it the year before, I was still qualified. I threw myself into teaching, unaware of the controversy it would provoke or of the forces moving against me. I was only a mild liberal: I taught religion in the spirit of Vatican II theology. I taught the kids to sing “We Shall Overcome” and talked about the civil rights movement down south. That was all, but in 1965, it was considered too much. I became an early casualty in the post-Vatican II struggle between the advocates of aggiornamento and defenders of orthodoxy.
One day in late November, I was called out of my classroom, stopping my history lesson in mid-sentence, and told by the principal-superior to go immediately downtown to the office of the superintendent of education. When I arrived, the assistant superintendent, who knew me from the previous controversy, assured me that I was an excellent teacher—and then fired me in nearly the same breath. I was right, he said, and he was on my side, but I was too controversial. Parents, priests, nuns, and fellow teachers were complaining (to everyone except to me), and I had to go. He reminded me of the grand inquisitor.
I was shocked. I tried to pray. For the first time in my life, I felt that there was no one there to hear. By the time I left his office, it was already dark, with thunder and lightning and pouring rain. I felt as if the ground had vanished from under my feet. That day, all the questions of centuries came to a crescendo in my mind. I could no longer cling to the beliefs that had sustained me in my life so far. I felt the full force of all my accumulating doubts, sending me into free fall through a void, bereft of all my bearings, deprived of all my traditions. I lost my faith, my job, my home that day. I lost the very meaning of my life, all within twenty-four hours. That morning, I had proclaimed the gospel, teaching others what, by nightfall, I would no longer believe myself. The shock jolted me toward a break that was already inevitable. When I arrived home, I told my parents, who were horrified. They sided with the school, saying I had rocked the boat once too often and that I had set a bad example for the younger children. I stormed out in anger, stuffed everything I owned that I could carry into a suitcase and left. For weeks, I walked the streets and lived out of bus terminals and railway stations. I was as alone and desperate as it was possible to be. My world was in ruins. In time, I would rebuild on new foundations. But between the collapse of one worldview and the construction of another, there was only an abyss. I often wonder where I found the strength to endure that emptiness. Maybe it was simple curiosity, a need to know: If the world was not as I had thought it was, what was it? Or perhaps it was sheer animal survival, the sort of natural evolutionary striving that brought our species up from the primal mud and the dark. Whatever it was that got me to the turning point, I did begin to find my way through a long dark tunnel, into a most intricate labyrinth. Eventually I discerned a shaft of light, which I followed to the point where I could stop stumbling in the darkness and see some kind of road ahead.
Philosophy, purged of theology, became the driving force of my life. In a way I lived through the history of philosophy in my own mind, emerging from the Middle Ages into the modern era and coming in a rush to the conflicting voices of my own time. It was exhilarating, but rigorously demanding and sometimes frightening. There were no shortcuts between the dissolution of a complete worldview and the emergence of a well-grounded alternative. A long and winding road stretched between what was lost and what was yet to be found. I was living a life of unexpected risk, of heightened responsibility, but also of new freedom. Prometheus defying the gods and seizing fire, Sisyphus negating the gods and raising rocks, Zarathustra proclaiming the death of God and the transcendence of man, Atlas, proud and unyielding, sustaining alone the world he had fashioned—these were the most powerful images illuminating the darkness and pointing beyond it. The rebellion, the higher fidelity, the transvaluation of values, the free man’s worship—these were some of the crucial concepts in adjusting to a universe without a master and affirming it as neither sterile nor futile. But learning to say yes to life by searching for the meaning of life in life itself was only a beginning, an orientation. It was not enough.
Existentialism carried me through the transition to the point of taking up the challenges of my own times once again, this time more rooted in concrete experience and aware of the open-ended and precarious character of human existence. However, it had too many lacunae for me to build anything more solid on it. Its emphasis on the individual alone with his fate addressed my own isolation and alienation, but it did not do justice to the sociohistorical context of human existence (or even of the experience of isolation and alienation). Its tendency to undervalue the rational and to reject systematizing thought was a necessary counterbalance to past systems, but it could not form the basis of a new synthesis.
