A good friend's mother once asked me how I cope with the loss of a religious community. At the time--and please bear in mind, the time was my senior year of high school--I didn't think it a silly question, but I did sort of dismiss it. I had plenty of friends, I told her. I see people at school all day long, and then I see them again during softball practice or play rehearsal or weekend parties.
Now that I'm done with my coursework, I kind of see what she was getting at. School, or at least the classtime part of school, is likely over for me... and I miss it deeply. I'm not really built for the "independent research" thing, and I never have been; without the prospect of seeing a group of my peers every week to discuss a common intellectual interest, I'm left woefully unmotivated. Sure, there are dissertation meet-ups and the like, but those just aren't the same. My brain's procrastination center (which I'm pretty sure constitutes roughly 75% of my frontal lobe's grey matter) would still know I was there voluntarily, with no real consequences for failure.
As a would-be scholar of religion, I absolutely recognize that groups of like-minded people can lift individuals out of despondency. Or that a person might draw comfort from the beliefs his group stands for. It doesn't take a lot of probing to see this dynamic in action; for instance, when his young son died of cancer a few years back, my previously-lukewarm uncle threw himself into Mormonism with an understandable enthusiasm. So yeah, I get it. People need people.
Religious studies folks love to talk about communities, brotherhoods, sodalities, wholes-being-more-than-the-sum-of-their-parts. Getting caught up in a transcendent togetherness. Never having been much a one for organized ritual or spirituality, historically I've found plenty of proxies to achieve that feeling: academic seminars, theater productions, sports. But for the last few years, I've succumbed to that obliging malaise of the white urban twentysomething: ennui. Weltschmerz.
Without school, without employment, without softball or Waiting for Lefty, I'm just leading an atomistic life, floating from each one-on-one rendezvous to the next. Yesterday, I met up with a former fellow-student for coffee. I'm having drinks with another in an hour. These little tête-à-têtes, these little individual bitch-sessions, get me through the week--but these don't make a community. They can't stave off the anomie. I've got friends, sure. And they're wonderful... but they don't lend definition to my identity in the same way.
I'm not looking to join a new church. I did play softball last season, but it didn't stick. I've started doing a little volunteer work, but that's mostly just phone calls and emails I do from home. I tutor high school students, which is just more one-on-one time. I'm reluctant to start playing another sport without decent health insurance. I've thought about going back to school, to a different program, but that just sounds like I'd be digging myself into deeper debt without much professional payoff.
I've got an amazing boyfriend, a thoroughly terrific (though thousands of miles distant) family, and great friends. But without something bigger to participate in, to work toward, the self wilts.
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