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Personal Narrative5/08/2007 18:10:22This is a personal narrative I'm working on in the process of a paper responding to Timothy Fitzgerald's The Ideology of Religious Studies in an effort to justify the academic study of religion in political and pedagogical, rather than methological, terms. When I arrived at Brown University as a freshman, having turned 18 less than a month before, I had a sort of mission. Though not in so few words, I was looking for a religion. The previous year had been an opening of the floodgates. Beginning with a sudden realization one afternoon in the shower, I decided that as my high school “senior project” I would visit a monastery. I keep trying to figure out where the idea had come from but can’t. Over the course of those last months in high school, while contemplating the end of living at home between just-separated parents, I took to reading religion voraciously. For the first time, really, I read about Christianity with an open mind. I dragged my then-girlfriend to churches and places of worship of different kinds, and when she got bored, I went alone. Then, for the last two weeks or so of high school, after classes and standardized exams had finished, I arranged to live “in community” at a Catholic monastery about a two hours’ drive from my home in Virginia. It belonged to the Trappist order, among the strictest of the Christian contemplatives. For those weeks the monks actually let me, an unbaptized 17 year old, live among them and share in their life. I rose at three in the morning for prayers, worked in the fruitcake factory, learned to sing the chants, and scoured their rich library. It was a difficult and confusing experience but, probably for that reason, generated nagging questions in me. Before that monastery, religion was something that was never really mine. Growing up, my parents had been spiritual seekers. Occasionally we would fly to California to visit the ashram of Eknath Easwaran, an Indian spiritual teacher and writer. I have strong memories of climbing over my parents as they meditated and eating while they experimented with fasting. Later my mother (raised in a midwestern Protestant family) became deeply devoted to Ramana Maharshi, a remarkable Tamil saint who died in 1950. Meanwhile my father (raised in a casually Jewish family) grew less and less interested in spiritual practices, but he shared with me his powerful appreciation of medieval European culture. On trips to Europe we went to church after church after church and made special trips to see the religious sculpture of Tilman Riemenschneider. But I was always the observer. My own subjectivity had no need of gods or any of that. The education I received in the public schools of a Washington, D.C. suburb was so secular I didn’t think it strange. I didn’t know the religions of almost all of my friends, and we never made occasion to talk about it. I remember distinctly one day a European history teacher having to explain the most basic points of Christian theology because otherwise we seemed to have no way of understanding what the Reformation was all about. Reading Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in occasional philosophy classes taught by a local taxi driver and filmmaker were the first time I began to feel religious questions subjectively begged. Part of what made the monastery so revelatory was that it unexpectedly placed in the familiar-but-foreign context of Christianity the contemplative meditation practices that were so much a part of the background of my growing up. It borrowed from the background and turned it into something mine. After that my quest was self-propelled. The following summer I went for a weekend at another Trappist monastery in Kentucky and a weekend at a Theravada Buddhist retreat in West Virginia. Everywhere I went I looked for religion, perplexing my friends, with whom such things were still never talked about. My first months in college, when the stereotype is supposed to be excessive drinking and promiscuity, were a religious bonanza. Brown is far better known for a party called “Sex Power God” than for its more recognizable religiosity, but I milked it for what I could. I took a class on Islam while attending Buddhist meditation, Catholic mass, and whatever miscellaneous events or speakers I saw announced. At first I had no idea what I was, but I figured it out surprisingly quickly. By the end of my first semester, I was attending Catholic initiation classes and had dropped the Buddhist meditation. I felt like I’d found a place where I could see God. That Easter I was baptized at the vigil Mass. My parents were surprised, I suppose, but they were both supportive enough to be there for it, seated in separate pews. In retrospect, this conversion cannot be thought of apart from their recent divorce, which had been brought on in part by their diverging religiosity. Life stabilized somewhat after that. As always, none of my closest friends had any interest in religion, so my faith was a rather private one. That was fine with me. The first two years I floated through possible majors, from philosophy to creative writing to astronomy. Sophomore year, I declared computer science and had a lot of fun with that until burning out in the spring. Junior year, after a summer of more religious tourism, I jumped full force into religious studies, where I’d been taking classes casually all along. Immediately I felt at home. The religion departments at Brown (Judaic studies is separate from religious studies) felt like the perfect expression of my own little journey. One professor would expose me to all the literature of “reductionism,” which spoke warmly to the secular-scientific metaphysics I’d picked up in high school. When it became too much for my newfound Catholicism, however, I would go knocking on the door of a Christian professor until I mustered the confidence to keep going. I took classes in ancient Chinese religion, religious ethics, and I studied Hebrew for a year in order to take a graduate seminar about formations of orthodoxies in antiquity. If it was religious, I wanted to learn it. And not much else. Probably most of all, I loved talking with the other religion majors. We all knew we were there because of a peculiar curiosity, because of something in us that needed working out, even as we were told in class that religious studies was about something much more critical and detached. When I was a senior we started a journal that questioned this detachment by juxtaposing academic essays with confessional prose, art, and poetry. It was a wonderful way to expose our assumptions a little, and we learned a whole lot about each other in those editorial sessions, testing our theological limits however we could. Over the course of college, my religiosity persisted. I became a leader in Brown’s Catholic community and was handsomely decorated for it at graduation. My thinking and feeling now wavers between a pretty decent impression of orthodoxy and aesthetic distance. Catholic faith and practice is important to me, but so is everything else: who I am with my secular friends and education, with my increasingly devoted mother’s guru, and with my grandfather’s rediscovery of Judaism. I am in love with a non-Catholic. As I now try to share in these things also, I feel simultaneous convergence and divergence. But perhaps what is most peculiar is the considerable stability I feel with this strange amalgamation, which would be welcome so few other human communities, as a student in my department. I liked studying religion so much I went right on to graduate school at UC Santa Barbara. I still wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to study but I knew it was religious. The program appealed to me because it was in a public university and had interdisciplinary tendencies. Though I applied to a theology program as well, I had already decided that the only way I could think about religion the way I needed to was within the freedom of a secular, pluralistic community. There, I have been jumping into thoroughly naturalistic, reductionistic work in the cognitive science of religion, which would have been difficult to find in a confessional theology department. Though I may work as a philosopher or an anthropologist, it is around religion, whatever people mean by it, that I look for my conversation partners. It is there that I find a satisfying pleasure.
re:Personal Narrative - 5/11/2007 11:28:51
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