One `First Year' Searches for God at Harvard

Sophomore year, 1990: A bewildered transfer student, having survived the orientation week "death march" to the Radcliffe Quad for the frozen-pizza picnic, stumbles into Memorial Church for some soothing organ music before going off to the first of five incomprehensible science courses.

So began the search for God (and a B+ average) at Harvard, otherwise known as my first year here.

Scholars of religion claim that all of us have some kind of religion, even if it's purely negative (atheism) or latent. Mine was pretty latent. Sure, I believed in God, but it was just like biting my nails: a childhood habit I never really tried to break. As far as I was concerned, all I needed was chutzpah and high SAT scores for my life to be perfectly under control. But that was before I faced the Great Harvard Humbling Experience.

All of you who come to Harvard will face a Great Harvard Humbling Experience eventually. For A-average high school valedictorians, it will be meeting other A-average high school valedictorians and finding out they're doing better than you in "Heroes for Zeroes." For aspiring writers, it'll be hearing of other students who already have books published or write for the Boston Globe. And for rich white preppy guys who haven't a care in the world, it'll be finding out that the predominantly left-wing student body thinks "your kind" is responsible for everything from global warming to lousy dorms.

For me, it was physics.

Given no adviser, I ended up in a physics course for which I had no background and found out my mistake too late to drop the class. Worse still, I had proudly insisted on taking five classes because the administrator in charge of transfer students had contemptuously told me that no transfer student was smart enough to do this. Yep, I was sunk.

How, I wondered, could this tragedy happen to a good, clean-living, smart kid like me? Did this prove the basic impotence of individuals to determine their own fate? What would befall me next--jury duty? Mistaken arrest? Cardiac arrest?

I prayed. What else could I do?

What started out as a blind faith that God heeded the fall of the sparrow (even if He couldn't stop it from accelerating downwards at -9.8 meters per second squared) turned into an exploration of my religious heritage that soon became the most important legacy of my Harvard experience to date.

I even switched my concentration from Chemistry to Religion in my junior year, provoking a chorus of "What are you going to do with that?" from family, friends, and advisers. Upon hearing my decision, my chemistry adviser Baird Professor of Science Dudley R. Herschbach said, "Religion? It's just a primitive form of science!"

But whether or not one chooses to study it academically, practicing religion at Harvard can be a difficult business. Though support can be found within the student groups like Hillel and Catholic Students Association, one sometimes feels that the secular university community considers faith to be incompatible with rationality, pluralism or liberalism.

The belief that your religion is truest or right (not just "right for you") is the new "love that dare not speak its name" at Harvard. Though this is the belief that traditionally motivates religious individuals, it's perceived here as a threat to pluralism or a perpetuation of Eurocentrism: who are you to say your heritage is better than another's? Religious students I know have often felt pressured to act as if their personal faith were a "lifestyle choice" like choosing to dye your hair blonde.

All religions are equal, but some are more equal than others: Judeo-Christian values and traditions are often included in litanies of oppressive Western paradigms. Catholicism (except liberation theology) is considered especially reactionary unless you openly denounce the Pope's position on abortion, and prochoice groups feel free to use anti-Catholic rhetoric to motivate their followers. Luckily, these problems are mainly confined to politically correct enclaves like Harvard Divinity school, which presents liberal Christianity as nothing but the sugar that adds extra sweetness to their New Age mushiness.

While these obstacles certainly exist, they hardly constitute a systematic program of oppression. The greater difficulty is resisting the belief that religion is irrational or outdated in those bastions of secular rationality, the University and modern society.

Mere rationality can't even begin to help you master the Harvard experience. Rationality hasn't the remotest connection to the core Curriculum, the shape of the Science Center, or how to find your way around Mather House.

Though we all think we know this, every entering Harvard student secretly believes, "I'm a Harvard student--a future leader of the free world! Of course I can control my life. If I couldn't wouldn't have managed to get in here."

But the main lesson I learned from Harvard life--humbling experiences and all--is that the most important things are often beyond your control (even if you're a brilliant pre-med with a four-color pen), and that this can actually be liberating and fortunate as well as frightening. Yet in order to see this, it helps to believe that there's an ultimate meaning, that your soul is more enduring than your GPA, and that a Harvard diploma will get you into heaven.

Jendi B. Reiter '93 is a member of the editorial board of The Crimson.