Initiation and Vocation
Thoughts During Late-Night Grading
The other night I was frustrated because I was trying to finish some grading before I went to bed, but the grading was taking far longer than I had planned. I didn’t want to push the ungraded assignments off until the next day because I already had a full day of grading and class preparation scheduled. I was probably more frustrated at myself than anything, for taking on so much this semester that sometimes it feels like more than I can chew. Out of a dedication to “getting myself out there” after leaving my job as a professor at Marymount University, I’ve taken on teaching commitments at our local community college and at Divine Word College, a college and seminary run by the Society of the Divine Word religious order.
To make matters worse, because the grading was repetitive and not that interesting, I was easily distracted by my own swirling thoughts and anything else my attention landed on, ironically dragging out the grading even longer. As my sense of frustration grew, I started to feel overwhelmed by the situation, bogged down with work and unclear about what direction my life is taking.
I think by temperament I am especially prone to losing track of what my core motivations are and becoming weighed down by the practicalities of work. For example, I’ve written about how this struggle to find internal validation has impacted my writing as a theologian. Being in the midst of a somewhat difficult career transition certainly hasn’t helped. Luckily, despite being tired and stressed, I had enough wits about me to pause and think about what it is I am really doing here in what feels like a holding pattern until my life finds its “real” direction. I needed to become more grounded in what I am being called to do in the here and now.
The word that finally came to my mind was “initiation.” Part of my role as a college teacher is to initiate students into something—adulthood, the life of the mind, the professional world, the discipline of theology. Being initiated into something isn’t just a box to be checked off on a to do list, it’s a process of personal transformation, of entering a new stage in life. In some ways, it’s a spiritual experience. Helping to guide someone through an initiation demands wisdom and even a sense of the sacred. I had toyed with this idea before, but as I was finishing that batch of grading, it helped me see what I was doing as something with meaning and not just a pile of work.
William Bridges, the author and expert on life transitions, notes that in contemporary society, we seem to have lost our sense of the importance of true initiation rites and of the role of those who guide young people through those rites. Colleges and universities remain one place where that remains untrue, as evidenced not least by our penchant for robes and hoods, like some kind of secret society. But even here, for many, a college education has become less a life-changing experience and more a resumé builder.
I have long been struck by the theologian Stanley Hauerwas’s description of how he approaches classroom teaching in his book Sanctify Them in the Truth:
. . . I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds. Instead, I tell them that I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me. I realize such a statement is deeply offensive to students since it exhibits a complete lack of pedagogic sensitivities. Yet I cannot imagine any teacher who is serious who would allow students to make up their own minds.
I think that is taking things too far in an authoritarian direction—students certainly bring their own knowledge (whether personal, familial, or cultural) and their own minds to the classroom, even in subject areas where the students are novices. I would probably advocate for a more dialogical approach to understanding the learning process. But Hauerwas still has a point that education is an initiation into something new, something students are ill-equipped to judge well until they have experienced it and gained wisdom of their own.
And after all, most institutions of higher education are being drawn in the opposite direction. They are increasingly less interested in offering a curriculum designed for the “preparation of informed, independent, and sympathetic democratic citizens,” as Martha Nussbaum writes in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; curricular offerings and courses of study are increasingly offered based on the preferences of students expressed in their first or second semester of study.
My point is not that understanding college education as an initiation should be opposed to career preparation for students and financial sustainability for educational institutions. The assignments I was grading, and which inspired this whole train of thought, were for a class at the community college, where most of my students are in professional certificate programs. Nevertheless, the class I am teaching is designed to provide students with academic skills that will not only help them in their future classes but equip them to be lifelong learners; we also discuss skills such as financial literacy and emotional intelligence that will remain valuable long after their time in college is over and regardless of their career path. I think in this context, understanding myself as a guide for students as they transition into a new period of their lives remains a meaningful way to look at it.
