As I walked up, the first thing I heard was the mother wailing. These were not polite tears or soft sobs, but large, open, gutteral moans of grief. They were the sounds that the heart makes but the mouth does not often share in, utterances of dreams and sometimes of nightmares. She and her husband sat beneath a green tent in front of a box no larger than a tool box, suspended above an earth covered in green felt, the dirt politely dressed in matching green cloth.
Vincent and Doreen’s baby was born dead. We had known this was a strong possibility, that Ryan-David would, through the sentence of a genetic deformity, not live long. But to be born already dead: this was something else. I don’t remember the first funeral that I went to; I remember the ones that I have missed: my grandmother, Chip Conyers, my great-uncle. But these were the old, or at least the old-er, ones whose lives could be celebrated by recounting the shape of their life and the faith of their heart. But what do you do when death visits someone before their life begins?
Do you speak of how they kicked? Of how their punches on uterine walls sounded like drumbeats, rhythms and soundings of an unknown world? Of the shape the belly took, large like a medicine ball? Do you speak of their parents, their siblings? How do you talk about a life that did not come to be, and yet, as evidenced by the small box suspended above the earth, took on a shape and a name? For this was no miscarriage, but a baby borne to term, and dead. Death and birth are meant to be distant cousins, reunited only by the occasional love letters, but not meant to be bedmates.
The funeral took place in a section of the cemetery lined with little headstones mere feet apart, with dates mere months apart. Tiny hands and tiny spaces marked with tiny stones and tiny hopes under tiny bits of earth, a colony of children. It felt as if we were coming to a village, and offering up one to them that they instantly recognized as their own. These markers stood silent as we prayed and passed and read Psalms, and went home. The box was lowered into the ground and for the first time, I watched the actual burial, as a workman unveiled the dirt, moving soft shovelfulls into the hole. So softly, so quietly; we stood and watched as Ryan-David was separated from us. I couldn’t help but think of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and wonder if putting away the dead so soon was of any help to the grieving; putting a physical distance up does not stop love, but only defers into memory.
Death and birth are meant to be vast strangers. And one day, in the words of David, we will go to him, as he cannot come to us.
By the title above, I’m not simply suggesting that you should go here or perhaps here and check out what you can do regarding, say, the earth and all that is in it. But you probably should. Rather, in continuation with figuring out what a doctorate in theology does, I’ll take the upcoming Farm Bill as a point of departure. Thomas Aquinas once said that theology concerned those things which have been revealed by faith, namely God, being the creator of all things. And so, when we talk theology, we talk of the matter in which God relates to all things. Thus, theology isn’t a separate matter from the farm bill or from communion or social injustice or how the church is made up. These things necessarily belong together.
When I started my doctorate, I was really interested in ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church: what is the church? how is it sustained? how does ecumenism happen? For the record, I still am. I believe that theology is something that all people do, as all people act explicitly or implicitly on the kind of God they believe is (or isn’t) around. But if we’re talking Christian theology, we have to start with how the people who are encountering the incarnate God in Christ are doing this. I won’t deny that Christian theology is sharpened by all kinds of saws: Foucault, nominalism, Aristotle, Marx. But Christian theology must always be focused through the lens of how God’s people are together doing this thing called following Jesus. Anyway, prolegomena over.
As I’ve gone on in my program, while I’m still interested in what makes up the church, my interests have shifted somewhat to those things which the church does, namely how it interacts with the things God interacts with: the world, social systems, reform movements. How does the church participate in peace movements? How do democracy and the kingdom of God connect and collide? Who are the formers and framers of how the church today thinks of its engagement with the world? And how do we go from here? If theology is to have its roots, it must consider these kinds of questions, and not be content to simply dicker around with its own internal life. In the words of Hans Frei, you can only clear your throat for so long before you finally have to say something.
