2003-04-09 - 3:50 a.m.
One of the reasons my thesis has been an unbearable delight is my personal intercourse with the work, Lancelot. Kieran Quinlan writes, “All of Percy’s previous essays and novels had been directed at shocking the reader into an awareness of his own situation and provoking him to make a commitment.” I admit that I spent most of the last two years unwilling to commit.
I was not shrouded in doubt, or unbelief in God, but in myself. I lacked faith and trust. On more than one occasion I wrote that existed in the second circle of Dante’s Hell. I refused not only God, or another god, I utterly refused.
In this case I contradicted Kierkegaard – I know that I was God’s child and He wanted me so much He compelled me to make the right decision. So He surrounded me with each one of you who asked for my salvation.
This novel though I could not have explained it to you at the time, hit me, and put me in that frame of mind that will come to me in the most public scenes: I twist my lips up or down, my eyebrows move as usual, and I seek the time or place to kneel in gratitude or hope, usually one of those two. It was about this time that I first told someone about my private prayer, and she prayed with me again. She must have already known a few weeks previously when I knew I had made the choice neither for anyone nor because of anyone.
A couple of weeks ago Dr. --- said that the Catholic professors in the English Department had a mission to convert students to the faith. Can he blame them? And what is his mission among the nonChristians? Anyway, he went on to complain that he saw a student talking with a professor with some Catholic text between them, not the assigned text.
I see that this is a “problem” on a campus like this one that advertises and emphasizes when you get here, that Hillsdale College is more than a college, it is family. Thus the professors are going to be friends, mentors, counselors, spiritual guides, etc. Few are all of that like the one who inspired this diatribe. This gets funny.
I am not the first English student to feel drawn toward Catholicism, partly due to my assignments. My assignments have been an integral part of my growing up in the past year and a half. Although most of what I read now touches me in the spirit -- I wonder I had not seen it this way before – my reading did not in the end motivate me to choose. What they did is teach to me to rethink love. Then I loved. And loving that young man taught me more than I thought I wanted to know. In loving him, I began to love Him, because I finally had some inkling what that meant.
Now my assignments encourage me further toward a more reverent religion, a deeper relationship with Our Father.
Which assignments do you think motivate me more than all others to visit my Catholic professors, a priest, to bully my room mate with questions? The ones from Dr.---‘s (see earlier Dr.---) course of course. How can he argue against Dr. --- accepting the Chair because the man is Catholic and might propagate Catholicism among students, when his classes are part of his problem? He is his own enemy. I still do not know how a man can write a thesis on Grahame Greene, teach Greene almost every year, and not walk away Catholic.
