We
had the second alum-led session in "DIY Religion" today, by a fairly
recent graduate who is in her first year in the PhD program at Harvard's Committee on the Study of Religion, focusing on medieval Christianity and critical theory. I've given the alums carte
blanche to teach about whatever they think might contribute to an
understanding of "DIY Religion" today, and each will be on a wildly
different topic. Beyond acquainting students with multiple images of
where their studies might take them, it's making our course truly
multivocal and multidisciplinary!
The first, two weeks ago over zoom, was entitled "Healing technologies." An alum who tried and left Rabbinical School before completing a Masters in Social Work focused on the way religious rituals can give body to a liberated future rather than an oppressive past - and suggesting ways of DIYing within rather than beyond "religions."
Today's, entitled "(A)theological dissent," took the class into dense passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche to provide a genealogy of efforts to move beyond a Christian culture. Key was "Acquaint Thy Self First Hand With Deity," the 1836 speech that got Emerson banned from Harvard Divinity School for thirty years (though now there's an endowed professorship named after him). Each of us is divine, if we only knew it and stopped accepting the forced mediocrity of imitating earlier supposedly more spiritual figures and ages. And yet Emerson still considered himself a Christian - and was in imagination still too Christian-like for our "atheist, not anti-theist" alum.
In Nietzsche's Gay Science we first mulled over the famous "Where is God? ... We have killed him!" section (§125). Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? But the presenter's goal was this:
Delight in blindness. – ‘My thoughts’, said the wanderer to his shadow, ‘should show me where I stand, but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love ignorance of the future and do not want to perish of impatience and premature tasting of things promised.’
The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (CUP 2001), 120, 162
The presenter's suggestion was that really DIYing it means letting go of received ideas not only of what "religion" is but even of what it means to be a "self." Can we live into presence, relation, and care for the oppressed without losing ourselves in the impatience of "projects" which seem future-oriented but really perpetuate the problems of the past?
Heady stuff, and no more something I could have come up with than the earlier alum contributions. But that's the point! I want the students to receive what the alums think valuable to share. And compared to my more academic presentations, these alum offerings are inspirational - and challenging - in a whole other way. Emerson was on to something:
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.
The Major Prose, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Belknap Harvard, 2015), 114
I'm provoked too!
Yet to come: alum-led classes on "Trans saints," "Making hijra," "Spirit and revolution" and "Wild church"! All framed by "Comfort ⇄ Control"!
