College Life Starts and Suddenly, a Graduation
In which Teófilo remembers his busy fall season of 1991.
I returned to college full-time in September 1991. I dove into my studies with much enthusiasm, very sure of what I wanted to do. I enrolled in an 18-credit load for each semester. I felt apprehensive. I had had heavy course loads as a student in Puerto Rico. But my marriage to Mercie made all the difference in the world. Her constant support and sacrifice put me through college. She did so even with her advancing pregnancy and raising Chris. The discipline and single-focus mind I'd learned in the military also helped me a lot. I thrived in college.
Being on the pointy end of the information revolution was also an advantage. I incorporated it into my routine. I attended class and took notes. Then I returned home and would transcribe all the notes into a computer file. Transcribing the notes served as my way of reviewing each class, each day. Then I would print the notes and bind them for future study. The system worked well.
My teachers were awesome.
Every instructor was outstanding. I enjoyed my American literature classes particularly. I enjoyed those by Dr. Richard S. Pressman. He polished my hermeneutic skills and to ask the right questions from the text at hand. I remember I had to give him an empty cassette tape in which he would record his observations of my written work. I felt honored at earning an "A" in the class, for he was very strict, very demanding.
Father John Leies was my first theology instructor. He had a long a variegated career as pastor, theologian, and administrator. He was very approachable. The Lord called Fr. Leies to himself in 2022.
Father George Montague was another outstanding instructor. A Biblical Scholar specializing in the New Testament, he’s the author of Christian Initiation and Baptism in the Holy Spirit: Evidence from the First Eight Centuries, among many other works. He’s also active in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. You could feel his job as he got up to teach about his favorite subjects. He became a professor emeritus in 2022.
Father Charles Neumann was another great theology teacher. He was also a former St. Mary’s President.
I had some hiccups with a couple of my instructors. One, a female professor, demythologized the guardian angels of the seven churches in the Book of Revelation. She called them “emanations” or “personifications” of the collective spiritual states of each church. Though an unorthodox approach, I felt her exploration yielded real information about Revelation. She also stated to Fr. Montague, in a conversation I witnessed, that “the Virgin Mary was an inadequate role model for women because she lacked what most women had,” presumably, sexual experience. I never forgot that comment and, now that I know better, I find it inane and adolescent.
The other instructor taught Philosophy of Religion. He was closer to me in age than all the others. He injected many references to Zen Buddhism in his class which I found intriguing. His lessons were my first formal introduction to Buddhism. Once, he sniped that, in his opinion, the military were/are “a new underclass” of people. I can’t remember his reasons, but I laughed inside. No one had called me a member of the lumpen proletariat before. I said nothing at the time but, after so many years of military service and being now retired, I can say he held a benighted, foolish opinion.
However, his course gave me the tools to approach religion phenomenologically. I learn to approach religions in terms of sacred space, time, persons, scriptures, and ritual. The approach was non-reductive, that is, I learned to understand any religion as their adherents understood it, not as I’d wanted to understand them.
An example of non-reduction would be the experience of a crying image - an icon, or a statue. People behold the image and experience religious awe. The student focuses on the phenomenon of religious awe alone, without resorting to a possible leaky ceiling as an ultimate explanation. The ultimate explanation is a reduction of the event to chance, coincidence, and accident but these don’t explain the phenomenon of religious awe by themselves. Rather, religious awe is a human state of being independent of accidents, worthy of study and description by itself. To me, this was a powerful tool, aiding my understanding of religion as a human experience.
Despite these two isolated challenges, they both were excellent teachers, and I learned a lot in their classes. These disagreements were minor bumps on my road to education, though they caused an impression. I’ve never forgotten these quips.
(I had good times with other professors. I need to recover their names from my memory or, better, from my old notes. Stay tuned for the final version of these memoirs).
First Graduation
As I had planned, the completion of my initial theology courses satisfied the elective requirements for my associate degree from the Community College of the Air Force. On September 23, 1991, the effort fructified, and I received my diploma at the Base Theater in Lackland Air Force Base.
This graduation was a good presage of what was to come. What came two months later, was the birth of our second son.