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By Connor Price
I did not grow up religious. This fact about myself is one that tends to surprise the folks I disclose it to, especially if they are from out of state. A kid from the outskirts of a small town in
Kentucky ought to have been, but it was not my experience. This part of my identity is something I have struggled with throughout my life. It caused me to feel excluded from the community of believers that surrounded me. I grew up being asked the same questions and being given the same answers.
How could you not? You can’t be serious. You are going to Hell.
It hurt, but it didn’t matter. I was raised to be logical, and from my perspective that did not include religion. I was against the very existence of a god because it simply could not be. So how could it be that some people grow up outside of religion and manage to fall into it later in life? Is it community-seeking? Fear of punishment for sins long dead? Weakness somehow?
One of us must be blind.
My head is solid, but my heart wanders. I believe, against my own judgement, in
something more. I seek meaning in a world of chaos and coincidence, and I question myself for
doing so. It’s partially the reason that philosophy interests me so. People look for patterns, and
where they look, they often find them. Our imagination weaves a tapestry, and we take it for
truth.
Perhaps that is all it ever was.
And yet, just the other day, just for a fleeting moment, I thought I glimpsed something
deeper. A few other scholars and I attended a lecture in Lexington by a British poet and priest
named Malcolm Guite which discussed faith through the frame of poetry and the marriage of
reason and imagination. I cannot explain exactly what he said that bridged some connection, but
where I had begun listening to the lecture relating it to classical philosophy like Plato’s forms, I
crossed over into something else. It was as if all my life I had been blind, but for a mere second, I
had been given sight. I tried to rationalize it, realized I couldn’t fully, wondered at it.
And then it was gone.
The veil pulled back over my eyes. My own blindness restored. Maybe it was a fluke,
maybe I was sick and reading too far into things, but I cannot be sure anymore. There is so much
to think about, and it’s like I was just cast out of the library once more. I seek truth, and I know
not where to find it, but I want to drink deeper the marrow of life. Dante says reason can only
take one so far, faith must do the rest.
But what to have faith in?
How can I completely trust anything I can’t know? If one organized religion’s beliefs are
different than another’s, whose is right to follow? There is so much to consider that it swirls
around in my head like a whirlwind. I have no idea what to think, and maybe that’s my problem.
Trying to reason it all out doesn’t work, but relying on imagination alone for a next step feels
fully unreasonable. Just like that, I am caught in a circle. I will have to keep thinking and
reading. I feel such a pull to figure this out. I want to experience that wonder again.
One way or another, I cannot tolerate my blindness any longer.
Connor is a McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville in the Class of 2028. He is studying political science and history.