Reflections on Cerebral Sadomasochism

Today I was at lunch with a couple guys from my Philosophy class that were stranger enough to me that I had to ask their names upon leaving the conversation. The class and the conversations and these disagreements are such nostalgic deja vu to me - Euthyphro's Dilemma today, and a million attempts a definitions of "morality." Agent-based or essential understandings? Is God inherently good, or otherwise? What is goodness, what is justice, what is piety? How will we go about defining these things? What can we know? I'm the resident token over-excited heretic again, and so I stayed after class to talk about my thoroughly pluralist, postmodern understanding of God's "existence" again, and ended up around a table and sandwiches with a couple perplexed and intrigued inquisitors trying to figure out how the hell I could mean what I was saying again.

I love it. I love every moment of it. This is my bread and butter, it is my intellectual milk, it makes me squeal just as much as it did when I was that fourteen-year-old kid in my first class on philosophical religious thought and dialogue. It is the same stuff I was writing about nearly four years ago, now, when I started this blog, and the same stuff that's provoked several life-altering existential crises. This is all so important to me, but it has been part of my life and my thinking for so long that I know how the ideas resonate with me and, more relevantly, I know how they have very clearly not worked.

People have been suggesting the most fascinating things to me in this Philosophy class. As little as Ancient Greek philosophy has changed since the first time I encountered it, I certainly have, and people's reactions to my ideas have. I have been suggestively asked whether I knew what sophistry was and told to wait until I have children to reject moral absolutism by my professor; I have been asked whether I've read Nietzsche as a direct response to description of my understanding of God; and then, because I said I enjoyed staying after class arguing with my professor and peers even though I knew we probably wouldn't get anywhere, I was called a sadomasochist by one of the guys with whom I was having lunch.

He was not at all menacing or accusatory as much as perplexed in his description and did not know the depth of his statement's implications, but it has caused me to reconsider very seriously the way I continue to go about that class. The way I do and have done education. In many ways, on an intellectual level, I feel so weathered - twice the age I should be, worn and shaped by all the many ideas I have absorbed and embodied and discerned and deeply "wrestled" with. Last year this time, I was weary and without any sense of peace or direction, any church, any community, anything to latch onto. But now, having found a fulfilling spiritual home and having thoroughly figured out my relationship to Christianity, I am satisfied. 

Satisfied. I'd often wondered whether I would ever make my way to that word again. I have no more reason to be ploughing my way through all these arguments. I have "been there, done that" so many times that it feels immature for me to speak of it as some kind of accomplishment. And still, I keep reentering the space. I keep "wresting with" old ideas, ideas that I have long settled, that I have understood as best as I'm likely to, and that I have let go.

Sometimes I feel like a homing pigeon - I was going to say a dog returning to its vomit, but the vomit is beautiful in many ways. The homing pigeon has found a better home where it's been sent, but it keeps coming back, like a boomerang. It keeps trying and trying and trying to fly the paths it has been told to, because it's been told that flying has an inherent positive spiritual worth. But its wings have grown strong and it has an excellent sense of direction, and it has found a tree it loves. Its training has done it much good and achieved its purposes. There is no reason to keep flying that same path. There is no reason to etch grooves into that patch of air.

Here I am, Year 6 of Classical Christian Liberal Arts Higher Education, fighting the good fight and discerning the hell out of everything. I have chosen this path because I didn't want what was easy - I bought the idea that there's worth in this exercise. There is something comfortable about this motion. I've been doing it for long enough that I'm used to it and the routine is "comfortable" despite its discomfort. But where has this practice brought me?

Well, some kind of deep spiritual satisfaction, like I said. I have been forced to squeeze my way through the cannon set Classical Christian Liberal Arts Higher Education dilemmas and it has unintentionally produced something that I genuinely think works for me. But having said that, it has brought me a shit ton of really hilarious side-effects.

Let's just take a moment to absorb the fact that I am a progressive ex-Evangelical Liberal Quaker feminist massively queer Christian mostly-atheist at a college of 4000 conservative Calvinist students in a small midwestern city. I moved here from the other side of the country by my own election. Thousands of dollars of tuition ensure my place here every semester. This is the place, of all places, I have decided to go. I am not bitter and I can honestly say that I have loved this institution, but after years of exhausting myself in Classical Christian Liberal Arts Higher Education, I put myself back here to do some more. I do not fit here. Why have I come back?

At some point, the lesson is just.... over.

At some point, I'm just going to have to find a place that has comfortable room for me to be and grow and thrive without putting myself through some kind of struggle I've been taught is noble.

At some point, I just want to have a girlfriend. I don't want to be on the margins of campus culture. I don't want to be in a society that makes queer gender feel like an impediment to safety. I want to be around more people that didn't grow up so similarly to the way I did, even if they come from a different place or culture. I want to know people that religiously identify as something other than "Christian," "Agnostic," or "Atheist." I want to have access to speakers that have interests that resonate with mine. No more sex-negativity and gay abstinence, no more how to empower women oppressed by the church and how to resist drugs and alcohol, no more free will vs predestination and whether or not God created the world in more than seven days.

At some point, real-life struggles that have practical application to real-life problems should be the ones occupying my thoughts, not the way I should be thinking about and responding to 2500-year-old philosophical concepts - and 21st-century ones, for that matter - that I worked through and rejected half a decade ago.

It's time to start living. I want to let go.