At the conclusion of my history senior seminar course (a capstone class where your write a 20-30 page research paper on a topic of your choice) I was required to write a reflective essay on the experience with pro's and con's, things I liked, and some things I did not. I went outside of the rubric to reflect on my experience and wrote this. While it merited only a "C" from the professor, I didn't think it was too bad and some friends suggested that it was some of my better writing. So, blogoshpere/facebook readers, enjoy some babbling from your friend Rob. Keep in mind, this was written in the exhaustion of the end of the semester and before continued reflection. There is surely more I intend to say and many things I do not fully agree with. However, this is a portion of what I turned in.
As I Sip My Scotch: A Reflective Essay
In Gulliver’s Travels, satirist Jonathan Swift imagines a floating island called Laputa, which is inhabited by brilliant thinkers who fail to ever contribute their knowledge to anything practical. This semester I have often felt like a Laputian. This semester I did more intellectual work than ever before in my life. For all of my reading, writing, synthesizing, and pondering, I have nothing to contribute to the world. I can say an awful lot about a mid twentieth century German theologian, pre-renaissance evangelism in the Americas, contemporary theologians, Franciscan spirituality, Methodism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the nation of Cuba. I can’t, however, design, build, grow, or develop anything that will aid my fellow man, the floundering economy, or my empty bank account. Scarcely anything I know is of use for practical measures.
Nonetheless, I pushed myself to the point of illness. With failing sanity, I pulled more all-nighters, skipped more meals, and mistreated more relationships than ever before, and all for the purposes of words. The amount of time and effort I put into this semester for the products that came out is absurd. There is little to rationalize it with. On December 2, a week from the end, with the tunnel’s light in sight, my computer was stolen. Two and a half months of academic energy – gone. Great writing and terrible writing, hours of research, all of my goods received and for sale at the academic market were gone in an instant. I was suddenly the Laputian without a floating island.
Completely aware of the vanity of my efforts, I am still enamored by the topics of my research this semester. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be a difficult figure to match in intrigue and mystery. The methods and motives behind the evangelization of the New World, particularly my home state of Florida: a topic, which incorporates medieval mystics and prophesies, Indians, and pirates; what could be more compelling than that? Yet it all amounts to nothing at the end of the day. Florida Governor Rick Scott recently cut funding to the liberal arts in order to bolster math, science, engineering, and technology. I cannot blame him one bit. In a society full of service industries and academics people will starve. And so I find myself to be in a paradox. I am totally fascinated with the study of history, religion, and culture, but I know that the world does not need another educator. Rather, it needs another inventor, discoverer, or scientist. We need thinkers that do, not potential doers that merely think.
Earlier this semester I switched my topic from medieval religious architecture to the protestant resisters in Nazi Germany, and finally to just Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Those shifts might have been mistakes. I continue to have interests in each of those areas. I could read for days about any of them. I have come to realize that institutionalized academia has its limitations. Despite its many benefits, forcing research, synthesis, and composition into thirteen weeks is too little time for this sort of seminar when taken with a full course load. I wish I had been more focused with my research. I wish my laptop was not stolen. I would do many things differently if I could do it over again. But at the end of the day, I must accept the fact that I love learning, but ultimately find it unsatisfying. It feels selfish and perhaps even futile.
Knowledge is good. All knowledge ultimately displays to us something about the Creator. This alone is my justification for anything I accomplished this semester. It informs me about humans, about creation, about how creation has existed in history, and ultimately this relays some sort of important Truth about God. I wish I knew what those truths were now. I do not. So, as I sip my scotch, I can only hold onto the many things I have learned and pray that they become useful for the sake of the Kingdom, that I become useful for the sake of the Kingdom.
Perhaps this all sounds ridiculous. Some friends of mine just got back from four months of mission work in the slums of the Philippines. What difference does Bonhoeffer make there, where fifteen year olds are addicted to crack and sleep with mosquito nets? What difference does Columbus’s apocalyptic motivation to the starving baby there? I am challenged to do something positive. I wonder how studying history can move from an ethereal vain joy to a gift I can use in some practical manner to contribute something positive to this world we live in. I do not want to think of Flagler as Laputa. I know it is not. But in all the academia, in all of our curious “why’s?” do we remember to ask ourselves the why? Why do we study this? What does this contribute?
The edition I turned in continued here citing proverbs 3:4-5 and the end of Ecclesiastes. That edition, however, is locked inside a computer at @ProctorLibrary ...
