Monday, September 06, 2004
(9:13 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On not making any damn sense
As I sit down to write on this last day of my summer vacation -- a summer vacation that has been one of the best of my life, certainly the best of my "adult" life -- I feel as though there is no aspect of my life that makes sense in terms of being congruent with the other aspects. For instance, despite some slacking in recent months, I am still a fairly devout Roman Catholic, complete with frequent morning or evening prayer, occasional rosaries and even the stray weekday mass. I am also enrolled in a program in theology at a liberal Protestant seminary with some fairly radical institutional commitments in terms of sexual liberation, and faculty with often even more radical commitments. Those two facts do not seem to me to be compatible with each other, but I have no plans to discontinue either practice in the immediate future.To pick up on the second point again, I am officially studying theology, but the vast majority of my reading has been in continental philosophy. My theological papers have all been significantly taken up with philosophical questions and with defending philosophers against theologians' critiques. Beyond the merely aesthetic question of what I enjoy studying, I am currently in a state of pretty radical questioning when it comes to the basics of Christianity, the very naive questions: How was the cross supposed to do us any good? Why did Jesus have to say so many things that seem to lead directly to capitalist approaches to ethics? Why does the institutional church suck so much, so often?
Certainly there's a part of me that finds a great deal about the gospel to be attractive, but I wonder how helpful it is to discuss those attractive aspects from the perspective of a church member or even a "believer" -- and in general, right now I can't bring myself to say that the Christian narrative holds the solution to all of the world's problems. Unless we're going to play the game where if the gospel has had negative effects, then that's not what I meant by the gospel, I'm even willing to say that the gospel -- as it actually is, as it has actually, in fact been understood -- has had negative effects in the world. And so, of course, in my local parish I am on the adult education committee and have assisted for several years in the program to catechize aspiring new Catholics.
Then there's the fact that I live in Bourbonnais, literally across the street from my alma mater, and there's the much more vexing problem of my approach to women, which has not significantly changed since the days of The Homepage, with the various heart-wrenching essays that are available for your perusal -- a recent surge of better luck seems to me to have nothing to do with any steps toward greater maturity and mental health on my part, but is just that, better luck, utterly unexplainable, though deeply appreciated.
All this doesn't even begin to take into account my debilitating habit of being far too hard on myself, or my penchant for misplaced irony. As a friend recently told me (paraphrase), "A lot of times, when you tell me a story, I feel like I'll never figure out what really happened. It's not alluring or mysterious -- it's just annoying."
In short, classes start tomorrow, and I don't know what the hell I'm doing on any level. Taking Ted Jennings' class on Romans has been a goal of mine for a couple years, but at bottom, I'm taking the other two classes because I'm so far along with my degree that I can't afford not to finish it.
But anyway, I hope you all enjoyed your Labor Day.
