Obsessing over Revelation

A person I knew in grad school had a little game she liked to play . . . connecting people's dissertation topics to their "issues." Her theory was, we often use our dissertations to work out emotional issues, rather than strictly academic issues and questions, even if it is not intentional. I had a dissertation topic that seemed to prove the point, for in the midst of writing my dissertation on Revelation's bridal and nuptial imagery I went through a painful divorce that involved my questioning of issues pertaining to gender and marriage in general. While at the time I nodded along and agreed with her assessment, today I look at the connection differently . . . I was attracted to my topic not because of the bridal or nuptial piece, but because of the Book of Revelation and how it relates to the way I think and look at the world. Scary, I know!

When I teach my apocalyptic literature class, I often show my students a picture of myself getting ready to drive off to college. I'm leaning against my car (which I would total a couple years later) and I look happy. I tell my students that what they can't see is the effect Revelation has had on me. At that time, August 1988, I was pretty consumed with anxiety. I had spent the summer working for my church denomination, leading children's camps. A group of people that I encountered that summer had become advocates of a booklet entitled "88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988." While the title used the word "could," the text aimed to convince the reader that the Rapture would most definitely happen in the fall of 1988. It used biblical passages, especially drawn from Daniel and Revelation, to make its point. Of course it hedged on pinpointing a precise date, because as all good evangelical Christians know, "No one knows the day or the hour." The week, however, we can guesstimate.

Given my encounter with "88 Reasons," I started college especially anxious. I didn't completely buy into the Rapture-fever-excitement, but I had always lived with the fear of impending judgment. I had spent my days trying to live a perfect life and I spent the moments before I fell asleep praying for forgiveness even for "sins" that I may have unintentionally committed. Years later I would realize that this fear of unintentional sinning is part of obsessional thinking, something that many people with obsessive personalities do. (Unsurprisingly, there are many of us in academia!) The "88 Reasons" booklet fed into this, giving me something else to worry about. What if the authors were right? Then I was really screwed.

The week of the supposed Rapture came and went, obviously. But, I had other things to deal with as first year student, like dealing with a crazy roommate and picking a major. The roommate situation remained a little unsettled, but I happily settled into a philosophy major. And, while the philosophy major made me rethink religion, Revelation and the Rapture, I wasn't able to shake the obsessive thinking. At least the impending end of the world was no longer an issue. I no longer imagined myself under God's judgmental eye or under the eye of a Christ-coming-in-the-clouds; instead, I had internalized that eye in a different way.

It wasn't until graduate school that I had to reconsider Revelation. It wasn't my choice, but Revelation was the only option for a New Testament seminar one semester. I approached it with some trepidation, but to my surprise I was intrigued with the text. I was reminded of the text's rhetorical power and I was fascinated by the way it used imagery to further its rhetorical ends. I was also reminded of its power over me, through the guise of "88 Reasons." I was a relatively intelligent high-school and college student, why had the book gotten under my skin and made me so anxious? As I thought about my dissertation, I thought I would explore how the text's imagery, its metaphorical language, worked to persuade and to shape thought. The text, I thought, had some power to persuade reasonably intelligent individuals to think in apocalyptic ways.

While I still afford Revelation's metaphor a certain amount of rhetorical power, I am beginning to think more and more that my own thought patterns were part of what attracted me to Revelation. My tendency toward dualistic and somewhat extreme thinking means that Revelation made some sense to me. I resonated with the text. Of course, I bought into the idea of an impending judgment . . . I had been anticipating it for years in my tendency toward self-judgement and criticism. I guess I think it is a cultural cycle of sorts: Revelation and other apocalyptic texts and traditions create a culture that tends toward absolutes, dichotomies, notions of judgment. Those of us who are prone to these ways of thinking buy into and potentially perpetuate the text's apocalyptic thought patterns. On one hand my scholarship tries to disarm the text of this power. If we know how the text's metaphors work, maybe we can resist them and not be bowled over. On the other hand, I wonder if or how my scholarship perpetuates these patterns.

