Approaching Storm, by Edward Mitchell Bannister
The summer holiday before my third year of undergrad, I struggled my way through the entirety of the French philosopher, Alain Badiou’s Being and Event. Beginning at a torturous rate of a page every half hour, by the end of it I was reading his difficult prose with relative ease, and had formulated in my mind something of a systematic understanding of his project. As this happened, my vision transformed: I started to perceive Badiou’s insights in the world around me, and to articulate my experience in these new, formerly alien terms. Prior to this, I had entertained the idea of becoming an academic. However, this experience showed me the world-making power of research, and my mind was set: I wanted more of this, and for as long as possible. This is why I became an academic; a role that I have had the privilege to occupy for slightly over a year now.
I achieved this through a great deal of luck, but also by a huge amount of personal investment. Having had this realisation, I dove into my studies, extending them to a masters, and then eventually a PhD. These years of study were difficult, but they also coincided with a particularly painful period in my personal life. Throughout this, my work was a constant centre of gravity around which I could circle in an at times chaotic but nevertheless ultimately secure orbit. And when I emerged from this maelstrom I found that I had somehow managed to rebuild a sense of myself around my work: like a satellite forming from thousands of shattered particles, the various parts had come together to form a coherent body within the structuring embrace of its gravity, and their momentum relative to it.
This job, then, is both my dream and an integral part of who I am. And, perhaps as a result, it is deeply meaningful to me. This is why it is exceedingly painful to realise that this might all come to an end, and soon.
COVID-19 has been devastating for the higher education sector. Universities, swollen and dependent on the lifeblood of international student fees, now face sharp budget cuts as student numbers drop. Staff are called upon to take on new roles, acquire new skills, and weather new stresses to accommodate for the disruption of infrastructure by social distancing measures, yet there are fewer jobs than ever. Like bees huddling around their queen, the first to succumb to this new academic winter are those on the edges: casual staff, who find part-time contracts unrenewed, available work insufficient to make ends meet, and the already excessive and unremunerated workloads which all academics shoulder to a greater or lesser degree inflated beyond manageability. And for those who fall from the swarm, there are no new jobs in an already hyper-competitive market, where careers are fragile and stability rare. This is the situation which I, along with many other early career researchers, face. Many of us will not make it, and will have to surrender our dreams and perhaps even identities to survive.
This situation, while painful, is not necessarily an entirely bad thing. Perhaps there is something unhealthy in being as personally invested in a job as I am. This is true however unremarkable these kinds of investments may be: countless people undergo the rigors of PhD study and persist through years of postdoctoral due-paying with a tenacity that could only be born of an iron conviction that academia is what they need to be doing, but perhaps this just signifies the extent of my disorder. Moreover, dreams are something very few people get to achieve, and life is still valuable even if you miss out on them - no matter how it feels while you are still fighting for them. Academia is also an industry that, while making you very knowledgeable, does not guarantee that you will become virtuous or wise - and the destructive pressures and expectations, and ego-stoking (minor) public acclaim, all of which only increase the more you succeed, are arguably fundamentally opposed to cultivating these things. Finally, I’ve also found my job to be incredibly difficult and stressful. There are days when I authentically love my job, and in general it gives me great satisfaction – yet there have been many periods in the past year where I would have struggled to say that it made me ‘happy’ on a day-to-day basis. And from what I’ve read on social media, I am not alone in this.
Yet despite all of this, the potential loss seems great, and profound.
Pope Francis, in an extraordinary moment of prayer at his 2020 Urbi et Orbi address, compared COVID-19 to the “unexpected, turbulent storm” that fell upon the disciples as they sat in the boat with Jesus in Mark 4:35. He explains the comparison:
The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities… The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us.
