Someone gave me a sunflower once, I don’t remember who, but I was six or seven at the time and I loved that flower like I’d never loved anything. I loved its brightness, its bigness, the way it seemed to be continually bursting into existence, pushing its yellow face into the atmosphere. But because it was a flower I also knew it would die. I mourned its inevitable death before it was close, would stare at it, worriedly, in its vase at the center of the kitchen table. When it finally reached its end, withered and brown around the edges, drooping over after it had been so straight and tall and seemingly invincible, my father lifted it up, took my hand in his, and led me into the vacant lot behind our house. It was dotted with trees and bushes, but mostly grass—grass as tall as me at the time. We laid the wilted sunflower down, gently, reverently, and I thought my father meant for us to hold its funeral since he knew how much I loved it. But instead he looked at me and said, “You wait,” and then turned around and led us back into the yard, past the swing set and onto the patio.
The following August and every late summer and fall after that until the lot was paved over to make room for a new house, great, tall sunflowers rose up among the grasses, more and more each year. We could see them from the kitchen through the glass doors at breakfast. I was as certain then as I am now that my father made this annual miracle happen on my behalf, evidence of his love for me multiplying through each new sunflower season like the story of the loaves and the fishes, but far better.
Back in the seventies and eighties, Rhode Island could shelter you like a great big festive tent, full of sea and sand and the simple pleasures of life, noisy with the kind of accents that people make fun of after hearing them on television and in the movies.
“Ray’s out pahking the caah,” my mother would say all the time when people asked where my father was, after he dropped us off at the door of wherever we were headed, like a gentleman—my father has always been a gentleman. My college roommates used to listen to the messages my mother left on our answering machine in awe, save them to play back again, sometimes for guests, because her accent was so strong it seemed unbelievable to them.
When I was little and learning to spell, taking in the rules about silent vowels and such, I remember my eureka moment when I realized there must be a silent r. How else could I account for the fact that words that didn’t sound like they had r’s in them—haaht, paaht, caah, prayyah—were spelled so differently on the page: heart, part, car, prayer? Why had nobody taught me this specific lesson about r’s in school? When I told my mother about this brainstorm that seemed to solve a great spelling puzzle, she laughed and laughed and explained to me about accents and how they could swallow letters like black holes in people’s speech. She was a teacher herself, and I remember how upset I became about how everyone spoke around us, my parents included, like they were trying to trick me, make it harder for children to learn to read and to spell. I told her she should fix this, that it wasn’t right or fair to her students that she spoke this way, almost like lying to them, which only made her laugh even more.
Rhode Island could shelter you with its simplicity, its annual rhythms of going to the beach in summer, going to school during fall, winter, and spring, and church on Sundays regardless of the season. It’s also the place where I learned in first grade, by accident, right around the time my father was making miracles with sunflowers, that there were gods other than the Catholic God in this world. We were doing a phonics lesson in my Catholic elementary-school classroom, sounding out words, sentence by sentence, working through the textbook readings, which happened to be about Greek gods that morning. Zeus and Athena, Aphrodite and Poseidon, and all of their adventures. The point was to teach us phonics, the lesson to read aloud and do so correctly, but the idea that there were gods other than the one my family and I prayed to on Sundays and before meals and bed was the real lesson I took home that day.
My mother was in her room, folding clothes on the bed.
I climbed up and sat on top of her comforter, legs crossed. Studied her smiling brown eyes, the soft curl of her short dark hair, her colorful clothing, sweaters with flowers stitched into them on one day, animals on another, the bright clothing of a nursery-school teacher.
“You didn’t tell me there were other gods,” I said to her.
It was definitely an accusation.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I explained about that morning’s phonics lesson and what I had discovered. I was shocked to find out that my mother had known about other gods all along, that this was not as surprising to her as it was to me. She asked me a lot of questions that day, what I thought about Zeus and his divine peers, if I liked reading about them and wanted to read more. She would be happy to supply me with books full of stories about Greek gods and other gods, too, if I was interested. But I was stuck on one single question, which I kept asking her over and over.
“What if we believe in the wrong one?”
Since it now seemed the world was full of gods, I could not stop thinking about the possibility that we had picked poorly with the Catholic one. Which god was the right god? We had picked, too, my parents and grandmother at least. My family did this without consulting me or revealing what I now saw as essential information before making this choice. How does one make such decisions, anyway, when there are so many gods out there? Why did we pick this Catholic God over the others? What made him better, exactly?
“Well,” my mother said, as she continued to fold clothes, little piles stacking up like tiny sand castles across the bed. “That’s what faith is.” She went on to explain that faith was about believing in something without knowing whether it was true, that leaps of faith were about the very questions I was asking, about deciding it was okay not to know for sure whether the Catholic God was the one “right” god or the one “true” god, accepting that we might never know the answer. That, as a family, my parents and grandmother had faith in the Catholic God and the Catholic Church.
“I don’t think I like this,” I told her.
