Come As You Are

Today as student asked me a question that I’ve reflected on every time I teach. The question itself and the response I gave are so important to me that I thought I’d write them down.

My student asked a version of this: “What do you want from your non-Christian students in your class?” She wanted to know how they were supposed to look at a text, what I expected from them in that most practical way. How are they supposed to relate to all this?

This question has a way of getting to the heart of what theology on a Catholic campus does or thinks it’s doing when that campus is not entirely Catholic. The question asks not only why students must partake in a theology course at a Catholic school, but also how they might at all. They’re at a Catholic college, so learning some Catholic thought is part of the deal (to the surprise of many), but that is only a structural answer.

So I said, “Come to a text as you are. I cannot ask you to be someone else, and I want you to be yourself when we read these things together. Now, in the classroom and the class in general, we will be learning the logic of Christians as they write these texts and think about these things. So, we will have to presume the reality of Christianity when we try to understand. Our goal is to learn this logic. But I will only ask you to be as you are as we learn. You are you, and that matters to me.”

The back of my mind murmured that I’d quoted something. I had half-forgotten that “Come As You Are” is a Nirvana song. I laughed when I figured it out later.

At the very end there I had returned to a theme in our Trinity class so far, which is the puzzle of what it means to be unique. Of what it means to be a person. To share so many commonalities, and yet to be yourself and not someone else. Contemplating the Trinity has a way of turning all of that on its head. Sometimes I say to students, “Do you see how careful and complex these writers are? This is why it is good to learn theology even if you are atheist. You learn how to think carefully.”

The religious diversity in classrooms here in the Bay Area of California makes the matter of relating to theology classes and theology texts urgent in a distinctive way. I think about this with immense care. I don’t, for example, assume a hostile relationship between my students and Christianity. They inherit a certain reflexive resistance to Jesus in particular, an attitude they absorb from the larger culture, but they are surprisingly innocent of prejudices and stereotypes. Learning this about them has been fascinating and challenging.

One of my colleagues says of our department’s challenge in the classroom, “We have learned a Christian theology that answers questions they don’t have.” I think he’s right in a certain way. Being within a tradition forms us into asking certain kinds of questions, and being outside of it means sharing fewer of those questions. This isn’t to deny the objective importance of theological questions. It’s to point out their relative availability to others.

I think that theology forms students in types of creativity usually unavailable to them in other fields, particularly because theology is so often forced to hold together two opposing ideas and make sense of them together rather than denying one. It also lets students ask big questions, the biggest possible, which is so rare in a higher education that is increasingly devoted to getting students prepared for finding jobs. Big questions are useless for getting a job. They’re essential for being human.

It helps that the Catholic tradition has incredible facility at affirming reason and truth “outside” of faith. I’m not quite sure what to call unaided reason when grace has been poured out upon the world, but the explicit gift of faith is understood to enable new reasoning rather than to bypass or eliminate the need for reason. That basically means that I expect there to be elements of my field that students without Christian faith can resonate with and understand. In fact, I fully expect them to be able to learn the fundamentals of formal Christian reasoning in theology. These, once worked out, can be communicated to others. They won’t share the motive for the question, though, which is to say they are not moved by faith to ask about the reality of faith. Similarly, they are not moved toward certain kinds of answers that theology, out of faith, prefers. (Although I find that students can learn these dispositions rather well.)

So of course I only want my students to be the way they are. It never occurs to me that they cannot contribute or cannot understand. And it is important to me, specifically, to hear them dealing with Christianity simply as they are. If this is Christianity’s new context, then I must learn how Christian tradition reacts in it. Sort of like learning a new alchemy.

As a professor, I’m not generally of the type predisposed to seizing elements of the new context and focusing on Christianity’s engagement with them. I hate the word “relevant.” It always strikes me as trying to hold still while standing on a boat in the sea. Besides, I have no idea what is relevant to my students. But they themselves are relevant to me, and I’m incredibly interested in what they make of Irenaeus or Augustine or Gregory Nazianzus. I’m also interested in what I have to do to end up making sense to them. What happens as the divergent substances mix?

I suppose my method – as I told them recently – is to throw them in the deep end of the pool and then wander away, returning after a while to see if they’ve drowned. To be honest, I think of it more like this: I expose the very heart of the Christian tradition to them. In all its complexity. In all its various composite forms. As yet unalloyed with the new questions students are asking.

I teach them the old questions. Together we wonder whether their new ones fuse with these. I don’t expect a specific answer. I listen to what they say. Sometimes they hate that because they’re not sure what type of answer will make me happy. There isn’t a specific one. I scowl if I think they’re trying to merely appease me. They scowl because it would be much easier if I let them.

Now, they’re often incoherently relativist – even my religious students – and so they manage to keep all of the questions at arm’s length. At best their encounter with Catholic theology is superficial and contrived. But, unlike God, I cannot give their wills the motive by which they would want to draw near. I cannot another person want. There is only that strange mystery of aching deep within, and it is not in my hands to make them vulnerable to their own yearning.

All I offer is a chance. Their grade is whether they get the logic and terms right. The chance isn’t. It just is. It only is. Like time itself. Waiting, there and not-there. And I am only a small matter in the stretch of time. That is all I am.

And they can only be as they are right now.