If You Love Something... 3 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

Last month, on the first night of winter, my nephew came home for Christmas break. For the past five years, since my dad (my nephew’s previous legal guardian) died, my nephew (now nineteen) has lived with me. He’s been away at school—a boarding high school, then university—so “living with me” has meant summers and vacations.

I knew something was up when he walked out of airport security with only a duffle and a small rolling suitcase. A clothes-horse, he usually arrives with a fully loaded Smarte Carte. I found out over dinner, when he announced that he’d taken a leave of absence from university to “see about” the priesthood at a seminary. Note the verb tense: had taken. Not “wanted to take.” Not “thinking about taking.”

He’d made this decision without me. I felt sucker-punched, lied to, tricked. We’d talked all term, Skyping about his classes and how well everything was going, and he’d said not a word of this plan. I’d paid for fall tuition and for books and room and board. Then he clarified that, “on matter of principle,” he didn’t intend to finish the fall term because his theology professors asked him to “write heresy,” and I felt overwhelmingly sad.

University opens our minds, gets us to think outside our comfort zone, exposes us to different—even unpalatable—ideas. The fact that he seemed further entrenched in a kind of calcified extreme orthodoxy terrified me; had I helped raise a narrow-minded fundamentalist? He attributed my opposition to my criticism of the Catholic Church, to my differing takes on doctrine, to my liberalism.

He had a point. But, I told him, I was taking issue not so much with the priesthood —even the Latin rite priesthood—as with the way he’d behaved. Dropping out of school suddenly, without talking it over with the person who pays the bills; running off to a seminary that—he said—would take him without any apparent discernment process; insisting that all of this had nothing to do with any other factor than the will of God—that was what I objected to.

Although I was freaking out to my friends, bursting into tears at yoga, and waking with anxiety, I managed to remain calm but firm in our discussions. In some strange way, the seriousness of the matter at hand had steadied me. This wasn’t an abstract debate about doctrine; this was parenting: When Your Adult Child Makes a Mistake. His behavior, I stated as calmly as if I were asking him to pass the salt, showed immaturity, lack of integrity, running out on a commitment. Were those the hallmarks of a seminary student, let alone a priest?

“You’re putting me on trial.”

“It’s my decision. It doesn’t affect you.”

“All you care about is the money.”

I told him it was my job to ask him tough questions. I told him money mattered. I told him that because I loved him, everything he did affected me. Since he’d made this decision on his own, I said, he’d be on his own. I wasn’t paying for any part of this.

He threw his soup back in the pot. “I won’t eat this soup then, because you bought the ingredients.”

Three days passed. He was off at work all day; I was out each night. I’d said all I needed to say. I reached a kind of tough-love detachment: If he was determined to go to the seminary, I couldn’t stop him. In the words of the soft-focus poster on so many dormitory walls back when I was in college, the original sappy version that tells you what to do if you love something very very much, I had to let him go.

On the third evening, we sat down to dinner. He announced he’d made his decision too hastily. He thought that I was right, that he had more growing up to do. He thought he could think about the seminary from right here. If I would allow it, he’d like to live at home while he figures out the next step.

Relief sank through me, and I felt almost giddy at the calm and humility in his affect. His defensiveness and guardedness was gone. Thank you, God.

And then relief gave way to a whole new anxiety. “He’s not going!” became, each morning, as I pressed my pillows to each ear to buffet the sound of his alarm clock, which trilled for up to forty-five minutes with repeated Snooze hits, He’s not going… What now?

I’m not alone, the university’s dean assured me; he talks to a dozen students a week about leaves of absence. Friends of mine have weathered similar storms. He needed your guidance, some have said, and I suppose they’re right.

But what about me? I’ve been offered a five-week residency in May; now I can’t go. And what if he doesn’t go back to university next fall? The answers to these questions will unfold, I tell myself, repeating Julian of Norwich’s All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner thing shall be well. Just as other answers will be revealed, such as: What exactly happened last term to lead him to his decision?

God’s will, he said that first night, and I knew there was more going on. Turns out, I was right. What does all that say—about him, about me, about God’s will, about discernment? I have a few hunches, just as I have a hunch that as parents, we can never let go of what we love very very much. Tough-love detachment, OK, but ask a lot of tough questions first.