Confessions of a Recovering Academic

Hello. My name is Moira, and I am a recovering academic. Likely, I’ll never fully recover — but that’s okay — the stumbles can help to keep a soul humble.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not study that is the problem: It’s what we do with all that knowledge we have gained.

To those people with a natural inclination towards academics and learning, intellectual pride can be a major stumbling block to doing something beautiful with all that knowledge.

It often leads to a total lack of gratitude to God for the intelligence that He gave you.

It inevitably leads to thinking that you know better than everybody else — offering unsolicited corrections and making harsh judgements of the people around you — in ways that are belittling and mean.

Sadly, it’s also incredibly blinding.

If you aren’t extremely careful, you just might wake up one day and realize that you have become an absolute a** about the (let’s be honest) limited knowledge you have gained while immersing yourself in the world of academia.

I speak from experience.

A number of years back I found a letter that I had written to a priest a year or two after college.

I happened to find it at a low point in my spiritual life.

I had gone from attending mass every single day to having 3 young children and having neither the energy nor the drive to make it to Mass, but once or twice a week.

I had stopped praying in the morning, and when I did pray it was actually quite painful and seemed pointless.

I was floundering in my faith.

The thing is, I had been somebody, or at least I thought I had — before kids — I had done well at almost every thing I put my hand to.

But kids — they were so different, so unpredictable, so much more challenging than Plato or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas had ever been.

I had always been able to face my academic challenges and triumph — but mothering was kind of killing me.

Or so I thought.

A few years into marriage and I was just trying to survive life with a bunch of littles.

Frankly I was feeling sorry for myself.

I sat there one day, daydreaming about the crowds of kids I used to speak to. I thought about the applause and the kids who approached me to tell me how my talk had “changed” their lives.

To be honest, I was missing all the applause and adulation in that moment.

I remember staring at my toddler, who had single-handedly destroyed the entire first floor and was now moving onto my bedroom for kicks — and I just knew there would be no applause if I handled this disaster with any amount of grace.

None.

As I began putting everything back into the drawers, a letter fell out of a book, which had been previously tucked away in my nightstand drawer.

There I stood, a veritable Greek tragedy, grabbing that letter and getting ready for a good cry about the life I once had. ( I wasn’t kidding when I said I was feeling sorry for myself).

I opened that letter and began to read it. It was not at all what I expected.

How could I not have seen it before? The girl writing that letter was a total a** who thought she knew everything.

There I sat, reading my letter I had written to a priest who was older, wiser and most definitely holier than I was. I was telling him what he should be doing and how he should be preaching in the most awful, prideful way.

It was UGLY. I almost felt sick at my own words. They were repulsive to me.

In that moment, I understood that the last 7 years of my life had actually been an incredible gift from God.

All that dying to myself — it was absolutely necessary.

That girl in that letter (a.k.a. “me”) would have been no good to anyone if she had been left to continue down that path of pride and egotism.

Sure, I had dreamed of being an evangelist, but this letter made it abundantly clear that even that desire was sprinkled with a healthy dose of pride and ego.

It was clear as day in that moment. Those kids that I thought were robbing me of everything — they were actually a part of my salvation.

My kids were saving me from myself, from my pride, from the worms of self-love that had filled my heart and mind until I literally couldn’t see how bad it had gotten.

The truth is that God had used those past 7 years with my littles to teach me how to really begin to love, without counting the cost — to evangelize, without saying a word.

I remember praying to God to send me somebody to help me become a better person, because that girl in that letter was not the person that I wanted to be.

And so He did.

I went on a silent retreat and met a priest who became a friend and helped me to begin again. He helped me to begin praying on a regular basis and get back to regular confession.

He had me begin reading books of great Saints, and eventually we moved on to books chocked full of my beloved theology and philosophy — and it felt really good to be reading things of substance again.

And my kids continued to teach me things about the importance of humility and the ways that I still needed to grow.

St. Paul once said that “women will be saved in childbirth”. I used to think he was a chauvinist, but now I understood what he meant.

I think he meant that having kids, raising kids, is perhaps the most powerful way to learn that love involves sacrifice and a sincere gift of self.

It also reveals weaknesses in ourselves that we most likely could go on for a lifetime without ever even noticing.

I remember looking at a particular child who was struggling with academics and seeing the empathy and kindness that this child had gained through those struggles.

I realized that I didn’t have those things — like this child had them — and I had mistakenly raised up intelligence as more important than kindness and humility and love.

And I was dead wrong.

I realized that love was the ultimate goal of any knowledge gained. It was a game changer for me.

And then it hit me.  All those years of accumulating knowledge — it had all been about me somehow proving myself to the world.

My accumulation of knowledge had been for all the wrong reasons, and so it only left me empty inside.

That day that I met that priest for my first spiritual direction meeting began a new approach to knowledge.

Rather than trying to accumulate more knowledge about God, I began to take the time to actually get to know God, and God alone.

And I’m not saying I’m out of the woods — intellectual pride may always be a weakness of mine — but now I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that Love is greater than all the knowledge in all the world.

It was a hard lesson to learn, but it has changed EVERYTHING.

I am learning to not care so much about what the world is telling me that I should be, so that I can actually become that unique, unrepeatable woman that God meant me to be, from the beginning of time.

There is freedom in that.

Besides, I like the woman that I am growing to be a lot more than that prideful girl who thought she knew everything.

And so I share this with you, because maybe you are a recovering academic, just like me.

Maybe you don’t realize that your self-worth isn’t rooted in anything you do or in what you know — it’s in who you are: a daughter of God, created in His image and likeness — and nothing and nobody can ever take your worth away from you.

I just want you to know that on the other side of that pride and ego is a pretty great woman who is meant to set the world on fire.

So what are you waiting for?

Sharing over at Kelly’s.