What Doesn't Bore You Makes You Stronger

being brave about history (and the cute boys who get us there)

Photo by Tanner Mardis on Unsplash

When I was in college, I took a class with (and because of) my boyfriend on the history of Latin America. The professor was a favorite of my boyfriend, and he (the professor, not the boy) looked a little like the old man in the movie, “Up”—short and slight, with a head full of wiry grey hair that he peered out under through thick glasses. I sat next to my cute boyfriend who was eating up the man’s every word, and filled my own notebooks with names and dates and revolucións that seemed to cycle in repeated and unending patterns, trying to pry my eyelids open with my pen. It was a hard class for me.

I also took two sections of Church History, with a slightly younger prof who had a soft voice and a fervent take on right and wrong interpretations of things. I can still remember the class where he walked us through the passage in Matthew where Jesus says to Peter, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” And then learning all the history of the church that flowed out of one’s understanding of that passage.

Most of these things I had never heard before. It was like the world expanded as I sat there, realizing how and why divisions had happened, institutions were formed, and in a deeply connected way how all of this was carried along as in a great river of gathering stories to where we all sat as barely twenty-somethings thinking that the world and the way it is began when we were born.

I still get knocked down by that rushing river of history sometimes.

This week, after a meeting and staff dinner at school, Josh sat next to me on the bus ride home in the dark. I was pretty excited about some research I’d been doing on the history of the early church. But I’m not sure I was as riveting as our old professor. This time it was Josh’s turn to pry his eyelids open as I filled his ear with my day’s discovery about the history of the Septuagint.

If you don’t know, the Septuagint (or LXX) is, in simplest terms a Greek translation of the Old Testament. I’ve known the basics about the Septuagint for a long time, but what I discovered was a deeper dive into its origin story and how long it had been around and how the early church, and even Jesus and his followers would have used it. It’s a whole giant hole to jump down, and I have two things to say regarding it:

It was a little scary.

It gave me confidence.

What struck me as I read and listened to a few sources on this ancient document, was how disconnected we can be from the headwaters of our history. This can swing in two directions— from a sense of nihilism that we can’t know anything, to a fierce dogmatism that remains uninformed by the very shoulders it stands on.

I felt the swing, honestly, as I learned (and continue to learn) more about the history of ancient texts and translation. There were moments when I started to think, wait a minute— this means…? And long held beliefs felt shaky. Then I learned more, and read more, and the circle would come around again and I realized instead my confidence in the Scriptures as reliable and true and somehow given to us by a God who loves us and wants us to know him, was strengthened.

I know not everyone comes to this conclusion.

I write this to say that with whatever capacity we have to read, to think, to wonder, to believe, we must use it. We can’t become a people who think according to the latest Internet take on (fill in the blank). We have to remember we stand on shoulders, and we have to know about the shoulders we stand on. This takes work, but it makes us strong, and keeps us from becoming hollowed out selves.

I also write this to say that we need to know the past and not be afraid of it, even if we get there just because we want to sit next to our cute boyfriend, even if we have to pry our eyelids open, even if it’s scary and uncomfortable at first.

And I write this to say we have to let the past lead us to hope. Not some kind of blind hope in a progressive view of history that says things are always getting better. In fact, history does not teach us this at all. But if a transcendent God has spoken, and has entered into this world that seems at once both so material and limited, but also whispers of something more, then we are not at a loss. We are not alone. We are not without meaning to the stories we are living.