Agapē in college, revisited
“All legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.” — J.D. Salinger, “Franny and Zooey”
At the end of my freshman year, I reflected on how my relationship with religion shifted over the course of the year. As my certainty about what God and religion meant waned, I clung onto what my mom told me: agapē is the unconditional, sacrificial love of God and others. It is an action that must be practiced at every single moment and what defines a Christian. I told myself that if I could hold onto that steady conviction, faith would follow.
Ultimately, life at college became what I had accused it of being — a slow erosion of belief. By the end of my sophomore year, though there was already little that could be called religious about my day-to-day, I suddenly found that I no longer considered God in my thoughts. It was a profound absence that is difficult to describe.
It came like a creeping quiet. I was still studying religion and told myself that this meant nothing had changed. I wanted to learn how God was thought of through the ages to ultimately try to prove, to myself, his necessity in my life. When I would talk about religion with friends, they would ask if I was trying to find meaning to life, but I wasn’t. To me, life was ultimately good and complex enough on its own, without a need for a cosmic explanation. Ultimately, though I wouldn’t admit it to myself, I was trying to disprove religion. Faith is hard to come by and I had the world at my fingers. I could approach it uninhibited, without a grander purpose. I decided and believed that creating my own meaning would be more beautiful. Studying religion, I could confidently close the door on what had been a huge part of my life.
In hindsight, my study of God had become hollow, more of an academic exercise than intellectual devotion. It was absent of the guiding principles of agapē I had clung to at the end of freshman year. Between class, work, friends, and the self-discovery and quiet crises that define college, I had little headspace to devote to lofty and deliberative ideas.
Through junior year, when it felt like a few lifetimes since the devout version of myself, I slowly rebuilt my sense of meaning around love and beauty, absent of God. It was a gentle agnosticism that felt honest and comfortably unfinishable. Though I had not abandoned religious study, it felt reasonably disingenuous to still call myself a Christian as I was letting go of the notion of God. By the time I arrived at Oxford at the end of the year for study abroad, I had mostly made peace with my agnosticism. My religious life was behind me — archived and adolescent, I told myself.
On one of my first nights at Oxford, during casual conversation in a pub, religion came up. In making a point, someone who would later become important brought up a Stanford Daily article on agapē, mine. It was a strange, sudden and sobering moment. It was unsettling to realize that someone else was holding onto a part of me I’d forgotten and left behind. When I wrote the piece freshman year, I was clinging onto an idea that I didn’t understand with the hope that I wouldn’t betray what had been central to myself. But, ultimately, I had let it go.
Later that night, I revisited my journals from that time. I had argued that agapē, the practice of sacrificial love, was the nearest I could come to divinity. Despite my doubts, confusion and seeming inability to practice faith, I hoped that love itself could reveal God to me. I realized then that amid the constant motion of college life — the kind that leaves little room for lofty ideas and questions of faith — I had long forgotten about the commitments I made at the end of freshman year to live by agapē.
A few days later, in London, while trying to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral, we learned we could skip an entrance fee if we waited a few minutes for service to begin, and attended it. I found myself at Evensong — a choral evening prayer. Over the next three months, and later back in the U.S., I would return to Evensong regularly. I don’t know if it was faith, but there was something in the beauty of the singing and ritual that I kept craving, the subtle and reverent glow of voices rising through the church.
I began studying faith again, more intentionally this time, less as an academic pursuit. There was something, I felt, however fragile, between the serenity I felt in the beauty of Evensong, beauty itself, and God. I had always believed it: in certain moments — looking at a tree, a blade of grass, the familiar, the characteristic motion of a friend’s hand or their eyes — I would feel God. I believe those fleeting moments are why I kept studying religion. I couldn’t let go of them; they made my agnosticism uncomfortably incomplete.
Beyond seeing beauty as a profound reflection of God’s nature, I picked up agapē as a guiding principle, again. I told myself it was only an experiment. Through agapē, faith came back like a creeping quiet, almost imperceptibly. In my senior spring, a course on the relationship between the sublime, beauty, and divinity tied together much of what I had known but forgotten and had learned on my own again. Agapē is not a substitute for belief, but how belief could return — not proof of God’s existence, but evidence of his nearness.
In some ways, I could say I am back where I started: uncertain about God, yet guided by agapē. But I am not where I was freshman year. What my mother had tried to explain to me, she couldn’t. I now believe that the most profound parts of life must be experienced to be understood. Reading a thousand novels on love can make love feel trite, until it is personally lived. I no longer need certainty to find divinity; agapē itself is proof enough.
What I’ve learned, through both doubt and devotion, is that faith in college isn’t about certainty — it’s about attention. Religion in college, like everything about it, is overwhelming and complex. I am no theologian nor am I a philosopher, and perhaps my experience is only my own. But, I believe there is value in confronting the idea of God during these years. Though there seems to be an implicit public agreement that God is gone or never existed, I will make a contentious claim: the idea of God is more around us, here at Stanford, than we realize. It is woven through our conversations, our art and our relationships. Atheism or revival are not inventions of our generation. As I prepare to leave Stanford after December, I can say that distraction is easy and faith is difficult. Yet, I’ve come to see that agapē, or any other idea of divinity, is not incompatible with life here. Believing it is will only make it so. It is important to break away and think. To sit and consider. To not shy away.
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