Summer Doubts

What is the shortest distance between the certainty of an epiphany and the disaster of unemployment?  And I use the word disaster here, not hyperbolically, but very literally, for disaster breaks down into dis-astros, or no star.  In other words, a disaster means to find oneself with out stars to guide you, in the vastness of confusion and unknowability.  In any case, suffice it to say that the short distance between my graduation day epiphany and the situation I found myself in during the autumn of 2009 was four years of graduate school.  All this graduate education was supposed to confer certainty in my chosen path; it was supposed to be a needed stepping stone between life as a student and life as a teacher.  Instead, my years as a grad student only served to increase my doubt and confusion.

The first sign of this was actually not the string of Ph.D. program rejections I received in the spring of 2009.  For me, the first inkling of doubt came in the summer of 2007.  It was about this time that I realized my work at seminary was not going to be a sufficient preparation for the doctoral programs to which I wished to apply.  In other words, my three years of grad school were indeed a step toward my goal, but were a smaller step than I would have hoped.  That summer I painfully acknowledged that I was not where I needed to be, that I would need, in short, additional schooling before I could confidently apply for doctoral programs.

Perhaps the second sign of trouble was that this 'painful' realization came as something of a relief.  By the summer of 2007, I had been in higher education for over six years and was becoming, for lack of a better term, restless.  The prospect of five to seven more years of school, without a chance for a break, seemed to me incredibly daunting.  True, I still greatly desired my chosen career, but the path required to get there seemed, at least for the moment, a grueling, punishing journey. 

Thus, the chance to delay this doctoral journey by extending my master's education seemed to me a breath of fresh air.  I reasoned that as long as I needed more master's work, I might as well do it somewhere interesting.  I thus hatched the plan to study in the United Kingdom, and thus to definitively break my routines, get the fresh air I needed, and return to the States renewed and ready for the slow march into doctoral studies.  Besides, I thought, this would only put me one year behind in my career goal, for I could put in my doctoral applications soon after arriving in the UK. 

So it was that this summer of doubt did not shake my plans.  The strength of my certainty endured as I made new, better plans for the future without sacrificing my eventual vocational goal.  And while I today do not and cannot regret the decision to go abroad, for this was of course an enriching experience, it is clear to me that if I had stopped to really think through the source of my summer doubts, I might have averted the disaster that still loomed in my future.

An Epiphany

It was a balmy May morning, the morning I first knew for sure what I wanted to do with my life.  The sun was shining, beating down in fact, on the quadrangle between Dean Hall and the Administrative building where the Austin College graduation ceremony was always held.  I sat on a makeshift stage, with the rest of the choir, as the sound of bagpipes filled the air with "Scotland the Brave."  The pipers made their way down the center aisle, followed closely by a robed man carrying the school's official mace.  As the drone of pipes continued, dozens of academics, clad in robes and tassels and mortarboards, processed to their seats.  It was then, watching these academics in their academic garb, throwbacks to the universities of the medieval era, that I knew for sure: I wanted to be one of them, to join their ranks and follow in the procession of learned scholars.  This was perhaps my first moment of vocational certainty and it came not a moment too soon; for this was after all, my graduation day, and I would be going out into the real world all too soon.

On the morning of the aforementioned epiphany, I had, of course, already applied to and been accepted by a graduate school.  But my reasons for applying were not so much vocational as they were practical: the desire to remain near to my then-girlfriend, the need to keep my options open, and naturally, my desire to delay entry into the real world and, shudder, the workforce.  Graduate school, I surmised, would be a continuation of my undergraduate experience and would afford me the same intellectual and personal freedoms I had enjoyed in college.  By this point, after all, I had become accustomed to the academic lifestyle, and moreover, to the rhythm of life in the academy, with its courses and semesters and exams.  Graduate school was, therefore, a safe choice, if not a cheap one.

Whatever my initial motivations had been for applying to graduate school, whatever decisions I was trying to delay by extending my academic training for another three years, these rationalizations were all set aside and indeed co-opted by the new narrative that I constructed at the moment of my epiphany.  I saw my future in that procession, in those academic robes, and so at once my decision to go to graduate school was no longer simply a stalling tactic, but rather a step along the road to my eventual professorship.  And this felt good, and indeed, very adult, for I was no longer looking to preserve my past, but rather stepping boldly into my future, a future that I saw laid out before me in folding chairs on a grassy quad on that sunny spring day.