I Am Not Jacob

Today I had the opportunity to attend the convocation "installing" my Ph. D. director and mentor into her new role as Dean at a local divinity school. It was a nice service, especially since it gave me an opportunity to hear her preach on a biblical passage I've always loved--the story of Jacob wrestling with God.

If I would have been a boy, apparently, my parents would have named me Jacob, after my grandfather. In high school and college, I took this would-have-been-name as a sign that it was OK to wrestle with belief about God, Bible, reality, etc. As a philosophy major, in fact, I reveled in the practice of questioning norms and accepted beliefs. It was a time of pushing against what I had been taught to believe and defining myself in opposition to family, church and others. In graduate school, I followed this trajectory toward wrestling with biblical texts, especially "difficult" texts . . . hence, my focus on the Book of Revelation. When I tell the story of how I came to study Revelation, in fact, I often shape the narrative around the theme of struggle: Having been raised in a church that embraced Revelation as unfolding around us, I chose to study Revelation as a way of disarming the text of its power to create division and imbue fear. (See evidence related to scriptural-fear-mongering below.)

Today, however, my mentor argued for reading the story of Jacob in a new light, shedding the tendency to idealize struggle. She suggested that our cultural valorization of struggle makes it difficult for us to see that Jacob's tendency toward opposition and winning almost made him loose sight of the divine. We read the text as Jacob having to wrestle the one that comes to him during the night. We fail to ask, what if Jacob had not struggled, not approached the other as an opponent. So intent was Jacob on battling the stranger, that he almost missed experiencing the other, the divine.

As I sat and listened to her talk about how our culture has embraced the notion of competition, how we look for opponents and assume others as enemies, I was struck by my tendency to view my self and my work in this way. I typically think of my approach to a text in contrast to another approach or reading, usually a reading that I understand to be dominant or dominating in some way. (Of course, part of this is related to my reading texts from a feminist perspective.) At times, I even approach texts, their contexts, the material I study as things to be mastered. I imagine scholarship and even teaching as wrestling against something or someone.

But, I need to remember, I am not Jacob. So, what if I began to think of the process of writing, teaching, working with texts in other ways, as something other than wrestling and struggle? What might those metaphors be?

On Mutant Academic Ideals and Resting on Sabbath/ Sabbatical

Even though I am someone who teaches about biblical texts, I'm not a person whose thinks about how my personal life is, should be or has been shaped by the biblical texts. I've resisted the idea that the Bible is somehow a road-map for living, a compass or a guideline. This resistance comes from my gradual migration out of an evangelical Christian context, a context familiar to so many other biblical studies folk. However, over the past few years, I've thought more and more about these texts as conversation partners and as points of conversation between myself and others from the past, present and future. My work on conceptual metaphor, in particular, prompts me to think about the ways that images from these ancient writings have shaped me and my context and the ways I might be more intentional vis-a-vis that shaping. Now that I'm on sabbatical, I've entered a period of time that explicitly draws upon a biblical tradition and image--sabbath. However, as I thought about this time I never really put much thought into biblical ideas about sabbath . . .

Instead, my thinking about sabbatical centered around 1) when I could get one and 2) all the stuff I might accomplish during the sabbatical. In fact, my thinking about this period in my career was shaped by some image I have of an ideal academic who goes on sabbatical to an exotic academic locale, does a lot of heavy reading, rubs shoulders with the popular thinkers of the day, sips cocktails in the afternoon and, presto, has some product at the end of it all. This image is a very "Protestant-work-ethic-modern-multi-tasking-sexy-book-writer-theory-loving-text-geek" mash-up. I'm really not sure when this mutant creature took over my life, but now she wants to call the shots on my sabbatical and, I fear, my academic life as a whole. Blargh.

So, back to the text, as I often say in my classes. Looking at Genesis, first of all, I'm surprised that the seventh day is one of the two times that at the end of a "day" God does not see and pronounce things as good. On the other days, except for the second, the author recounts God's creation and then reports: "God saw that it was good." God does not take the time on the seventh day to look back at the creation, to muse about whether the dome in the sky looks a little wonky, to fuss over whether or not sea monsters were a good idea or not. God's not looking back seems particularly important to me now, since one of the things I'm struggling with on sabbatical is looking backwards. As I mentioned before, the luxury of time on my hands creates an opportunity to re-look at past writing and to focus on (i.e. literally obsess about) shortcomings. Double blargh.

