MY FAVORITE MISTAKES
By Mary Troxell
I’m of a certain age where you look back and think, “What have I done right? What have I done wrong?” Some of the biggest blessings in my life are as much a result of my mistakes as they are a result of my successes. They say that God draws straight with crooked lines. It’s a more prosaic way of saying what the New Testament says in the Letter to the Romans, which is “We know that all things work for goodforthosewholoveGod”
My first mistake was becoming Catholic I call it a mistake because at the time it just felt like a disaster I was raised in an evangelical church. My parents were very devout. We had very long services which are very joyous and jubilant. There was dancing in the Spirit, praying in tongues, and prophecies. But throughout all of these very intense meetings, I never experienced God. One of the reasons I couldn’t wait to go to college was so that I never had to go tothatchurchagain.
So when I got to college I considered myself an atheist, a Marxist feminist. That was sort of my tag. And so were all my friends. You can imagine: we were very leftwing, very progressive, social activists, and outspoken. In my senior year, I saw my friends sending their resume everywhere looking for a job I realized I was not up to the task So I stayed in the town where I went to college and lived with a couple of my friends I got a slacker job: I worked at a tanningsalon
During that time I read a lot of books, including Dostoevsky. And I realized that I didn’t think communism really spoke to the human condition. The understanding of human nature articulated by Marx wasn’t really tenable. And by reading Nietzsche, I realized that I didn’t have the stomach to be an atheist.
I decided that I was going to apply for jobs in South Florida where I’m from and where the market was better I moved down there, and while I was waiting to get a job, I decided to go to a Catholic church And this is very strange I didn’t go with anybody. I didn’t discuss it. I just went to a Catholic church one Sunday.
By the end of that Mass, I knew that was going to be the most important thing in my life for the rest of my life. It was a transforming experience, like no other experience I’ve ever had. And I was kind of confused, because here I was, with these evangelical parents and these progressive, activist, feminist Marxist friends. And I knew that I had to become Catholic. That’s why Icall it a disaster.
I knew telling my parents would be devastating. In my parents’ church, Catholicism was not considered Christianity So to tell my parents that I was going to become a member of a faith that would impede my salvation was extremely difficult
At this time I had never done anything that displeased my parents. So telling them was brutal. I didn’t know if our relationship would ever be the same. At the same time none of my friends were religious. Nobody had any religious orientation that they practiced at all. None of my professors, from what I knew, were religious. It was such a strange thing to declare that I was going to be a Catholic For a Marxist feminist, Catholicism is about as bad as it is for an evangelical I mean, the Catholic Church is patriarchal and has had a hand in most of the systems of oppression in the Western world
I was afraid that my friends wouldn’t understand me or would think that I joined a cult.
But my relationship with my parents was better after I became a Catholic, because I was so full of joy, so at peace and centered. It was so what I was supposed to do. And once my parents saw that, they began to accept it. It wasn’t overnight. But a couple of years later, they were happy for me. They actually converted to Catholicism about 10 years after Idid.
The same thing happened with my friends Once they saw how much joy and peace it gave me, they were accepting, at least open to hearing what I had to say about it
Mistake number two comes out of those resumes. I went to a college where nobody talked about vocation. The idea was that you graduate with a liberal arts degree and then do something for a living that has nothing to do with what you studied.
So that’s what I did. I got I got a very good job at a bank. The first year I really liked it, because it was like a miniMBA program. I learned a lot, and it was fun. But after the second year, I realized I didn’t like it much. And by the third year, I realized I couldn’t stand it. Now, meanwhile, I kept getting promotions Six years in, I thought this was my life for good Changing your career after six years at that age felt absolutely impossible
I had this best friend from sixth grade named Theresa who sat me down in a sort of intervention and said, “Mary, you’ve become a shadow of yourself. You used to talk about ideas all the time. Now, all you talk about is money. You’re materialistic. You’re shallow. You’re not an interesting person anymore. And you’re not the personthat I love and I’ve loved for all these years ”
And when she said it, I knew she was right I mean, I really knew she was right So I applied to graduate schoolsfor philosophy
I called my brother, who was a philosophy major, and I asked him, “Where do I go to grad school where I can read the books that you read?” He said, “I think Catholic schoolsdo thiskind of philosophy.”
I knew Catholic University was Catholic because of the name. So that’s the only school I applied to because part of me felt like if I get in, I’ll go. And if I don’t get in, I’ll stay at the bank.
And that’s what I mean about being glad it took me six years Because if I’d asked an advisor right out of college where to go to graduate school, they never would have suggested any Catholic school and certainly not Catholic University
And that was the best decision. I couldn’t have gone to a better place. I developed a faith community. I met other people who wanted to talk about their faith and how to integrate it with the rest of their lives. And that was incredibly rich for me. I saw professors who thought that teaching was a vocation. Most of my professors were priests, and they used philosophical texts as a way of helping them to think more carefully about the big questions, about meaning, ethics, integrity, and authenticity. And that was extremely exciting for me.
I fellin love with philosophy all over again
Mary Troxell, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Philosophy at Boston College
