“He was only nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love.”
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
As a mom and a Christian college professor, I move in several, overlapping social circles: church, university, neighborhood, parochial school, guild, city.
Lately, I’ve felt a similar unease in all these circles.
And I think I can finally give it a name. I call it “ontological bruising,” and its throbbing force emanates from people of all ages – schoolchildren included – whose circumstances are not allowing them to develop as they should.
Of course we live in a fallen world, and almost no one in history has been allowed to “develop as they should.” (Jesus Christ being a standout exception.) But today, I think we share an exquisite, subconscious awareness of this tragedy of existential pain. And we also awaken, daily, to the many subtle ways this tragedy is perpetuated in a world whose institutions look increasingly unable to create human happiness.
Very quickly, what do I mean by “ontological bruising”? I mean the pain that comes when one’s essential, spiritual boundaries are not respected – when one’s being in the eyes of God is buffeted and chafed in ways that fundamentally scrape and wound. This happens in broad-scale, systemic ways (such as systemic racism), but it also happens in subtle ways that are hard to recognize because they seem good on the surface. As all of us instinctively know, even well-meaning Christian people and institutions can inflict ontological bruises. Perhaps we are all bruising each other at every moment, in an absurd dance that consists mainly of stepping on toes.
Well, here in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, I think we are all aware of this brutal dance like never before, and we cannot tolerate it. Many of us respond by “dropping out.” Like Anna Karenina’s son Seryozha, we increasingly close the eyes of our souls, waiting defensively for “keys of love” that never come.
Seryozha, an alter ego of the genius Tolstoy, was a “soul protection” prodigy. And maybe his same instinct toward “soul protection” explains the “drop out” energies of our present moment. For years, trend watchers have noticed broad-scale movements toward delayed employment, marriage and child-rearing among young people. Is a fear of soul-bruising systems the main cause of this inertia? Has our patience with high-stress, ethically challenged jobs, dehumanizing online dating apps, and a dysfunctional public discourse finally snapped?
Meanwhile, among those who have successfully “adulted,” there are growing trends toward very early retirement. Young families amass money quickly, spend it sparingly, invest it boldly, and then make plans to live cheaply in some out-of-the-way place by the time they’re forty-five. (Maybe Montana, Idaho, or even the rural Midwest, on the abandoned estates of mining bosses and railroad barons.)
Very early retirement is one way of exiting the system before it bruises you too deeply. Other young adults, however, opt to minimize the pain from the very beginning. They deliberately choose low-paying jobs that allow for flexible schedules and a high level of self-determination (say, rideshare driving). By avoiding complete enmeshment in the “system,” even for a little while, they hope to preserve their souls comparatively unscathed.
And then, there are the homeschooling families. According to some studies, the percentage of homeschooling families in the United States has doubled in just four years, and this increase cuts across almost all demographics.1 Covid gave these families a chance to exit the system, and they took the chance and ran. Whether they knew it or not, they, too, were escaping ontological pain.
This is a story as old as civilization itself, of course. In fact, it’s almost a cliché. It reminds one of bohemian artists (like Paul Gauguin) rejecting the family business in favor of global adventure and self-expression. It reminds one of hippies on communes “tuning in and dropping out.” But I think these earlier phases of cultural Romanticism lacked a philosophical sharpness, and even a grim stoicism, that characterizes the “drop out” culture of today.
Paul Gaugin and the hippies of the 1970s were at least partly motivated by a kind of starry-eyed, utopian idealism – an idealism that aligned with the delightful fulfillment of sensual desires. (Gauguin, in particular, made the most of indigenous Tahitians’ polygamous sexual practices – with total indifference to his wife and children back in Denmark.) Today’s “dropouts” however, are not starry-eyed utopians or lusty, heedless sensualists. They are not trying to usher in the “Age of Aquarius.” They are just seeking respite from existential pain – and a “reset” that might help clear their heads of the decadent civilizational noise.
Therefore, in a way, many of today’s “dropouts” are (I think) like the Desert Fathers of late Rome, who exited the suffocating density of rotting ancient cities in favor of bracing and burning desert air. For ancient saints like Anthony Abbot, who plunged into the wilderness to face his demons, the “noise” of the ancient metropolis was an insuperable barrier to real self-investigation. The heart and the soul cried out, but its messages couldn’t be heard amidst the Late Roman chatter. Radical exit was the only choice.
Pleas, incentives, commands, and temptations, all wreathed about by the sensual charms of Late Antique culture, put the spirit in a fog, back then. Even the deeply-ingrained expectations of Late Antique social piety and etiquette (whatever god one invoked) were smokescreens obscuring true apprehension of the health of one’s stretching soul. As the Holy Spirit wended gently among palaces, colossi and ruins, spirits awoke and were terrified by the nightmarish din. Choirs of plangent demons, the hangers-on of centuries, walked discreetly in forums and gardens, telling stories about what was obviously true. But some winking, waking souls began to realize those stories were lies.
To hear the truth, to hear the witness of one’s childlike soul, it was necessary to GET OUT.
Now, what does that mean for Christian colleges?
It does not mean Christian colleges should become bastions of “counter-cultural” defiance that preserve confident spiritual purity within forbidding walls of stone. (This is perhaps the “Benedict Option,” as popularly understood.)
And it goes without saying that Christian colleges should no longer hitch their wagons to civilizational trends that are obviously in decline.
I think, rather, that Christian colleges must become places that both attend to ontological bruising and give space for a spiritual “reset.” Now, more than ever, young people are primed to hear ontological truths about their inherent dignity, their adoption by God, and their unique vocations as specially-designed members of the Body of Christ. This is good news that will heal them, and their throbbing souls long for it. How can we give it to them?
The thing called “hardness of heart” is a natural a protection against the ontological bruising that buffets the soul. But today, by the grace of God, our hearts are more likely to be pierced than to be hardened. Whether we like it or not, ours is an era laid bare to existential pain. Ours is an era singularly unable to generate the leathery scar tissue that would shield us from both harrowing soul-wounds and ceaseless afflictions of conscience. Our students come to us bleeding their inner light, and their wan faces show the ache.
How can we reimagine our call in a time that demands not career training so much as soul-triage? How can we reimagine teaching as healing?
