Читать книгу The Middle of Things - Meghan Florian - Страница 5

Sandheden er en Snare: Du kan ikke faae den, uden at Du fanges; Du kan ikke faae Sandheden saaledes at Du fanger den, men kun saaledes, at den fanger Dig.

The Truth is a snare: you cannot get it without being caught yourself; you cannot get the truth by catching it yourself but only by its catching you.

—Søren Kierkegaard1

For the third summer in four years, I returned to Northfield, Minnesota for two precious weeks of writing and research at St. Olaf College’s Kierkegaard Library. This would be my summer vacation. Granted that a vacation spent studying philosophy may sound unappealing to most, the quiet and focus of a small college town in summer was all I wanted as an escape from the other employment that takes me away from my own research for much of the school year. A small town with few distractions outside of the local pub is as nice a place as any I can imagine for such a retreat.

Still, while I was there, an up-and-coming band I had been following for a few years was playing a show in Minneapolis, and this seemed like an appropriate opportunity to get out of my head for a while, have a few drinks, and dance—to remind myself I am not a word-producing machine, and that vacations are meant to be fun. I’d written 5,000-plus words in my first week at the library, on top of daily marathon reading sessions. I was due for some kind of break.

I was still hemming and hawing about whether it was worth the hour and a half bus trip each way from tiny Northfield to the city, though, which would cost more than the concert ticket itself, when I got an email from the band’s tour manager informing me I’d won a spot—for myself and a friend—at the band’s sound check party the next day.

I emailed her back and said it would be just me. I laid aside my copy of The Two Ages and bought my bus ticket. Then my social anxiety kicked in.

I go to concerts alone all the time, but hanging out with the band? A test of my self-confidence. I texted my best friend, joking about the likelihood of making a fool of myself, and began to stress out about what to wear in order to look less like a nutty professor. (Black skinny jeans, chambray shirt, Birkenstocks—was I trendy or nerdy, with my tortoise shell Warby Parker frames? Is nerdy-chic a thing, I wondered, and if so, can I pull it off?) Lamenting the limited options in my suitcase, I nevertheless got dressed on Friday and headed into the city. Nerves would not stop me. I really liked their music. And they were cute. If I fell on my face in front of them, I would at least get a good story out of it.

I got to the venue early and milled about awkwardly by the sign where Ginelle, the tour manager, told me to meet her. I considered smoking one of the clove cigarettes in my purse, a vice I embrace on research trips, though never at home, but thought better of it, not wanting my first impression to be wreathed in smoke, even if it would add to the aura of mysterious existentialist I seem to cultivate in spite of myself. Eventually two other women joined me—young women, maybe twenty-two, in high heels and thick make-up that immediately made me want to sink into the sidewalk. I tried to breathe in calm and breathe out cool, as Ginelle walked us in, down the steps to the basement venue. I blinked as my eyes adjusted, tried to make confident eye contact with the band, on stage, where they’d already started warming up.

I’m the Cool Girl, I thought. Though normally I hate the concept, and all such reductive categorizing of women, I tried to believe it was true. It’s easy to feel cool when surrounded by philosophers, at least some of whom have earned the stereotypes we press upon them. Lots of tweed, elbow patches, receding hairlines, and few small talk skills. The “real” world where I was spending this weekend cast that world in sharp relief.

The other women introduced themselves. I could sense them moving toward a metaphorical center stage in our impromptu trio of fangirls. In the dwindling days of my thirtieth year, I was aware that the confident cool that took most of my twenties to develop was now already fading into the shadows cast by other, younger women. In ordinary life, I am less Cool Girl or even Smart Girl than I am Invisible Woman. I am no longer simply uncool; now I am aging. If you were never the hot one to begin with, wrinkles certainly aren’t going to improve matters.

Did I mention these musicians were cute?

I rocked back and forth in my Birkenstocks, smiling shyly. I love this band’s music, and I’m not one to base my fandom on physical attractiveness, but I’m not blind. Or maybe it’s just that anyone who can harmonize like these guys is attractive to me, regardless of aesthetic realities. Maybe they’re not even that cute, rather their voices had addled my brain. Perhaps it’s just that inexplicable quality Kierkegaard’s Young Man drones on about in “In Vino Veritas”—“if love is ludicrous, it is just as ludicrous whether I find a princess or a servant girl,” he says.2 In my case, one might paraphrase: a crush is just as ludicrous whether he be a musician or a philosopher.

