An Article on the Incarnation

Earlier this year, I was asked to write something to contribute to a piece in our diocese's newsletter, the Bishop's Bulletin. They got five people who live out different roles in the diocese to submit a few words on preparing for the Incarnation. My entry is the last one on this link:
http://www.sfcatholic.org/bishopsbulletin/pondering-the-incarnation-god-is-with-us/
Enjoy!

Sophomore Year

     Hello, world! I’m Maria, a sophomore at Thomas Aquinas College, and that means I spend every minute of every day either in class, at work, at Mass, or studying! Sounds nice, huh? It is, but the lack of free time/sleep really gets to you. Which is why, on Christmas break, I am enjoying an abundance of free time and sleep. And I have time to write a blog post.

     Sophomore year is crazy. Everyone says it’s the hardest year at TAC, and that seems about right to me. The step up from freshman year, in terms of both workload and content, is huge. For instance, we’ve gone from reading ten pages of the Gospel of Luke for a theology class to reading 60 pages of St. Augustine’s arguments against the Pelagians and wondering if predestination takes away free will. We’ve gone from naming the Ten Categories in philosophy to arguing about whether chance exists and analyzing Aristotle’s deceptively concise definition of motion in the Physics (with little help from the Coughlin translation). 150-page seminar readings, which were horrifying and infrequent last year, are now the expected norm. It’s a ridiculous amount of work, and there’s little payoff at this point.

     But I love it. There’s something exhilarating about getting into the nitty-gritty of the intellectual life and literally devoting all your time to your studies. It feels medieval, in a way. You really get to know what the vocation of Student—with a capital S—entails. The human mind is incredible, and the capacity of an average 19-year-old girl to understand and retain thousands of pages’ (and years’) worth of knowledge is incredible.

     As we are finished with first semester finals, part of me feels like we’ve hardly learned anything. But that’s because we’ve finally begun to wade into the waters of the truth, and now we’re realizing just how big the ocean is. How can our 90-minute discussions of a few paragraphs of Aristotle’s Physics, or a few lines of St. Thomas’ Latin, get us anywhere, in the grand scheme of things? Well, you’ve got to start somewhere. And, in a way, you have to forget about the size of the ocean in order to have courage to step into the water. It’s going to be a long journey—a lifetime long, or more—but that is all the more reason to get started.

     This life is not for everyone. That is evident, now that we’ve begun it in earnest, in how many people we’ve lost from our class this year. None of us really knew what we’d be getting into when we came back to campus after the summer, and I think none of us can say we were pleasantly surprised. We’ve lost the bright-eyed enthusiasm of freshman year but don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel like the upperclassmen do. But you learn to keep going, because the end goal of all your lost sleep and eyestrain and scribbled pages and chalk drawings is worth the suffering involved in reaching it. No one said it would be easy. If we want the truth, we have to work for it. We have to desire it with a persistent, almost foolhardy desire that doesn’t let us give up before we’ve reached it. The more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know, and that’s a good thing. Anything which leads us to greater dependence on God is a good thing on some level. Participating in this vocation of Student, and knowing that every time I open my City of God or practice a prop or do a science lab, I am doing God’s will, is a difficult and beautiful way to live life. As Pope St. John Paul II put it, "Study is an expression of the unquenchable desire for an ever deeper knowledge of God, the source of light and all human truth." (Vita Consecrata, 98)

     They say that “sophomore” means “wise fool”. Typically that isn’t a compliment. But there may be some wisdom involved in realizing how much of a “fool” you are—how much you don’t know. And that, it seems to me, is what sophomore year is all about.