to time Jack would also have me read articles by contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, and each week I wrote an informal one- or two-page paper to get our discussion going.
Those discussions were the highlight of my week. Yet I also dreaded them, at times. I was still learning to articulate my ideas, and the text was dense. Besides that, I hated the thought of appearing stupid in front of a professor I respected. Those old perfectionist habits died hard. Most of the time I simply did not know what I thought yet, and compared to my normal classes, now the discussion was all on me. There was no lecture component here. It was Jack, me, and our Danish friend Søren.
There were a lot of long pauses during those discussions. Often I began by reading my short paper aloud, grateful to at least have some ideas to start things off, always more confident with my pen than with my voice. At other times I stared out the window at those rocking chairs across the street, and past them to the dorm I lived in my first year of college. “Well . . .” I said, and paused again. “I guess . . . maybe . . . it seems like . . .” and perhaps then the words started to trickle out. I started to say what I really thought, which was that Kierkegaard was right about all of this Christian love stuff. But that I worried he was also wrong, sometimes.
Kierkegaard’s understanding of love begins with a central assumption taken from Matthew 22:39: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He goes so far as to assert that if loving one’s neighbor is not a duty (e.g. you shall love, whether you like it or not), the concept of neighbor does not exist. He writes in his journals, “And it is this Christian love that finds out and knows that the neighbor exists and, what amounts to the same, that everyone is that, because if it were not a duty to love, then the concept of ‘neighbor’ would not exist either.”9 In other words, what besides duty could make sense of a person’s efforts to love that neighbor whom she has no particular preference for, not to mention loving the neighbor who she flat out doesn’t like? And, on top of that, without duty, loving one’s enemy (a central aspect of Jesus’ teaching) would be impossible; the Christian, Kierkegaard emphasizes, is called to love not only the people she naturally likes, but even those she is tempted to hate.
These are hard words, words that I knew in theory having grown up in the church, but words that I now wrestled with philosophically and personally as I tried to make sense of duty as a concept, and the strange idea of loving someone you don’t like at all. I was struggling just to love my roommates, who I genuinely liked, but who also genuinely got on my nerves a lot of the time. And while Kierkegaard’s understanding of the love of neighbor assumed and rested on the necessity of self-love, so few pages of Works of Love were devoted to the self that it diminished in comparison to love of others.
I was only just coming to realize that I was not very good at the whole “self-love” thing, so this was more than a bit disconcerting.
Sometimes my conversations with Jack would shift away from Kierkegaard, and I would say, too, that I wanted to go to graduate school more than anything, but was afraid I wouldn’t get in, afraid I wasn’t smart enough. I wanted to know as much as Jack knew, though I never told him that part, or at least never in those words. Mostly I plodded through the text slowly, my teacher always patient, never filling the awkward silences with his own words, letting me think, letting me struggle to find my own opinions. When it was apparent that I disliked a certain idea we were discussing, Jack reassured me that even he was not Kierkegaardian on all issues.
One week I came in, completely exasperated by the excessive self-giving nature of love as Kierkegaard articulates it, and read to Jack from the paper titled, “Does loving make me a doormat?” which was my attempt at making sense of the need for self-care in my life as an RA who spent a lot of time looking after everyone else and putting other people’s needs first. When I finished reading the most personal essay I had written that semester, I looked up at Jack, nervous for his response. “Meghan,” he said, “not everyone can do the kind of work you’re doing, and the people who can, should.” I didn’t know then how true that would be, nor how often I would need to return to that moment, to struggle to believe those words, a blessing spoken over my work and my goals as I left the intellectual womb of Hope College for the wider world of academia. I return to them still, and I hope they are true.
After receiving rejection letter after rejection letter, I finally got a call. I returned to my apartment on St. Patrick’s Day 2007 to a message on the shared answering machine from the admissions director at Duke Divinity School, congratulating me on my acceptance to the Master of Theological Studies program. I jumped up and down on the couch in the empty apartment, squealing with glee, before calling my friends to come over and celebrate with me. That night we watched Waking Ned Divine and ate sticky toffee pudding, and the following morning we left for spring break. Our final semester was nearing its end, and my relationship with Kierkegaard was moving to the next level.
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