Nothing less than such a synthesis would do. I could not live without a comprehensive picture of the world in which I was living, without seeing my story within a larger story. Even as a child, I struggled to see things whole. I sought to grasp the totality, and could not settle for anything less. Catholicism, a ready-made totality, had nurtured this in me. The intellectual comprehensiveness and ritual grandeur of pre–Vatican II Catholicism had shaped my world. Even when the bottom fell out of it and I could no longer believe in it, leaving me raw, rootless, and roaming a world that felt like a wasteland, it nevertheless left a taste for totality I could not shake, no matter how well I subsequently learned to live without the whole supernatural dimension. Indeed, I believed that I should not shake it. It was an urge too basic to depend on the validity of one particular way of seeing the totality. I acknowledge this debt to Catholicism, however radical my rejection of nearly everything else about it. It inculcated a belief in having a comprehensive worldview and a demand for total commitment to the values flowing from it, which has stood me in good stead, even if it has been turned to purposes the Church never intended. I know all the arguments against this made by positivists, neo-positivists, existentialists, postmodernists, all the sneers about changing one religion for another, but I stand by it. It was not as if I simply took another totality off the shelf. I knew what I was leaving behind, but I did not yet know what I would find ahead.
On a practical level, I had to get a job and a place to live. At first, I found work in a downtown department store as a credit interviewer. I was to ask prospective customers a list of questions, and if certain boxes could be ticked, I could authorize credit. If the boxes could not be ticked, I had to deny it. For borderline cases, I had to consult the credit manager, who would glance out of his office to see who was standing at my hatch. I began to see a pattern. White customers were approved and black ones denied. Once I was sure of it, I confronted him, and was promptly fired. Then I had to get another job, although it was getting difficult now, having been fired twice in a matter of months. Next I worked for a market research company, doing telephone interviews about how certain advertising campaigns were received by the public. It was an intensely repressive environment. Everything was heavily monitored; even every trip to the lavatory was counted and timed. Meanwhile, I got a roof over my head. A classmate from St. Joe’s, a Filipino, took me in, and I slept on her floor for a few weeks. She and her friends introduced me to the New York nightclub scene. It wasn’t really for me, but I wanted to experience what I was rejecting as well as what I was embracing. As soon as I could afford it, I got an apartment of my own.
Life was hard. I completed three years of university in two years, while also working full-time at jobs I hated and traveling long distances on public transport. I studied every possible minute I could. My teachers saw how I was struggling and tried to help me. My literature teacher, John Mullen, suggested I quit my job at the market research firm and work for St. Joe’s. He arranged a scheme whereby I would be paid to grade assignments and exams, starting with his own freshman composition papers. Then Dave Marshall took me on to grade his logic papers. Several others in philosophy, literature, and education did likewise, and I earned enough from this to scrape by under far better conditions than in my other jobs. I even made up with my parents, though our relationship was still strained, and moved back home for a while to make ends meet.
Above all else was the quest for a new worldview. It did not come easily. At the center was the challenge of learning to live without God, to explain the natural world without recourse to supernatural forces. Religion was not the only force in my life being called into question. It was everything. Not only in my life, but also in the world around it, everything was changing. Everything was undergoing a radical reassessment. Gender was high on the list. Finally, I found a means of understanding my extreme unease about gender in a way that allowed me to feel whole. Like many others, I was struck by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and even wrote an article on the book for a college magazine. I questioned traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity. I objected to the life world of a woman confined to the beautification of the body, the seduction of men, the production of children, and the care of the home. I argued for psychological wholeness and social participation.
Situation ethics was creating a buzz at the time. Theology and moral philosophy were shifting from adherence to rules and laws toward consideration of the contingencies and exigencies of concrete situations. The idea was that it was love, not the pastor or judge, that determined whether sex was moral. It applied to matters other than sex, of course, but most of the discussion surrounding it was about sex. I broadly agreed, but needed a firmer grounding for morality. I was acutely aware of my need to build a new ethical position now that the moral precepts of religion had fallen out of the picture. I was less inclined toward case studies of isolated moral or immoral acts and more on an overall moral grounding. I focused on integrity of personality and responsibility to society. I was disposed (at least theoretically) to be flexible about sex, but believed strongly that ethics had to be about truth and justice, and I wasn’t inclined to be all that flexible about deceit or injustice. So many questions. Were the answers really blowing in the wind? I wondered.
