Last Week in Div School: I Believe in Providence

I had 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.”

Marissa in the forrest of New Hampshire, being afraid of ticks.

Dr. Holland is a kind man who speaks slowly. He’s a respected scholar of American religious history and a stake president. He leaned back in his chair and smiled at me and told me it was OK. (Which is always, always what I want people to say.) He said, “Some days you will do this badly, and then you can try again tomorrow. Almost none of this is make or break. You can do it badly some days.” And then he said, “I believe in providence. I think you are here for a reason.”

I have said that to myself over and over again. I said it when I had to give a presentation on polygamy in the Church and felt like I was in court testifying against a friend and not getting to say any of the good things. I thought it when a friend came up to me in a party and said, “But you don’t really believe that ancient Israelites crossed over to the Americas, right?” Again when a different friend asked me about the church’s position on the LGBTQ community. I also thought it when studying Buddhism led me to new ideas about forgiveness, when reading about Hindu goddesses and queer theology helped me think through chastity more deeply, when I read about womanism and found my favorite kind of feminism. I thought it every time I saw glimpses of God in the people around me.

It’s a bit of a mantra at this point, heralding the good and the hard. I believe in providence. I’m here for a reason.

I’m saying it a lot as I graduate. I spent two years at Harvard, and they are gone now.

When I was an undergrad, one of my professors told me that you have to read Moby Dick, because it’s like “watching your house burn down in a good way.” I think what he meant is that we have to expose ourselves to things that challenge our world views. It’s how we see see our own contradictions, how we find new paths forward, how we come to understand the things beyond ourselves. While I’ve been at divinity school, I’ve let my house burn down over and over again. I’ve built it again and again.

So much of who I am has formed in the last two years, but I don’t know what that means outside of the context of where it happened. The hours and hours of reading, the pages and pages of writing—it’s hard to see what they point to. I just spent a lot of time and energy, and now it’s done, and I don’t know where it’s leading yet. I’m afraid it will fade into obscurity, become that cool thing I did once, a talking point at a party instead of something that led to something. I don’t know if I’m getting a PhD, what sort of things I’ll write in the future, who I’ll become. There is very little certainty in my future at all. But I believe in providence. I was here for a reason. I’ll go other places for a reason too.