God is in the Detours

My alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, has unique course registration methods which sometimes work in a student's favor, but usually only if the student has recently sacrificed a rack of veggie burgers on the grill behind Westlands. (Now you know the real reason for all those orientation BBQ picnics.)

Alas, in my sophomore year I was bumped from the apparently popular course called Psychoneuroimmunology, which had taken me a substantial chunk of the summer to learn how to pronounce... so it's probably for the best that I didn't get to take it. Still, I suspect that I would have (blissfully and ignorantly) enjoyed it, because I'd bought some of the textbooks in advance and started reading early. This, in light of my procrastinating nature, was downright miraculous.

Being bumped sort of popped the miracle bubble.

Reluctantly, I returned my orphaned books and began the well-loathed ritual of Alternate Registration. I revisited the course listings, jotting down feasible second choices. Possibly the most fear-inducing part of this process is that registration takes place the week before classes begin, and by the time Alternate Registration rolls around, you have both fewer options and less time until term. Not uber conducive, I feared, to good decision-making.

I eventually narrowed it down to two courses, including a philosophy course called "Language and Religious Experience." The title hummed back at me from the page, like a fiendish zombie or a frustrated teenager (obviously interchangeable): Take meeeeeeeeee.


Source

It drooled. Or I drooled. I'm not really sure. Anyway, it suddenly sounded especially interesting, and the very fact that both of my remaining options were each somehow theological in nature (and I'd not yet studied anything of the like) sort of whacked me upside the head with insight.

Okay, God, I get it.

Ultimately I decided that this two-and-a-half-hour, 8:30 AM class would be well worth it.

Mind-blowing academia aside, it certainly left me with a few quotable gems, like this one from a discussion on humans' "sense of time," and the student was entirely serious and unaware of what he was saying (TO OUR PROFESSOR) until it was out:

"Sometimes time seems to go by very quickly and other times it moves very slowly. Like this class is two and half hours long, but it feels like forever."

Beat. Laughter. Yeah, it was a good time.

But most significantly, I gained vivid understandings of ideas that had absolutely baffled me, particularly the doctrine of the trinity and the duality of Jesus' humanity and divinity. By the end of the course, I still couldn't articulate it for beans. Yet there was a distinct time of growth in my spirituality, mostly toward reconciling intellect and mystery of faith.

The irony is that these are exactly the sort of topics (and then some) with which I am struggling now in my theology program.

Sometimes we have to take multiple detours.

And all the while, there is a pervasive sense that any such pain truly is an aspect of growth, that this is just one step in a complex process. Like wanting to loathe the detour of Alternate Registration, yet knowing in my core that I'm headed to where I must be.