Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
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I studied philosophy with extraordinary intensity, which was a source of affectionate amusement to my teachers. When one of them heard I was heading for the beach for the weekend, he speculated that my beach towel was emblazoned with “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Such moments brought light relief from my fierce existential angst, which nevertheless continued to weigh heavily. Another teacher predicted a prolonged virginity for me, because: “After all, who wants to talk about Hegel at the breakfast table?” He must have felt it was safe to assume nobody had yet been subjected to such discomfort, since I had only recently left the convent and as yet had only got as far as turning into a secular equivalent, a Heideggerian variant of “being-toward-death” after taking off the veil. I reeked of Sturm und Drang. I brooded with neantization. I ached for authenticity. One of my teachers did not see it that way, and we bonded, to the point where I was on the verge of losing my virginity, but he stopped and decided it was a line we should not cross. My virginity was one thing, but my integrity was another. Another teacher offered to pay me to write a postgraduate paper for him. Desperate as I was financially and flattered that he thought an undergraduate able to do his postgraduate work, my integrity was really all I had left, and I had given up much already to keep it. He was not happy at having exposed himself without getting what he wanted. Though he believed I could ace an A for him on his postgraduate course, he gave me a B in my undergraduate class.
Philosophy preoccupied nearly my every waking moment. I pondered the great questions of the ages: between idealism and materialism, monism and pluralism, realism and conventionalism, structure and process. Above all, I weighed the arguments for and against the existence of God, as if deciding were a matter of life or death. Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways didn’t really work for me anymore. There was also the problem of evil. Where was God during the Holocaust? Where was he now, as some lived in luxury while others lived in rat-infested ghettos in Philadelphia or bomb-devastated hamlets in Vietnam? I struggled to believe. Much of what I read spoke of the eclipse of God, the absence of God, the death of God. I felt the full force of these phrases. I prayed for faith. I prayed to this hidden God, while asking myself how a hidden God was different from no God at all.
I turned every assignment into something meaningful and important for me to explore. I read texts that had enormous impact on me, such as Dostoevsky’s The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. I memorized the most arresting passages:
Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
Although I was still at a Catholic institution, many of these readings were on the Church’s index of forbidden books, which would have filled me with foreboding in high school. By then, we hardly noticed or cared which books were on the index. It was formally abolished by Paul VI in June 1966, which was just as well, because some of the titles were already required reading for my philosophy courses.
I met new people. I liked many of my classmates, but preferred the company of my teachers. The ones I liked best were as indulgent with me as the mentors of my teenage years. I wanted to be around people who pushed me, challenged me. We formed a philosophy club comprising both faculty and students. I saw a lot of Greg during this period. I went down to Baltimore, where he was stationed, as soon as I could. Another time we met in New York, walking the streets of Manhattan all night long. We talked and laughed and even danced. There was still no one to whom I could speak with such freedom and openness. I also saw Ken again. He had left the Dominican order and entered the psychiatric ward of Philadelphia General Hospital. The story was that he had a “nervous breakdown,” a term used widely and loosely then. To this day, I don’t know what happened to him. We were no longer on the same wavelength. The last time I saw him he had joined the Marines. I dated quite a lot, despite the Sturm und Drang. I “played the field.” I enjoyed male company after being so starved of it in my convent years. There was a high school teacher, a scientist, an ex-seminarian (who then became a priest after all), even a businessman. I didn’t fall in love with any of them. They didn’t touch me at my core. I did know what it meant to love someone, even if I had never expressed it sexually. I was seething with erotic desire, but my strongest attractions were to men who were unavailable in that way, even when we became quite close in other ways.
Through it all, I was still a Catholic. I went to mass. I attended joyfully the first masses of seminarians I knew. Around my own parish, I ran into my former classmates from primary school, whose Catholicism seemed untroubled and unchanged since eighth grade. Meanwhile, my doubts were multiplying and intensifying. In this aspect of my life, which was starting to swamp me, I felt utterly alone, no matter how many great people I had around me. I still did not know a single person who was not a religious believer. No one I knew was going through such a crisis of faith.
In the fall, I went to work as a sixth-grade teacher at Our Lady of Charity School in Brookhaven. I would have preferred to be in the city and not the suburbs, but this was what the archdiocese offered. At that time, it was unheard of for an ex-nun to continue to teach in the same school system. I won that battle, against the wishes of the order I had left, and got a job teaching in a different school staffed by a different order. I also fought for and won my appointment to teach religion as a layperson, arguing that if I had been qualified to teach it the year before, I was still qualified. I threw myself into teaching, unaware of the controversy it would provoke or of the forces moving against me. I was only a mild liberal: I taught religion in the spirit of Vatican II theology. I taught the kids to sing “We Shall Overcome” and talked about the civil rights movement down south. That was all, but in 1965, it was considered too much. I became an early casualty in the post-Vatican II struggle between the advocates of aggiornamento and defenders of orthodoxy.
One day in late November, I was called out of my classroom, stopping my history lesson in mid-sentence, and told by the principal-superior to go immediately downtown to the office of the superintendent of education. When I arrived, the assistant superintendent, who knew me from the previous controversy, assured me that I was an excellent teacher—and then fired me in nearly the same breath. I was right, he said, and he was on my side, but I was too controversial. Parents, priests, nuns, and fellow teachers were complaining (to everyone except to me), and I had to go. He reminded me of the grand inquisitor.
I was shocked. I tried to pray. For the first time in my life, I felt that there was no one there to hear. By the time I left his office, it was already dark, with thunder and lightning and pouring rain. I felt as if the ground had vanished from under my feet. That day, all the questions of centuries came to a crescendo in my mind. I could no longer cling to the beliefs that had sustained me in my life so far. I felt the full force of all my accumulating doubts, sending me into free fall through a void, bereft of all my bearings, deprived of all my traditions. I lost my faith, my job, my home that day. I lost the very meaning of my life, all within twenty-four hours. That morning, I had proclaimed the gospel, teaching others what, by nightfall, I would no longer believe myself. The shock jolted me toward a break that was already inevitable. When I arrived home, I told my parents, who were horrified. They sided with the school, saying I had rocked the boat once too often and that I had set a bad example for the younger children. I stormed out in anger, stuffed everything I owned that I could carry into a suitcase and left. For weeks, I walked the streets and