All of this only served to make me nervous, now that I was in the same room with them, now that they were taking song requests, from me (and the pretty young things in their tall shoes).

We sat on stools in the back as they played, and I loosened up. They were funny, the guys in the band. Normal guys, not rock stars—the kind of guys I might have hung out with in college, I thought. College—longer ago for me than for them. They bantered from the stage, and their banter had a relaxing effect on me, my stress releasing with each laugh.

They finished the sound check, though, and I remembered that I was still a thirty-year-old introverted philosopher in Birkenstocks. Thirty. So young in the grand scheme of years, yet perhaps too old to be a fangirl, I realized belatedly.

We milled about. The band guys introduced themselves, asked how I came to listen to their music. I softened as I told them about seeing them open for the Indigo Girls in Raleigh a few years ago. We talked about Amy Ray. They expressed confusion about why I was in Minneapolis when I am living in Durham, and I offered a suitably vague answer. They told a story about the time they played at Motorco, a venue near me in Durham, and I felt retroactive sadness that I missed it.

I sat on a stool, and one of the guitarists, Scott, sat down next to me. Scott, I had decided, is the cutest one.

He introduced himself, and we made conversation the way you would if you met someone somewhere ordinary, not at a private party before his band’s show in a tiny venue in the Midwest, not as a fangirl and a guitarist. I felt better, talking to him. I felt glad that I came, though now I was focused on how easily I lost track of what he was saying because of the light in his dark eyes, looking at me. He glanced around, apologized, said he just wanted to be sure there wasn’t something else he should be doing—it’s the first time they’ve done one of these things.

I took him to mean he wasn’t sure it was okay that he was talking only to me, and I smiled my shy smile again. He asked me why I was in Minnesota, and this time I didn’t give the vague answer. I blame his eyes for magicking the truth out of me. Eye contact, the source of so much accidental truth telling.

“I’m doing research at the Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College,” I told him. “It’s like philosophy camp for grown-ups.”

Away flew any chance I had of pulling off the Cool Girl act.

He laughed, this delightful laugh. “That is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard . . . I love it.” He smiled, his eyes dropping for a moment as his body moved with laughter. And then he said this: “I studied philosophy in college.”

DANGER. Cute musician also likes philosophy. No good can come of this.

“But I’ve never read any Kierkegaard. What’s his thing?”

I am sorry to say I gave a terrible introduction to Kierkegaard—I rambled about Abraham, about the Knight of Faith, which isn’t even my favorite part of Kierkegaard’s work. What a missed opportunity. If I were a true Kierkegaardian Flirt I would have drawn on all of my knowledge of Works of Love and Stages on Life’s Way to discuss passion, preference, all the subtle nuances of self-deception and seduction in the works I’ve studied for nearly a decade now. Alas, the moment passed. I resolve to do better, next time.

Scott told one of the other guys the real reason I was in Minnesota, completely blowing my cover. I was back in my normal role as aging nerd, as the Smart Girl. And it was okay. A decade studying philosophy has taught me that such resistance to my deeper self is futile. Nights like this, when I fought it, are more and more rare. I’ve changed; I am no longer twenty-two, thank God.

The band prepared to leave for dinner. I would see them again later, for the show, though we’d be separated then by lights and a crowd. “The crowd is untruth,” I think, according to Kierkegaard. But the laughter in Scott’s eyes was true.

We took a picture, we said goodbye.

Scott hugged me. Those smiling eyes made contact with mine once more, and it seemed somehow that being the Smart Girl is not half bad.

Kierkegaard would have a field day with me, I’m sure.

When I began college at nineteen I had never read a single page of philosophical writing. I would have struggled to tell you what philosophy actually was if you had asked me. As a high school student I had always assumed I was going to study English in college, and be a writer. I also assumed that I would spend my life waiting tables.

Philosophy drew me in over time. One might think that the obsession with big ideas that consumed me in college was just a phase, abandoned as soon I found a slightly more realistic career path. Philosophy, after all, is the only major that gets made fun of more than English when it comes to potential for success. “Would you like fries with that?” people asked me, when I changed my major.

Yes, I would, thank you very much. Pass the ketchup.

Everything I ever liked or was good at was something that would mean struggling to support myself, and in college I worried about my future far more than was good for me. I lived in my head most of the time. I remember sitting in one of the roomy armchairs in the common room of my all women’s dormitory at Hope College a week or two into the semester, the Norton Anthology of Western World Literature in my lap, reading The Iliad, pleased to be in a 200-level literature class with mostly sophomores during my first semester, but feeling like I may have gotten in over my head. Lindsey, who lived across the hall from me, walked in and paused outside her door.

