World Without End

My sophomore year of college was arguably the most difficult year I spent at Florida State University. Having spent most of my middle school and high school years in an evangelical setting, I found upon becoming a Religion major that many of the things that were circulated in the evangelical circles about Religion departments weren’t true. The most common one being, of course, the ever doom-filled warning, “Be careful. They’ll make you lose your faith.”

I always found that statement to be strange. It was as though my faith could be “lost” or “misplaced” in the same way that one loses a set of keys or a pair of glasses. However there I was, Fall semester sophomore year, and little by little, without any idea as to when it had begun, I was losing it. Each morning when I woke up I felt like I had less of it than I did the day before, and I could not figure out for the life of me how to recover it or where I may have placed it in order to retrieve it. But what caused most of what ended up being almost a two-year struggle to “find my faith again” was not difficult theological questions, or the long history of scribal errors in our holy writ, or antagonistic professors (a stereotype which I never saw fulfilled by my wonderful professors at FSU), or even the messes that are our long history of anti-semitism, the oppression of women, and the holy wars. No. None of that was it.

I was “losing my faith” because I realized that the faith upon which I had built my entire life looked nothing like what I found in my text books. Martyrs, creeds, saints, desert fathers, theological crises, liturgy, eschatology, women mystics, ancient traditions, sacraments–entire empires of people!–what was all of this?! who were they? This looked nothing like the white walls, “rockband worship band,” bright lights and sound boards, individual devotions Christianity I had always known.
I did not recognize my own religion.

Now, before I continue, I want to make very clear that this is not a post that is meant to bash the tradition I grew up in or the people in that community. They were good to me, and as I write many faces come to mind of people who loved me dearly and whom I loved in return. Nor do I want to paint the caricature that there was never mention of the above topics. But it was not like what was suddenly in front of me. And though I have been gone for years, I do think it is fair to say that when I was there, there was very little emphasis on such things. [I am currently calling to mind a conversation I had not long ago with a rather prominent individual in the community who looked at me completely puzzled when I mentioned the Nicene Creed; they had never heard of it. And another conversation when I was asked by someone else if Anglicanism is a cult, which I found hurtful since I had just been confirmed; but this person had never heard of that, either.]

Nonetheless here I was: a Christian, studying a Christianity I had never heard of. I was hurt, I was confused . . . I was so, so angry. And my troubles began much at my own hand. Immediately out of my anger I began to violently and wrongfully sever ties with everyone I could whom I saw as connected to my evangelical life. They are liars, I thought, also wrongly, pastors and leaders especially. They cannot be trusted. They have lied to me and what they haven’t knowingly hidden from me has been kept from me because my church has thrown it away. Friend by friend I cut myself from away. Those I did not suspect of malice I reduced to ignorance, and left them to their fate of being led blindly for the rest of their days.

By the time I rounded around to Spring semester sophomore year I was without community, without a church, or hardly anyone associated with my religion whom I trusted, and I had yet to find anything that “looked like” that Christianity I felt had been denied me. Soon, as I pushed away on one side and lost on the other, I began to pick up something new: anxiety attacks. Mostly I had them right after I got up in the morning. It was always the same thought. It was not that I did not believe in God anymore or did not want to believe in God. Rather it was that I felt like God had left. Disappeared to who-knows-where, and I did not know how or where to find God again. Maybe I misplaced God with my faith and my keys. And with the disappearance of God everything I had built my life, my hopes for the future, my career goals, my ‘day-to-day’ upon – that disappeared with God, too. And that is when I would begin to have an anxiety attack, because it was just me sitting at the edge of the bed and no one else was with me.

Then I met Matt. It was the Thursday of the first week of classes that Spring. I had three classes back-to-back on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Matt was in the first and third classes with me, and on that first Thursday, after “class one,” he made the connection and approached me. We began talking, which then turned into walking and talking as I had to get to my second class. Thus began a tradition which was maintained for every subsequent Tuesday and Thursday for the next 16 weeks: he walked me to class. He was Catholic, and while I still self-identified as a Christian, he had no idea what was happening in and around me. In fact, I made sure not to tell him. I was afraid that if I told him it would ruin the friendship, which I could not let happen. He was the only stable connection I had to Christianity, and I wasn’t ready to let go just yet.

