Making Sense of Making Sense of it All: On thinking critically and humanly

Like most people who grow up in America and go to church fairly often, I grew up feeling as though I possessed a soul. I believed this soul was separate from my body and yet the essence of who I truly was. But somewhere in the latter half of my teenage years something in my head reeled back in alarm and dissatisfaction: reason. You have to start thinking really critically and humanly for the first time in your life.

Most everybody has this sudden awareness that most of the beliefs you’ve held in the past are b.s. and have to be either left behind or reconsidered altogether. And it’s frightening when you first become aware of this; it can leave you feeling sapped and drained for a long time afterward. Because, probably for the first time in your life, you’re thinking differently and—for lack of a better word—adult-ly. You’re thinking differently about yourself, your beliefs, other people and what is ultimately important.

It’s pretty damn hard to think this way at first, let alone to sustain it, because it can leave you feeling as though you don’t have a whole lot to hold onto. In my own case, I went through really intense, nihilistic bouts of skepticism, followed by periods of a throbbing need for something important to believe in besides myself. That’s the hard thing about college and adulthood for many of us: leaving behind much of what was important about your childhood and then grappling with trying to find something to replace this emptiness.

Like many students, including myself, I left behind religion. And as a result, we have thus left open an enormous gap in our lives that is very hard to fill up on our own. That’s one of the attractive things about belief systems: they do a lot of the work for you; all the stuff that’s supposed to be important and meaningful has already been laid out for you in advance, and your job is submit yourself to believing.

There are many different services on campus that address these problems: Campus Ministries, the Wellness Center and the Forgiveness Blitz immediately come to mind. But the problem I have is that much of what I hear from these organizations is so generalized and sanitized that it simply doesn’t come off as honest to my ears. Now, this doesn’t mean that Ministries and Wellness are wrong about what they talk about, but it doesn’t come off as honest to what really goes on when people have these crises of self and identity.

If these organizations were really being honest, they would say that we are not easily happy, and this is especially true in college, when one is so confused about what is ultimately important. If they were being honest, they would acknowledge straight out that college is the first time you begin to really think about what makes you happy and why, and likewise, what is good happiness and what leaves you feeling empty and lonely.

I know this comes off way too harsh, and who am I to tell these organizations what works for people? But one thing I’ll say is that there is a small number of students who go to chapel, and there is an even smaller number who take Wellness seriously. And what this leaves me wondering is whether or not they’re doing as good a job as they could be.

None of this is new to anyone. I know much of this sounds despairingly cynical, but it’s stuff that’s important and stuff that I don’t really hear people talking honestly about on campus. I’m sure I’m not giving the Ministries and Wellness enough credit for what they do for this campus, and they do a lot of good. The only beef I have is that what they’re saying about growing up as a person in this time and place doesn’t sound true to me and doesn’t tap into my wellspring of emotion.