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| Marcel Proust |
It's funny you bring up the Myers Briggs, Will. After having accepted my designation as an INFJ for years, I began to realize just recently how significantly I have changed in the past twenty-four months. It's mostly because of my job: I've been required by social and professional and even intellectual necessity to cultivate savoir faire and sociability—to do my job even remotely well, I've had to run with traditionalist conservatives and social conservatives and libertarians and tenderhearted center-leftists and democratic socialists and gender-and-race theorists, as well as hipsters and vegans and young Republicans and every other variety of millennial. I've come not just to like this sort of living, but to derive all my energy from it. So, I decided to take the test a few days ago to see what I've become. Verdict: very pronounced E, pretty pronounced N, only 6% preference for F, and a meager 1% preference for J.
That's a roundabout way of getting at my interest in politics, Will. Not accounting for the interest I developed in political philosophy as an undergraduate, nor for the attraction to political and cultural criticism that I've developed only in the last two to three years, the root of my urge toward the political life is an acquired preoccupation with politics in the Thucydidean sense: not the politics of casting ballots necessarily, but rather the activity of discoursing and debating with other people on every social level—in small communities of thinkers, throughout a university, and in the wide world.
At the same time, I must acknowledge that partisan politics became interesting to me right around the time when I lost my faith, which was about two years ago. There's much to be said about that topic—and frankly, if it does not prove too often to be a non-sequitur in our conversations, I'd like to haggle over and piece through it a bit with you both. I want that mostly because you both knew me when I was at my most, shall we say, faithful: my most Catholic in the spiritual and social senses. You knew me when I felt certain that I would live a devoutly Catholic life, when my main preoccupation was how truly to be Catholic in a secular world. And now you are among the only people in my life who can critique me, who can remind me of faith in ways others just can't (not to re-convert me—I am not asking for that, have no real interest in it—but to remind me). This is admittedly selfish. I hope in return that my agnosticism might be of some use to you and the project. If it's not, I'll stay out of it. But I do remember that my character is an angry, disaffected agnostic. Now that's a character I can play.
Presently, there's something about my agnosticism (let's be honest: functional atheism) that troubles me. Because my agnosticism is so easily incorporated into secular life, especially among academics and the sets toward which I most naturally gravitate, I am not required to contend with the claims and virtues of my old Catholicism. In other words, it would be very easy for me to ditch the former Joe—the one who was devout, the one whose mental horizon was populated with Christ and the Church and Aquinas and Dorothy Day—for the new Joe—the one with new political interests, new moral sensibilities, who can run head-first into the sort of life offered by the 21st century educated cosmopolitan milieu that runs The New York Times, most universities, and with whom I generally feel at home.
Put otherwise, I see something wrong or unwise in the prospect of sliding unthinkingly and comfortably into postmodern secularism and en vogue secular cosmopolitanism. Granted, I already sort of fit into these categories. There is just something fundamentally unsatisfying about what would be most comfortable: a quick change of worldviews from Catholicism to 21st century secularism, the stripping off of my Catholic clothes and putting on of the ready-to-hand jumpsuit of the liberal secularist, the NPR-listening educated Democrat, the good citizen.
Because I have this ill-defined fear, I head to mass once in a while, usually at a church where I'm anonymous, to try to re-enter the mental space of my old Catholicism—to smell the incense, hear the organ and, à la recherche du temps perdu, be brought vividly back to my old mind and soul. But occasionally these attempts at anonymity fail, and I run into someone I know. Many such people are aware I don't go to church anymore; many also heard rumors about me, circulated among Grand Rapids Catholics a couple years ago and that seem never to go away, which insist that I'm some kind of rank hedonist, or Hitchensian anti-theist, or sexual adventurer. So I'm often looked at with a mixture of hesitance and curiosity and mild, pious concern. Indeed, this very sort of thing happened on Good Friday, when I went to Tenebrae at the Cathedral of St Andrew. The questioner, a Catholic Central grad, asked what brought me to church? I told her it was the aesthetics.
I said that because I think Joyce once said it, and anyway it's true: the aesthetics, the beautiful physicality of the icons and deep sorrow of the chants, stir into life certain old feelings and associations. But their function is nostalgic, and I'm becoming less interested in nostalgia. So why do I still go to church every now and then?Well, that's a question I want to answer. I think talking with the group, being part of this project in some manner, might help me continue to ask the question.
It's funny, it's only been two years since I stopped believing in God—or rather, it's been two years since the moment I noticed that the belief in God had exited me. That's not a long time. But the exit was so dramatic, so complete, that all I felt in its wake was a spiritual vacancy that, after a short while, I regarded with only mild interest and numb concern. That vacancy has filled, in some manner, with other things. I don't sense it anymore, and because I don't sense it, I find it hard to remember what my belief even felt like. Is that because I never believed? Or because I have a short memory? Or because the postmodern malaise is so hegemonic that it not only invades you but blinds you to the possibilities and promises of faith?
Anyway, this project might helping me remember. To what end, who knows? But I prefer the struggle of memory to the blissful ignorance of dementia.
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