Last Week in Div School: I Believe in Providence

I was having a hard time holding it together the first few weeks of divinity school. I was overwhelmed by the lack of familiar, by the new city, new school, new apartment, new people. I left everywhere an hour early, scheduling getting-lost-time that I often needed. I had not yet learned that I had finally reached the point of my education in which it was physically impossible for me to read everything I was assigned—so I was reading everything that was assigned, which meant I wasn’t doing anything else.

I also didn’t know how to live my religion at divinity school. It wasn’t hard in the ways Sunday School prepared me for—saying no to friends offering me drinks was fine, and no one was derogatory towards my beliefs or the the Church. I walked out of zero movie nights and a grand total of no one offered me illegal stimulants. It was hard because I didn’t know how to simultaneously represent the complexity and the strength of my faith, I didn’t feel that I was showing how important it was to me, didn’t feel like I was framing it in ways that made sense to the people around me. And because my faith is such a strong part of who I am, I didn’t feel like I knew how to be me in this new space.

None of this is surprising, since I grew up in the Utah part of Hawaii and then moved to Utah. I’d never had to represent my faith to people who didn’t already know what it was. So it wasn’t surprising, but it was a little crushing. I’d always felt good about talking about God, but as soon as I got to divinity school, poof! Away that ability went.

Fortunately, I was taking a class with the only LDS Christian member of the faculty, and I had an appointment with him to discuss the presentation I was giving in his class. After we’d gone over my handout and general plan, I said, “Professor, can you give me some pointers on how to be LDS here? I don’t feel like I’m doing it very well.”

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Easter: Presence and Absence

There is scriptural precedent for people feeling left behind by God. Job is, I think, the most famous, but Martha felt abandoned when Jesus did not come in time to save her brother. She went out to meet Him when he finally came, three days late, and said, “Lord, had you been here my brother would not have died.” In jail, Joseph Smith wrote, “How long shall thy hand be stayed?” On the cross, Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

What I think is interesting about all of these moments of rebuke by the servant to the master is that, while they are cried out in agony of soul, in hurt and anger, perhaps in feelings of betrayal, they are also always expressions of faith. Martha is hurt that Jesus did not come to rescue her brother—because she knows that if he had, he could have stopped death. This was Martha’s faith, that the Lord she worshipped had power over death. Joseph Smith wrote in the pain of his own suffering and the suffering of those who followed him. He had witnessed death and illness and imprisonment and rape, and he knew that His God had power over all of those things and all who perpetuated them. And, on the cross, Jesus knew that His Father could save Him, could be with Him, could preserve Him. All of these people would have done anything to feel God with them, and what God seemed to require that they do was, for a time, feel alone.

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Hope and the End(s) of the World

A few weeks ago, I made Austin and my mother-in-law watch World War Z with me. (Sorry, Kathy).

I’ve loved this movie for a long time, which Austin says is “out of character,” just like my obsession with frozen pizza. I love it for lots of reasons—I like that it’s family instead of romance based. I like that it’s smart, that killing the zombies isn’t just about shooting them, but also about thinking. I like that there are strong women in it who are strong in different ways. What I wanted to watch it for this time, though, was the hope: in the movie the world ends, and it’s awful, but there’s still hope. It’s the worst case scenario, and then things keep going.

I’ve been thinking about how the world has ended lots of times. On March 13, the same day Austin and I decided to get out of Boston and left our apartment two hours later, I was listening to a podcast called Hardcore History on the Celtic Wars. The world ended for the Celts. Their society and culture were razed and their people were slaughtered. The world ended with Noah’s flood. Worlds ended in colonialism—with Native Americans wiped out by disease and violence, with tribes in Africa that lost their cultures and peoples to slavery, with the Hawaiians who saw Captain Cook’s soldiers walk up the beach and called them “ha ole,” no breath, because they were so pale they looked like the death they would bring.

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Wilderness and Becoming

You may remember that in my last post I wrote about wordlessness. It was timely, because I’ve felt myself without words again over these last few weeks. I’ve found thinking, much less writing hard. Instead I’ve been reading—reading lots of things by people I respect about how to think through and name what is going on in our world right now. Here is a sermon from one of my professors, Stephanie Paulsell, on things unseen, including viruses but also conviction. Here is an article on the importance of the ordinary during these times. And below is a talk my mom gave a few months ago on wilderness, which I’ve been thinking about ever since. Thanks for letting me steal it, Mom.

