Some Backstory
I posted a few days ago about a… let’s call it a vision… that I’ve been slowly piecing together over the better part of two decades. I’m learning to be as direct as I can about things, but it’s difficult because I don’t want anything to be understood as being about me. I’m a dangerously selfless person: I get taken advantage of a lot, and I never seem to be able to know when to stop being so nice. And my fear of people mistaking my frankness about things I think, know, experience as being self-righteousness or egoism often keeps me from asking for help when I need it, or advocating for myself because I don’t understand quite how to read people and discern ulterior motives.
When I was in middle school, one of the few friends I had — a girl who lived a few streets over from me — told me I was “conceited” when she overheard a conversation I was having with one of the “popular kids” on the bus one morning. I don’t remember the details about the conversation (that was 26 years ago) but I remember telling this kid I was good at some subject or another so I could help him study. I was often continuously ostracized through elementary and middle school for my academic prowess, so I was overjoyed with the prospect that it finally seemed to have enough value to my peers that I wouldn’t be so… well, alone. At the time, nobody knew that I was on the spectrum because I wasn’t violent and didn’t seem “slow” — I was actually in the “gifted” program.
I never felt very “gifted.” I felt like I didn’t fit anywhere and like there was something wrong with me because of it. All the intellect in the world did me no good to understand why people couldn’t just hear the words I would say, exactly as I said them, and receive the message exactly as I was trying to communicate it; they always read superfluous intentions into things I would say and make assumptions that I was doing something because I had a motive or agenda. And this was exactly the case that day on the bus when my friend told me, point blank, “you’re so conceited.” I did not realize it, at the time, but that accusation would haunt me for the rest of my life. I would go to great pains, every day, to make minimize myself and my presence in everything. Maybe that’s why monasticism appeals so much to me.
I’m not mad about the situation and I wasn’t mad at her, then, either. I was hurt, and I didn’t understand the context; I took a literal vow of silence for the rest of the school year and didn’t speak a word from the time I boarded the school bus at 6:57am until I stepped off at 3:15pm, with the exception of private appointments with my guidance counselor (who, in hindsight, I’m quite certain didn’t even remember my name when I left her office). That girl, who was once one of the few childhood friends I had, took her own life in the early 2010s. When I found out, the memories that surfaced weren’t of us bouncing on a trampoline or practicing for the karate class we were both in. It was that day on the bus. But I didn’t feel vindicated. I was sad. I was sad because I never told her it was okay, and that she didn’t have to feel bad for it, because I know she did. I know she knew, no sooner than the words left her lips and reached my ears, that she cut deep.
I still pray for her, sometimes. And I still struggle to pray for myself; even when its God I’m asking, I struggle to center myself enough to ask for help. “Am I being selfish?” “What about the people who have so much less than me?” “I don’t want to be a burden.” Of course, God seems to know and understand this, and has found other ways of guiding me, even when I don’t know how to ask for help, by communicating things directly to me through wisdom and faith… but then I struggle with wondering whether those “messages” are genuinely from God, or if it’s just my ego wanting to think it has the answer.
I wrote about that struggle last week. After weeks of carrying anxiety over a work situation, which has slowly been building for two years, my only choice was to listen. The message was clear: trust God, He’s got this; let go. So I did. And it immediately helped me feel better. The worry and anxiety are still there, but they don’t reach me, now. Not the way they did. So I trusted more, and wrote about the vision — an idea for a community of misfits not unlike myself who, after “flunking out” of life in the world, are ready to surrender and give our lives to God, inspired by the Apostolic Church, the Benedictine monasteries of the “Dark Ages,” and the work of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. I have no idea how this will materialize, but I know I need to put it out there if I ever want it to.
And, oh, do I hope it will.
So What Do I Have to Offer?
I first felt a calling to the monastic life ten years ago. In an e-mail to the priest of the parish I’m slowly grounding myself in, I even lamented my stupidity of walking away all those years ago. Not only did the world “chew me up and spit me out,” it missed the spittoon and I landed in a pile of rubbish. But since writing that, I’ve been granted a little bit of clarity on why that experience was necessary. I touched on it a little in those things I’ve written, over the last couple weeks. But now I have to address the hardest thing in all of this: my role. What am I able to offer such a community?
On one hand, in the world, I’ve been both a tech worker and a carpenter, and those are very real skills I can bring to such a community. Marketable skills, that could be used to raise money to fund the “monastery” (if you could call it that; I’m not sure what it would be called — Peter Maurin called them “rural communes” but I feel like this needs to have a much stronger spiritual element than “rural commune” suggests, more akin to the Benedictine Rule). That’s all good, great, and fine, but it’s not what God is calling me to do for Him.
And here I am, a twelve-year old on the bus, telling the world what my intellect can do to serve others.
If you know me, you probably know that I’m a philosophy nerd. I don’t just appreciate reading forgotten tomes of archaic wisdom; I do philosophy every day. It’s how I write code (logical philosophy), how I analyze the world (metaphysics), how I decide how to interact with people (ethics), and how I discern what information I should assimilate as knowledge (epistemology). I still haven’t finished my degree (it’s a slow going process; part time study means I should be done sometime in the next 3-5 years) but I already excel in practical philosophy, and I can hold my own in philosophical discussion. I recent had a course review following an ethics class, and I successfully argued that Kant’s categorical imperative needs to be understood in the context of his theological disposition; that his conception of a metaphysical dimension of objective ethics necessitates theological presumptions, but providing that makes it workable (for the record, I couldn’t stand Kant when I started my studies!)
