Theological French and Metaphorical Wildernesses

A few summers ago I studied French. I did not want to study French. It was not on the top of my Languages to Learn list. But my program required French or German, so French it was.

There were a few things that were very unfortunate about this class, besides, of course, the fact that I did not want to be in it. The first was that we were not learning how to speak French. Written French, as you probably know, bares little to no resemblance to spoken French, and my professors were not at all interested in my ability to order a croissant in a little bakery in Marseille (which I would have found motivating) and much more interested in me being able to power through Foucault (a writer that I find deeply confusing even in English. Did you know most French theorists don’t use topic sentences? I hate it).

The worst part of the class though, for sure, was that I was really bad at it. Everyone else in the class had some background in French, even if that background was just “I took Latin for four years in high school.” Those people at least knew what conjugation was. I studied Mandarin in high school. Mandarin doesn’t do conjugation. Mandarin is about as related to French as lobsters are to seagulls.

Anyway. Me hating being bad at things is becoming something of a theme of this blog, so it wont’t surprise anyone that being the singular person in the class who didn’t know what was happening ranked high on my list of least favorite feelings. Every time I walked into that class, every time I walked out of it, and every time I studied for it (so essentially the entire summer), I told myself over and over again, “It’s more important to be good at being bad at things than it is to be good at reading theological French.”

I said it over and over again, because it was comforting, and it was comforting because I knew it was true. Literally no one cares how well I can read Foucault in French, but my life will be much, much happier if I can learn how to be good at being bad at things. Being good at being bad a things means that I can get better at them. It also means that I can enjoy things I’m not naturally skilled at. I wish I’d been practicing this my whole life instead of being a perfectionist. I wish I could go back to third-grade-me and say, “Listen. No one cares that you’re not good at kickball. A year from now it won’t matter at all. But trying to play kickball will give you experience at putting energy into things that don’t come naturally to you, and that is something that will matter forever.”

Not that third-grade-me would have listened to me. But maybe if I’d shown up when seventh-grade-me quit acting because she didn’t get the lead in the play; or when ninth-grade-me gave up on math, because my brain didn’t take to numbers the same way it took to words; or early-twenties-me refused to acknowledge any crushes that wandered into my possession, because I didn’t know how to flirt. Maybe then, when I’d hit theological French, I wouldn’t have had to say, “Get good at being bad at things” as a mantra, because I’d already have gotten good at it.

I’ve been thinking about this this week, because I’ve been wondering what future-me would say to twenty-eight-year-old-me. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the advice I would give to past selves, enough to see a pattern and to sometimes hear temporally displaced echos of advice a future self might give.

I think my future self might say to me, “I know you feel lost. I know you think you want a PhD, and you’re worried about how to know whether or not you actually do, especially because you can’t know how it will effect having a family, and above all you just want the next thing already, because you’ve been in limbo so, so long. But you’re mistaking the problem. The problem is not that you don’t know what to do next. The problem is that you aren’t good at not knowing what to do next.”

I was talking to a cousin a few months ago who, like me, is wandering at bit at the moment, and I said, “I do this every two years.” It was an epiphany as I said it—That’s true, I thought. I do this every couple years. Every two years something in my circumstances changes, and I have to stop and make an assessment and decide what I want now. Inevitably, that process takes longer than I want it to. And the answer, even when I arrive at it, is never as clear as I want it to be. I accepted the admission to Harvard Divinity School the last night they would allow me to, and I spent the rest of that night crying, because I was overwhelmed by that decision, and I wasn’t 100% sure it was right.

These periods of wilderness, of wandering and not knowing, are never going to completely go away. I will definitely have one when I have kids. I’ll have one every time I move. I’ll have one when my kids leave. My guess is that I’ll have one when I die—I’ll walk into what I hope is heaven, and think, Gosh, what do I do now? So getting good at not knowing what comes next—that’s much more valuable than God to coming down in a flaming bush (or, more likely in my case, houseplant) and saying, “Here is your revelation: this is what you do next!”

As my mom wrote about last year, wandering in the wilderness is a valuable time for servants of the Lord. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks preaches that “the Hebrew word midbar, wilderness, has the same root as the word dabar/davar, meaning ‘word’ or ‘thing.’ It has the same letters as medabber, ‘speaking.’ It is in the wilderness that the Israelites [referring to the time of Moses] hear revelation, the word or speaking of G-d.” Jesus did this too—he went to the wilderness in the transition periods of his life. This is a well-worn, time honored tradition, and good things come out of it. The wilderness, the wandering, the not-knowing—it leaves space for God in new ways. Knowing how to be here is the best thing I could possibly get out of this time. It’s a very important part of being human.

That said, I would really love to not learn that and instead have a Godly visitation in flaming vegetation right about now.