“Meghan, you read all the time,” she said. I looked up, puzzled. Wasn’t that what college was for? I shrugged and went back to reading at a snail’s pace, hoping at some point things would start to click in my head. The literary world of the ancient Greeks fascinated me more than the conversations I overheard in the common room about boys or weekend parties (which usually drove me back into my tiny cinder block room to work). With time I became more comfortable with my ability to interpret the works I was studying; I did not understand fashion or dating, but I understood books. It helped when I got an A on my first college paper, too. I wish I could re-read that paper now, but it is lost to a world in which I still used floppy disks—bright purple ones, purchased at the college bookstore, and transported from one computer lab to the next.

Though my grades were good, I remained quiet in classes. I spent Saturdays at the library, and evenings reading in coffee shops with the studious friends I slowly unearthed. I doubted my own voice, and rarely expressed my opinions. I was not sure what my opinions were half the time. Then, toward the end of my first year of college, my advisor suggested that I take a philosophy course the following fall. It would be wise in case I ever decided to go to graduate school, she said, and besides that she thought I might enjoy it.

I laughed at the suggestion of graduate school. The thought had never even crossed my mind. I was part of the first generation in my family to attend a four-year college, and just getting this far seemed like an awful lot of education to me (and my parents). I had no idea why people went to graduate school in the first place, unless it was to become a medical doctor or a lawyer. As the sort of well-behaved young woman who takes her professors’ advice, however, I registered for Intro to Philosophy.

It was an eight-week, two-credit course that changed everything. “The Body” was the focus of the class, and we read both ancient and contemporary texts. Once a week we were required to write a one-page response paper about anything that struck us in the reading assignment for the day—these were to be “shitty first drafts,” Dr. Allis told us, quoting Anne Lamott, doing his best to quell our nervousness about writing philosophically. I wrote a diatribe in response to that first week’s reading (I am sorry to say I cannot remember who we read) about the distinction between having a body, and being a body. Caught up in a culture of female body shaming, my response as a young woman was gnosticism—I wanted to disassociate from my body. My body was not me. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I said, and a six-foot-tall Meghan with red hair and green eyes would be no different from the five-foot-tall brunette I actually inhabited. A body was just a body.

My classmate Sarah had written something very different, and when Dr. Allis put us in discussion groups and we read our words to one another, I found myself playing intellectual ping-pong with her, and questioning my own perspective. Was a body perhaps more than I was willing to let it be? Was I being just as reductive as the body-shaming culture I critiqued, reducing myself to a mind or a personality? What did it mean to be embodied—to experienced myself holistically? My whole understanding of personhood turned upside down.

I do not remember what other courses I took that semester. What I remember is meeting my best friend Laura for lunch after philosophy class, and talking her ear off about the material we were covering. I remember that I spoke up in class on a regular basis. I remember Dr. Allis telling me to call him Jim (though I continued to call him Dr. Allis until I was a senior). I remember that he wrote “Thank you for your work” on every single paper I wrote for him, and that I knew he meant it.

I am sure that many, many people in my life had believed in me over the years. I had always gotten good grades, been described as having “potential.” But I never believed it. Who can say what was responsible for that mental block, but something in Jim’s kind eyes, his earnest thanks, both written on my papers and voiced in class, got through to me. He said that we were free to change our minds about anything we said in class five minutes after we said it, and so, for the first time, I felt free to try something and get it wrong. For a lifelong perfectionist, a people-pleasing middle child, that was what I needed more than anything. Permission to fail, and begin again.

If I ever did find those purple floppy disks I am sure I would find much that would embarrass me now, but it was the process that mattered. I was learning how to think. As Kierkegaard (a philosopher I would soon encounter) put it when discussing his authorial position in My Point of View as an Author, I was learning “in working also to work against oneself.”3 I developed an internal dialogue, and a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity about the world around me, as I worked out my own thoughts.

My mind was set on fire. Existence, embodiment, epistemology—these words rolled around in my head, and eventually off my tongue, as I learned a new language, delighting in a foreign tongue, coming to rest in a new land where I began to feel at home for the first time in my young adult life. I barely paused when considering my courses for the next semester. Modern Philosophy was the clear choice, and my advisor encouraged me to follow the rabbit trail and see where it led me.

