My professor told us that one of his undergraduate students once said to him that “I think I’ve met Christians who would stab you to death with a crucifix and then would get down on their knees and thank God for the privilege of doing so.”
The statement struck me. Something that I’ve been reflecting on and thinking about lately is how each and every single human person is a little off balance. We all “miss the mark” from time to time. Actually, in my mind, I think it’s more often than not.
Lately I’ve had several opportunities to re-connect with old friends and talk to people who knew me back in the days before I came to Notre Dame. While it has been a wonderful experience, it has also shown me how very different I have become. Theological education changes a person, and it should. It is about personal and intellectual conversion. I think my graduate theological education has brought about both in my life.
This makes it difficult in some ways to interact with individuals who knew me before. I struggle with whether I ought to just simply relate to individuals as I always have – to connect with them as I have in the past, or whether I ought to tell them I’ve changed.
On some occasions, I’ve done both. But when I just act in the same manner, I feel that I am not being true to myself, that I am not being honest that the person I have become is not the same as I was – just as the person that I will become tomorrow be the same person that I am today. But then when I try to share the person I have become, I find people startled, even sometimes dismayed that I have changed my views on a number of issues.
What I’ve come to realize through much of my theological education is that my views on certain things were at times a bit off balance. Being exposed to new ways of doing theology and having to struggle with new ways of thinking about theological questions has I think in turn made me more balanced.
What is interesting, however, is that sometimes those who knew me before now think that I’m the one who is off-balance now. And the experience of being-in-relationship with those who fall more in the category of the way I used to think – and having them question my position – is an interesting one. Sometimes I try to share with them what I’ve learned, and try to help them see that while I understand where they are coming from (because after all, I once shared a similar view), that it’s possible to see things from a different perspective. Other times, I just marvel at how very different I’ve become – and wonder if the shock they must feel in realizing that is similar to my own surprise at myself. At times, others take a judgmental stance- and try to caution me against buying into what some regard as ‘bad theology’ – and while I might feel an unease about the fact that I might identify more readily with this new theology than I used to – I also cannot shake the fact that at the same time I also feel that this new perspective opens up much wider, much freer, much more loving horizons.
I find myself in a position of experimenting, of trying new things and watching and waiting to see what the long term fruit will be. And even while I feel radically outside my comfort zone, being in new theological territory, I find myself consoled by the fact that God is with me in the process and I trust that He will not allow me to go too far astray. Perhaps I formerly was too far to one side; now, I find myself swinging to the polar-opposite extreme. In a sense, this is how we all are, always a little off being centered on Christ. The saints are the ones who, in mastering the life of virtue, are able to keep a life of balance amidst a world of competing extremes. All this being said, I'm not there yet, but I trust that in the end, with God's grace, I'll balance out and end up right where God wants me to be.
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