What I learned in theology class, episode 1: the beginning

(originally posted on Facebook on 27 October 2016)

So you guys. I have this habit… I get bored with my life and I sign myself up for some interesting thing rather obviously inappropriate to my personality and/or education. In this case it is a theology class. In German. So yeah. But at the same time I’ve had rather a lot of time to think in the last five and a half years, and I’ve been wanting to write, and I feel like this could give me some kind of framework…or anyway an excuse, to write every week. I fear no one will read this, I’ll sound stupid, I’ll sound crazy, it will be too long, I’ve already lost you, but whatever. I’m doing it. Here goes.

What I Learned (or possibly misunderstood because let’s face it my German isn’t that good) in Theology Class Last Night.

The class is called “Understanding God and the World” and the theme of the first trimester is “The Meaning and Purpose of Life.” Yesterday’s class – bet you can’t guess! – “Introduction.” Note that a month before the class started we received a big binder containing the pre-class readings for THE WHOLE YEAR featuring I-kid-you-not precisely 10 pages per class session because, Switzerland.

I really had no idea what to expect from this class. Would it be very conservative, Catholic…insular in that particular churchy way? The reading material for today made me a little nervous. “Religion today can be described in four sentences: what I believe is my own business; no one knows the truth; the purpose of belief is to help me live my life; I collect the things that suit me.” Honestly I was sort of worried that this was a straw man of moral relativism that we were going to BEAT DOWN with the righteous flaming sword of HOLY TRUTH. But no, that was apparently fully serious. Welcome to godless Europe, skeptical American!

The instructor talked about how we in the modern world have broken many of the bonds that formerly kept us down – ideas about right thinking, behavior, identity, institutions – and we now have a huge (to the point of bewildering) range of options for what we can choose to do and believe. But the flip side of this is that questions like “what is the meaning of life?” and “what should I become?” are no longer given to us by society, but thrown back at us to answer for ourselves. And some dude named Ulrich Beck wrote about how because we have more individual choice and less structure, we can easily be thrown off track entirely – it is in fact common for a person to experience one or more total life breakdowns and then feel like they have to build their lives again from zero. And we experience this as a personal failure, when in fact our lives are reflecting the changes in society.

At this point I was all WAIT WAIT WAIT I myself have been trying to claw my way back from at least my second total life breakdown and feeling utterly ridiculous because I feel like I have to start again from zero and you are telling me this is maybe not completely my own personal failure and it is actually normal? Can you say please that like 10 more times?

And then he talked about what a variety of philosophers, psychologists, and writers have said about the meaning of life – whether it exists and how one finds it – and then the class was over. And then I walked out the door and down along the river and I’m sure I’ve said before how stunning Zurich is at night? The church steeples are lit up and the lights reflect in the still river and last night the swans were chilling and strains of “YMCA” were wafting through the air (really. I don’t know.) and I marveled at how much of this societal change the very buildings I was looking at had presided over and wondered what they might see next.