While God leaves the past to be the past, God also does not, according to the text, dwell on the future either. There is no suggestion that on the eighth day God might re-do some part of creation, make it better or more consistent or more witty. Neither does the text suggest that God is sitting around writing up action plans or research agendas. The day, instead, is about rest. Rest. And the day is made sacred by God. Sacred rest.

The notion that a sabbatical might be some sort of "sacred rest" is a little scary to me. It sounds a little more slacker-ish and spiritual-ish than I tend to be. However, it also makes me wonder what might come out of a sabbatical that is treated as a time to take a break from what one has done in the past, a time to think about and within the present without fear for the future. Maybe it's time for me to think about what kind of professor, scholar, person I am right now: What are my current questions, my current scholarly motivations and interests? Hmmm . . .

Personal Apocalypse: On Sabbatical

The school year is starting, but I'm not. I'm on sabbatical. Sigh.

As I hear my friends talk about their first days back--the carefully selected teaching outfits (tie or no tie? sexy heels or "I mean business" boots?), the last minute syllabus preparation, the pre-year meetings that delay the actual beginning--I feel a sense of sadness. I miss the adrenaline rush of that first day. I miss the first day discussion about how my Intro to New Testament class is NOT a Sunday School class. I miss the students who I've taught before expressing their enthusiasm about being in my class again. I miss getting my students (and myself) excited about the material I teach--it's inherent interest and significance. Instead, I'm feeling detached and depressed.

Don't get me wrong, I am (or have been) excited about sabbatical. In fact, all spring and summer I reveled in the idea of having a chance to do writing. However, the reality of a wide swath of time to myself--to be with myself, to be with my "work," is now daunting. I'm realizing, on one hand, that I like my teacher self. I'm comfortable with her and her abilities. (Of course, at the beginning of next semester, as I re-enter the classroom, I'll have to be reminded of that.) Not going into the classroom this fall reminds me that I like being in there. On the other hand, as I face an ongoing writing project and a couple of papers, I'm realizing that I'm not as sure of the scholar/ writer self. I did not expect that the so-called imposter syndrome would hit me like a ton of bricks.

Armed with the luxury of time to look at my past work, the few publications I've done, all I can see are the mistakes, the inconsistencies, the short-comings. Sitting in my re-done home office, I'm compelled to reach out to people for reassurance: "Other people make mistakes, right?" I offer myself advice on how I should have done things: "When that esteemed individual asked you to contribute an essay the first semester of your first year teaching, you should have held off until you had time to really work out the details." Instead of telling the Lynn of 20/20 hindsight to shut the hell up, I allow her the last say. Ouch.

So why share all this? It's so revealing (hence, labeling it "apocalypse"). Well, I think that revelation can lead to gaining some kind of perspective on the issue. By looking at what I am doing, thinking, saying, I see that while there are parts of me in my academic work, my writing, my work is not me. I am more than the book, the essay, the review. My sense of sadness about the semester, for instance, reminds me that I am also a teacher and a colleague. Looking at my work, I see that I am also more than what any critic or academic conversation partner, negative OR positive, says or thinks about me. (Not that this reflection was occasioned by some external criticism--it wasn't.) Luke Johnson, who was an important mentor to me in grad school, once told me that I shouldn't dwell on what others think, regardless of whether their feedback was positive or negative, since it was putting my self worth in the hands of others. I think he was right. Of course I knew all of this before sabbatical, but now I need to learn to believe it and to find strategies for living it. I need to find ways of being comfortable with putting my ideas out into the world without the paralysis that comes with perfectionism, without worrying about what others think. I need to find ways of being comfortable with my role as scholar, as someone who lends her voice to intellectual investigations and inquiries. If you have any great strategies, feel free to share of course.

I'm also sharing this because of the hype around sabbatical. It is a great thing, mind you; however, as any other stage of the profession, it has its difficulties and times for growth. I hate growth, because, damn, it hurts some times.

Now, on to sabbatical . . .