At Divine Word, I am teaching undergraduate theology to students who are mostly seminarians called to a vocation in the Society of the Divine Word and religious sisters from a variety of different orders. The students are mostly from East Asia and Africa. Here, I think, the sense of education as an initiation is woven into the curriculum, and indeed the students’ course work is closely tied to their life outside of class, where they are part of a community dedicated to shared educational and spiritual goals. Teaching at Divine Word, the spiritual or religious dimension of being a guide through the process of initiation is much more alive.
A few weeks ago, I described some of the challenges of teaching an introduction to theology at a Catholic university, particularly focusing on the challenge of teaching a student body where perhaps half or more of the students are non-Catholic, and the majority of those who are Catholic lack the faith formation that could be taken for granted not that long ago. There is a strange, liminal quality to teaching the course, since you are introducing them to the discipline of theology, but since there is not a shared faith in the classroom, it is not totally clear that you are doing theology (“faith seeking understanding”) together. That tension can be fruitful and educational, but it also has limitations.
Working with seminarians and religious sisters, that tension is no longer present, although of course other dynamics come into play. In the above cited article, I also discussed the tricky distinction between theology and catechesis, suggesting that in an introductory theology course you can only take students so far along the path toward initiation in the faith. In my new context, that distinction still holds—the goal is primarily to develop intellectual understanding rather than to form students in their faith—but it is possible to be much more open to the Augustinian and Anselmian understanding of theology in which intellectual understanding nurtures faith.
In other words, I get the sense that I am first of all a guide initiating my students into the discipline of theology. But I am also part of a larger team guiding them through the initiation into a new stage of their vocations, of which theological education is only one part.
I might not have even stumbled on the idea of initiation while I was grading except that earlier that day, my wife and I had been watching the movie You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, streaming on Netflix and starring Adam Sandler, Idina Menzel, and Adam Sandler’s wife Jackie and two daughters Sunny and Sadie. The story focuses on Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler) and her best friend Lydia Rodriguez Katz (Samantha Lorraine), two Jewish thirteen-year-olds preparing for their bat mitzvahs. Light-hearted but thoughtful, the movie portrays how Stacy and Lydia experience betrayal and brokenness in their relationship but achieve a sense of maturity and responsibility as they prepare for their religious and social rite of passage. Their religious formation (embodied in a rabbi portrayed by Saturday Night Live cast member Sarah Sherman) lacks theological depth, but the film is sensitive enough to capture that there is still a spiritual dimension to the young people’s experiences, and that it is shaped by their religious community.
One of the more interesting aspects of the movie is that the adults who should be acting as guides for Stacy and Lydia during this initiation process—their parents, the rabbi, and other adult authority figures—are flawed and imperfect. For most of the movie, they remain oblivious to the personal and spiritual struggles experienced by the young people under their care. In the end, however, the adults remain present enough to fulfill their roles and help guide Stacy and Lydia toward the adulthood symbolized by the bat mitzvah ritual.
The movie, then, captured for me the experience of a real initiation or transition, of having your life taken apart and put back together in a new, more mature way. But it also was a reminder of the important role of guides or mentors for the process of initiation. Although ultimately it is the initiate that must take the journey, the guide can make or break that experience by operating out of wisdom or abandoning their responsibilities, respectively. It was a good reminder when I needed it that being such a guide is a noble vocation that can give the seemingly mundane chores of everyday life (whether parenting a thirteen-year-old or grading college’ students’ homework) a sense of purpose and meaning.
Have you had a meaningful experience of being initiated into something that you want to share? Or have you had positive or negative experiences helping to guide people (whether students or not) through an initiation? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments!
Of Interest…
Last week, I wrote about the question of whether artificial intelligence could meaningfully provide pastoral or spiritual care, responding to articles by Eric Stoddart and Andrew Proudfoot. I began by noting that there had already been conversations percolating on social media over whether homilies could be written by AI. Back in July, theologian Joanne M. Pierce wrote a thoughtful piece at The Conversation on just this topic and that only came to my attention after I wrote last week’s article. Pierce argues that preaching by an artificial intelligence would be insufficient since the purpose of preaching is to offer insight into the human experience of faith. Although Pierce’s argument, like Stoddart’s, is grounded in skepticism regarding the capabilities of AI, I think her argument might still stand even if AI was capable of self-consciousness and a spirituality of its own. In that case, AI would still not be capable of offering a human audience insights into the experience of faith because the intelligence and spirituality experienced by a machine would be fundamentally different from that experienced by humans, a point raised by Proudfoot in his essay.