I attended my first philosophy conference, at Pennsylvania State University, in October 1966. It was on existentialism and phenomenology. In beautiful autumn weather I took the bus to the center of the state brimming with anticipation. I read the program on the way, which caught the attention of a man seated next to me, who was also going to the conference. It was the first of many conversations with philosophers during that weekend. They treated me with extraordinary seriousness and respect, given how young and new I was to such things. I attended every session and listened with awe. I was particularly impressed with Paul Ricoeur and Richard Rorty. The latter spoke of the two dominant trends in contemporary philosophy—analytic and phenomenological—and memorably articulated the insights and blind spots of both. As far as I can recall, I was the only young woman at these sessions. (There was a “ladies program” for wives.) I also met a philosopher from Duquesne, who asked if I knew a friend of his who was lecturing in theology at St. Joe’s. When I told him I was avoiding the theology department, he made me promise I would get in touch with him.
Back in Philadelphia, true to my word, I went to the theology department and introduced myself to John Malinowski. We talked and talked. When I got up to leave, he offered to drive me home, although it was far out of his way. We stopped at a bar for happy hour and didn’t leave for many more hours—all of them happy. After that, we were nearly inseparable. I guess it was love at first sight. It marked a change for me to feel attracted to someone who was not out of reach. Jack was good-looking, articulate, critical, conscientious—the sort of person who entered the seminary in those days, though he never did. He was in tune with all the new thinking in the Church. He was drawn more toward social activism than supernatural intervention. He grew up in Mahony City, a tiny mining town full of churches and surrounded by a devastated landscape of strip mines. He had studied history at Duquesne and theology at Notre Dame, and was earning his PhD in religion at Temple University while teaching at St. Joe’s. We soon got an apartment near the college, where I lived while he came and went, fulfilling his duties as a proctor at a college dormitory.
In June 1967, I graduated from St. Joe’s and married Jack. The wedding was a bit tricky to organize, as I was an agnostic, although still a very Catholic one, and Jack was still a Catholic, although a very agnostic one. Those gathered around us urged us to be married in the most liberal church in the city. There was also the fact that Jack was teaching theology at a Catholic college. I saw the need for compromise, but I was resolute in my rejection of inauthenticity. The night before the wedding involved intense negotiations with the officiating priest, who was Jack’s brother (which was already a compromise, as I would have preferred Greg). I refused to profess anything I did not believe or promise anything I would not do. I was adamant about not promising to obey. I also declined to be given away by my father. Jack and I walked up the aisle together. It was not a lavish affair. I made my own dress and he wore his best suit. We had a buffet for guests in the church basement. The bill from the caterer was far higher than we had expected, because it turned out that someone had sent an open invitation to radical Catholics all over the city, who flocked to it. It featured the latest in progressive church singing and participation. I met for the first time some of Jack’s friends, such as Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, who were leaders of a new charismatic renewal movement in the Church who hoped to persuade Jack to join. He had shown me their letters, which kept getting stranger and stranger. I was curious to meet them. They were warm and friendly, but there was a huge gap between us. Jack and I both thought that this movement was seriously unsound. They were speaking and singing in tongues, becoming obsessed with ecstatic experiences and turning away from political engagement.
I had been intending to go away to pursue a PhD in philosophy. I applied and was accepted and offered fellowships to a number of graduate schools and planned to go to Purdue, but decided to stay in Philadelphia and do my postgraduate studies at Temple, because of Jack. It was a compromise, not only in city, but in milieu. I wanted to move away from Catholic circles and study in a more secular setting, focusing on philosophy, not theology. I was now in a secular institution, but still surrounded by a Catholic subculture, particularly the radical Catholic set. At the same time, my relation to religion still felt far from settled. I was an agnostic, but it was a deeply uncomfortable position. I still wrestled with basic cosmological questions. For my PhD, I took courses in religion, philosophy, and history, primarily at Temple, but also at the University of Pennsylvania and City University of New York. Many of my fellow graduate students were Catholics, some of them ex-priests in the first days of their laicized lives. They were great company and we had much in common, but they were still within the Church in ways that I wasn’t. They would react indignantly to the latest statement by Cardinal Krol, but I no longer cared what he said. They were organizing underground masses. They sang and played guitar beautifully, but I couldn’t believe with them that bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. They asked me to sign a petition supporting the ordination of women. I would have gladly done so a few years earlier, but since I no longer saw the point of having priests at all, the gesture felt pointless.