Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals

Chapter 4: Memoirs and Meaning

c h a p t e r 4 Memoirs and Meaning jill ker conway I t is a great honor and pleasure to participate in this historic award. When the invitation came I realized how grateful I was to be asked to reflect on the way my Catholic faith had affected my scholarly life. I had never before given the question the sustained attention it clearly warranted. So I am in your debt for an important stimulus to reflection. My Christian faith has certainly led me to my interest in the moral and spiritual dimensions of the journey in time we all make, and since my intellectual bent is literary, I have focused my attention on the way we narrate life histories, and the forms and conventions which define what can be thought and said about those travels. But when I speak about my Christian faith I must make clear that mine was not a typical encounter with Christian institutions as a child and adolescent. My introducer mentioned that I grew up in a very remote part of rural Australia. My parents’ sheep station was about five hundred miles west of Sydney; the population density of the region was about one in twenty square miles. The annual rainfall was less than ten inches of rain a year making it semi-arid desert country. Our closest town was forty miles away, and there was no Catholic church closer than one hundred miles. So, as a child, I did not encounter institutional religion. The time of my birth increased this isolation because I was five years old when the 1939–45 war broke out. Most able-bodied men in rural Australia then joined the armed services; my two older brothers Memoirs and Meaning 59 were then in boarding school, and so I worked beside my father on the ranch rather than doing correspondence school with a governess. My mother had concluded correctly that since I could read I could teach myself what was necessary one afternoon a week, and I was a farm worker on the other six and a half days. Much of that time was spent alone herding sheep and cattle, a solitary life, almost an Old Testament existence. It never surprised me that the Old Testament prophets were alone when God spoke to them. How else could it be? For a child whose days were solitary without the sound of another human voice, not even the sound of songbirds, nothing but the wind and the desert, most of the time was spent thinking about the relationship of human beings to nature. And the question kept being reinforced because of encounters with Tribal Aboriginals, hunter-gatherers whose culture was many thousands of years old. Those made one ask: what are we white people doing here? More existentially pressing was: why am I here? and what am I supposed to be doing? These questions don’t arise so early for children in a man-made environment. There are people all around like oneself, and the built environment seems to have been made for you. But the long silent days and the contemplation of nature made me ask the theological questions which are the grounding of a religious sensibility long before I had ever seen a church. Events also produced a powerful interest in questions of free will and determinism. The arrival of drought and other natural disasters prompted me to question the efficacy of human will, and to see human beings as tiny entities in face of the vastness and impersonality of nature. Those two powerful interests shaped how I read and what I thought about. There was no Sunday worship, just the Bible to read, and a father who was a devout Catholic, ready to talk about the creation and his understanding of God. Since these discussions took place in the absence of any institutional church or liturgy, there was nothing to object to, no exercise of clerical authority about which to be outraged . I knew only the questions and the vastness of the universe. There was no sacramental life, a discovery made much later when we moved to the city. Believing Scholars 60 When I did encounter institutional religion at boarding school and in college it was initially at the margin rather than in the center of my attention, because I already had my questions and was intent on finding the answers my...