How God Pursues Us Through the Intellectual Life
Letter from Rachel Bulman
Photo by John Mark Smith
This letter is a part of The Catholic Woman’s letter collection For the New Feminism. Each piece featured in this series will explore the different ways in which Catholic women are making sense of what it means to be a woman in light of her lived experiences and in light of the Catholic Church. The intent of this series is to explore that “‘new feminism’” St. John Paul II called women to cultivate. To learn more about what such a feminism means and could look like, check out our free video program Cultivating Catholic Feminism.
D
ear Beloved,
I still remember the first time I fell in love with the Catholic Church. It was Easter Sunday, 2008. I had promised my then-boyfriend that I would go to Easter Mass with him and had frantically called my only Catholic friend the night before.
“What should I know? What do I need to be ready for? What do I wear?”
“Clothes,” he said. “Obviously wear clothes.”
“What else? How do I not look dumb tomorrow?”
“Do what everyone else does. Say the prayers you can say. Stand. Kneel. Bow.”
“There is calisthenics!?”
Laughing, “Yes! You’ll be fine.”
So, I wore clothes and we got to Mass late, on Easter Sunday, which is always a disaster except for this Easter Sunday. We sat in the very last row of the balcony, and I couldn’t see a thing. But, I could hear the hymns, smell the incense, hear the prayers, and hear the clanging of the chain from the incense thurible. I heard one voice in the unified prayers of the faithful. I smelled reverence in the scents wafting their way to the rafters.
I felt at rest.
When we drove home for lunch, I didn’t realize that I had spent the entire ride in silence until Jason pointed it out.
“Okay, you’ve been quiet for the entire ride. Did you hate it? Are you breaking up with me? You have to say something.”
I took a deep breath, and I told him, “I found home.”
So for you, beloved, I hope you have found home too. I know the Church can feel like she is at odds with herself right now, but her arms are always welcoming you and her womb is always a safe place for you. And she longs to know you and be known by you.
I attended RCIA for a month or so before I finally told my now-husband that I had been covertly learning about the faith and had made the decision to become Catholic, to finally come home.
“I took a deep breath, and I told him, ‘I found home.’”
Photo (left) by Rikka Ameboshi
At the Doors
When I found home, I was so excited to finally have a space of my own that I was ready to tell the world about her. I took a deep dive into apologetics and now see that my passion only revealed the fringes of the Church. I was willing to tell anyone that would listen about how beautiful the windows are and how grand the walls are that hold her up and the rafters that shelter her, but apologetics only led me to the door. I never stepped inside until I opened up my mind and my heart.
And you, dear beloved one, do not neglect your mind and the depths of your heart. Too often women are reduced to their emotional life which – while beautiful – does not encompass all that we are. We are more than how we “feel”, and while we are learning the value of our emotions – and of the freedom required to actually feel happiness, sadness, joy, or anger – we must not allow ourselves to be reduced to them alone. Your emotion holds greater weight when you are able to derive why you feel, when you feel, how you feel, and what you feel as a means to engaging your whole self in the life you’ve been called to lead. If your heart is truly in something, it allows your mind and will to be steadfast and unrelenting, but you must engage your intellect and will. You must challenge yourself to think deeply, to be moved intellectually, to ask questions and keep looking for answers.
A few years ago, there was an ad on one of my social media feeds for a summer philosophy seminar. Now, growing up, I would read scripture and the occasional spiritual book, but philosophy? That was a hard no. It sounded daunting and felt incredibly foreign to even say the word. This particular seminar was titled “Love, Sex, and the Human Person”. Having just read Love and Responsibility by Karol Wojtyla, my interest was piqued. The information page for the seminar nudged me farther, claiming that this would be for all types of learners, beginning and expert philosophers, and everything in between. I applied and to my surprise, was accepted and had no idea what I was getting into.
The seminar was a week long and the days consisted of nothing but deep thought and conversation. We would wake up at 8 a.m. for breakfast, attend a series of seminars, spend time in small groups, and then the evenings were filled with deep conversation and social hours. The discussions were never frivolous or superficial. We would talk about what we were learning at the seminar, take deep dives into the depths of our hearts and minds, and going to bed felt like giving up the fight but our bodies would eventually relent.
When I boarded the flight to head back home, I was weary from all of the intellectual stimulation, but something had awakened within me. It was like a dam had burst open and a thirst I never knew I had was beginning to be satiated. And, when I got home, I started devouring theology that had otherwise seemed out of reach and reading and writing with an air of philosophical knowledge that I didn’t know I was capable of having.
“Too often women are reduced to their emotional life which – while beautiful – does not encompass all that we are.”
Photo by Chelsey Shortman
A Conversion of the Whole Self
While the Catholic Church had become home, the wings of philosophy and theology flew me right through its doors and as I unfolded layer and layer of knowledge, it would spring forth from my heart like a new room with all too inviting decor and a warm fire. I could never leave this place and this world would never look the same because of it.
I invite you to join me here. Pick up the book that seemed all too dense and struggle through it. Do not lack the humility to look up the words you don’t understand, to reach out to knowledgeable friends for clarity, to hold your mind out next to your heart, and beg the Holy Spirit to penetrate them both. You are indeed both. You need both to be fully expanded in the torrential love of God.
When you fall in love, you want to know everything about the one that you adore. You want to know their likes, their hates, their favorite things, and all of their aversions. You want to be able to trace all the lines of their face and see all the flecks of hazel in their eyes. You want to know them just as much as you want them to know you. And it is the same with Christ and His bride the Church.