But let’s take this a step further. For the past five years, I’ve also been a pedagogue for two kids (well, one of them is grown, now) in a home school situation. Both of them, like me, are on the high-functioning end of the spectrum. During the first year of this experience, I discovered the classical education model, rooted in the liberal arts tradition. The oldest, now twenty, is building his own career-ready portfolio in computer science; the youngest, seven, reads better than most middle school children and will be exploring computer programming and introductory Latin, and knows more about black holes and quantum physics than I do. The best part about this experience is that it has never required me to be “smart:” I get to learn with them, cooperatively, and fill in the gaps I missed in my own conception of the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric, comprising the trivium, and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, comprising the quadrivium), which I have come to understand as a lifelong process of learning and enrichment.
I believe this is what God intended for academics and the continuity of human knowledge. A fluid experience, for those whom He so gifts, that becomes a lifetime process of assimilating knowledge about ourselves and the world, through which we can come to know Him better, and that we may pass on to the next generation to bend and shape according to their needs, so that they, too, can know Him in their own way, according to their own needs.
The icing on the cake? Their mother1 has started listening to me talk about theology. When I read Bible stories and tales of the Saints to the little one before bed, she asks questions about God and Jesus, and wants to understand. She used to hate it when I made sounds that even remotely resembled the Gospel. I have long-since accepted that we cannot have the happy-ever-after husband-and-wife story I used to imagine; but I’m starting to understand that maybe God didn’t bring us together for that in the first place. I think it was for something better.
Just like the liberal arts with the next generation, talking with her about theology is a cooperative learning exercise. I realize that I understand the Catholic Faith much better than I ever thought; but it also grounds me the understand that I don’t have to know all the answers. I’m not afraid to say “let me get the Catechism…” — and that tells me that I’ve internalized and am acting on the lesson God gave me as a caution against Gnosticism and hubris. And I’d like to think that, in spite of all that has transpired, I might have succeeded in giving her the greatest gift I can imagine giving anyone: faith.
Last week, when I was exploring the website of the parish I’m attaching myself to, I found a useful tool they shared: a spiritual gifts assessment. It’s about fifty questions, and the score helps you identify what gifts God has endowed you with. It suggests selecting the three highest scores, but I seem to had 4, all tied with a score of “12” (the highest possible score): Faith, Prophecy, Teaching, and Wisdom.
To me, Faith makes perfect sense. At the times in my life when I’ve been “lowest,” when Faith was all I had, it was enough. And even when I’ve been in grave error about the nature of God and His work, even when I’ve been over-burdened by anxiety and unable to think clearly enough to express it, I have never had less than an overflowing glass of Faith.
But the other three? Wisdom? Uh… I’m a moron. Look at my life! Would a wise person be in this mess? Prophecy? No, no, no. I can’t even trust myself to know what to make for dinner; how can I trust myself to discern and relay God’s advice? These are gifts that great men and women through the ages have been given. Me, on the other hand: I’m competing for gold in the “train wreck” event.
And Teaching? My mother used to tell me I should never be a teacher, under any circumstances. “You’re just not a teacher; you have no patience.”
The point is, never, in a million years, would I have pegged myself in this kind of role; in any of these roles. I’m a nobody, a disaster of a person, and about as hopeless as it gets. I still shy away from the prospect of expressing that I possess any “talents” or “gifts,” and I don’t believe I have much to offer, even if my predilections suggest otherwise.
However. The one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that God blew up my life — again — in all the right ways, at the same time, to put me in a position to evaluate what I’m supposed to be doing. And I don’t know what that particular thing is supposed to be, but I know that the reward is beautiful, peaceful, and fulfilling. And whatever it is, I will do whatever He wants me to, to get it.
Endnotes
- This is an interesting situation. One of my first clues that God was doing something with/through me, over a year before my conversion experience (and largely responsible for my ultimate surrender to God’s will), was discovering my wife was having an affair. This wasn’t just someone I married because I was going through the motions; I was head-over-heals in love with her and I had poured my heart and soul into this relationship. I was a born romantic, and it was one of the things that largely defined who I was. When I found out, I was deeply hurt, and to say I wasn’t angry would be a lie, but I kept my temper well (I learned to rely on God for temperance many, many years ago, even if I didn’t wholly get my conception of God right), and I found that I was not nearly as devastated as I had been. Our romance had long since faded. Months later, she confessed to me that her feelings evolved into a more sibling-ish format years before. The more I think about it, the more this made sense. When I decided to come “Home to Rome” (as I often say), one of my first questions was “what do I do with this?” The doctrine of “like brother-and-sister,” even though it wasn’t exactly garnered to our situation, fit well, and it has allowed us to provide two boys with a stable, normal home life, and remain the closest of friends in the wake of a perilous relationship. I think it was good for both of us, to be honest. Since giving in and surrendering, and having my conversation experience, I have largely lost any interest or inclination for romance, anyway; it seems that God has other plans. 🙂
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