The Middle of Things. Meghan Florian
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