Finding God On My Own Terms
How an 8th grade Latin class shifted my perspective of the divine
After my recent acceptance into the Spiritual Guidance Institute’s 16-month training program, I’ve been thinking back on all the breadcrumbs that led me here. For decades I’ve lived a life of teaching (both children and adults), and in every instance I’ve been tasked to help care for and develop others. My good fortune for such an opportunity is not lost on me.
And though my experiences have mostly been opportunistic, there’s a common thread in all of my life’s line items—curiosity and love. Most everything I’ve ever done, both personally and professionally, has asked me to dabble in landscape that is best served by these two tenets. The passage of time affords a deeper understanding of how the joyful, adventurous, and terrible alike all weave perfectly together. Such confluence, at times, feels like magic. And since I like the idea of enchantment, I honor it as such. But in reality, the magic of life is simply the result of living. We are, at times, marveled by our beingness, and that strikes me as just fine.
What follows is a brief recollection of a pivotal moment in my spiritual life. I’ll lead into the essay with a statement that guides my life today, because its significance now links inextricably to when I was just a knucklehead kid, desperately scrambling to figure things out.
Here goes: To love is to actively extend oneself for the purpose of nourishing my, or someone else’s life (paraphrased quote about love from bell hooks’ book all about love). Thanks for reading.
Enjoy!
For three years I attended an all boys, suit coat and tie wearing, Jesuit high school in upstate New York. The sort of school led by old priests with bulbous noses and veiny cheeks. Their clothing reeked of stale cigarettes, their breath of coffee, and though their rote refrains did little to inspire, they taught me so much about how to appease adults seeking certain compliance. Learning how to fit in, how to draw as little attention as possible, is often a core lesson. It sure was for me.
One morning, when the day’s schedule of classes was thrown off by a morning mass, my Latin teacher, Mr. Finn, hurriedly ushered us into the classroom, shut the door with a bang, then centered his tall, well-worn stool before our neat rows of desks. His movements were foreign enough for us to take more interest than usual. His diminutive stature, his short and groomed beard, his high forehead and beady eyes, his chapped, pursed lips—everything seemed to contort tighter than ever as he leaned against the stool and exhaled a mighty huff. Then his eyes went up and down the rows, briefly holding each of our gazes. I, for one, swear that at some point he started tearing up, but I can’t be sure.
“Gentlemen,” he said quietly but with an edge (he always called us gentlemen), “we will not be learning any Latin today.” Which was music to my ears, and surely my classmates’, too. For the first time in my academic life, I was truly challenged by a subject. Barely passing and madly resenting the mandatory eighth grade requirement to learn a dead language. Also, I had not done my homework, because I never did my Latin homework. But not because I shirked it, but because I simply couldn’t make sense of it all. I honestly didn’t know how to start, let alone complete, each assignment. With each failure I felt dumber. With each failure, Mr. Finn grew more frustrated with me. Who could blame him?
The idea of verb conjugation remained an impossibility. I hadn’t managed to grasp the first or second or third person, the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, or ablative cases, or how a word like farmer, a first declension noun, was translated to agricola in Latin, and, somehow, deemed masculine in gender. I hated the lot of it. I hated witnessing others gradually understand it while I remained stuck on the so-called easy stuff. And by association, I determinedly hated Mr. Finn, too.
Not talking about Latin was the best possible news I could have heard that morning. “Today, instead,” he said, “we’re going to talk about something far more important. Something I hope you’ll carry with you for a lifetime. Today, gentlemen, we’re going to talk about God—but not just God, God as a metaphor.”
For context, I should say that I grew up believing that somehow, long ago, in an era that either predated or paralleled the time of the dinosaurs, two naked people lived in a paradisiacal setting, location unknown, until a snake made the woman eat an apple, after which everything changed. I grew up believing, wholeheartedly, there was an actual flood that covered the planet’s entirety, and that someone built a boat so big that pairs of every exiting animal somehow fit in its hold. I grew up believing these stories, and so many more, without question. I understood them all to be part of history. One that chronologically tracked as readily as the thirteen colonies and two world wars I’d been ingesting repeatedly since primary school.
But that morning in Latin class, Mr. Finn told us to stop believing everything. He told us to question all we know. All we’d ever learned. “Because whatever you think you know about God is likely wrong,” he said. “All you ever learned, all you were ever told, all those stories of the Bible you grew up hearing in church or around your dinner table—they are just stories. Digestible bits of information meant to teach you a thing.” I remember his words stopped my breathing. And when he paused between thoughts, the room remained silent, as if we all greedily awaited more. Mr Finn continued, “All you’ve learned may not be true at all. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve a purpose, but it’s up to you to figure out exactly what that purpose is.” Finn said that God doesn’t give away wisdom. That it’s for us to find. “And perhaps somewhere in that wisdom,” Finn said, “you’ll find yourself. And perhaps God, too. ”
Mr. Finn said the only pathway to God is a life of inquiry. We must question everything. Stay honest. Stay curious. Finn advised us not to believe in a thing simply because we were told to believe. “Blind faith is a problem,” he said. “You have to be smart and open with the divine. Because the divine doesn’t want yes-men. The divine prefers the thoughtful, the probing, the contrarians. God wants you to find a balance of knowledge and peace so you might give yourself over to it.” I distinctly remember Mr. Finn saying that true goodness simply can not be the result of being ordered to be good. Goodness, he stressed, must be a self-driven choice, or else it is not goodness at all.
As I recall this moment today, more than forty years after the fact, I realize that I am putting words into Mr. Finn’s mouth. But I do this with the utmost faith that his declarations, though varied from my own recollection here, offered the seeds for my ultimate remembrances. My words are the matured and evolved version of what landed that day in his Latin classroom. The pivotal day I expected more failure, and instead was entrusted with a sentiment that altered my personal trajectory.
Mr. Finn catalyzed a sudden understanding that God insists I partake in inquisitive moments that might otherwise cause me shame and guilt. That I am to do this inward-looking with abandon in an attempt to better know myself. Which is to say, to better set the stage for knowing something bigger than myself. Finn’s words were perhaps the first moment the world stopped revolving around me. The first artifact discovered in my life of digging for answers.
Mr. Finn maintained we take religion with a grain of salt. And for me, he was the first adult to confirm that it was OK, if not preferred, to think for myself about things. That it was OK to question religion, to question God, the Bible, heaven, goodness, and even authority. It was OK to wonder deeply about and critique the ethereal He who lives up there in the clouds and whose rules supposedly grant access (or refusal) to a life of eternal joy and sweet reward.
Mr. Finn sparked a personal empowerment that propelled me to recognize my own small, yet magnificent role in a collective holiness. He made it OK for me to find God on my own terms.
This Mr. Finn actually sounds ok to me, Tom.