For the most part we would talk about general things going on in our lives, but often we would talk about faith. Well, really he would talk about faith and I would listen. I hung onto what he said like it was water, and I was in a dry and weary land. He never preached. He mostly just thought out loud. But when he spoke I felt like I could hear martyrs; I could hear ancient tradition; I could hear genuine questioning and struggling that was unafraid; I could hear assurance. What was most intriguing to me about the pair we made was that I am a raging extrovert (which usually leaves me embarrassed), and Matt is a raging introvert (which usually leaves him miserably lonely), and yet most days it was most helpful for him to speak and for me to be silent. I was never embarrassed, and he was never lonely. Matt was not “un-cool” or “socially awkward,” but whenever I try to describe him to someone, the best I have come up with to say is, “It is as though he was perfectly fit for a place I cannot figure out. It feels like he was abstracted from elsewhere. He could get along just fine in our world and in life. But I always felt like he had an adventure waiting for him in some place I cannot articulate.”

I looked forward to every Tuesday and Thursday. On the days when class was cancelled or schedules were somehow changed, we would meet anyway. That un-official fifteen minutes was holy, set apart. My anxiety attacks stopped, and I soon began to feel my heart and spirit healing. Somewhere about halfway into the semester, Matt, who was an English major and graduating that semester, finally answered the one question he had always skirted around every time I asked it.

“So what do you want to be when you grow up?”
…and finally one day he said, “A monk.”
“Oh,” I looked at him a little shocked, and then I smiled. “Okay then.”

Once he made his big confession everything just got that much better. He would talk openly about his desire for the monastic life, and I was all the more intrigued to hear. Whenever I think about that semester, every memory I recall is sunny.

After he graduated we wrote e-mails back and forth to keep in touch. Finally, the July before my senior year he wrote me one final e-mail telling me he had been invited into a Benedictine monastery in Pennsylvania. He had to leave right away, and would not be allowed to use the internet for the next year. But, if I was willing, we could write letters.

So for the next twelve months we wrote our friendship out by hand. I have dozens of letters in a folder in my room: letters about his first year as a monk, about my job as a youth minister, about how I was soon to be confirmed Anglican, about his discernment at the monastery, an entire letter in which he tried to convince me of transubstantiation (he gave a valiant effort, ha), and about how I missed Uganda so much it hurt.

Finally, after three years of communicating through e-mails and letters (and then e-mails once again), I was able to visit him last month. It was over Spring break, and I drove the 8 hours to St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, PA. When I arrived I called his room to tell him I would meet him in front of the basilica. And as I stood on the steps taking in the mountain view, I heard someone say my name. I looked over, and saw Matt rounding the corner in his habit. There it was: the adventure I knew he was meant for. It was so right. It was good. From Friday afternoon to Monday morning I joined with him in the monks’ life at St. Vincent’s. Prayer three times a day, and walking and talking all day in between (an activity with which we were perfectly content). He showed me where he liked to pray, liked to study, and where he worked. We joked about the monastery cat and the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was wonderful. It was ‘sunny.’

On Saturday night at dinner I was telling him about school and he asked me about Field Placement (the required internship for my graduate program) and what kind of placement I requested for the summer.

“I told them that I want to walk people to class for the summer.”

He looked a little confused and asked me to explain. So over the next 10 minutes I began to tell him all about what he had meant to me that semester. I told him about my struggles, and my pain and loneliness, and how to this day some of my attempts to repair those broken relationships have not been successful because of just how angrily and violently I went on my rampage. I told him that his friendship was the reason I had remained stable, and that he taught me more about ministry than anyone I had ever known. And I told the Field Placement office about him because I want to spend my summer doing for others what he did for me.

“Wow. Really? Wow. I had absolutely no idea,” he said, blushing, and I laughed.

I spent four glorious days at St. Vincent’s. During my last Morning Prayer there, I sat in the pew next to Matt and chanted the psalm along with him and the other monks, thinking about how I was proud of him for being courageous enough to do what he has done with his life. I thought about all he had done for me, and the amazing friend I was not expecting when I needed him most. I thought about how God had not disappeared. Matt is my proof.

As we rounded the end of the chant and stood in unison for the Gloria Patri, I, like an idiot, broke into a huge grin.

And together we bowed, and sang,

“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son :
and to the Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be :
world without end.

Amen.”

-Anna

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