It’s taken about two years of running the gamut and grazing from the buffet line of the tradition of Christian theology to come to this place of saying that if what we believe about God does not ultimately enact itself in these sorts of questions, I can’t see what good it is. This is not to say that we shouldn’t think about Trinity or Eucharist or metaphysics; these are absolutely essential to being able to do the rest of it correctly. But as Paul reminds us, we’re looking through a dark glass. We’ve been given enough to see by faith, and if the history of theology tells us anything, it is that how we see through that glass has changed and will probably change again: Calvinism was replaced by German liberalism which was eclipsed by early Fundamentalism, which is being eclipsed by a new kind of catholic spirit–these sorts of things happen.
How one thinks about God will inevitably dictate how one then acts in the world. However, we are not machines who think first and act later. We act as we think, think as we act, an inseparable morass of being. So let us not wait to pin down our thinking before doing something. Let us do something and let God transform our thinking in the process.
What does it look like to do a doctorate in theology? Such an enormous question. Lemme break it down.
On one level, it doesn’t require anything more than it takes to do a doctorate in any other field. And by that, I mean, it requires your life and everything in it. You do seminars, write papers, present at conferences, schmooze, write little book reviews, all in the effort of landing a job at the end of the day. Like other doctorates, it requires time, patience, deferring little pleasures toward a larger goal, habits of mind.
Like other doctorates, it leads to misunderstanding from those who think you’re not doing a real job. Like other doctorates, it means that you’ll become a stranger to lots of pop culture references and spend an inordinate amount of money on books. It means that you’ll start laughing at things that two years ago, weren’t really that funny, and aren’t really that funny now. It means that you’ll spend a lot of money to get good coffee, peace and quiet, and strong sedatives.
Unlike other doctorates, however, for the Christian, the theology doctorate gets a little more personal. It starts asking questions about the core convictions of the world, about those things which make the Christian tick outside and in. It introduces Christian faith to strange bedfellows like Foucault and Lacan, Marx and Dorothy Day, Augustine and Therese of Liseux. It makes you get to know the family in a way that before you didn’t really want to know them before. If a doctorate in theology does anything, it makes one take seriously the questions of what it means to think through the story of the Christian faith.
This is not to say that other doctorates for Christians don’t do the same thing; it was Aquinas who defined theology, after all, as having to do with God, and thus, with everything that God created. So, in a sense, all subjects that Christians study are good objects of study, and ones that might direct their gaze toward God. Theology differs from these, in that you spend your time not looking at what our gaze might fall on, but how one gazes. You spend your time hearing different spins on the topic, of reading the history of looking, of trying on new sets of glasses in search of ones that bring the world into sharper focus.
It’s hard on the soul to do a doctorate in theology, because one day I looked up and realized that I had moved. I realized that my mind and soul had shifted into a place that I could never have expected; it wasn’t a bad place, but a different place, and with different neighbors and different friends standing nearby. Old neighbors still did their lawns and took out the trash, but their houses, while still houses, didn’t look like mine anymore. We were still homeowners, and citizens, and breathers of air, but not neighbors in the geographical sense. In the biblical sense of neighbor, yes; in the sense that someone who lives in Chicago and someone who lives in Fiji are neighbors, no. So, I’m in a metaphysical Boise and trying to maintain connection with my roots, which are elsewhere. But in some important ways, I feel like I see more clearly here than I could there. Some folks see better at sea-level, looking at grasses indigenous there; apparently, I’ve gotten more accustomed to looking at potato roots and the Rockies.
Truth One: A doctorate in theology makes you conscious of your own genealogy in ways that you never expected.
With any life-consuming prospect, be it parenthood or a doctoral program, there come a number of changes, not only to one’s routines, but to one’s self. You start looking at things in different ways; the pieces fit together slightly differently than they did before. In my case, I found myself looking at the Economist for insights as to how the Holy Spirit might be drawing all of this world together into something resembling the Kingdom of God. When the Bible makes your head hurt, go to British journalism.
