Belief – Part Three

After my parents dropped me off at Rutgers University in the fall of 1990, I breathed deeply, relieved that I was on my own. It wasn’t that I didn’t love or wouldn’t miss them. It was the feeling that I was free to create my day, study subjects and garner knowledge, be friends with whom I wanted without my parents looking over my shoulder with wary eyes. I was awarded a full scholarship plus another one that gave me spending money; for the first time in my life I wasn’t financially dependent on anyone. I had a sanguine outlook because I got my golden ticket and I was ready to fly.

The first thing I decided before I arrived at college was that I would never, ever go to church again. I would finally sleep late on Sundays. I turned my back on my Baptist upbringing because, for me, it was like a suit that was always just a little too tight around the shoulders. There was something about the faith and belief system that didn’t have much to do with Christ’s teachings, but rather Paul’s tomes and interpretations of Christ’s words.

My Christian background is a part of me and I can’t deny it, but now it’s a matter of reconciling it with who I am now. After my mom died, the usual questions about life and death arose, but what I wasn’t expecting was a voice to pop up and say what it said to me. It was the same voice that told me to be a teacher; the one that told me to get my master’s degree in education; the voice that’s guided and directed me at different points in my life. It’s not the voice that tells me when to take a drink of water or skip to the loo; it's the one that I believe is connected to my Source of Being.

Last Spring, I heard it during my morning commute. I was reading a book by Harold Bloom on humanity’s fascination with the iconography of angels when the voice said, “Go to seminary.” Yeah, right, I thought. Go away. But it didn’t go away. The voice repeated, “Go to seminary.” No! I’m already in debt for my last master’s degree and there’s no way I’m going back to school right now! After the third time I acquiesced enough to say, “All right. I’ll look into it.”

After doing some research online and talking with the chaplain at Grace Church School where I taught, I found the place - Union Theological Seminary. I visited last fall and when I told the admissions director I had no idea why I was even there she said, “You’re my favorite kind of potential student. It sounds to me like it’s a calling.” I told her that I was already treading the high waters of student loans but she said the school often offered scholarships to people, so just apply and see what happens.

I took her advice. A week before I left for Paris, I received my letter stating that my application had been accepted. While in France, I received an email from the financial aid director: I didn’t get a full scholarship, but the aid package was very generous. I accepted because what’s a few more thousand dollars of debt? Just add it to my bill.

Since that first day of college nineteen years ago, I’ve walked a circuitous path from the renouncement of religion to slowly finding a different way back, more of a spiritual seeking not based on any denominational belief, and that’s what I like about Union; it’s a place where I can seek and not be judged.

My 20s was about figuring out what I was and my 30s have been living what I’ve come to understand about myself. That doesn’t mean I’m not constantly evolving, but I do know the core of who I am. Now, I want to concentrate my life on understanding more about my relationship with the mystery of the universe, the enigma of creativity, the glimpses of grace that come now and then, and how I can reconcile my past with a new synthesis of Christianity, eastern mysticism, quantum physics, Emily Dickinson poems, novels by Kinky Friedman, Brahms’ “Requiem”, and a painting by Picasso. To me they’re all connected.

I’m going to school again. If you asked me a week ago why I was going I wouldn’t know what to say. Two days after returning to New York from Paris, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I walked through the Asian wings filled with smiling Buddhas and demigods. I sat in a Japanese meditation garden. I looked out windows across Central Park as I ate a salad and drank a glass of crisp white wine. I went there because I wanted to find the answer to why I was going to seminary. The answer came quietly and simply after I turned off the chatter in my head and simply listened to my Self. The answer to why I’m going to seminary? Because I want to.