Part 6: Foreign and Familiar

Tim Jurgensen

15 Oct 2024 — 10 min read

You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
― Thomas Merton

If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut.
— Alan Watts

It’s hard to find a word for it.

It's like nostalgia, not for some time in the past or in the future, but for the moment you’re already in.

A “now nostalgia?"

Or maybe it’s almost like whatever the opposite of what “homesickness” is?

It is not so much a “wanderlust,” which is more about the romanticized yearning for a new experience, but a kind of de-ja-vu to the sheer experience of experience.

Instead of missing a “home” that is in a distant past or future, it's the discovery or remembrance of the sheer nearness of a “home” that is accessible at any given moment. The “home-ness” of now, of the present.

No, that’s not it, either.

There really is no word precise enough for this “now nostalgia.”

It is one of the strangest and yet most delightful experiences I have come to know in life. It is that inexplicable feeling of being surprisingly at home in completely unrecognizable, unfamiliar, and entirely obscure and foreign places.

Like the time Raghu and I decided to travel to Amsterdam for Easter weekend.

Instead of taking the train from Nijmegen, however, we opted to make an experience out of it and bike the 120 kilometers ourselves.

Yes, you read that correctly: to bike there - on our secondhand city bikes, no less.

It was Raghu’s idea — I was just in it for the adventure.

The morning we embarked, we went downstairs to our bikes, almost as if we were just going to the grocery store or perhaps to campus for a lecture, except this time, we were planning to casually bike across the small European country we called home.

We crossed rivers and canals by bridge and by ferry, biked into the wind and had been propelled by it, we were rained on and warmed by the sun, we observed cows who observed us, we biked past windmills, we laughed and maybe even wanted to cry at some points, although we never admitted as much to each other.

10+ hours of biking later, we arrived in Amsterdam at our hostel barely before the nationwide 9:00 pm evening COVID curfew was enforced.

We were exhausted and starving.

We had rushed to the grocery store to grab some microwavable meals to eat (all the restaurants were closed) and bring them back to the hostel before the curfew.

After we self-checked in at the hostel, however, we discovered the hostel kitchen was locked and closed. This meant we could neither reach the microwave nor any kind silverware, not to mention even a table to sit at.

Thankfully, we had gotten some potato chips and our food wasn’t frozen, just refrigerated.

So we sat on the floor in our small hostel dorm room—because the bunk beds were too compact to sit up on comfortably—and we used our potato chips as spoons to shovel our cold grocery store meals into our utterly exhausted bodies.

We laughed at the scene of pitiful circumstance, knowing somehow we were forging a core memory.

“What a bizarre and unique situation to be in,” I thought.

It was entirely unrecognizable to anything I had ever known before, anything I could have ever conceived of.

And what a surprise, despite how strange and foreign it was, I never felt more at home, as if there was no other place to be except for right there.

There it was, that obscure “now nostalgia.”

I wrote in my journal after that trip.

I love in life when I find myself in such unique situations as I did on Friday. Here I was, an American, on a bike with a backpack strapped to the back of it, accompanied by a man from India whom I didn’t know existed but three months ago, riding across the Netherlands towards Amsterdam. Its a bizarre thing to feel so at home in such a foreign situation.

It was a feeling that I would become very accustomed to.

Not only with the people and places I met and visited but especially with the world of theology I was beginning to investigate.

The first thing I learned in my graduate studies was, in fact, just how little I actually knew.

Despite having grown up in Christianity my whole life and having studied it thoroughly (or so I thought) in my bachelor’s degree — I was encountering ideas and concepts I had never encountered before.

In my first semester of grad school, I took three classes: Theological Ethics, a Seminar on Christian Spirituality, and a class on Spirituality and Mysticism in the Modern Age.

Each week, I found myself entranced by the reading material and lectures.

In my ethics class, I learned about the history and development of Christian ethics and morality from the time of its origin throughout its two thousand-year-old history until today. I became familiar with the historical conflicts, philosophical debates, and enduring challenges that Christian ethics was forced to reconcile or explain.

In my seminar on Christian Spirituality class, we surveyed all the wonderfully diverse expressions and traditions of Christian spirituality across the faith’s two-thousand-year-old existence. Stretching from the desert fathers and mothers, the medieval monasteries, the Eastern Orthodox, the Pentecostals, and the Baptists, etc. This ecumenical introduction was rich and broad, and the beauty of the diverse expressions of Christian faith, practice, and belief throughout history struck me.

In my Spirituality and Mysticism in the Modern Age class, I was introduced more thoroughly to the mysticism found within Christianity and the particular challenges and opportunities that modernity poses to it.

For the first time, I considered things like the efficacy of the divine liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox tradition or Catholicism rather than just discounting it as “misguided" and “stodgy,” as I had always done.

I considered the difference between apophatic and cataphatic theology, their forms and functions, and the ways each had informed different movements and expressions of Christian spiritual and religious practice.

