Dabbling in Mysticism: On Taking Some Wacky Turns
February 11, 2020

     So find yourself a mentor or two.  Actively seek out and cultivate the relationship, but be careful not to become a burden.  Learn lightly, if you can.  But learn.  Learn all you can, and if the relationship takes a turn for the up-close-and-personal, or for the long-haul, or for the intense, collaborative-project end of things, bring all that you can to the table.  The benefits will mostly accrue in your favor, but work on some reciprocity.  A little will go a long way.

    That's one of my standard bits of advice when I'm speaking to high school and college-age audiences – which is something I find myself doing with some regularity these days.

      Another is this: do something – or a whole series of somethings – that would surprise the "you" of one or two years ago.  In the spring semester of my first year of college, I took a seminar-style class called "Martyrs, Mystics, and Witches".  I think the course name had a subtitle as well, which I don‛t recall offhand, but which must have run something like "Ecstatic Bodily Experience in the Christian Tradition" – because that's essentially what the class was about.  It examined the treatment and experience of the body (especially the female body) in early, medieval, and early Reformation-era Christian texts, as much from the perspectives of the martyrs, mystics,  and witches themselves as could be excavated from historical sources.  It was the first class I took that was offered by Harvard's Committee on the Comparative Study of Religion, which was where I ended up making my academic home for the next three years.  I think there were six students in the class, a couple of whom may have been graduate students from the divinity school.

 
     Now, I must say, a class called "Martyrs, Mystics, and Witches" is not exactly a class that my slightly younger Southern Baptist self would have gravitated toward.  In fact, my slightly younger Southern Baptist self probably would have shunned that kind of class on the presumption that it would inevitably peddle some kind of outrageous heresy.  At a minimum, let's just say it was not on my list during shopping week that semester (when Harvard undergrads get to visit and "try on" courses for a week before officially enrolling in them for the semester).  But I think I had gone to an introductory meeting for the Comparative Study of Religion – that was one of several "concentrations" I was considering settling into as my principal field of study, the other two being English and philosophy – and I must have met the instructor for the MMW course there, or maybe someone just encouraged me to take that class.  I don't recall exactly.  

     But by whatever chain of seeming accidents that I wound up there, it was through that slightly heretical-sounding class that I struck up a relationship with the instructor, Kimerer LaMothe, who became my principal academic advisor for the rest of my undergraduate studies.  It was Kimerer who convinced me to stick with the Comparative Study of Religion – a field of study that set my brain and heart on fire, and gave my undergraduate experience a richness and texture I could have easily missed in a more mainline degree program.  I took several more of Kimerer's classes over the ensuing years, and it is not an exaggeration to say that she is a (the?) central reason why my Harvard experience was an overwhelmingly positive one.

     Kimerer also remains one of my most cherished mentors to this day, for reasons that will probably unfold in this space.  But for now, suffice it to say that I would not have the treasure of her mentorship in my life if I had not been willing to do something a little wacky, a little surprising, a little off the beaten path – a little mystical, perhaps.