In the beginning, Lehi received a vision from God telling him to leave Jerusalem and go into the wilderness. In the account of this story by Lehi’s son, Nephi, the wilderness looms large. It looms not only as a place but also as a metaphor for affliction. It existed as a wilderness not only because of its location but also because of what it lacked—the familiar as well as dreams once held dear.

It is not difficult to imagine that when Nephi traveled through the wilderness in the plains, wadis, and mountains of the Middle East; across the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean; and even the new-to-him uncharted Promised Land he missed the briny taste of olives and goat cheese. Did he also miss the colorful cacophony of Jerusalem’s marketplace? Did he miss the wet/dry smell of rain on the dusty streets of Jerusalem?

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Emptiness and Wordlessness, In a Good Way

In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton says, “In order to know and love God as He is, we must have God dwelling in us in a new way… not only in His greatness but in His littleness, by which He empties Himself and comes down to be empty in our emptiness and so fill us in His fullness” (40).

One of the interesting things about mystics like Merton is that they push metaphors until they break down. All metaphors break down, of course, but most of us try to keep our metaphors in tact, to stop before they crumble. Mystics, though, they just plow through. They want to make sure you know that the words they’re using aren’t the reality they’re trying to communicate. “God’s bigger than the words,” they’re saying. “Stop getting hung up on them.” In The Cloud of Unknowing, the unknown author spends whole chapters discussing how when he says “up” towards God, he doesn’t really mean up, and when he says “in” towards ourselves, he doesn’t really mean in. Merton is more concise in his unraveling: God empties Himself to come to us in our emptiness and in His emptiness fills us.

“Fills us with what?” I ask the text. “You said He’s empty?”

“Exactly,” Merton says. “You’re getting it.”

I’m really not getting it.

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I Cried in a Hallway Again: LDS Women Anointing Each Other

This week was a bit rough. I’m not exactly sure why. I was tired, coming off a weekend in which I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not do homework, so maybe that was it.

I don’t think so, though. I think last week I just felt very, very small and afloat. Which is why finding information about pioneer women anointing each other during childbirth in one of my school books made me break down in tears in a school hallway.

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You Have Your Mom's Cells (Hope That's Cool)

Austin says that he gets all the main benefits of div school because I come home and tell him all the best stuff—but I submit as evidence that time we were sitting on his couch and he kept not doing his homework so he could read mine (it was about gender among the ancient Greeks, and it was fascinating). So you should all go to div school, but here are the ideas that are lighting me up this week:

Mothers and Grandmothers

I’m in this class called “Encountering Motherhood: Sacred Histories,” and my professor is intensely motherly. She’s also quite hippy, which I associate that with motherliness, because my mom is also kind of a hippy. My professor wears long green velvet dresses, and the first day of class she assured us it was OK not to come because of family emergencies, and “family includes pets, I want to be clear. If your goldfish dies, and you’re very upset about that, I will absolutely understand.”

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This Week in Div School: Eve and Asherah

Div school is always fun (except when I’m eating oatmeal for the third meal in a row and googling the meaning of words I think I know while wearing pajamas at four o’clock in the afternoon), but this week was extra fun because there was so much scriptural women stuff.

Eve and Eden

The first time I ever really started thinking of doing religious scholarship was in a Milton class where we were reading Paradise Lost, and I noticed that Eve’s interactions with divinity always happened through Adam, which annoyed me. Partially because I really, really think the Eden story matters. For Christians and Westerners, it’s one of the stories we understand ourselves through.

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Marissa: A Recap

Things that might have happened since the last time I talked to you, depending on when the last time I talked to you was:

  1. I went to graduate school at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) to study stories of holy women. Consequentially, I moved to Boston, cried a lot, wrote and read more than I thought humanly possible, and started learning how to combine my spiritual-speak with my school-speak.

  2. I started dating Austin, got engaged to Austin, and married Austin.

This takes us to the present day, in which I am sitting in a tiny little apartment on Commonwealth Avenue where the tub is blue and you cannot open the fridge while standing in the kitchen. (I love this little apartment. It seeps sunshine.) I just sent my husband off to class and just paid for this blog, because I’m graduating again, and I want to keep writing.

I think I’ve forgotten how to write when it’s not for a professor, and I want to remember.