One of the largest things that I’ve learned about myself in the last two years is that, against my own best desires, I throw myself into my work. After spending two years in retail reading and auditing classes and taking any writing gig I could get, I was a hungry little student going back in, and threw myself into it with total abandon. My assistantship that first year was a glorified work-study position, and a time for me to have 15 hours a week to read all the things I’d been missing out on, and in some ways, to learn to read all over again. But the work of grad school is like any other kind of hard discipline. First, you despise it because it’s knocking you down and breaking you over its knee. Then, you realize the benefits of it, and grow to appreciate it. Then, you see the internal logic of it, and grow to love it. And finally, with your mind and soul so fully atuned to how it works, you grow to need it.
And so, after spending three weeks in Africa, detoxing from another semester, I found myself yesterday afternoon in my room, churning out two book reviews and corresponding with some other folks on school-related stuff. In July. On a Saturday.
This has got to stop. On the one hand, the academic life doesn’t really have weekends or summers. I mean, yeah, you get three months off a year, but not really. Those months are filled with doing the things you didn’t get to do during the school year because you were working 80 hours a week. It’s nothing more than habit, the product of training at the hands of a system designed to take a half-formed mind and turn it into a keen, slimmed-down thinking machine. You get used to doing this stuff, and so, at the end of the day, you don’t mind it: in fact, you love it.
**
I think back to the professors I had in undergrad and how relaxed they appeared, or at least how relaxed I remember them appearing. When I think harder, I see little wrinkles, furrowed brows, dark circles, mounds of grading. It’s funny how memory gives you the good stuff and blocks out the warning signs. I think that’s a trueism in general beyond those things you’re pursuing as a life goal, be it with regards to a relationship or whatever: the memory is the kindest filter, deleting the rough edges so that all your memories can sit well together in your brain.
Did these professors ever wonder what the hell they were doing? Did they ever curse their lot? Did they have balance? Did they get out? Every so often, I eye the back door and wonder if it’s not too late to run. But then I realize that I love this, and that there’s nothing I’d rather be doing, and that at this point, I’m too much a part of this to do other than change things from the inside.
Next: What the hell does a doctorate in theology look like?
I’ve not blogged consistently in about four months, I think, mostly because I haven’t had much to say. When I was working at Barnes and Noble and was reading and thinking about more than simply what was next on the docket toward this degree I’ve been churning away at for the last two years, I feel like my writing was a lot more fertile, the words a lot more vivid and meaningful. But recently, that’s not been the case.
Case in point: after I write this, I’m going to churn out 250 words reviewing a book on theologies of baptism.
Case in point: this week, I wrote 1,000 words on the Salvation Army for a different publication.
Case in point: the only things that I’ve felt passionate about writing in the last four months were my travelouges from Kenya and Rwanda, and the debriefing emails since that time.
When I write about life, about real people, my heart and words come to life like a child laughing. When I’m writing sterile analyses of the Salvation Army’s history, my mind feels like a green chalkboard, dust clapping its way into the air as the children choke and the teacher’s eyes glaze over–repetitive, ridiculous, and a bit trapped. In a lot of ways, in this free time of my life, I feel trapped. And I can’t put a finger on it.
So, this is the goal for the next bit: digging to the roots. I’ll be covering what it means to do a doctorate in theology, if for no other reason than to dispell some of the rumors and shed light on the life of a doctoral student. I’m tired of people making the jibes of not having a real job, and of people’s jaws dropping when I tell them that some weeks I put in 70-80 hours between work and classes. I’m tired of people asking if I’m going to pastor when I get done, and of being asked if I’m studying Greek and Hebrew. I love Jesus, but I don’t do Greek or Hebrew, and God help those that have to.
In the process, this is what I hope to do: figure out how to write about these things in ways that don’t come off sounding like cocktail party conversations, and more like telling stories. If life is one narrative, which, for all its twists and turns and frayed edges hopes to have some internal coherence, then talking about my academic life and telling stories should not be two different ventures. My examples are limitless: Rowan Williams, Annie Dillard, David James Duncan, Robert Pirsig–all people who know the strain of taking very big things and telling them in ways that are tangible and split the ribs.
So, here we go. I need this. If anyone reads it, all the better. This is my little apologia, the beginning and the present, with the end firmly out of sight.