I considered the myriad of ethical frameworks employed by different Christian traditions over the centuries and explored how they compared to what I had always known.

I allowed myself to consider the philosophical implications of fundamentalism and mysticism in our contemporary society. In view of modernity, were they viable? What did they mean for our contemporary society, for current events, and for our politics?

What did modernity mean, if anything, for our use of prayer?

Are mystical experiences of the divine viable evidence for the divine’s existence?

And how do we reconcile that individuals who have completely conflicting theological conclusions both claim to have had mystical experiences?

What criteria do we have to say one’s experience is proof that their construction of theology, their concept of god, is correct while the other one is mistaken? What criteria do we have to say some spiritual or mystical experiences are legitimate while others are not?

The more I learned, the more I was able to locate myself and the particular variant of Christian tradition that I had grown up within and inherited.

The second thing I learned in my graduate studies was that I was a fundamentalist.

Never had I associated with this label. (And this was on purpose, I would soon discover in my research on my inherited theological tradition.)

Nevertheless, as I learned about the categories of theological belief and the histories of different traditions within Christianity, I was confronted with the plain truth that the faith I had inherited was categorically fundamentalist.

Christian fundamentalism, as it is found in America, is a distinct movement of Protestant Christianity that emerged at the end of the 19th century and grew rapidly in the 20th and 21st centuries.

There are two theological features that differentiate fundamentalism most from other forms of Christianity. First is its particular belief in the absolute inerrancy of scripture (the Bible), meaning that it is entirely without error. While the seeds of this belief go back to the protestant reformation, in the modern frame, this belief is, in part, largely a direct reaction to more modernist interpretations of scripture and theology, which posited that some or all of the Bible was allegorical or metaphorical in nature and should be interpreted as such. Fundamentalists, then, are theologically known for their literal interpretations of the Bible and their resistance to (and suspicion of) both modernity and modernist critical theology.

Secondly, fundamentalists are also differentiated by their overtly apocalyptic vision of the world, believing in and looking forward to the ever-nearing “second coming” of Jesus Christ, which will mark the redeeming of God’s people, the final judgment of nonbelievers, and the beginning of Jesus’s final and eternal reign.

While Biblical inerrancy and its apocalyptic vision are two of Christian Fundamentalism’s defining theological features, in practice, fundamentalists are readily recognized by a number of distinct behaviors. First is their absolute assurance that their particular conception is the only correct conception of Christianity. They are known, therefore, for their evangelistic efforts and missional work around the world in an effort to proselytize and convert as many people as possible. Secondly, in the 20th century, since the leaders of the fundamentalist movement intentionally co-opted adherence to its belief system with American patriotism, fundamentalists are also known for their tremendous socio-political involvement and influence, especially in 20th and 21st-century American politics.

Identifying myself as a fundamentalist came as a shock, I must admit.

I had only made negative associations with “religious fundamentalism."

And yet I was one?

What did this mean?

What were the implications of my fundamentalism?

Unsure if I was more terrified or thrilled, the circle of certainty I had so zealously fought and nearly killed myself in order to maintain my whole life was shrinking.

Answers I had held for a long time suddenly transformed into questions.

The things I swore I was absolutely certain about, suddenly I doubted.

No longer needing to defend a position I had always held, nor needing to hastily jump to any new conclusions, I found myself in very foreign territory theologically.

Not unlike sitting on the floor of a hostel dorm room in Amsterdam shoveling cold food into my mouth with potato chips alongside a man I had just met from India — the theological place I was in never felt more unrecognizable, disorienting, obscure, and bizarre, and yet I somehow never felt more at home.

I had never been more uncertain about my inherited faith, and yet I had also never felt closer to God.

It was a place of paradox.

On April 1st, 2021 I wrote in my journal:

How is it I feel like I am losing my faith, yet finding it? …. Perhaps because what I am finding is the simple mystery of loving union with God but I am losing the gatekeeping, “ambiguating,” and oppressive structures that religion placed around that mystery? Its like by losing religion, I am finding what religion has sought to provide all along.

Seeing as the weekend me and Raghu biked to Amsterdam happened to be Easter weekend, I decided I wanted to attend an Easter service. I told Raghu and Sanjana (who, forgoing the tempting 10-hour bike ride, had joined us later by train in Amsterdam) that I was going to attend an Easter service. To my surprise, they both expressed an interest to accompany me.

The next thing I knew, I stood next to my two Indian and culturally Hindu friends in a Catholic church celebrating Easter mass in Amsterdam, and never had life felt more foreign and familiar, never had God felt more mysterious and yet true.

I wrote in my journal on easter morning, April 5th, 2021:

This Easter I am in Amsterdam and I am in the midst of deconstruction. In that way it feels foreign, I feel like I don’t know what I believe other than in the Love of Jesus and God. What a strange experience this is. I’m happy to be here… I really do feel like while I have lost part of my faith, I have rediscovered God. I feel so close to him and him to me.

Little did I know, however, that I was nearing a point of no return.