It led me to Søren Kierkegaard.

Long before I started reading the famous Danish Lutheran philosopher, known to some as the “father of existentialism,” I had begun a faith struggle of my own. Raised in the Christian Reformed Church by parents strongly influenced by Baptist and evangelical Christianity, and attending a small religious college in the west Michigan “bible belt,” my life had always been influenced by the church. Even as an adolescent, though, my busy mind had wrestled with big questions. In my high school Sunday school classes, while I reveled in—and sometimes struggled with—the language of the Heidelberg Catechism, my peers seemed bored, simply accepting the faith their families had practiced for generations. While others attended football games on the weekends, I was at home poring over C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I scribbled ordinary teen angst in my journal, yet my prose was also peppered with thoughts on the universe and God and my place in the order of things.

Now, as a college student, I was in the midst of a crisis—a dark night of the soul, as theological types like to call it. I was taking courses on bible and religion and philosophy that stretched the boundaries of what I thought I knew, of what I was capable of knowing. I hadn’t given up on church, but I had a new set of questions, more skeptical than those of my C. S. Lewis days. In my Old Testament class we studied historical critical methods of interpretation, and as I learned more of the details of by whom and how the biblical canon was constructed, instead of lashing out like some of my peers did—denying this method if interpretation in favor of infallibility—I accepted it. But I didn’t know what to do with this new knowledge. The bible had not dropped from the sky in one piece. It contained contradictions, dare I say flaws, with which I did not know how to cope.

My professor somehow still managed to believe in biblical truth, and the church, despite knowing that this primary Christian text was written by human hands, and as such contained ordinary human inconsistencies. How? Why? What did he hold on to? What motivated him to continue to read the bible as Scripture? And what about all the theology I was becoming interested in, which was based on biblical texts? Could I find a way to hold onto that, or should I give that up, too? I did not know how to interpret the bible anymore, and so I simply stopped reading it at all. I asked myself, maybe for the first time, whether the God I thought I believed in really—really—existed, and I found no answers.

Yet, despite all of this, for some unexplainable reason I decided it was a good idea to sign up for an evangelism-focused spring break “mission trip” in Los Angeles. Evangelism is exactly what a person should be doing when she’s at a place in life where she wakes up every morning and wonders if everything she’s built her life on is something made up by a bunch of dead guys, right?

It was as if I thought by somehow pushing myself beyond what church leaders kept calling my “comfort zone” I could, maybe, experience some kind of miracle. Perhaps God would give me some revelation, if only I showed enough faith.

This was a terrible plan. Instead of encountering truth, I came face-to-face with the faith I was basically trying to leave, but somehow couldn’t quit. We spent the week hanging out with homeless folks in LA, offering gifts of food and clothing at times but mostly focusing on “sharing the gospel,” and the guilt I felt in the face of that poverty was a result of realizing how little the Christianity I knew had to say to what was in front of me. What do you say when standing on a corner in Skid Row with a stack of evangelical tracts in your hand? How do you talk about a God you think you no longer believe in, yet somehow hope exists, in a place where God seems so clearly absent? Broken bodies, broken souls, broken social systems—everything around me was broken, and I was breaking, too.

To the extent that I could say I believed in the absurdity of the Christian story of God becoming human, and dying, and that death somehow saving humanity from some sort of hell or damnation, at the end of the day, I still asked myself the “Why?” questions. Why did I think I should be here? Why do any of us think we are supposed to help others? Why would it even occur to me to think that some sort of miracle might be possible, that God might not only exist but might show up in my life, or in the lives of the people whose humanity and value I was trying to acknowledge here on Skid Row?

I really didn’t know. I felt like a liar. I had nothing to say for myself.

Given that this was a college spring break trip, and I have always been a good student, I had brought along a backpack full of homework. Perhaps the greatest miracle of the trip was that Kierkegaard was in that bag.

Reading Kierkegaard for the first time was like someone, somehow, had lifted a huge weight off my shoulders I barely knew I was carrying. It was the weight of logic, of certainty, of proof. Kierkegaard reframed my understanding of doubt, and showed me that not only is it possible to doubt yet remain a Christian, but that in fact it may be the only way one can become one. Perhaps his most well-known and oft referenced idea is that, in fact, without doubt there is no faith. A bit of an outsider himself, Kierkegaard seemed like a kindred spirit to a young, alienated, budding philosopher like myself. I felt that I was standing in a field alone, confronting a choice about how I would align my life. Would I give up on the church, on the God I only partially believed in, or would I press on? “Infinite resignation,” Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling, “is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity.”4 I was searching for this kind of resignation, and I was unsure whether or not I had it, but at least, here, was someone who understood the need for it.

