I am sure that many, many people in my life had believed in me over the years. I had always gotten good grades, been described as having “potential.” But I never believed it. Who can say what was responsible for that mental block, but something in Jim’s kind eyes, his earnest thanks, both written on my papers and voiced in class, got through to me. He said that we were free to change our minds about anything we said in class five minutes after we said it, and so, for the first time, I felt free to try something and get it wrong. For a lifelong perfectionist, a people-pleasing middle child, that was what I needed more than anything. Permission to fail, and begin again.
If I ever did find those purple floppy disks I am sure I would find much that would embarrass me now, but it was the process that mattered. I was learning how to think. As Kierkegaard (a philosopher I would soon encounter) put it when discussing his authorial position in My Point of View as an Author, I was learning “in working also to work against oneself.”3 I developed an internal dialogue, and a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity about the world around me, as I worked out my own thoughts.
My mind was set on fire. Existence, embodiment, epistemology—these words rolled around in my head, and eventually off my tongue, as I learned a new language, delighting in a foreign tongue, coming to rest in a new land where I began to feel at home for the first time in my young adult life. I barely paused when considering my courses for the next semester. Modern Philosophy was the clear choice, and my advisor encouraged me to follow the rabbit trail and see where it led me.
It led me to Søren Kierkegaard.
Long before I started reading the famous Danish Lutheran philosopher, known to some as the “father of existentialism,” I had begun a faith struggle of my own. Raised in the Christian Reformed Church by parents strongly influenced by Baptist and evangelical Christianity, and attending a small religious college in the west Michigan “bible belt,” my life had always been influenced by the church. Even as an adolescent, though, my busy mind had wrestled with big questions. In my high school Sunday school classes, while I reveled in—and sometimes struggled with—the language of the Heidelberg Catechism, my peers seemed bored, simply accepting the faith their families had practiced for generations. While others attended football games on the weekends, I was at home poring over C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I scribbled ordinary teen angst in my journal, yet my prose was also peppered with thoughts on the universe and God and my place in the order of things.
Now, as a college student, I was in the midst of a crisis—a dark night of the soul, as theological types like to call it. I was taking courses on bible and religion and philosophy that stretched the boundaries of what I thought I knew, of what I was capable of knowing. I hadn’t given up on church, but I had a new set of questions, more skeptical than those of my C. S. Lewis days. In my Old Testament class we studied historical critical methods of interpretation, and as I learned more of the details of by whom and how the biblical canon was constructed, instead of lashing out like some of my peers did—denying this method if interpretation in favor of infallibility—I accepted it. But I didn’t know what to do with this new knowledge. The bible had not dropped from the sky in one piece. It contained contradictions, dare I say flaws, with which I did not know how to cope.
My professor somehow still managed to believe in biblical truth, and the church, despite knowing that this primary Christian text was written by human hands, and as such contained ordinary human inconsistencies. How? Why? What did he hold on to? What motivated him to continue to read the bible as Scripture? And what about all the theology I was becoming interested in, which was based on biblical texts? Could I find a way to hold onto that, or should I give that up, too? I did not know how to interpret the bible anymore, and so I simply stopped reading it at all. I asked myself, maybe for the first time, whether the God I thought I believed in really—really—existed, and I found no answers.
Yet, despite all of this, for some unexplainable reason I decided it was a good idea to sign up for an evangelism-focused spring break “mission trip” in Los Angeles. Evangelism is exactly what a person should be doing when she’s at a place in life where she wakes up every morning and wonders if everything she’s built her life on is something made up by a bunch of dead guys, right?
It was as if I thought by somehow pushing myself beyond what church leaders kept calling my “comfort zone” I could, maybe, experience some kind of miracle. Perhaps God would give me some revelation, if only I showed enough faith.
This was a terrible plan. Instead of encountering truth, I came face-to-face with the faith I was basically trying to leave, but somehow couldn’t quit. We spent the week hanging out with homeless folks in LA, offering gifts of food and clothing at times but mostly focusing on “sharing the gospel,” and the guilt I felt in the face of that poverty was a result of realizing how little the Christianity I knew had to say to what was in front of me. What do you say when standing on a corner in Skid Row with a stack of evangelical tracts in your hand? How do you talk about a God you think you no longer believe in, yet somehow hope exists, in a place where God seems so clearly absent? Broken bodies, broken souls, broken social systems—everything around me was broken, and I was breaking, too.
To the extent that I could say I believed in the absurdity of the Christian story of God becoming human, and dying, and that death somehow saving humanity from some sort of hell or damnation, at the end of the day, I still asked myself the “Why?” questions. Why did I think I should be here? Why do any of us think we are supposed to help others? Why would it even occur to me to think that some sort of miracle might be possible, that God might not only exist but might show up in my life, or in the lives of the people whose humanity and value I was trying to acknowledge here on Skid Row?
I really didn’t know. I felt like a liar. I had nothing to say for myself.
Given that this was a college spring break trip, and I have always been a good student, I had brought along a backpack full of homework. Perhaps the greatest miracle of the trip was that Kierkegaard was in that bag.
Reading Kierkegaard for the first time was like someone, somehow, had lifted a huge weight off my shoulders I barely knew I was carrying. It was the weight of logic, of certainty, of proof. Kierkegaard reframed my understanding of doubt, and showed me that not only is it possible to doubt yet remain a Christian, but that in fact it may be the only way one can become one. Perhaps his most well-known and oft referenced idea is that, in fact, without doubt there is no faith. A bit of an outsider himself, Kierkegaard seemed like a kindred spirit to a young, alienated, budding philosopher like myself. I felt that I was standing in a field alone, confronting a choice about how I would align my life. Would I give up on the church, on the God I only partially believed in, or would I press on? “Infinite resignation,” Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling, “is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity.”4 I was searching for this kind of resignation, and I was unsure whether or not I had it, but at least, here, was someone who understood the need for it.
. . . he can be saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps by faith. Consequently, he acknowledges the impossibility, and in the very same moment he believes the absurd, for if he wants to imagine that he has faith without passionately acknowledging the impossibility with his whole heart and soul, he is deceiving himself and his testimony is neither here nor there, since he has not even obtained infinite resignation.5
The absurd! There was the concept I had been wrestling with, the absurdity of what I believed, alongside the strange realization that I did believe it. Though I would later realize that Kierkegaard’s treatment of faith is far from a glorification of doubt in and of itself, and not merely about the individual, that in fact the reader herself is not the “knight of faith” in Kierkegaard’s thought, nor should she aspire to be, for the time being this affirmation of my reality was exactly where I needed to begin again, approaching my faith anew. “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards,” read my assigned reading that week from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. “But then one forgets the other