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A Mathematician's Journey into Orthodoxy: Ramblings on Becoming Human
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I entered Wheaton College as a math major, and deepened a practice of daily Bible reading. During that time, I realized--or more properly, allowed myself to acknowledge--that there was something Wheaton required of me that I was morally uncomfortable with. Wheaton had a Pledge, which was a very important agreement that required students not to drink or dance. There is a case to be made that some of the things in the New Testament mix very badly with this kind of rule, and whether I was right or wrong, I increasingly came to a point where the issue was not simply about being correct, but about something that had me squirming morally with an unquiet conscience. Continuing to be under those rules as Wheaton had them was unsettling my conscience enough to be a continual moral discomfort in my daily life.
After trying to do as careful study and analysis as I could, I talked with administrators and other community members, wrote up as comprehensive a case as I could (the printout was over a quarter inch thick), and appealed to the Board of Trustees for a conscientious exemption to the Pledge.
The Trustees would not even let my appeal be put on the agenda for consideration.
To put this in other words, there was no way for me to finish my bachelor's at Wheaton without continuing in a required violation of conscience, and the trustees did not even have enough respect to say, "We have considered your request and rejected it after consideration."
After that, I stumbled in my walk of faith.
Doubtless the way I went about things showed that I did not understand negotiation very well; possibly I was asking something that would have been denied even to a skilled negotiator who genuinely understood how people work things out. All that and more can be said in retrospect. But to say this much and stop is to leave something out.
One of the reasons invoked for Wheaton's Pledge is a concern that seeing people drink or dance could make a few with delicate consciences stumble, and the Bible has strong words about making the "weaker" brother stumble (see Rom 14). But Wheaton's way of handling this left me stumbling, and however much I might say I didn't understand negotiating, I acted in good faith and tried to appeal to fellow Christians as a Christian brother, and I was stumbling at their response enough to ask myself, if this is how Christians acted, whether I really wanted to be a Christian. And I didn't know how I would answer.
I spent a lot of time with that question, and it resolved much like my first near-solipsism, where I never reasoned my way out of the "prison of ideas," but after time I began to see the things around me as real. What happened was that I spent a lot of time struggling to hold on to God, despite how I was stumbling, and much later I realized that he still had me: God was still holding on to me.
I decided I had to leave Wheaton without knowing what, if anything, there would be for me: I was unsure whether I would complete my bachelor's at all. It turned out that there was something very good for me: Calvin; as had happened at Wheaton, I connected with a good group of friends.
Many of my favorite things that I've written are things where there was a particular creative process that began with what seemed a kind of inspiration and flowed into something I would write. While at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, I was writing a lot, and I believe my writing has improved considerably from a starting-point of writing that could be pretty hard to understand. My early writing was, if anything, beneficial to me as an extended practice session. At Wheaton, I worked with some people and presented Blessed Are the Peacemakers, and I believe it was a good work, but not quite in the same way as the "almost inspired" pieces. Those pieces basically started at Calvin, such as Religion Within the Bounds of Amusement and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
I would like to stop a moment and explain what I mean by "almost inspired." There is a certain level of writing that happens simply because I initiate and choose what I am going to write: I can sit down and decide that I want to write a letter, or an explanation of how to do something, or an opinion on some topic. And in that sense I have almost complete control, but none of the pieces I cherish the most come this way. My favorite works--including much of the writing on this website--comes by another process that I cannot simply do at will: a half-shapen creation comes to me, and there is a process of listening, of simultaneously wrestling with my creation and wrestling with myself, of giving of myself and of receiving, much as is described in Madeleine l'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. The works that I cherish the most are ones that I cooperate with, not ones that I can dictate at will, and the collection--growing for over ten years--is what a Protestant might call my "ministry," or my vocation.
One of the Calvin friendships became a romance and, eventually, a broken engagement. There's a lot I could say, but perhaps it would be better not to dig deep into that. Before the friendship turned romantic, I wanted to be celibate, and then I loved a woman and offered her my celibacy, and now I'm trying to get back to the work I was originally reaching for.
After graduating from Calvin, I entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I earned a master's, and my GPA was reasonable (3.5/4.0), but I was spending time and energy on other pursuits, time and energy that should have been given to my program. I had taken something of a "This is my day job" attitude to my studies, and had thrown energy into extra-curricular pursuits which were good in themselves but should not have been given energy from my progam.
After that came a long, low period. Every time before and since in my adult life, I have usually made some kind of accomplishment, but here I was strangely squelched. It wasn't exactly toxic mold, but there was a year's worth of doing nothing--of not often leaving my bed or home, and lying on my bed, staring at my light bulb for hours on end, with nary a thought running through my head besides, "This is worse than watching television."
When I finally found a way out of that prison, the first thing I wrote was a meditation on Psalm 139:7-8:
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
And whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I should go up to Heaven, thou art there:
If I should go down to Hades, thou art present.
I had found that God was still holding onto me.
When I was in a position to be more active, I started trying to discern what I wanted to do with my life from then on: math was no longer an option; a year's mental inactivity had destroyed my ability to do pure mathematics. After working on discernment, I wanted to be thinking in community about God. Theology was a stronger draw even than philosophy or literature, and I was accepted for postgraduate work at Cambridge.
I had extraordinary difficulties getting over there. One of them was about student loans: I worked on student loans for six months before I was supposed to leave, and they fell into place one business day before I left.
I had begun a newsletter for people praying for me, and I was grateful for the people praying for me.
Some time after I arrived, I found out why I was exhausted and had some frightening symptoms. I was diagnosed with a form of cancer, to be treated with chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Partly for financial reasons, I chose to receive the treatment while I went ahead with my diploma. At the end of the year, I ended up passing, and after God provided another unlikely answer to prayer, I was able to continue on to the next step: a master's in theology.
Once I started the program, the biggest single way I had to impress the gatekeepers to the Ph.D. program would be to write a good thesis, so I decided on a strategy of aiming for "good enough" in everything besides my thesis, and doing my best at making an impressive thesis. So I spent as much time and energy on my thesis as I could afford, right up until two-thirds of the way through the year, when the committee made me radically change the topic for my thesis. The stated reason: my thesis topic, which I declared at the beginning of the year, did not fall under philosophy of religion. I ended up passing my master's by two points less than the minimum for Ph.D. placement, after receiving credit for only about half of the work I had done.
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A Mathematician's Journey into Orthodoxy: Ramblings on Becoming Human
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