. . . he can be saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps by faith. Consequently, he acknowledges the impossibility, and in the very same moment he believes the absurd, for if he wants to imagine that he has faith without passionately acknowledging the impossibility with his whole heart and soul, he is deceiving himself and his testimony is neither here nor there, since he has not even obtained infinite resignation.5

The absurd! There was the concept I had been wrestling with, the absurdity of what I believed, alongside the strange realization that I did believe it. Though I would later realize that Kierkegaard’s treatment of faith is far from a glorification of doubt in and of itself, and not merely about the individual, that in fact the reader herself is not the “knight of faith” in Kierkegaard’s thought, nor should she aspire to be, for the time being this affirmation of my reality was exactly where I needed to begin again, approaching my faith anew. “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards,” read my assigned reading that week from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. “But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forwards.”6 These popular excerpts were my gateway drug, giving me the language I needed for the absurdity I felt.

On our last day in LA we rested. I sat with my friend Katherine on the beach, toes in the sand, staring out at the ocean. We were silent. Neither of us understood why we had decided to come here, yet perhaps as we let the silence hold us a little bit of spirit crept in. Instead of resignation, I felt release. We cried, without knowing exactly why.

I returned to school, burnt out on churchy things, consumed by existential angst and my pursuit of Kierkegaardian “resignation.” As the semester wore on, I became enthralled by this Dane, even as I became obsessive about philosophy more generally. The devotion to Christianity that I was struggling to maintain shifted to my intellectual pursuits. They became a way I could wonder and wander and think about God without needing to find the right answers. I was as devoted as ever, in some respects, but I was searching for different answers. Lubbers Hall, which housed the departments of Religion, Philosophy, History, English, and Political Science, became my church—a cathedral of learning in which I could confess my doubts, and be absolved.

In those days, I still snuck into the Sunday night services in Hope College’s Dimnent Chapel. I showed up about fifteen minutes late, ensuring I had missed the happy-clappy contemporary praise songs, sung with eyes closed and hands lifted to the skies. These songs irked me, not so much because I didn’t believe the people around me were experiencing something in singing them, but because I wasn’t experiencing whatever or whoever it was.

My school had just hired a new chaplain, Trygve, and he was a smart man—someone who would later become a friend and mentor to me, though I didn’t know him personally then. “O Chaplain, my Chaplain,” he once told us to call him, earning my respect with a dual reference to Whitman and Dead Poets Society (he would go on to form a Dead Preachers Society for those of us on campus considering going on to divinity school). Trygve seemed comfortable with my questions. So every week I would climb the stairs to the balcony as the last song played, slip into a pew, shrink down to remain as invisible as possible, and I would listen. Somehow, in all of his words, I think this thing Christians call the Word got through to me. Somehow, I heard the good news that I was lovable, worthwhile, that who I was was not dependent upon my performance—news that was as much about my ability to perform a perceived right way of being Christian as it was about basing my self-worth on my grades and other successes. There was some freedom in what he said. It was much like the freedom I felt when Jim said, in philosophy class, that it was okay to change our minds, and that our work and words mattered more than grades.

After the sermon ended, people would bow their heads to pray, and I would sneak out before communion. The total opposite of most chapel goers, I came only for the sermon—the part most students wished was shorter, the part most people struggle not to simply tune out. Once in a while I bowed my head too, though. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, listened to the words, whispered “amen.” I received the invitation to the communion table, to eat, and drink, many grains gathered into one loaf—me and my doubts alongside my charismatic classmates, my roommates, my professors. I would approach the communion servers, often with my head hanging low, overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, trying to grasp the love I was offered, and sometimes the server would be a friend or favorite teacher. BP—as students fondly nicknamed Professor Bouma-Prediger—always chose the words, “The body of Christ, strength for the journey” when he served, breaking off a piece of bread and pressing it into my hand, holding eye contact as long as I would allow. Whatever else those words meant, I knew that something greater than myself would sustain me, and somehow that was enough to keep going, to church as well as to philosophy class.

The following summer I started reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling in its entirety. The book is a retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son despite the fact that God has also promised that he will make Abraham the father of a great nation. Tough to do without an heir, right? Abraham trusts God, follows the absurd command up to the last moment when God stops his hand from stabbing Isaac, who lays bound upon the alter. This passage has puzzled scholars and religious leaders for ages.

