The Middle of Things. Meghan Florian
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.
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