Good morning. My name is Marit Langley and I am a senior Theatre and Philosophy major.
Last February, I applied and was accepted to study in Lupeni, Romania. I had been hoping to study abroad for some time, but Romania barely made it onto my radar screen until a couple of weeks before the application deadline. An unexpected chain of events led me to Romania, but I decided to follow the opportunities presented to me and walk through an open door amidst many unanswered questions. So on August 23rd, with 4 people I barely knew and few expectations of what was ahead, I flew to Romania for what turned out to be the most challenging, educational and fulfilling semester of my college career.
I'm not here to try & sell you on a trip to Romania, I'm here to tell you about how my faith and future have changed because of my time at Northwestern...it just happens that the most formative semester of my time here wasn't spent here.
During the nearly four months I spent in Eastern Europe, my vision of myself in relation to the world changed significantly. Iowa is not a far cry from my central Minnesota homeland, and the culture is not too noticeably different. Romania was nothing like what I am used to. The culture shocked my system at first and for a week or two, I wondered if I would ever figure out a way to live in this place and culture. I did. And eventually I even caught myself forgetting that I was on the other side of the world, living day to day in a place I had never dreamed I'd even have a chance to visit.
Every morning as I walked down the mountain from my host home or, later, down the 8 flights of stairs from my apartment in an imposing communist bloc structure, I would revel in the beauty of my home...and then remind myself that my "home" was halfway up a mountain in the Transylvanian Alps...or at the top of an epic set of stairs in a valley between those mountains.
I'd like to read you part of a journal entry that I wrote near the end of the semester, as one of my big realizations was dawning:
From the day I left for college until now, my understanding of home has changed vastly. I have a home over breaks with my family in MN, a home at school in Iowa, and a home with my summer theatre job in Colorado. And between the three of them, I feel like somewhat of a vagrant. I have found at least something of a community in each of these places, but I have struggled to put down real roots in any of them, because I know how temporary my time in each is. Friendships that involve vulnerable openness, relationships built with depth and made to last, connections formed with a focus on the spiritual, the meaningful, the important… none of these have been a priority in my life through the past few years, and I excused this because of my physical state of limbo between locations. And now I consider Romania to be a fourth home, but I have been even more careful in forming connections with the people here, because I see so clearly in the distance a permanent uprooting.
The trouble is that none of this was consciously done and only in retrospect do I see how stingy I have been in relationships, investment, involvement and love. I am only beginning to realize how stringently I have held myself back from lavishing love and care and friendship upon the people around me because I saw them as a part of a passing time and an impermanent place. I'm waiting to settle for good...then I'll begin to root and find my home. So I just live with uncertainty and shallow roots, for now.
This affects my confidence of stability, support, and even my ability to be myself…or know what that means. Without a sense of where I fit, my sense of who I am is left uncontextualized and quickly diminishes confidence in my ability to form relationships, speak my mind, share my thoughts honestly and still assume that I am loved by a community. There is something so disconcerting about lacking place. The feeling of floating free brings with it an incredible loneliness and even an inability to begin establishing place, self and community.
Not the cheeriest thought in the notebook, but frustration is a big part of many of my realizations and I was delighted to at least realize why I hadn't felt at home in so long...Because if I see the problem, I can begin to fix it. And in a way I did and have and continue to.
In my classes there, for the first time I understood what my profs at Northwestern had been trying to teach me for years: that learning and education are about living. This isn't a practice run for anything, college isn't supposed to just prepare me for life...it is life, at least for now. And that living, like faith, requires complete investment. In the same way that you cannot understand the realities and experience of faith without fully committing to it, so, too, I couldn't make sense of and live fully in a place & with a people I wasn't fully invested in loving.
In my classes there, for the first time I understood what my profs at Northwestern had been trying to teach me for years: that learning and education are about living. This isn't a practice run for anything, college isn't supposed to just prepare me for life...it is life, at least for now. And that living, like faith, requires complete investment. In the same way that you cannot understand the realities and experience of faith without fully committing to it, so, too, I couldn't make sense of and live fully in a place & with a people I wasn't fully invested in loving.
When my classes intermingled with each other and with every other aspect of day to day existence to form one cohesive course on living life well and loving people well, I met true integration of faith and learning, or learning and living and usually both. Experiential education at its finest. And let me tell you, its a good way to learn. I finally realized what it means to nix the stereotypes I try to fit, to ditch the obsession with the next step, and to be fully present, fully invested and to put down roots. It became beautiful to me to see each day how faith and learning intermingle with all of life. I found true, honest, painful, wonderful community with members of the semester program staff and especially with my fellow students. It became easy to let myself invest and strange to imagine ever leaving.
It always seems like just as I get the hang of it, everything changes. So of course I would first realize what it means to make my present place a home in a place that could only be home for just so long. Its hard to let something like that go.
A quote, from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, says it better than I can: "You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place…like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”
That was tremendously true for me and Romania. But even though I will never be exactly who I was in that time and that place again, I know that this is just another step in a grand journey and what I learned in that time and place will go with me to the next ones. And if I can learn to find my identity in God and not present circumstances, to be present and to root in a place where I can barely communicate, I should be able to be at home just about anywhere. Northwestern College, for example, even for just one final semester. I realized what most people probably knew all along: this isn't practice for life...and waiting to put down roots and develop a sense of place and home until I find a permanent one simply won't cut it. Living well requires, as Heather Talbot told me, fully committing to a people and a place for a time.
It means being present and invested and allowing yourself to integrate with your life now, no matter how short "now" looks, instead of looking only to the impending future. It means embracing the questions, not backing away from the open doors and living the moment that I have now. "God," as C.S. Lewis remarks in The Screwtape Letters, wants men to attend chiefly to two things: "to eternity itself and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience which God has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them."
Although I've gained a lot of life experience as well as theoretical and practical knowledge in my classes, this is one of the biggest lessons that I will take with me from my college experience, both in Orange City and Lupeni. It is a commitment to loving the process, to looking for community, and my place, to embracing doubts and to investing my heart, mind and strength into whatever I do.
So, I'm not going to tell you about the grand plans I've laid up for my future, because they are still chock-full of unanswered questions. Instead, I want to encourage those of you who, like me, are waiting to "find their place" that your place, for now, is ...wherever you are. So live in the moment and follow where the questions lead you. For me, last semester, the opportunities led to Romania and the questions led me to live my way into answers...but I don't know where the next set of questions, opportunities and open doors will lead. Finding your place, your home, your calling, your vocare...these may not involve permanent answers, I can tell you experience that waiting until the permanent answers come along means missing out on a lot of good livin' time. Instead, I encourage you to seek to invest fully in the place you find yourself and the people who form your community. If your identity is tied not to where you are or where you're going or where you someday hope to be but to who God calls you to be now, you will be able to be at home in whatever place you find yourself.
I'll end here, with a quote that Kadie Becker, the Romania Semester's wonderful off-campus administrator, shared. It comes from Rainer Maria Rilke's book Letters to a Young Poet: "...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
Mergeţi în pace. Go in peace.
