Version 1: Emerald Lawns and a Search
This summer in Oxford is green. My American study abroad cohort lives in a gold-brick Victorian mansion a mile or two from the city’s spires. Here, ivy snakes around the windows, and mismatched chimneys stipple the roof. Old oaks frame a lawn so smooth and green I can only call it emerald to do it justice. I sometimes sit barefoot in the grass and listen to The Golden Compass on audiobook.
I am 21 and an aspiring academic. I am afflicted by existential crises. I hyperfixate on Catholic mystics and do not know if God exists. I do not feel at home in the world.
Perhaps existential terror is one of the reasons I ended up in Oxford. I’ve come here for the summer to study C. S. Lewis as both a classicist and a philosopher. I’m interested in Lewis’s so called “argument from desire” for God’s existence. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes inchoate experiences of longing, sparked by the beauty of the world, for something he could not yet name. For Lewis, this longing came from Norse mythology or from the smell of a springtime currant bush; for me it comes from sunlight on grass and the shush of wind in trees, from stones covered in moss and from children’s fantasy novels.
The human heart is afflicted with a longing for the transcendent; I know that much. What I want to know is why, and whether that longing leads to truth.
Exploring Oxford feels like part of this search. How can one not wander beneath those golden spires without feeling the grandeur of an intellectual adventure? I bike through cobbled streets from library to library. A couple times a week, the students meet for a round-table seminar discussion of Lewis’s work, led either by an articulate philosopher lady who dresses like a librarian, or by the bombastic classicist guy who wears the same waistcoat every day. I don’t shut up about Lewis’s religious epistemology.
Many philosophers write of our epistemic capacity for God. The sensus divinitatis, the sensus dei. We long to know the truth of existence, to know the reality on which our existence depends. Rudolph Otto writes of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mystery that terrifies and fascinates. He calls it “the holy.” We desire to know and love that which is ultimate. We cannot help it.
At least I can’t. For three years I’ve been obsessed by the question of whether or not Christianity is true. I can’t bear the thought that the God I wish to love is nothing but a collective projection of human ideals, or a phantom conjured by wish fulfillment to combat the cold dark Beyond. And yet I can’t shake the longing I feel, the longing for transcendence. My entire being can be summarized as a groping after an invisible God. A blind search, led by desire.
On my morning runs in the park near the dorm, I wonder if our sense of transcendence is inversely proportional to our spiritual blindness.
I, as someone who is physically blind, have a much smaller sphere of visual awareness when I interact with the world. I jog through a park and cannot see the fence bounding it, so I experience the illusion of jogging through an enchanted English wood. I see only the dappled shade of trees, the emerald grass, the sunlight. Anything could exist around the corner, and that sense of possibility brings with it a sort of religious awe.
Perhaps there’s an analogue in the spiritual life. I am blind; my sphere of vision is small, but this smallness makes me all the more aware of a transcendence beyond what I can see.
I only hope that what lies beyond is more than a prosaic fence, an insensate fact that bounds existence. I hope it is, instead, the infinite creator of the universe, the God who is love, who I wish to love but do not yet know how to.
My trip here is only a month long, just enough time for me to hope for a return visit.
Version 2: Enamel Cast of Shadows
Winter in Oxford is mild. The days are short, but the sunlight shimmers with a pearlescent quality. The sun stays low in the sky, casting cool shadows on the cobbled streets. The shadows are blue and have a texture I can only compare to enamel.
I am 22, I wish to be Catholic, and I do not want to be an academic. I have returned to Oxford for my final semester of college to study post-Kantian philosophy and Shakespeare.
The problem is, I am burnt-out. Four years and I’d settled on the notion that God exists and that Catholicism is probably true. My intellectual questions, one by one, were answered, and it felt as though truth after truth slowly slid into place and coalesced into a coherent worldview. But after four years of searching, I no longer know what to do with myself.
Intellectually, I’ve reached a sort of endpoint, but I am still searching. Though I haven’t reached the end of my journey, I don’t know how to go on.
