Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
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most arresting passages:
Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
Although I was still at a Catholic institution, many of these readings were on the Church’s index of forbidden books, which would have filled me with foreboding in high school. By then, we hardly noticed or cared which books were on the index. It was formally abolished by Paul VI in June 1966, which was just as well, because some of the titles were already required reading for my philosophy courses.
I met new people. I liked many of my classmates, but preferred the company of my teachers. The ones I liked best were as indulgent with me as the mentors of my teenage years. I wanted to be around people who pushed me, challenged me. We formed a philosophy club comprising both faculty and students. I saw a lot of Greg during this period. I went down to Baltimore, where he was stationed, as soon as I could. Another time we met in New York, walking the streets of Manhattan all night long. We talked and laughed and even danced. There was still no one to whom I could speak with such freedom and openness. I also saw Ken again. He had left the Dominican order and entered the psychiatric ward of Philadelphia General Hospital. The story was that he had a “nervous breakdown,” a term used widely and loosely then. To this day, I don’t know what happened to him. We were no longer on the same wavelength. The last time I saw him he had joined the Marines. I dated quite a lot, despite the Sturm und Drang. I “played the field.” I enjoyed male company after being so starved of it in my convent years. There was a high school teacher, a scientist, an ex-seminarian (who then became a priest after all), even a businessman. I didn’t fall in love with any of them. They didn’t touch me at my core. I did know what it meant to love someone, even if I had never expressed it sexually. I was seething with erotic desire, but my strongest attractions were to men who were unavailable in that way, even when we became quite close in other ways.
Through it all, I was still a Catholic. I went to mass. I attended joyfully the first masses of seminarians I knew. Around my own parish, I ran into my former classmates from primary school, whose Catholicism seemed untroubled and unchanged since eighth grade. Meanwhile, my doubts were multiplying and intensifying. In this aspect of my life, which was starting to swamp me, I felt utterly alone, no matter how many great people I had around me. I still did not know a single person who was not a religious believer. No one I knew was going through such a crisis of faith.
In the fall, I went to work as a sixth-grade teacher at Our Lady of Charity School in Brookhaven. I would have preferred to be in the city and not the suburbs, but this was what the archdiocese offered. At that time, it was unheard of for an ex-nun to continue to teach in the same school system. I won that battle, against the wishes of the order I had left, and got a job teaching in a different school staffed by a different order. I also fought for and won my appointment to teach religion as a layperson, arguing that if I had been qualified to teach it the year before, I was still qualified. I threw myself into teaching, unaware of the controversy it would provoke or of the forces moving against me. I was only a mild liberal: I taught religion in the spirit of Vatican II theology. I taught the kids to sing “We Shall Overcome” and talked about the civil rights movement down south. That was all, but in 1965, it was considered too much. I became an early casualty in the post-Vatican II struggle between the advocates of aggiornamento and defenders of orthodoxy.
One day in late November, I was called out of my classroom, stopping my history lesson in mid-sentence, and told by the principal-superior to go immediately downtown to the office of the superintendent of education. When I arrived, the assistant superintendent, who knew me from the previous controversy, assured me that I was an excellent teacher—and then fired me in nearly the same breath. I was right, he said, and he was on my side, but I was too controversial. Parents, priests, nuns, and fellow teachers were complaining (to everyone except to me), and I had to go. He reminded me of the grand inquisitor.
I was shocked. I tried to pray. For the first time in my life, I felt that there was no one there to hear. By the time I left his office, it was already dark, with thunder and lightning and pouring rain. I felt as if the ground had vanished from under my feet. That day, all the questions of centuries came to a crescendo in my mind. I could no longer cling to the beliefs that had sustained me in my life so far. I felt the full force of all my accumulating doubts, sending me into free fall through a void, bereft of all my bearings, deprived of all my traditions. I lost my faith, my job, my home that day. I lost the very meaning of my life, all within twenty-four hours. That morning, I had proclaimed the gospel, teaching others what, by nightfall, I would no longer believe myself. The shock jolted me toward a break that was already inevitable. When I arrived home, I told my parents, who were horrified. They sided with the school, saying I had rocked the boat once too often and that I had set a bad example for the younger children. I stormed out in anger, stuffed everything I owned that I could carry into a suitcase and left. For weeks, I walked the streets and lived out of bus terminals and railway stations. I was as alone and desperate as it was possible to be. My world was in ruins. In time, I would rebuild on new foundations. But between the collapse of one worldview and the construction of another, there was only an abyss. I often wonder where I found the strength to endure that emptiness. Maybe it was simple curiosity, a need to know: If the world was not as I had thought it was, what was it? Or perhaps it was sheer animal survival, the sort of natural evolutionary striving that brought our species up from the primal mud and the dark. Whatever it was that got me to the turning point, I did begin to find my way through a long dark tunnel, into a most intricate labyrinth. Eventually I discerned a shaft of light, which I followed to the point where I could stop stumbling in the darkness and see some kind of road ahead.
Philosophy, purged of theology, became the driving force of my life. In a way I lived through the history of philosophy in my own mind, emerging from the Middle Ages into the modern era and coming in a rush to the conflicting voices of my own time. It was exhilarating, but rigorously demanding and sometimes frightening. There were no shortcuts between the dissolution of a complete worldview and the emergence of a well-grounded alternative. A long and winding road stretched between what was lost and what was yet to be found. I was living a life of unexpected risk, of heightened responsibility, but also of new freedom. Prometheus defying the gods and seizing fire, Sisyphus negating the gods and raising rocks, Zarathustra proclaiming the death of God and the transcendence of man, Atlas, proud and unyielding, sustaining alone the world he had fashioned—these were the most powerful images illuminating the darkness and pointing beyond it. The rebellion, the higher fidelity, the transvaluation of values, the free man’s worship—these were some of the crucial concepts in adjusting to a universe without a master and affirming it as neither sterile nor futile. But learning to say yes to life by searching for the meaning of life in life itself was only a beginning, an orientation. It was not enough.
Existentialism carried me through the transition to the point of taking up the challenges of my own times once again, this time more rooted in concrete experience and aware of the open-ended and precarious character of human existence. However, it had too many lacunae for me to build anything more solid on it. Its emphasis on the individual alone with his fate addressed my own isolation and alienation, but it did not do justice to the sociohistorical context of human existence (or even of the experience of isolation and alienation). Its tendency to undervalue the rational and to reject systematizing thought was a necessary counterbalance to past systems, but it could not form the basis of a new synthesis.
Nothing less than such a synthesis would do. I could not live without a comprehensive picture of the world in which I was living, without seeing my story within a larger story. Even as a child, I struggled to see things whole. I sought to grasp the totality, and could not settle for anything less. Catholicism, a ready-made totality, had nurtured this in me. The intellectual comprehensiveness and ritual grandeur of pre–Vatican II Catholicism had shaped my world. Even when the bottom fell out of it and I could no longer believe in it, leaving me raw, rootless, and roaming a world that felt like a wasteland, it nevertheless left a taste for totality I could not shake, no matter how well I subsequently learned to live without the whole supernatural dimension.