You cannot exhaust the wonders of Him and His Bride. You can bring your heart to the altar and weep at His feet, and you can do the same with your mind and your body. You can surrender every piece of yourself as He responds with everything He has and everything He is. You see, we cannot reduce our relationship with Him to one facet of communication. I did that for far too long. I only found him in the pages of spiritual writers, in apologetics, and content that only pulled at heartstrings—emotionally driven and never piercing through the heart and into the soul and mind. It felt as if I was only being pursued by romantic gestures and not through knowledge and wisdom. I think we both know that when all we are met with is flowers and a tasty dinner, the date is over quickly. We stay when the conversation is rich, when we are known and are invited to know the other as well.
But now, having opened up more of my own self—intellect, body, and will—to knowledge and love of him, the world has responded with a reflection of him that I find hard to explain but will attempt to do so here.
I mistakenly treated my relationship with God as one of constant emotional and romantic advances. When I didn’t feel anything, I thought I wasn’t trying hard enough. It would be akin to trying to recreate the night my husband proposed in order to feel pursued again. As the love between my husband and I has matured, I find his advances in extraordinary and ordinary things, in extravagant and moderate displays. When he sends me flowers, I recognize the pursuit. The pursuit is not less when he makes the bed or spends hours talking with me before we fall asleep or takes out the trash or holds my hand as we ride in the car. The pursuit is the same.
Sometimes, I read the words of great thinkers in our Church or even the words of Christ in scripture, and I am unmoved. Sometimes I feel nothing, but the pursuit has not changed. The pursuit has taken a different avenue to reach my heart: through my mind. As I keep reading and searching, I eventually find the bridge between my mind and heart, and a little bit of the wholeness that I’ve longed for trickles out from the dam that was broken by that philosophy seminar from years ago.
I think you may long for this too: to be valued beyond our physicality or beauty, beyond our affectivity or emotion. Perhaps you long to be asked too, “What do you think? How do you think?” We long to be seen fully.
Good Company
I promise that the pursuit of the intellectual life is worth it. It is hard and sometimes it feels like you’re running in circles, but the Holy Spirit is willing to show you the hidden paths. We also have the gift of the female saints that have paved this way before us —St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Hildegarde of Bingen, and St. Katharine Drexel. Get to know great female thinkers: Elizabeth Anscombe, Adrienne Von Speyr, Anna Terruwe, and Flannery O’Connor, Alice Von Hildebrand, Tracey Rowland, Mary Healy, and more. There are so many names to add to this list including yours.
And above all else, we can look to the Blessed Virgin Mary as the wonderful lover of wisdom and the woman par excellence. She is the embodiment of womanhood and Christianity for us and hands down, the best thinker.
She not only pursues wisdom but she loves Wisdom Himself and in fact, the early Church Fathers called her the “Seat of Wisdom”. If you seek to become more like Our Lady, then you are also seeking to become a thinker. Within her flesh, Mary allowed the Divine to come among us. She made the unreachable, reachable and brought that which seemed far within the grasp of mankind. As thinkers, as women, we seek to do that, too.
“Within her flesh, Mary allowed the Divine to come among us. She made the unreachable, reachable and brought that which seemed far within the grasp of mankind.”
Photo by Henry Be
In Fides et Ratio, John Paul the II teaches us that Mary’s fiat does not impair her humanity or freedom, but it expands her very person. Her love of wisdom expands who she is. Your desire to be a thinker, to answer the greatest “whys” that arise in your own heart and in the hearts around you not only brings light to the Gospel truth but also allows it to rise to its highest expectation.
Where to Start
I know that one of my greatest obstacles to enriching my mind is the lie that in order to think, I must devote myself to hours of reading and some sort of academic work. While these are good things and things that I practice when I have the chance, they are not the formula to sparking the fire of the mind.
I believe that the Lord, in His wisdom, has surrounded you with current opportunities to think deeply. We can fan the flames of thought anywhere: in the mountains on a hike, in a library buried in a stack of books, watching the storylines of a favorite sitcom unfold, while doing the thing you do each day that you call “work”, or within any day-to-day reality that has become monotonous or repetitive. We must realize that the pursuit of God is not confined to any framework. He pursues you tirelessly in every single moment of your life.
What does pursuing the intellectual life look like for you? I think there are as many ways to answer this question as there are women in the world. But it will begin within the things that you love. It will set those things afire and the flames will spread throughout your entire life.
For me, it began within Theology of the Body and spread into grander thought. It now envelopes the way I write, how I teach, how I mother, how I think, and how I love. There is a fullness herein that I never imagined possible. But when I neglect any aspect of self—mind, heart or body—-the fullness is lessened.
When I grow weary of writing or reading or thinking or searching, I’ve learned to crawl underneath the mantle of Our Lady. She covers me in her cloak and whispers away the distractions that say I am not a thinker, that this is too hard, that this is all for naught. And she whispers them away with one word, “Fiat.” Yes to this. Yes to His will. Yes to becoming woman fully alive and in pursuit.
The monks in Christian antiquity called Our Lady “the table at which faith sits in thought”. Beloved daughter, pull up a chair. Rest beneath this cloak and hear it even now. Yes, the intellectual life is for you. Let’s sit together and think.
Beneath her mantle,
Rachel
“When I grow weary of writing or reading or thinking or searching, I’ve learned to crawl underneath the mantle of Our Lady.”
About the Writer: Rachel Bulman is a wife, mother, author, and speaker. She frequently writes for the Word on Fire blog and CatholicMom.com, and her first book will be published with Our Sunday Visitor next year titled "Becoming Wife: Self-Gift in Matrimony". She has also contributed to two books which will be published with Ignatius Press and Ave Maria Press this year and has essays published in the Word on Fire Institute Theological Journal. She is married and has seven children, six on earth and one in heaven.