It was not great beach reading.

What is this strange faith Abraham had? Who is this God, who commands such things? Those questions would occupy me for a long time, and provoke many rereadings of the text. I packed Fear and Trembling in my suitcase when I left for a semester in London that fall, and continued to ponder these questions, abstractly and in my own life. I also took another philosophy class while I was overseas. My new professor, an intimidating Italian man, was no Jim Allis. I hated the class. Yet I still found the material engrossing. I studied harder in that class, an introduction to ethics, than any other that semester, discussing the material with my roommate over pints of ale at The Trafalgar, a pub down the street from our dorm in Chelsea, and when it came time to register for spring courses back at home, I made a decision: I emailed Jim and asked him what courses I should take next, and I called my parents to tell them I was changing my major. To philosophy.

This is what all blue-collar parents want to hear their first-generation college student daughter say when she is an ocean away, right? I delivered my carefully prepared speech about how philosophy prepares people for a variety of pursuits, and teaches you to think, and made sure I saved my best line for last. “It’s great for people who are thinking about law school, Mom,” I mentioned. I had no desire to go to law school, but I knew my mother harbored a not-so-secret belief that I would make a fine lawyer. What was the harm in soothing her nerves a little?

My parents sufficiently comforted for the time being, I enjoyed the rest of my time abroad and returned to Michigan ready to delve into my studies in earnest. That was a course load I have no trouble remembering: Existentialism, Philosophical Theology, Intro to World Religions, Informal Logic.

Soon I was barely sleeping. These lines from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, which I had yet to read, aptly describe my state at the time: “Which deception is the more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of the one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see? What is more difficult—to awaken someone who is sleeping or to awaken someone who, awake, is dreaming that he is awake?”7 I was searching for answers, and the search was one of both literal and figurative waking.

I shot up in the wee hours one night that I had actually managed to fall asleep at a decent hour, and lay in bed unable to return to sleep, pondering the problem of evil—that is, how can a good God allow bad things to happen? We were in the midst of a five-week study on theodicy, which is the term for attempts to answer to this question about evil, in my Philosophical Theology class, and thinker after thinker came up short for me. My grandfather died while I was in the middle of reading Nietzsche for my Existentialism course at the same time, and between the idea of the übermensch, his theory of eternal recurrence, and the oft-quoted pronouncement that “God is dead,” existential despair took on flesh and blood for me. It wasn’t until week five of Philosophical Theology that I found a way to make any sort of sense out of the loss of my grandfather within months of the birth of his first great grandchild, my cousin Matthias.

Professor BP assigned Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff last, and finally the whole grueling five weeks of insufficient arguments came together. Wolterstorff’s book was written after the death of his son in a mountain climbing accident at the age of twenty-five. I was submerged in its honest, open grief, the raw pain Wolterstorff bled onto the page. “Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved,” he writes in the preface to the 2001 edition, twelve years after his son’s death.8 Lament for a Son is an act of grieving, and its theodicy was lament. That was the only theodicy I could abide.

At twenty-one, I had always prided myself on my unwillingness to allow others to see me cry. After I received the news that my grandfather was in hospice, with only a short time to live, for maybe the first time I let myself hurt in front of others. I left a message for my best friend Laura, who showed up with a plate of food from a party some classmate was having down the street, and two arms whose embrace let me dissolve into a flood of tears I would usually have held back until I was alone. Tally and Lisa came by later, ready to drive me to Kalamazoo, an hour and a half away, to be with my family immediately, even though it was getting late and we were in the middle of a cold Michigan winter. I refused, afraid of missing class the next day, not anticipating that my professors, like my friends, would be kind and supportive as I stumbled into this new grief. I let Tally and Lisa take me out for ice cream instead, went to class the next day, and then waited for my dad to pick me up so that I could go home and wait for my grandfather to die.

“You are not a thing,” Jim had said the first day of Existentialism, by way of definition of our subject matter. And I wasn’t. I had to start setting boundaries for my obsessions. On top of the grief of losing a family member, I also had to cope with my unrealistic expectation that in the midst of funeral preparations at home I would continue to keep up with all of my schoolwork. In Kierkegaardian fashion, philosophy was personal for me, and as another existentialist thinker, Simone de Beauvoir, put it, “In truth there is no divorce between philosophy and life.” In my grief I dove in further, yet I knew I couldn’t live like this forever.

