In Which Elizabeth Gaskell and Judi Dench Demand that Lorien Read Theology

If ever moti­va­tion existed for trudg­ing through the task of read­ing 175+ aca­d­e­mic pages a day, plan­ning two research projects, and writ­ing book reviews, jour­nal arti­cle cri­tiques, and dis­cus­sion board entries each and every day…

… then it existed in the form of Cranford.

My big boxes full of text­books (half of which are big­ger than the Bible, thank you.) arrived four weeks into an eight week grad­u­ate course. My first bona fide grad­u­ate course (nearly half of my Missouri State classes were 500s, but it’s not the same). My first course, period, in the­o­log­i­cal stud­ies which is not my usual field of Early American Republic his­tory, no mat­ter how closely related they may be. Theology is a dif­fer­ent world. Meanwhile, and this is quite the con­fes­sion, as a minister’s daugh­ter I seem to have a Pavlovian response: sleep.

That sounds dread­ful. My father is, with­out ques­tion, the most gifted teacher and speaker whom I have encoun­tered. It’s not his fault, this response. But one can­not describe the end­less mass of preach­ers who haven’t skill at preach­ing, the teach­ers who haven’t a gift for teach­ing, and the speak­ers who can barely speak — nev­er­mind per­form. In uni­ver­sity this wasn’t a prob­lem for me. Now, sud­denly, I’m watch­ing DVDs of a bland speaker dis­cussing some­thing God-esque and I feel like I did as a teenager lis­ten­ing to some ran­dom preacher and think­ing, “ah, yes. This would be such-and-such out­line I heard when I was eleven. Snore.”

No mat­ter that the mate­r­ial is inter­est­ing. No mat­ter that Intertestamental Judaism, par­tic­u­larly under Ezra/Nehemiah, is ridicu­lously fas­ci­nat­ing. It’s Pavlov, man.

Nevertheless, to the right of my desk is Cranford, perched impa­tiently on my book­shelf. Judi Dench and Imelda Staunton are star­ing at me from the cover. Nineteenth cen­tury BritLit! Gaskell of North and South! Staunton. Dench. Atkins. Gambon. All on my book­shelf, wait­ing for all of my stud­ies to be thor­oughly caught up so that I can watch it a free mind and spirit. With spe­cial fea­tures.

and so I con­tinue study­ing as fast and as thor­oughly as I can, try­ing to ignore the abject ter­ror of how dread­fully behind I really am. This was not how I wanted to begin grad school.