For Francis, the pandemic is an ambivalent thing. The destruction it wreaks is also a stripping-back of what is superfluous to a core that will ultimately lead us to greater fulfilment; a trial which Francis describes as a dreadfully-yet-hopefully apocalyptic “time of choosing”. Perhaps this dread captures something of what I am feeling in this moment, looking towards the potential end of my career even as it has only just started. If so, it also offers a more hopeful vision: perhaps this destruction would, eventually be turned to good. Perhaps the shadow of the thwarting of my desires is cast in the light of a brighter future beyond them.
But there also seems to be something deeply unsatisfying about this: it is all well and good to talk about the pandemic clearing away what is unfulfilling and opening up redemptive possibilities. However, it does not change the fact that some of this destruction is just that: destruction. People are dying in this pandemic. Peoples’ livelihoods are being destroyed, and their lives derailed. Likewise, although ultimately lesser than these evils, perhaps I will just fail to get another job and that will be that. Maybe I will find a fulfilling life afterwards, but even so, maybe it will always be marked by regret and disappointment at my failure to achieve my first goal; the impossibility of my first love. This indeterminacy in turn makes it harder to face up to the fear of the storm. It is all well and good to say “be hopeful”; it is another to summon up hope in the face of this uncertainty and the corresponding possibility of meaningless pain.
I think that Francis also provides us with a resource for managing this fear, and to bear this pain: a call to embrace the cross. However, this is more than just a platitude. He explains:
Embracing his cross means finding the courage to embrace all the hardships of the present time, abandoning for a moment our eagerness for power and possessions in order to make room for the creativity that only the Spirit is capable of inspiring.
Here, embracing the cross is linked to a surrender of power and control. He develops this in an interview given to Austen Ivereigh shortly afterwards: in this, Francis talks about a Church “institutionalised by the Spirit”. This is a Church that is unafraid of disorder, but rather recognises that “the Holy Spirit provokes disorder through the charisms, but then out of that disorder creates harmony”. He finds this best expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, in which “the Holy Spirit de-institutionalises what is no longer of use, and institutionalises the future of the Church”. This undergirds a vision of the Church in which its institutional structures are subject to both creation and dissolution through the work of the Spirit in disorder, and he correspondingly calls Christians in the midst of the pandemic to “an apostolic creativity” in which they find new possibilities for Church life where the disruptions of the pandemic have made old forms impossible.
In this context, we can read Francis’s call to embrace the cross as a call to recognise that hope comes from amidst destruction and disorder. Here, negativity becomes the (or at least a) condition of hope itself: the Spirit works in the midst of disruption, and the possibility for its creativity cannot be separated out from it. In doing so, he invites us to a kind of resignation, but not one shorn of hope. Rather, that resignation is to the very condition of hope, and we cannot hold to it without also looking towards the possibility of redemption.
This does not reassure us that we will escape disappointment, pain, or destruction. But it does reframe these perils such that we also cannot lose hope in the face of them: in acknowledging them, we are already acknowledging more hopeful possibilities. Put more concretely, the destruction of my career would be the necessary condition for my finding fulfilment in the space that is left after that destruction. Trust in the Spirit means trust in the cruciform path of this creativity: that after the death of my hopes and dreams, there may yet be a resurrection; and that were this resurrection to happen, it could only happen after this death.
Moreover, this is the case even if we cannot foresee the nature of this hopeful future: we can recognise disorder as the condition of the Spirit’s creativity without knowing in advance the creative path the Spirit will take. We can recognise that we have something to gain without being able to see concretely beyond the loss that precipitates it. I can recognise that the Spirit may make something else of my life without knowing what ‘else’ this may be. And I think this brings us to the difficult, consolling heart of Francis’ exhortation to embrace the cross: the Christian vocation to embrace the cross is not just a call to identify with a suffering God (although it certainly is this), nor merely to remember that God is with us through our suffering (although He certainly is), but to be prepared to lose without knowing what we stand to gain; to be prepared to lose even if it seems like there is nothing more to follow.
Nicolete Burbach is a consultant research associate in the CCSTP, and a lecture in the Department of Theology and Religion, Durham Univiersity. She is also editor of this blog series.