Here is an real anecdote taken from my real life here at Oxford. I had an interesting lunch a few weeks ago and I wrote this down right after the lunch. I figured I'd make it a blog post since I am trying (and failing) to use my blog to keep people up to date on my life (not that I am necessarily important enough for people to keep tabs on me). So, here it is and apologies for the unedited/stream-of-consciousness style:
Oh my heck!!!! Transcendental humanity!!!!! So I'm still trying to find friends here, but today was really nice. Yesterday was particularly rough because I was sick and confined to my room. Today I felt a lot better and went to the library and one of the German girls in my program came up to me around lunch time and asked me if I wanted to go to lunch. I of course jumped at the opportunity to have human contact. Well, we sat down and started chatting about life and career and then it got really interesting. She said that she used to get all worried about her future, but she now does not worry so much about it now because of "Gottvertrauen" (which is German for "trusting in God", i.e. faith). I kind of had to do a double take because this is not normal--or at least being here at Oxford makes you think that bringing up faith in a conversation is not normal. Plus, we had spoken before and there was not necessarily any inkling that she was religious. You have to understand my surprise. It is just not selbstverständlich, (understood/expected/natural) that a German--especially at Oxford--would be religious. So I kind of stammered, "wait, are you religious?" And she said yes and I asked what religion. She said that she was "catholic/protestant". She was raised catholic, but she recently realized that she thinks more like a protestant (wait for this), but she still identifies herself as catholic because she realizes that growing up catholic has made it such that catholicism is her identity and she can't escape it. It makes no sense to her to "convert" to another religion. And besides, if she just jumps ship, how could she ever effect change in her tradition? I got really excited when she said this and stammered "me too!!!!" but it did not end there. She then said, "yeah, the main thing is the claim about being the only true church." I almost lost it at about this point. But then she started talking again without letting me catch my breath: "But I've been thinking a lot about pluralism lately." And then she started explaining an analogy that tries to capture a pluralistic worldview. We all are blind and are feeling different parts of an elephant and describing what we feel from our vantage point. What we say ends up being different even though the ultimate reality is the same. hahahaha. I thought I was watching myself in a mirror. I had been using that analogy for a while as well. We both have realized that we don't like the analogy though and that the arguments for pluralism are just as unsatisfactory and contradictory as are one tradition's claims to absolute truth. We both kind of just left it at the thought of having an epistemological ceiling when it comes to certain matters. Tradition is not rational and there may not be any easy way to harmonize them all into one meta-system. I thought the conversation was such a crazy coincidence though and kind of made my heart jump about the possibility of connecting with people and finding commonalities. You know those moments when someone says something that really speaks to your experiences and suddenly you feel like we are not all just trapped in some hermetically sealed jar not really able to communicate with one another? This lunch was one of those experiences. We then wandered back to the topic of Gottvertrauen and how we both have derived a lot of strength from the religious mindset and have noticed that religious people are often characterized by a calm approach to life.
Just the other night I had the same conversation with a Jewish girl who is trying to figure out her place in her tradition. She came to a similar conclusion as the one above. It is interesting to me how many young people at this place come from religious backgrounds and are having similar experiences relating to their traditions as me. I suppose it is one of the effects of being in an in-between world with faith on the one side and secular academia on the other. Anyways, it is interesting how so many people deal with the same issues and questions. I think being at a place like this is kind of deceptive. You get the idea that with so many people from different places and backgrounds and religions that there is little you have in common. It seems to me that you just have to scratch a little below the surface to find surprising commonalities in human experience.