Once again, I felt tricked. Like my parents and the Sunday school teachers had intentionally been keeping essential information from me, leaving out data necessary to make an informed decision about God and faith and what I believed.
“You can keep asking me questions,” my mother said.
She seemed so unruffled, so full of calm as her daughter was making inquiries that could shatter the world as she’d known it since birth. But in truth I think my questions had shaken her. My mother wanted faith for me, faith in the Catholic God and its traditions. Everyone around us had this faith, and she thought it would arm me well as I got older and had to face life’s hardships, like padding all over my body, breaking the force of the hurt and the pain.
It’s also true that my childish faith in the Catholic God never recovered, that I could never stop thinking about what was true and what might be false when we went to church on Sundays, that I didn’t like the idea that we might be wrong, that my parents and grandmother might have made a bad decision faithwise. I never stopped asking questions about other gods, either, both in my head and out in the world, questions that sometimes startled and scandalized my teachers at the Catholic schools I attended my entire life, schools that I loved, full of friends and nuns and priests whom I loved along with them. And though I may have lost my faith in God when I was very young, I never lost my faith in my parents. It was easy. They were always right there.
I was a voracious student during high school, college, graduate school. I still am, to a degree, but not like I was back then. I gobbled up books like the candy my mother forbade me to eat as a child, which only made me a more passionate consumer of all things sugar. I was so precocious at trig and calculus that my math classes conflicted with Honors English, and the AP Lit teacher, Miss H., gave me a private class for years. It was like winning the lottery.
Miss H. was adored at my school for her kindness, her intelligence, for always wearing long, flowing hippie skirts and swea
ters, for being stuck in a 1960s time warp, for her pacifism, for her impossibly frizzy, dirty-blond hair that was parted in the middle and framed her weathered face. She smiled a lot, spoke in a soft voice, and had an equally soft laugh. I worshipped her.
She and I read everything together, all the classics. I swooned over Ayn Rand (I was young, I got over it), Dickens, Shakespeare, Steinbeck. My beloved personal teacher would hand me 450-page tomes and ask, quietly, whether I could read them in two, three, maybe four (if I was lucky) days.
Yes, I replied. A thousand times yes!
There was no syllabus, no curriculum, no plan, no structure, only a teetering stack of books in a dim, ugly classroom (for some reason, we never turned on the lights) and conversation, discussion, study, talk. Miss H. would pull up another desk and chair and sit next to me like she was a peer or I was her colleague, and I would forget I was at school and that she was my teacher until the bell rang again. Often she was too busy to meet, and I would sit there alone, reading, working. But she pushed me, hard, on everything, harder than anyone had ever pushed me, especially on my writing. I ate it up, every last crumb, like I was starving, like it was the best meal of my life, like it might be my last, like I’d never tasted good food even though my mother was a gifted Italian cook. I was hungry, and the hunger only grew once I discovered it was there. I learned to love the ache of it.
I had always been a reader, my mother made sure of this with biweekly, even triweekly trips to the library to pick out books and more books. She always made them into these big events, the two of us getting into the car, making sure we had our library cards. I remember, clearly, the day my mother decided I was old enough to strike out on my own into the stacks.
“Why don’t you go explore,” my mother said to me as if this were no big deal, not a milestone at all, while we were sitting cross-legged on the floor in the children’s section, paging through a picture book. “You pick out what interests you, and when you’re ready, we’ll check it out at the desk together. Take your time.”
I got up and stood there, staring at her, not really believing she was sending me off into the wilds alone with no curfew, thrilled at the promise of secret wanderings. Afterward, I would stagger home with piles of books, as thick as I could manage (Louisa May Alcott was wonderful in this regard, I discovered), as many as the librarians would allow me to borrow, a habit my mother heartily approved of and indulged.
But that private English class with Miss H. marked a shift in my relationship with books and ideas. It was the beginning of everything, my future, my academic desire, my intellectual awakening, my initiation into critical thinking, my joy at learning, searching, questioning, at uncontrolled and unyielding wonder about why, why not, how, who, and what does it all mean, what? Miss H. was the reason I got into Georgetown University, a school where it became clear after I arrived that everyone else was more qualified than me to be there. Everywhere I turned were people who’d gone to fancy private boarding schools where they’d had sex and done lots of drugs and taken courses with titles like Life, Death, and Immortality in Greek Literature, or Love and Shakespeare. Where their parents had paid the equivalent or even more than the price of Georgetown for a semester.
I’d gone to the little parochial girls’ school affiliated with our equally little Catholic church. This was back when parochial schools cost a few hundred dollars a year, and even this was a stretch, and an ongoing complaint from my parents. We had generic courses like history and English and science, and my fellow plaid-skirted schoolgirls and I often cared more about dances where we could encounter the mysterious species of the high school boy than about academics, and where getting away with wearing boxer shorts under our uniforms or going without socks was a daily occupation. My private English class was a fluke in the grand scheme, a stroke of luck bestowed by a book-loving teacher who’d found the rare student who could keep up with her evening reading, maybe even lap her once or twice in the race.