Returning to school after we buried my grandfather, I was physically and emotionally spent. I needed to compartmentalize, or at the very least spend a bit more time at the local watering hole relaxing with friends. As I struggled through midterms and made plans to work at the summer camp where I had worked every summer since finishing high school, my mother finally became the voice of reason.

She asked me if I’d ever thought about taking a break.

I had not. I took her advice and turned down the camp job—notorious for seventy-hour work weeks and low pay—in favor of a gig as a summer Resident Advisor that included free rent in the small lake town where I went to school. I started to look forward to afternoons lying on the beach, and then, because summer has always meant reading for me, I set about planning a book club. A favorite history professor would later say to me that anyone who organizes a summer book club on the scale that I did was basically “doomed” to go to graduate school. Having warmed to the idea since my advisor first suggested that graduate education might be in my future, I took that as a compliment.

Together with a couple of equally bookish friends, I emailed favorite professors and asked what books each of them would suggest to students as “must reads” before graduating. We wanted to know their “best ever” book recommendations. And so the Best Ever Book Club was born.

We chose one book from each professor, created a syllabus (yes, a syllabus), and then invited the professors to join us the week that we discussed their books. We read Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov, selections from Wendell Berry, and Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation, among other things. The Merton text was suggested by my Logic professor, Jack. He had also suggested Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, but I had been unable to convince my friends to include it on the syllabus. They were wise to talk me down off that ledge—it is nearly 400 pages long, for one thing—but they could not hold me back permanently. The book lodged itself in my mind, a “must-read” before our graduation the following May.

Jack invited us over to his home to discuss Merton, and I met his wife Melissa for the first time. As we sat around sipping coffee she started talking about Works of Love, and the Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. When Jack was in graduate school they spent a summer there while he did research for his dissertation, and she participated in a Works of Love reading group with him. She echoed my friends’ sense that it would have been a bit much to include it on our summer reading list, but I was too distracted by her mention of this Kierkegaard Library to hear much else. I laughed as she told stories about being one of the only women in residence that summer, philosophy still being a male-dominated field, and how she would hang a warning sign on the door of the shared bathroom whenever she took a shower, just to be on the safe side. I tried to imagine spending a summer in a place where everyone around me shared my slowly growing love of Kierkegaard.

As summer wore on I began to think that my history professor was right—perhaps I was doomed to go to graduate school. And perhaps I would study Kierkegaard. My understanding of what that meant was still limited, however, and first I had another year of school, not to mention applications to fill out, rejection letters to cope with, and finally an acceptance to rejoice over.

Most importantly, first I had to actually read this book, Works of Love. Fall semester of my senior year flew by with required courses for my major and drama with my roommates, and I took a full load in my final semester so that I could complete a second major in religion. Weekends, as always, were spent doing school work at my favorite coffee shop, JP’s. Best of all, I convinced both department heads that a directed study on Works of Love should count for both of my majors. And so my Friday afternoons with Jack began.

Jack is a tall, thoughtful, blond man, awkward in that endearing way that philosophy professors inevitably are. Born and raised in the Dutch Reformed tradition (the same one my parents had raised me in), he converted to Catholicism in college. He was the only person I knew who liked Kierkegaard more than I did. Way more. His office was lined with books I had never read but hoped I would, eventually—beautiful Princeton editions of Kierkegaard’s works, translated by Howard and Edna Hong, secondary scholarship on Kierkegaard’s works, other non-Kierkegaardian books about religion and philosophy. There was also a collection of philosopher finger puppets Melissa bought for him. On the fourth floor of Lubbers Hall, home of all my favorite professors, Jack’s office window overlooked 10th Street, and in the spring, beautiful flowering trees and rocking chairs on the front porch of the campus ministries house across the street.

It was a picture of a future I was I afraid to hope for, a future as a scholar and a professor. I was twenty-two, and I finally knew at least one thing that I wanted for myself. I still wasn’t sure how to get there, though. I was looking for someone to show me the way; I didn’t yet know that I’d have to make it up on my own.

