Elizabeth's Bright Maidens post really resonated with me since she described the stage that I'm grappling with right now - figuring out how to balance my faith and my professional life. When I interviewed at my grad program, I described my volunteer work with the poor and my love for fancy museums as "two halves of me that I'm trying to reconcile." Two years later, that is still a work in progress.
One of the new lambs on the museum grounds |
I'm startling to realize that this is another conversion opportunity. I have to decide to be Catholic not because it's what my parents taught me, or because I'm afraid of hell, or even because I loved my college campus ministry community. No, it has to be something I choose myself, today, for the way I live right now. But exactly how do I make that choice?
Lamb of God headstone at my Delaware parish |
God gave my jumbled mind and heart a breakthrough this Tuesday as I sat with the daily readings in my local parish. My over-academic brain noticed that there was a lot of material culture in the Gospel accounts of Holy Week - clothes, dishes, donkeys, attic spaces, plants, money. Maybe the two halves of me weren't so separate after all...
I thought about all the reasons why Catholics are supposedly weird:
- We talk about people and things most people have never heard of. Oh wait, that's what my classmates and I do all day long. Normal people don't spend car rides discussing Chippendale chairs, museum ethics, vernacular architecture theories, or Jackson Lears' conception of antimodernism.
- We have goofy rituals and traditions that are off-putting to outsiders. Well, at grad school dinner parties we flip over chairs, climb under tables, and analyze the china. (Seriously, I did that last weekend.)
- Then there's that sticky final issue of poverty and self denial. Frankly, I can't think of a better way to describe getting a master's degree or PhD. Case closed.
late 1800s embroidered Lamb of God burse at Church of the Transfiguration, NYC |
There are times when studying history feels similar. Sometimes my mind envisions a timeline of people and events stretching back through the decades, connected by threads of causes and ideas. Good history books weave a complex web of lives and stories to help us understand how the world got the way it is now. The best way I can try to explain it is a kind of 3-D or polarized filter, and you have to make a point to turn it on.
Today, Holy Thursday, I turned in my master's thesis about Episcopal vestments. The whole thing is secretly about the allure of the Eucharist, so it's perfect that it ended on the day Christ instituted that very sacrament. Maybe God is trying to tell me something.
For the rest of the Triduum, I'll be praying for the converts waiting to be Confirmed, and working on my own conversion. I'll be praying for God to open the eyes of my heart, so I can see the connections that have yet to be made.
This is really beautiful. It gave me a great perspective on my life as well, and I am not a grad student or historian.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this!
ReplyDeleteBeautiful! Thank you for your reflection, its very fitting this Good Friday morning!
ReplyDeleteThank you! This is something I struggle to reconcile as well, especially since my section of academia seems in many ways anti-religious (or at least ambivalent). Faith has really interested me in the ethics of anthropology and archaeology, not so much towards places and objects but people - descendants and contemporary communities. It's a hard line to walk, though - it seems like people on both sides find it difficult to accept someone who is in-between "worlds".
ReplyDeleteWow Sarah... I love almost every paragraph of this post. When I say almost, I mean I like all of them, but I really love the second, fifth through seventh grafs. I love making connections, and I think a lot of people try to separate religion from their work, without realizing that religion and faith is exactly what enriches knowledge.
ReplyDeleteThis is brilliant. Thank you for sharing this! Wow, I have to read it again...
ReplyDeleteI LOVE this, Sarah. Reconciling my faith with the rest of the world has been on my mind a lot lately too. Happy Easter and Congrats on turning in the thesis. :)
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