This inertia makes me question what I’m doing in Oxford. I still bike from library to library, still read book after book in the vast silence of the Radcliffe Camera, but I am no longer on the same sort of mission. Now I find myself wandering through University Park, listening listlessly to The Wheel of Time on audiobook because I don’t know what else to do with myself. A friend and I go to mass every Sunday and I do not receive the Eucharist, as I can’t bring myself to officially convert. Afterwards, we sit at a sandwich shop and chat about philosophy. We both admire the French mystic Simone Weil, and we both want to know what it means to love what is true.
I begin to feel that love of truth may not primarily come from academia, and I find myself turning instead to creative work.
Every morning, I wake up at 5:00 and write for an hour or two before the day begins. I am rewriting the entirety of my first novel, Clockwork Heretics. As the days pass, this project begins to sustain me through my inertia. During lectures on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, I jot down notes on plot points and character motivations. The philosophy I’m studying inspires the magic system I construct for this fantasy world.
A few other students show interest in creative writing, so we decide to start a writing group, which we jokingly call the Inklings 2.0. We meet weekly in a little dessert shop themed after Alice in Wonderland to read and discuss each other’s work. There’s a good mix of high fantasy, fairy tale retellings, and modern thriller. I feel at home here, here with other writers who wish to tell beautiful stories for no other reason than that they are beautiful. This is the highlight of my week.
Soon spring comes, and the colors turn pastel. Once, as I wander the cobbled streets to sketch things, I come across a stone courtyard frosted with snowdrops. The sky is robin’s egg blue, the air pearly and delicate. It is achingly beautiful.
It’s also the spring of 2020, and soon global lockdown sends us all home. It’s so sudden I don’t have the chance to be shocked. One day I’m there, the next I’m home in the States—a jarring end to college. I have the option to finish the program remotely but drop out instead. I have enough credits to graduate and am too burnt-out to continue.
I spend the next year learning to search in different ways. I begin teaching; I begin to learn to pray; I relearn how to love what is true.
Version 3: Golden Summer Stillness
This summer in Oxford is golden. The sun is warm, the wind gentle, and crickets chirp sleepily in University Park. Tawny grass sways gently under ancient oaks.
I am 24, Catholic, not particularly holy, and very tired. I have a master’s degree. The last six years have wrung me out and left me insensate.
After presenting a paper on theological aesthetics and Christology at a conference in London, I travel with a fellow graduate of my university to a retreat for Christian artists in Oxford. It takes place in a modern church with lots of plate glass windows. We attend talks on finding inspiration for our art, on the writing of Flannery O’Connor, on the theology of games. We listen to musicians share their work. It’s lovely, but I’m too exhausted to enjoy it.
The second day I leave the conference to explore town. It’s surreal to be here and know my way around. After burnout, global lockdown, a conversion, a master’s program, here I am wandering around as though nothing had changed since 2020.
But so much had changed. The world looks completely different. I visit the Pitt Rivers Museum and sketch the artifacts I hadn’t sketched last time. I’m enamored by the colors of the indigenous vases. Afterward I visit University Park again, where I buy a salmon and cream cheese crepe from a food stand. I walk along the river and watch people punting, pushing their rafts along with ponderous swipes of their poles. The bridge over the river offers a wonderful vantage point from which to sketch them.
Then I simply sit on a bench and feel the breeze. It is good to be here, basking in the golden summer stillness. I didn’t realize I loved this place, didn’t know I needed this closure from my last visit. Now I have a chance to say goodbye—and thank you. A quiet gratitude overwhelms me. All is well.
I hardly know where I am or where I’m going in life, but I have come to a moment of rest. The beauty of Oxford is here as it always was. The emerald lawns, the winters of blue shadow, the pastel snowdrop courtyards, the gold, the light. Three versions of Oxford. Three versions of myself. They are all present, and part of this journey, and gesturing forward to the remainder of my search, beyond the sphere of my own blindness.
And with my gratitude there comes a sense of security, of wholeness—perhaps even of being, for a brief moment, at home in the world.