On the flight back to Rome from his recent voyage to Mongolia, Pope Francis offered some remarks in response to a recent book comparing the Synod on Synodality to a “Pandora’s Box” for the Church. His response, clarifying the purpose of the Synod, was similar to comments he has made before, like those I noted in my reflection on the synodal continental document from the Middle East. More interesting to me were his comments on the procedures that will be followed at the Synod. Not surprisingly, he stated that the process will use the method of “spiritual conversation” that has been used throughout the worldwide synodal process. He also explained that the Synod’s Commission for Information will provide regular updates to the press about the proceedings of the meeting. Earlier this week, in my profile of Synod participants from Africa, I noted that one member of the commission is Dr. Sheila Leocádia Pires, a Mozambican radio host and producer working for the Catholic bishops in South Africa. Pope Francis also mentioned that the Synod would not be livestreamed, a decision that is disappointing even if understandable!
In that same profile of African Synod participants, I described the recent conflict in Tigray, a region of Ethiopia, and the role of local church leaders as peacemakers in that conflict. The Catholic News Agency tells the story of the Catholic charity Mary’s Meals, which has been able to resume work in the Tigray region providing meals to children, another hopeful sign of peace in the area.
Pope Francis’s comments on the Synod as he returned from Mongolia come after Francis offered some highly critical remarks about “reactionary” attitudes among some American Catholics published in La Civiltà Cattolica last week but actually given during World Youth Day celebrations at the beginning of August. Francis was especially critical of resistance to accepting the authentic development of the Church’s doctrine.
In my profiles of continental documents and Synod participants that are part of my ongoing Synod on Synodality World Tour, I have tried to take special note of regions where Catholics are a small minority and of the leaders shepherding the faithful in those regions. For example, in the above-mentioned profile of African participants, I highlighted Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, S.D.B., the Archbishop of Rabat, Morocco, who is pastor to a small community of Catholics who make up less than 0.1 percent of the population in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. On his voyage to Mongolia, Pope Francis told Catholics there that “God loves littleness,” comparing the small but faithful community to the littleness of the Virgin Mary. I highlighted Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, I.M.C., who as Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar leads the Catholic faithful in Mongolia and who accompanied Pope Francis on his visit, in my profile of Synod participants from Asia and Oceania. As Christopher White reports at the National Catholic Reporter, Pope Francis also told the Mongolian faithful that “"All of us are 'God’s nomads,' pilgrims in search of happiness, wayfarers thirsting for love,” offering a Central Asian twist to the traditional image of the Church as the Pilgrim People of God. As I have noted throughout my commentaries on the Synod continental documents, this view of the Church, expressed through the biblical image of the “tent of meeting,” has proven controversial in some regions like Oceania and Africa, where it is an uncomfortable reminder of the plight of refugees and displaced persons, although the image has been embraced in other regions like the Middle East.
Coming Soon…
I am focused on bringing the Synod on Synodality World Tour to a close, which means taking one last stop in Europe. I will try to post an article analyzing the European continental document by the end of this week, then begin work on a profile of the Synod participants from Europe. I will probably break that into two parts, one focusing on Western Europe and one on Eastern Europe, given the extremely large size of the European delegation. My profile of the African participants took quite a long time to prepare, so I may need to spread out my work on the European profiles. I do hope to have everything published by the middle of September, though, because my plan is to remove the paywall for the whole series so that it can be a resource for those reporting on or trying to make sense of the Synod as it unfolds.
I also want to continue to focus on artificial intelligence, and last week I mentioned that I wanted to do some further study on the AI program Magisterium, which claims to offer answers to theological questions and questions regarding Catholic teaching. That article is still in the works, so stay tuned.