Compared with everyone around me, I didn’t belong at Georgetown, but somehow I was there, and I would make the most of it. I approached my excitingly titled classes with the same gusto I had for all those novels in high school with Miss H., and I approached my new professors in exactly the same way. I showed up to their office hours with my questions, my confusions, my ideas. I went to discuss what we were reading in class and I went to propose ideas for papers they hadn’t assigned. It never occurred to me, not once, that I shouldn’t go, or that it was strange how often I went, which was very.
I became a regular. Those small, rectangular office spaces with modest desks, impressive bookshelves, and two chairs—one for the professor, another for visitors—were my local watering holes, and I the alcoholic needing my daily drink after work. The more I went, the thirstier I became, and in my professors’ offices I found willing and enthusiastic drinking partners. We guzzled down Heidegger and Sartre and Kierkegaard and Charles Taylor, proud lushes of philosophical inquiry. I was drunk and euphoric with the challenges of theory, with the ways my professors pushed my mind, with the discovery that philosophy was akin to the math that had come so easily to me in high school, so easily that it made my classmates angry.
I was that student, the one who was always showing up, always devising new and weird ideas, always experimenting, always going above and beyond the regular assignments. Maybe I was also a pain in the ass, but my Georgetown professors were skilled in the art of not showing they felt this way. They humored the enthusiastic, idealistic undergrad that I was. My intellectual awakening was nurtured, fed, given a warm and welcoming home, and raised to become the aspiring, confident PhD applicant I eventually became, a young woman who, shortly after leaving Georgetown, arrived for her first day of graduate school in this new and exciting chapter of her academic life.
My greatest hope was to become like them. My beloved professors, my philosophical guides, my most ardent academic cheerleaders, the reasons I got to be where I now was. They were benevolent gods raining down knowledge and I their most grateful subject. They gave me more than I ever could have asked for, and in that cheesy, idealistic way of the young, I wanted to do the same thing for my own students someday. I was truly lucky to have found these intellectual parents who helped me to become the academic woman I was meant to become.
But on that first day of graduate school, what I didn’t know was that all that professorial luck of mine was about to run out.
I took his course because I had to. It was a requirement for my program, one of the foundational classes I needed, and he was an important scholar in the concentration I’d chosen to pursue. He was my newest mentor and I was excited to meet him; excited for all that lay ahead.
I sat down in a chair to his right, nearly next to him but not quite, at the small seminar table around which my peers began to unpack their things. They were decidedly unlike my fellow students at Georgetown and their privileged backgrounds, their glamorous lives and aspirations. I’d chosen religious studies as my general field because it’s so interdisciplinary, the kind of PhD where I could let my questions run as wild as they always wanted to, stomping across the various humanities like a happy child through the mud. On that morning I found myself among priests and nuns, some of them in habits and collars, most everyone far older than me. Those who weren’t celibate were married with children. I remember looking around the table and thinking, There is no one here that I could date. The only other single people I encountered in my program were pursuing other academic concentrations. I was the youngest student in the class.
The room was long and narrow, just wide enough to fit the conference table where we were sitting, waiting for the professor to arrive. Along my back were windows and, in front, a nondescript white wall. But behind the place where the professor was to sit were shelves packed with books. I say this now, though it’s possible I’m remembering it incorrectly. Or that I became so accustomed to seeing this man in his office, which was overflowing with books, that certain memories of him have seep
ed into others. But in my mind, behind his chair in that classroom were dark wooden bookshelves, as though to emphasize his role in guarding them, protecting them, speaking for them.
The professor was short, he was unassuming, he had a soft, gentle voice, he smiled at each one of us, he was as friendly as I expected all professors to be, as friendly as my beloved teachers from Georgetown. He had graying hair, cut neatly so that it was flat across the top, and he was dressed in dark, flowing robes. I remember him sitting there at the head of the table like Yoda, layered in fabric, only his small head visible above it, lines running across his face and crinkling around his eyes. Like several of the students, my professor was also a Catholic priest.
There were maybe eight of us in that room, at the most ten. We went around the table, introducing ourselves, explaining our interest in the topic of the course.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I said when it was my turn to speak, voicing my uncertainty about the subject matter we were to study that semester, the skeptic among the group. The class involved reading the works of important spiritual figures in history, all of whom had chosen a celibate life themselves. Now that I was studying religion, I felt out of place. How had I, a boyfriend-loving, philosophy-major atheist who had no interest in celibacy, landed myself in a course like this? In a program that required a course like this?
“I came to study philosophy and spirituality,” I went on. “To try to understand the nature of the divine, of religious experience, of Meaning with a capital M.” I loved capitalizing words like Being and Connection and Purpose, and giving them extra philosophical oomph. “But I’m not sure what spirituality has to do with these celibate people.”
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