Education and Salvation

Marla, a Survey of World Literature student, wrote an insightful essay about Etienne, the central character of Zola's Germinal. She argued that Etienne's devotion to reading and self-education might have been motivated, in part, by his desire to overcome the bleakness of his days as a boy and the alcoholism he inherited.

Her point hit home for me. It took me back, in particular, to my sophomore year at North Idaho College and the years that followed at Whitworth College (now University) and my graduate school years at the University of Oregon.

Although my outward expression may have seemed to belie it, I entered college very insecure, especially regarding my inward self and my understanding of the social world around me. Everywhere I looked, young people my age and little older seemed to know how to get on socially and seemed to have knowledge and and understanding of things I was clueless about.

I felt sheltered and naive, and I can't say it was because I came from Kellogg. I knew Kellogg and Wallace and Mullan and Sandpoint and Post Falls and, of course, Coeur d' Alene kids who were more worldly. They seemed to have secret knowledge. They were (much) more experienced sexually and had partied (much) more than I, and the Christian kids had a depth of experience with the spiritual life that it had never occurred to me was even possible.

I felt inferior. Very inferior. I was especially confused about what it meant to be a Christian and, on different plane, very confused and awkward regarding women and did not/would not become sexually active.

The other place in my life where men were talking about experience far out of my range was at the Zinc Plant. These men hunted, gambled, talked about motorcycles and snowmobiles, had served in the military; some were dopeheads; others cared for and drove muscle cars.

I didn't hunt, gamble, or recreate with motorcycles or snowmobiles; I wasn't a vet; I didn't do any dope, though I started drinking a lot; my car was a 1969 Volkswagen bug. Not much muscle.

My only special knowledge related to sports, but I was starting to get really interested in school.

Over my first two years of college, I began to regard formal education as my way to overcome my social deficiencies and my failures with women, not to mention my theological ignorance.

I really thought that if I learned all I could about human nature and the human condition, I could overcome my lack of sophistication and, above all, could succeed in relationships, and, ultimately, in marriage.

I really thought that if I could meet and get together with a woman with a similar love of learning, where would read poetry and theology and novels together and become students of human nature, that would be the way to overcome my inherent deficiencies, including my dark mood changes and unpredictable and irrational temper.

Like Etienne, I lived in a fantasy world, informed by great ideas and beauty. I grew passionate about history, art, literature, theology, and the study of human nature.

In the same way that Christians sought salvation in the church, I thought I was finding social, marital, and personal salvation in my studies.

By the time I was in the midst of graduate school, my obsession with this road to salvation became so seductive that I spent most of my time reading and writing papers. I rarely took breaks. I resented visitors. If I went to a movie with my wife or if her family came to visit, if these things pulled me away from studies, I panicked inside, afraid that I wouldn't get a paper done or not pass an exam. I was committed to overachieving.

I feared I would lose my salvation.

The fantasies deepened. I thought the only thing wrong with the world was that others didn't know what I knew. I began to think if more people would study Shakespeare, and understand his wisdom, or would read Death of a Salesman and understand its warnings, or plunge into comedy and understand it promises and hopes, then they would find what these stories had to say and the world, and my personal relationships, would change for the better.

It was intoxicating, much as Etienne's readings about social revolution intoxicate him.

For me, the word that governed my thoughts was "transformation". I thought that others didn't understand that literature and history and theology could transform one's life, and so I pursued my vocation as a teacher with zeal, with the idea that I could be an instrument of transformation.

I felt the same way about marriage, that regardless of tensions, my bouts with depression, and my tendencies toward withdrawl, that if my wi(ves) and I understood life the way it is portrayed in great literature, we could both avoid and overcome the pitfalls of failure.

Little to none of this has or does work out.

I still love to read, study, and write. I still get intoxicated and still find myself wishing or believing that by the power of intellectual will problems can be avoided or overcome and family rifts and social situations can be solved.

But my thirty-five year belief in this kind of salvation is falling away.

I look back at my history of delusions and feel foolish and know old habits are hard to break. It's true that what I thought would lead to success in my life outside of reading and thinking has been largely a failure breaks my heart.

I will probably always be a romantic in my core approach to life, but at least my failures in this way of pursuing success have been tempered and maybe I'm starting to mature.