It had taken all my nerve to ask Jack to supervise this directed study, shy as I was, though I figured all along that he would be happy to help a student read a text he told me was one of his favorites. When the semester began, I read about fifty pages a week, because Jack thought it best to read slowly and carefully, instead of at the usual breakneck pace of many of my courses, which resulted in students remembering nothing they read—or giving up on trying to read at all. Jack knew college students well, perhaps because he was young enough to remember being one himself in the not-so-distant past. He told me that if I got stuck, I should read aloud, and so I closed my bedroom door and paced around, delving deeper into the text, getting lost, and finding my way out again. From time to time Jack would also have me read articles by contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, and each week I wrote an informal one- or two-page paper to get our discussion going.

Those discussions were the highlight of my week. Yet I also dreaded them, at times. I was still learning to articulate my ideas, and the text was dense. Besides that, I hated the thought of appearing stupid in front of a professor I respected. Those old perfectionist habits died hard. Most of the time I simply did not know what I thought yet, and compared to my normal classes, now the discussion was all on me. There was no lecture component here. It was Jack, me, and our Danish friend Søren.

There were a lot of long pauses during those discussions. Often I began by reading my short paper aloud, grateful to at least have some ideas to start things off, always more confident with my pen than with my voice. At other times I stared out the window at those rocking chairs across the street, and past them to the dorm I lived in my first year of college. “Well . . .” I said, and paused again. “I guess . . . maybe . . . it seems like . . .” and perhaps then the words started to trickle out. I started to say what I really thought, which was that Kierkegaard was right about all of this Christian love stuff. But that I worried he was also wrong, sometimes.

Kierkegaard’s understanding of love begins with a central assumption taken from Matthew 22:39: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He goes so far as to assert that if loving one’s neighbor is not a duty (e.g. you shall love, whether you like it or not), the concept of neighbor does not exist. He writes in his journals, “And it is this Christian love that finds out and knows that the neighbor exists and, what amounts to the same, that everyone is that, because if it were not a duty to love, then the concept of ‘neighbor’ would not exist either.”9 In other words, what besides duty could make sense of a person’s efforts to love that neighbor whom she has no particular preference for, not to mention loving the neighbor who she flat out doesn’t like? And, on top of that, without duty, loving one’s enemy (a central aspect of Jesus’ teaching) would be impossible; the Christian, Kierkegaard emphasizes, is called to love not only the people she naturally likes, but even those she is tempted to hate.

These are hard words, words that I knew in theory having grown up in the church, but words that I now wrestled with philosophically and personally as I tried to make sense of duty as a concept, and the strange idea of loving someone you don’t like at all. I was struggling just to love my roommates, who I genuinely liked, but who also genuinely got on my nerves a lot of the time. And while Kierkegaard’s understanding of the love of neighbor assumed and rested on the necessity of self-love, so few pages of Works of Love were devoted to the self that it diminished in comparison to love of others.

I was only just coming to realize that I was not very good at the whole “self-love” thing, so this was more than a bit disconcerting.

Sometimes my conversations with Jack would shift away from Kierkegaard, and I would say, too, that I wanted to go to graduate school more than anything, but was afraid I wouldn’t get in, afraid I wasn’t smart enough. I wanted to know as much as Jack knew, though I never told him that part, or at least never in those words. Mostly I plodded through the text slowly, my teacher always patient, never filling the awkward silences with his own words, letting me think, letting me struggle to find my own opinions. When it was apparent that I disliked a certain idea we were discussing, Jack reassured me that even he was not Kierkegaardian on all issues.

One week I came in, completely exasperated by the excessive self-giving nature of love as Kierkegaard articulates it, and read to Jack from the paper titled, “Does loving make me a doormat?” which was my attempt at making sense of the need for self-care in my life as an RA who spent a lot of time looking after everyone else and putting other people’s needs first. When I finished reading the most personal essay I had written that semester, I looked up at Jack, nervous for his response. “Meghan,” he said, “not everyone can do the kind of work you’re doing, and the people who can, should.” I didn’t know then how true that would be, nor how often I would need to return to that moment, to struggle to believe those words, a blessing spoken over my work and my goals as I left the intellectual womb of Hope College for the wider world of academia. I return to them still, and I hope they are true.

After receiving rejection letter after rejection letter, I finally got a call. I returned to my apartment on St. Patrick’s Day 2007 to a message on the shared answering machine from the admissions director at Duke Divinity School, congratulating me on my acceptance to the Master of Theological Studies program. I jumped up and down on the couch in the empty apartment, squealing with glee, before calling my friends to come over and celebrate with me. That night we watched Waking Ned Divine and ate sticky toffee pudding, and the following morning we left for spring break. Our final semester was nearing its end, and my relationship with Kierkegaard was moving to the next level.