Welcome to Disparate Things

Finding the light

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

As a child, I dreamt of being a writer.  The recesses of my closet still hold some evidence of the hours spent immersed in fantasy, in notebooks filled with scribbled stories and jotted poems.  That dream departed with age, or at least went dormant, and I discovered a passion for science.  In college, I studied genetics but learned quickly (although not quickly enough to change my major) that life in a laboratory did not suit me.   At the same time, I found myself undergoing a conversion from my evangelical upbringing to Catholicism.  And behold, this swirling mental soup of science and life and theology led me straight to bioethics, or biomedical ethics.¹

The next logical step seemed to be continuing my education, but this time in the correct direction – a master’s degree in Catholic bioethics.  By the time, however, that this became possible, I had married my husband and welcomed our first child.  In my (virtual) classroom filled with doctors, nurses, and clergy, I was the stay-at-home mom with little relevant work experience and uncertain plans for the future.  While I intended to use my master’s degree in some professional way eventually, I undertook the program with full knowledge that at its end, I would continue my role as a stay-at-home mom.  The timing was purely strategic – my husband and I knew we wanted more children and adding more needs and nap schedules to my plate would only make it that much harder to find time for school.  And if I had any doubts about my priorities before starting the program, my two years of dancing between coursework and parenting – scraping together time at the edges of the day, weighing exhaustion against obligation after a toddler’s bedtime – made an undeniable impression.  I felt the thrill of pursuing my passion, but I also felt the burden of squeezing too much into too little time.  Six months before graduation, I became pregnant with our second child, and what had never really been in doubt became that much more evident: this was not the season, this had never been the season, for climbing any ladders.

So then why, as the time came to graduate, did I feel like I had missed some boat?  Maybe I thought too much about how it looked to the outside, to everyone who thought of me as that promising young woman who got a degree and then never used it.  But even putting aside the glaringly obvious fact that I still have plenty of non-baby-soaked years to work outside of the home, there is also this: I am using my degree.  Not for pay.  Not in any public way.  I don’t get to peruse academic quarterlies as much as I would like, and the frequency with which I engage in discussions about end-of-life care or the principle of double effect has, well, lessened.  I do, however, apply my degree – in that I apply the hours I spent studying and exploring a concept of ethics centered around the inherent dignity of every human person.² 

Maybe someday I will plant my feet on the pages of a periodical read by the masses, but for now, I till the soil of my own family’s life, infusing beneficence and justice into little lessons on manners, apologies, and tidying up our messes.  I can offer bigger words - but still the same basic principles - to my fellow parents, my Church friends, and the family members I attempt to convert to Catholicism.³

So why this?  Why “Disparate Things”?  The name itself comes from the book A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken.  In this incredibly moving story, the author takes us through his life with his beloved wife, Davy, and their eventual journey to Christianity, referred to as their Encounter with Light.  After describing the initial stirrings of faith, Vanauken writes,

"And that's how it all began. The encounter with Light. Only of course, it didn't begin then...Wherever it began, what it was was a coming-together of disparate things...They came together into one, into focus, and the Light fell upon them."

As mentioned earlier, I experienced my own conversion in college, nearly seven years ago.  The discernment process started about a year before that, which means that for going on eight years now, I have been fielding questions – ranging from genuinely curious to hypercritical – about my decision to become Catholic.  Any hesitation I have ever expressed upon being asked about my conversion stems purely from my inability to tell the whole story.  Whatever I say, wherever I choose to start in the story, I end up going back and forth as Vanauken does, because of course it didn’t begin then…. 

My answers are varied, long-winded, and ultimately incomplete.  How could I sum it up, when I myself can only see a small part?  There were the people I knew in college, at the time of my conversion, who discussed religion and took me to mass.  There were my wanderings, my choices to delve deeper.  But there was much more, before any of that, from my childhood to the infant “christening” that was actually my own first (and therefore efficacious) baptism, and even the years before me, when my parents and grandparents were being formed in matters of life and faith which would eventually impact my own life in some way, however small.  It was and still is a “coming together of disparate things.” 

When I started thinking of a name for this blog,⁴ that line stuck in my brain.  Initially, I had tossed around the idea of concentrating on moral decision-making and medical ethics, but although I sought my master’s degree intending to write about bioethics (especially in the in-between years before a more consuming job was possible), asserting myself as any sort of expert on the topic felt disingenuous.  I also hoped to avoid titling myself into a corner and thereby limiting the range of subjects I could cover.  As I struggled to define what this would be, back again came Vanauken’s line: 

A coming together of disparate things... 

There are so many parts of my life where I can see such a coming together. Outside of my own life, too, so many of the thoughts that swirl around our cultural consciousness weave around each other.  We ponder hospitality and human dignity, access to nature and growing children into independent adults, walkability and the role of technology.  The issues do not look the same, they sometimes do not even look remotely related.  But if you look closely, you can notice where they start to intertwine, coming together into one.  Maybe if I keep grasping, if we keep talking, we could find an answer.  We could find some Light. 

1. Bioethics can be broadly defined as “the study of ethical, social, and legal issues that arise in biomedicine and biomedical research.”

2. There are some fairly overt applications: I wrote my final thesis on the liceity of embryo adoption, and while it’s not the most common conversation topic, there is a non-negligible chance that I might someday meet someone actually considering embryo adoption.

3. Mostly joking - but my sister and brother-in-law just became Catholic, so I haven’t been entirely unsuccessful.

4. Everyone knows that trying to come up with a title is the best way to put off actually writing…