A Personal Note on Conversion

I'm in the middle of preparing for the final, oral comprehensive examination for my MA in Philosophy at Boston College. I took a little break to try to get out what I've been thinking about as I close up this academic chapter of my life and put on hold what, by the original plan, should have been the next. Here are those (somewhat rambling) thoughts. This is a little more of a personal note and I hope that's alright.

In August, I move back to California from Boston. In Boston, I live alone in an apartment that costs just an incredible amount every month. I work part time for good money and I’ll be finishing an MA in Philosophy in a few days. I’ve been accepted to the PHD program at SIU Carbondale (a ways outside St. Louis) in Philosophy, though I wasn’t immediately offered any funding. My employment in Boston ends in mid-August and (as of writing this) I don’t have a job lined up in the Bay Area.

The plan was to get into a PHD program and become a philosophy professor at the sort of small, Christians liberal arts university we affectionately call “East Jesus NoWhere College.” That plan, for the moment, is on hold.

Why put that plan on hold? It’s not the most secure plan in the world. Philosophy, like the arts and so many of the humanities, is sidelined in many universities and jobs aren’t so easy to come by. And a PHD is like a union card for the academy.

Well, because I have a kind of religious devotion to the way things are done around here. I tithe to a religion with elaborate temples in Washington, DC. The priests and clerics of that religion want me perpetually taking on debt (education loans, home loans, car loans) and then I’ll be forced into labor in order to pay those debts and a portion of those earnings will go to the temple’s coffers. To make that labor (so peculiarly chosen and coerced at once…) tolerable, I’m offered distractions and spectacles for a small portion of the funds left over once my bills are paid. If I have children, I’ll work as hard as I can so that they can get into the religious schools and be taught the piety I learned as a boy. I’ll work hard and take on even more debt so that my child can earn the right and ability to take on even more debt than I was able. After all, I could take on more than my parents and them more than their parents.

This is the eschatology of my civic religion. That every generation will be able to borrow more than the last. Wealth is measured in how much you can afford to borrow. Security is being able to pay your debts.

Now, of course, that’s not the way I’d told the story to myself all these years. I had become like a Christian who takes the sacraments and attends masses without understanding why, but knowing only that if they do, somehow they are in God’s good graces. In other respects, I went about what were the more explicit desires of my heart: to pursue questions of meaning and value, so that I could help shape young people to be formed better than I had the chance to be. I want to be an educator.

And yet, I’ve come to realize that, if I’m ruthless with myself, I must recognize that my religious devotion is to the American Dream and not to the Kingdom of God. Certainly, I explicitly claim Christianity as my religion. And intellectually, I take what I think are probably ecclesiological (church inspired) positions on moral and political issues. Dig a little deeper, and you find the pagan-ness of my heart. I’ve got such selfishness and lust of all kinds lurking down there. But even then, I think one can dig deeper.

Deeper into how habitual action reveals what we REALLY value and what we really believe will bring us happiness, what will bring us Abundant Life. For me, like I’ve said before, its my fancy-ass cell phone. It’s also fancy coffee and my single-speed bike. My expensive haircut and my tattoos. My quirky-fashionable clothes.

How do I know this? Because when I’m bored, I whip out my cell phone. Because when I meet someone new, I hope they ask about my shoes or t-shirt. Because I spend most of my disposable income at the local café. Because those are the things I talk about. Because those are the things I’d be miserable if I was deprived of them. Because I plot what kind of car I should buy to complete my image and lifestyle.

Because those are the things on which I spend my precious, finite, gifted time on this beautiful planet.

So, I need to put my “way things are done around” here plans on hold for a while and change religions all the way down. Not just change my mind, or even my heart, but change my habits, my way. Otherwise, all I’ll have to offer my students is the surface play of words and ideas that are easily dismissed when push comes to shove.

After all, as Brother Milch put it, “as much as he’s her misery, the pimp's a whore’s familiar; and the sudden strange or violent draws her to him.”

Why now? Why, when my future is so much on the line at this perilous age? Why not get secure and then “better myself?”

Because “I’m no longer the boy I once was and I’m not yet the man I’ll be.”

Because, like Aristotle says, wealth and security are only the necessary external goods on which possible happiness rests. After all, those who suffer under tyrants will tell you that when you’re starving, you can’t think about bettering your circumstances. You think about food. About how hungry you are. And yet, if we say of wealth and security, “that is all I need and I’ll be happy,” we will wonder why we’re never brought to our fullest selves. To the men and women that we’ll be. We’ll suffer and never understand.

Or worse, we’ll never suffer and still not understand. After all, Brother Kierkegaard reminds us that the soul in despair that knows it is in despair is better off than the soul that is ignorant of its own despair.

Because the despairing soul that knows its state can seek salvation. The other doesn’t know it doesn’t know.

(As a side note, perhaps we should be careful calling good fortune by the name of God’s Blessing.)

The deal is, we’re dying.

And everyday I’m dying to this world, either into a grave from which there is no return, or, with Christ, into a grave from which we return more than we were. I can either be dragged to the former, all the while vainly hoping that my some magic I’ll be spared the universal fate of humans. And yet our very name, “Human,” means burial. Who can escape the return to dust? Who can wave Time away forever?

Or I can stop obsessing about empty stuff and take up my cross to march towards a death that opens unto life.

And yet, between here and there, is suffering.

I really, really hate suffering. I might tolerate some small suffering for some small reward. I am, after all, rather heavily tattooed. But raise the stakes and make more strange the suffering and more strange the reward, and I’ll pretend I never even heard of the option. The dull ache of a life unfulfilled or the sharp pain of suffering for an Abundant Kingdom?

I’ll take dull ache, thank you.

I know that’s my choice, because it’s the choice I’ve made everyday for as long as I can remember.

In mid-august, I start to choose differently and it scares the merciless shit out of me.

Now, let’s get things straight: this is no heroic shift.

No, these are going to be toddler’s steps. And there’s one thing we know for sure: toddlers stumble.

Often.